Monday, Feb. 07, 1949

THE BIG BANG NEVER CAME

For 90 minutes or so it was like old times in London's Stepney. Homes along Brunton's Place, Raby Street and Salmon Lane were evacuated, buses were stopped. Sick animals from the People's Dispensary had been moved to a safer place, and in the old air-raid shelter near the Church of Our Lady Immaculate, the neighbors were gathered once more waiting in awful suspense for the detonation of a German bomb. Just as they hoped, the big bang never came. In an operation as delicate as brain surgery, London's No. 2 Bomb Disposal Squad successfully took the the surface. The 2,775-lb. bomb was second largest ever dug up in London. Seven years ago during a bad raid its fuse had jammed as it tore through Mrs. Alfred Fry's kitchen, then buried itself 30 feet in the Stepney ground. At that time air-raid wardens laid the damage to an antiaircraft shell. Recently Mrs. Fry noticed that the ground around her repaired kitchen had been sinking. That gave the bomb disposal experts a clue to the real culprit.

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