Captain John Hannaford: Architect who became part of one of the first bomb disposal squads

This was a bomb that defied every one of the War Office’s make-safe gadgets. It was early 1942, and Lieutenant John Hannaford of 16 Bomb Disposal Company, leading a team of Royal Engineer sappers, was faced with a German “17”: a long-delay fuse, buried 15 feet down in shifting gravel on the bank of south Wales’s tidal River Usk.

The device, dropped in an enemy raid on a bridge, was too clever for the Crabtree Discharger, too close to rising water for the Magnetic Clock Stopper and too much for the remote-control, but now jammed, Merryless Fuze Extractor.

There was nothing for it but to get down the ladder past the two noisy water-pumps that were keeping the precarious shaft clear. Hannaford checked for the usual booby-trap, a “Zus 40”, aimed by the Nazis at killing anyone who tried to stop the detonator clock. There seemed to be none: the fuse was almost out of its pocket. So, Hannaford recalled: “I removed the Extractor and eased out the fuse.”

At once a thick grey pall blinded him. Silence reigned. Was he dead? BD men were always told the explosion would happen, if it did, too fast for the human nervous system to register it, and so would cause no pain.

But that beguiling, delaying illusion really could have killed him, had he stayed at the shaft’s bottom. Distracted by what was in fact the effect of an accidental coming-adrift of the compressor-pump’s rubber hose, and then by sudden silence as his sergeant, thinking the spray to be smoke, switched both pumps off, Hannaford did not notice his own omission: he should have got on and removed the gaine, or sheath, at the fuse’s base. Only the Sergeant’s voice: “Are you all right, Sir?” broke the spell.

Having come to his senses, and paused to remove the gaine, Hannaford climbed up and away from the bomb, holding the shiny aluminium fuse in his hand. A crack – and a sheet of flame passed his face. The detonator in the fuse had fired. He had had the narrowest of escapes.

The dicing with death was intense: he once defused seven unexploded bombs in a single morning. Having begun as a sapper, he saw many men, including his own commanding officer, blown to smithereens, and rose quickly through lieutenant to captain.

A talent of the most tranquil kind – drawing – had brought Hannaford to this. He was, like many assigned to the first bomb disposal squads from June 1940 onwards, an architect, chosen because the War Office thought professional qualifications and knowledge of buildings useful for the job.

As an employee of the Ministry of Works he had done scale drawings of Westminster Abbey in preparation for the coronation of King George VI in May 1937. Having won a national prize for drawing while at elementary school in Newton Abbot, Devon, he was helped by his headmaster to attend art college once a week, and to go on at 14 to a pupillage with an architectural practice.

He was an only son, with one older sister, Lola. His mother, Amy, had endured the death of her youngest child, a daughter called Pat, aged four.

Hannaford would have been spared his wartime fate had he not chosen the Royal Engineers when he joined up. He had considered himself set for the RAF, having long lived down the first name “Avro” given him by his father, Tom, a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps, in honour of an aircraft manufacturer. But when he was told, “The RAF are looking for rear gunners now, and they don’t last long. Life expectancy five sorties,” he changed his mind.

He trained in the north of England and was then posted to 16 BD Company in Cardiff, south Wales. Of this Company, one man was to die for every 38 bombs defused – a higher mortality rate than in London, where it was one per 50.

The squads at the start, when death rates were highest, numbered only 1,500 men across mainland Britain. Hannaford survived the daily tension for two years before the steadily worsening pain of an abdominal ulcer put him in hospital. He was posted to an administrative job, and later in the war, as an instructor, imparted his bomb disposal knowledge to American air force personnel at Duke of York Barracks, London.

At war’s end he returned to the Ministry of Works, and in 1948 married Joyce Smith, née Brown, the widow of a soldier killed in September 1944 at Arnhem – “Operation Market Garden” – to whose daughter she had given birth soon after. Hannaford adopted the child, Jackie, as his own, and they had another daughter, Jill.

They lived successively at Reading, Portsmouth and Hastings, then Bexhill in East Sussex. On Guy Fawkes’ night he always lit a display. Only once did his habitual caution and methodical care fail: a Catherine wheel, not properly fixed, is remembered to have spun off into the fireworks box, exploding all the contents. No one was hurt.

He helped design the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment Aldermaston, and the Royal Ordnance Factory in Chorley, Lancashire. He became Senior Architect for the South of England, and his proudest work was the Maritime and Rescue Co-ordination Centre, the “coastguards’ building”, at Dover, which the Prince of Wales opened in November 1979. He also drew and painted watercolours of landscapes, boats, buildings, ancient ruins, and views of Venice.

Hannaford is thought to have been the oldest surviving member of the first Second World War bomb disposal squads to be formed. His prodigious memory for the detail of Second World War devices and fuses was often sought out for advice by today’s professionals whenever undiscovered bombs were found.

He felt keenly the lack of recognition given to the wartime squads, and threw away the “General Service Medal” that was all they were deemed entitled to. In October this year he was prevented only by ill-health from giving a reading at the “BD 75” anniversary service at St Paul’s Cathedral. He and his wife died within a week of one another.

Avro Frederick John Hannaford, bomb disposal officer: born Teignmouth, Devon 9 April 1917; married 1948 Joyce Smith (died 2015; two daughters,); died Hastings, East Sussex 11 November 2015.