Live Artillery shell used as doorstop

A pensioner used a live artillery shell as a doorstop for 20 years.

The German squat shell was live, packed with its original payload and with its firing mechanism primed, experts say.

It was only when a neighbour saw the shell outside 68-year-old Thelma Bonnett's door that the danger became clear, reports the Daily Mail.

The police were called and they summoned Royal Navy bomb disposal experts to the house in Paignton, Devon.

Several neighbours were evacuated from their homes and the seven-inch-long device was taken to a local quarry where it was made safe.

It had been in the family for nearly a century after her grandfather Arthur Croxall picked it up on his travels with the Merchant Navy in 1918.

"I had no idea it was dangerous," Mrs Bonnett said. "My father used to polish it all the time and kept it on the mantelpiece.

"When I was young, five of us children would play with it. I don't think he would have brought it back if he'd known it was live." A Ministry of Defence spokesman said: "The shell was packed full of explosives and it could have gone off at any time. "It was brought back from France and had been used in battle when it had been fired but failed to go off."