“They got showered with doggy poo!”

Peter Adams and
the Poo Bomb

"Perhaps my shyness” says Peter Adams, “came from the playgrounds I grew up with when I was a child. My home village of Stanmore had been headquarters for Fighter Command during the war and we used the bomb sites of North London as our playground. We were all members of gangs and I was a skinny weed and I got out of trouble with these gangs by inventing projects and games.

“Our gang was called ‘The Robbing Hoods’ and we'd nick the bamboo bean poles from Fred Batty’s garden allotment to make our bows and arrows. Our major opponents was another gang called ‘The Stanwell Mob’ – which was bigger and more powerful than ours. They used bows and arrows which they fired from their fantastic clubhouse, a bombed-out bungalow without a roof – how nobody got seriously hurt is a mystery! They would fire arrows at us through slots in the boarded-up windows which made it very hard for us to beat them. 

“Until I invented the poo-bomb."

The poo-bomb, Peter explained, was constructed from the cardboard centre of a toilet roll, stuffed up with dog faeces and a bunger (firework). “We tied our shoe laces around the tubes so, after lighting the fuses, we could swing them over our heads and lob them into their roofless house where the defenders would be showered with pooch poo as the the bomb exploded. Eventually they waved the white flag.

“We always intended to recover the shoelaces after the siege, but they were a wee bit pongy after the battle and we left them where they were. 

“I have often wondered what our parents thought when we announced our mass loss of shoelaces!

"In those days kids could buy penny bungers, but only adults could buy the sixpenny ones which were much bigger and more destructive – a sixpenny bunger could turn a metal letterbox into an abstract sculpture in seconds!

“It made a neat 1/2’’ hole in the window.”

 “All the old bomb sites had become building sites and were being rebuilt with council houses and on Sundays they were deserted. There was lots of short pieces of galvanised pipe lying around which could be converted into effective mortars. The trick was to ram one end into wet cement and let it dry. Then you’d light a firework and drop it down the open end, and hastily drop down a ball bearing or fill the pipe with dog shit or whatever and point it at Mrs Pyle’s washing line or Tim Hughes’ garage door.

“One day, I let it be known that I had finagled a sixpenny bunger from the cardboard grocery box (that served as the adult armoury during Guy Fawkes night) and we were going to use it to demolish a carved pumpkin head of the Fuhrer on the Sunday. 

“The news travelled fast and kids arrived from everywhere on their bikes and billy carts and after a bit of a biff-up a spirited discussion ensued about what we were going to use as ammo. 

“One of the boys suggested marbles, but he didn't want to use his ‘Amber Eye’ or his favourite ‘Sydney Smasher’ … even though he had been assured he would get it back. Another boy called ‘Baggy’ Hamer (so named because he always wore his elder brother’s hand-me-down pants) showed us a highly polished half inch ball-bearing. After lots of ‘ooohs’ and ‘ahs’ he added that if he was going to use it, he was going to light the firework. 

“After another a biff-up, we agreed and he took ages aiming our ¾” mortar at Adolph – which was resting on a stack of bricks – ‘Baggy’ lit the bunger and dropped in the ballbearing.

“Well, he completely missed the pumpkin, so it was a bit of an anti climax. Until, that is, a few days later, when we learned that the ball bearing had made a neat ½” hole in the dining room window of an unoccupied new house on the other side of the building site, before smashing to pieces the window on the opposite end of the room. The police had assumed it was a drive by shooting. 

“Of course, I had nothing to do with it – probably more by good fortune rather than by better judgement – but anyway, by then we had run out of explosives until November 5th the following year.”