When my grandmother died there was a lot of stuff. She had run the St John’s Ambulance brigade from around 1912 to the 1980s: through two world wars. She ran the ‘home comforts’ department for Tilbury and Orsett hospitals, so the sheds had a couple of bathchairs, 30 or so wheelchairs, and hundreds of crutches, braces, and trusses. There were wartime watch diaries we gave to the Imperial war museum, and rubber fake wounds (for training) we gave back to the St Johns. Stirrup pumps and gas masks went to the local museum. The boxes of old field dressings I burned.
But the strangest thing, and the most difficult to dispose of, were the boxes and boxes of nerve gas samples in glass ampules. According to the leaflets the idea was to learn the smell of lethal substances, to help pick the right treatment for casualties. The boxes were marked with various military emblems. Each ampule was about 25ml, but there were thousands of them. Thousands. The Police could not deal with them, the Unexploded Bomb squad didn’t want them (they did take the dummy weaponry). The rest of the Army would not help. The local council were terrified.
In desperation I put them in our mobile shop and drove to Porton Down, the government scientific warfare establishment, dumped them in reception and fled.
Read other answers by Robert Harvey on Quora:
- Who was the most ignorant person you have ever met in America?
- Would freezing dead people ever work? Would they be able to come back from the dead?
- Who is the most interesting person you've ever sat next to on an airplane?
from Quora http://ift.tt/2jZMBpI
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