The Luton News of January 2, 1919, told the distressing story of how a soldier was killed an four children injured by an unexploded bomb lost during earlier tests at Ivinghoe Beacon.

The Christmas festival, said the report, was tragically marred for a family at Ivinghoe by the sudden explosion of a bomb found in a field, causing the death of a soldier and seriously injuring four children.

An experimental party performed tests on Ivinghoe Beacon during the latter months of the war, using hand flares, signalling rockets and smoke bombs. Two weeks before the armistice the police were informed that three unexploded bombs (commonly known as 'duds') had gone astray during the tests, and it was assumed they had become buried in the soil of a newly ploughed field at the bottom of the Beacon.

On the police expressing alarms at the idea of three bombs being in the district, they were told that the explosive charge was of such little power that the danger of the bombs exploding on being ploughed up was very small.

Schoolchildren were warned in this connection and several cases of discharged bombs were taken to the police, but the one in question was not found until last Friday – the day following Boxing Day.

On this day a party of boys found what they imagined to be an old fish tin lying in a ditch at the entrance of the little wood at the foot of the Beacon. Thinking it was possibly a tin of salmon left behind by the Signallers, the lads took it home, where two of them – Arthur Bierton and Arthur Halsey, both aged 10 – tried to open it. They were unable to do so that night, but next morning they succeeded in forcing off what they thought to be the lid with a screwdriver.

A quantity of red powder was then poured out, and Arthur Halsey took the tin home. He lives in Church Road, and his father and brother are both in the Army. On reaching home he found his mother out, and his soldier brother Pte William Halsey (52nd Devon Regiment) in the house.

According to the statement of his little seven-year-old sister Violet, the boy Arthur endeavoured to prise open the tim with a chisel, during which the soldier brother came out and enquired what he was doing.

Mrs Cox, who lives in the next house, witnessed the scene, and says that William then got a hammer and hit the chisel with it into the tin. There was a terrific explosion. William received the full force of it in his stomach and fell to the ground.

Arthur and Violet were injured as well as two other sisters, Alice, aged 13, and Ethel, aged five. Mrs Cox attended to the little victims, but the soldier had to be removed to the Aylesbury Military Hospital, where he succumbed to his injuries the next day [December 28].

A coroner's inquest was held on the body of the deceased soldier on Tuesday in the Military Hospital. It came out in the course of the enquiry that the deceased man had placed a lighted match to the contents of the tin, whereupon the explosion occurred. Death from misadventure was the verdict brought in.

The two children, Arthur and Ethel, have had to be taken to the Bucks Hospital, where the little lad lies in a very grave condition but improving.

[Commonwealth War Grave Commission records show that Pte William Thomas Halsey, 38386, 52nd Battalion Devonshire Regiment, died on December 28, 1918, at the age of 18. He was son of William and Lottie Halsey, of Ivinghoe, and was buried at Ivinghoe (St Mary) Churchyard. He is commemorated on the War Memorial there.]