Five schoolboys were killed by a wartime mine on Swanage beach in 1955

Robert Key, who died last year, was the Conservative MP for Salisbury between 1983 and 2010. On 17 March 2010 he gave his last Commons speech, and it was one of the most remarkable ever given there.

It was on the second reading of the Gordon Brown government's Cluster Munitions (Prohibitions) Bill, which passed into law before the general election of that year.

Early in Key's speech, he said:

The hon. Member for Montgomeryshire (Lembit Öpik) referred to the question of far-off lands, saying that if mines exploded around our shores or in our country there would be immediate public outrage and very swift action indeed. Well, I can tell the House that that has happened in our land. I was there, and I want to pass on, for those who will be here long after I have gone, what happens in those circumstances.

And that is just what he did:

On Friday 13 May 1955, when I was 10 years old, I was on Swanage beach in Dorset with some 20 other children of about the same age. We were doing what children on a beach on a Friday afternoon in May do-building sandcastles, digging holes in the sand, making dams and so on. I was building my castle with a chap called Richard Dunstan: five of my friends were digging holes, and then one of them found a tin. He thought that it was Spam, or something really exotic-yes, Spam was exotic in 1955. He was wrestling to move it, because it was lodged between two rocks. He got out a shoehorn but could not break the tin open. The boys stood back, and were seen throwing things at it.

My friend and I got bored. We turned round. We had our backs to our friends, and were about the same distance from them as I am from you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, when there was a huge explosion. We were blown into the sea, and lived. Five of my friends died. Five British children were blown up by a British mine on a British beach, within my living memory, and the living memory of many other people. It was an extraordinary thing. It happened in the middle of the 1955 general election. The front page of the following day's edition of The Daily Telegraph carried a story with the headline, "4 Boys Die, One Missing in Explosion". Below that, smaller headlines stated, "Big Crater Torn in Beach" and "Wartime Mine Theory".

There was not much theory involved for the five who were killed, or for the two of us who were the luckiest people alive. I still think that I am the luckiest person alive in this House. Of course, my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Milton Keynes has deliberately put himself in harm's way, and I salute him for it, but I was there as a child and got tangled up in what happened by mistake. So what was the response in Britain when a mine exploded around our shores? Many years later, I was a Minister in the Department of National Heritage, and the Imperial War Museum was one of my responsibilities. One day, I asked the staff there whether they had any records of something happening on Swanage beach on 13 May 1955. A couple of weeks later, a large box arrived, full of all the documentation relating to that horrible event.

I have here in my hand copies of the Dorset police documents entitled "Report to Coroner Concerning Death". They detail how, on 13 May at about 4.20 pm, four boys were reported dead. I also have a copy of the report from the police constable who found them, but the strange thing is that the fifth boy was never found. Within a day or two, a plimsoll that he had been wearing was found. Another was found a few days later. That meant that the then Home Secretary had to issue a document giving authority to the coroner to investigate the matter. The coroner simply declared that there was no conclusion to reach other than that the fifth boy had been a victim of the same mine explosion.

In the inquest, the coroner called for evidence from the officer responsible for de-mining the beach, who had issued a class IIA certificate in January 1950. The officer said:

"I am convinced that this mine had been in the sea and from evidence of marine growth I consider the mine had been washed ashore.

What the boys were seen to have been doing was quite sufficient to have exploded the mine...As an expert I would have allowed boys to walk across the beach."

I have read the mine clearance officer's reports, and have with me a copy of the plan of the mines that were laid on Swanage beach in 1940. A clearance operation was undertaken in 1945, which was repeated in 1947 and again 1949. Eventually, a clearance certificate was issued on 17 February 1950. The documents reveal that 117 mines had been laid, of which five were lifted in clearance. They also show that, although there was some evidence of the existence of 54 others, the remaining 58 are still unaccounted for. That was what I found so horrendous when I discovered all this as a Minister of the Crown so many years later.

The coroner concluded his remarkable summing up-in those days, of course, everything was handwritten, and I have a copy of his notes-by saying:

"I think the bomb was in all probability washed ashore.

I do not think any blame can be attached to any living persons in this matter. The boys were all playing among the rocks in a perfectly normal way so far as"

the master in charge

"could see and I do not consider he has any reason to reproach himself, and after the explosion he could not have done more nor acted more resolutely than he did."

I certainly concur with that. He was my favourite master. He was my French master, and a remarkable and good man. I think that he must have been through hell ever since.

One can imagine how horrified the staff at the school were by what had happened. They, too, were remarkable in the way in which they handled the incident, the enormity of which was overwhelming. The headmaster, John Strange, who was a wonderful man, managed to hold the whole community together. The retired headmaster, the Rev. Chadwick, also played his part. The master who had been at the heart of the incident and who had been taking his charges on the beach was wonderful. 

The school could not have done more to look after the children, but the fact remained that the mine clearances had not been completed satisfactorily. The mine clearance officers had, in fact, refused a certificate of clearance on one occasion, but had been overruled.

In the final certificate of removal of dangerous military defence works, the officer concerned-who, ironically, was operating out of Southern Command in Salisbury in my constituency-stated:

"The whole area has been swept with a detector and those portions of the area which have been subject to disturbances have been explored thoroughly to the apparent depth of that disturbance".

Bulldozers were brought in, and the beach was removed down to the rock and put back again. The officer continued:

"Though no guarantee can be given the area may be considered safe except for the possibility of mines being washed up from other fields",

and that is what happened.

This is a horrendous story, and I repeat it to the House to point out that on the issue of mine clearance, whether it is cluster bombs, cluster munitions or mines of any kind, the impact is the same on a child of 10 at play, whether in Beirut or in Swanage. Personally, I would like to see the mystery of the missing mines of Swanage bay cleared up. My hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, East (Mr. Ellwood), who also knows more about military matters than most of us, and who has first-hand experience in his military service, might be interested.

After the event, the coastguard swept the whole coast from St. Aldhelm's head right round past Poole harbour all the way to the Isle of Wight for any traces of that missing body. None were found. 

More significant now is the fact that we have the technology to detect those mines. I would like to see minehunters of the Sandown class or equivalent brought in, perhaps in training, to sweep Swanage beach and the coast right round Bournemouth. We have the evidence in the 1950 statements of the officer who did the clearance and also from the 1955 inquest that the bomb which killed those children had probably been swept inshore by a gale. There is an opportunity for the Ministry of Defence, in the course of training our Royal Navy operatives, to have another go. That would be an opportunity worth taking.

I support the Bill - of course I do, after what I have been through in my life. I still think I am the luckiest Member to be alive. It motivated me in my politics, and it motivated me to be interested in defence once I came to the House. I have done that for 27 years. 

I hope the lessons of Swanage beach will not be forgotten. I hope the Bill will be but one step on the road to realising that although war may have to be fought, we should always strive to do it honourably, morally, with integrity, and always and everywhere with the minimum impact on a civilian population that has not put itself in harm's way. That is my wish, and that is why I support the Bill.

I am blogging about this story today because I found an interview with Robert Key that he gave just after making the speech, in the folder of press cuttings I turned up the other day.

In it he gave some details of the boys' deaths which he didn't mention in the Commons (and which I shan't repeat here), and talked about the effect on him:

"I had just started making friends in my new school when the land mine went off. My mother came to see me, and my father prayed with the other parents, but I was desperately homesick and miserable. My back was badly injured. My friend was taking shrapnel out for years.

"We hated having to go back to the beach every Friday. The Army said they hadn't found any other mines. But we heard the explosions in our classroom, everyone went white. It was very stiff upper lip, pretending not to notice the spaces in the dormitory."

Reading the contemporary news reports of this tragedy and the inquest into it, I get the impression that the authorities seized too readily upon the explanation that the mine responsible had drifted ashore, because it meant that no one need be held responsible. That seems to be what Robert Key believed too.

Swanage was not the only tragedy involving wartime mines. A Sunday Mirror article from 28 June 1959 warned:

Death Hides in the Sands!

Killers, silent, corroded, rusty, lurk where the holiday families play this summer - on beaches and moors, in woods and fields.

The tides, or children with spades, will uncover-some 40 beach mines on Britain’s East and South Coasts. 

These are the deadliest of all, warns Lieutenant-Colonel N. Barker, who commands the Royal Engineers Bomb Disposal Unit at Horsham, Sussex. 

They can kill at 100 yards, And they have done frequently since World War II ended - fourteen years ago.

And the report goes on to remind readers:

Killers all - that, only recently, killed four men near Harrogate and five boys at Swanage, Dorset... and maimed six children in Yorkshire.

I now wonder if the danger of mines was something that every holidaying family was once aware of. Certainly, I can remember being told before a family caravan holiday at Winchelsea Beach in 1967 that I shouldn't pick up anything metal I found on the shore. At the end of this post you can a public information film that was issued after the Swanage tragedy.

The five boys are remembered by a tablet on a building erected in their memory at what was Forres school, the prep school they attended. Forres later merged with another school and its buildings at Swanage are now occupied by a special school, which means the tablet is not generally open to public view.

So money is being raised to provide a more accessible memorial to the boys and one that is near the place where the tragedy took place.