In April 1951 the naval armament vessel – the Bedenham - exploded while docked in Gibraltar killing 13 people and causing a great deal of damage to the town. Ten years later this traumatic event was still fresh in the mind of whoever edited the Gibraltar Directory of 1961 who dedicated two pages to it under the heading of “Gibraltar Disaster.”
A group of curious bystanders in Main Street viewing a large piece of shrapnel from the Bedenham – the ship had been birthed a considerable distanced away from this spot with numerous intervening streets and houses
The entire Directory is not available but several pages of the publication were posted on the internet by Annabelle Victory in February 2011. Nevertheless those surviving pages shown below are – I think - of relevance to anybody remotely interested in the social history of the Rock. Thank you Annabelle for allowing me to copy them.
