A LIVE grenade discovered underneath a washing line pole had lost its pin and was primed to explode, the Bournemouth man who made the discovery has said.

Keith Goddard was pushing a wheelbarrow across his back garden in Horsham Avenue when the front wheel disturbed the soil around the pole, unearthing the huge defensive hand grenade.

And Mr Goddard said the World War One incendiary device had been buried directly beneath the pole, which was hammered down into the soil on a regular basis by his wife.

Speaking two days after experts carried out a controlled explosion of the device in the sea off Hengistbury Head, Mr Goddard said: "When I saw it, I kept pushing the wheelbarrow but straight away I thought, 'That looks like a hand grenade.'

"Then I turned around and thought, 'That's definitely a hand grenade.' It was by the washing line post and it must have been rolled around a fair few times. When I looked at it, there was no pin it it."

It is believed that the grenade failed to go off as densely-packed soil prevented the device from triggering when the pin fell out.

Mr Goddard said: "It was really big - about the size of a potato.

"It's a defensive grenade, which means that it's too heavy to throw far enough away - you'd have to be the other side of a concrete wall or something similar when you threw it. If it had gone off, it would have been an almighty explosion. Luckily, the firing handle was pinned completely to the grenade by mud."

Video credit: Bill Mason

He said the washing line pole, which had been driven several inches into the earth, had been moved and re-fixed by hand on a number of occasions after it dislodged in bad weather.

The device, believed to be a 'Mills bomb' - the popular name for a series of British-made hand grenades - was carefully removed from the garden by officers from the Royal Navy Ordnance Disposal Team.

It was taken into the sea, where a controlled explosion took place.

Dorset Police cleared an area of the between two groynes just along the coast from Hengistbury Head to allow the explosion be carried out around 6pm.

An eye-witness told the Daily Echo that a navy frogman in a wetsuit carrying a bag containing the device walked backwards into the sea while unrolling a cable, swimming out a little way before depositing the bag and returning to the beach. The navy team then detonated the device from a safe distance.