70 years on, Fife village honours its five heroes who died tackling mine

Now seven decades later a monument has been unveiled to mark the heroism of four men and a teenage boy who died while attempting saved their village from a drifting sea mine.

On the morning of 23 January, 1941, George Storrar, a miner and a special constable with Fife Police, was told of the danger drifting towards the village of West Wemyss.

The mine, packed with 320lb of high explosives, had broken free of the moorings anchoring it as a defensive curtain against German U-boats and enemy shipping. The floating bomb was now drifting on the tide towards the village sea front and the nearby gas storage tanks.

The iron ball spiked with detonators was drifting near Lady's Rock, a prominent land mark a few hundred yards to the east of the village. Mr Storrar rounded up a four-man team to try to tether the mine by looping a lasso of rope over one of the spikes and stopping the drift long enough for the Ordnance team to dispose of the danger.

He was joined by Colin Smart, a 36-year-old Home Guard volunteer and miner, James Anderson, 58, and David Laing, 69, a retired miner, as well as Peter Graham, 15, who lived in nearby Seaview Cottage and had run off to collect the required ropes.

Together the team set off to Lady's Rock to try to protect not only the village but also, in case the mine drifted back out to sea, the local shipping which used the nearby harbours of Methil and Kirkcaldy.

The exact cause of the detonation is unknown, but it is thought that after the men lassoed the mine, it banged against rocks. What is known is that at shortly before 11am on that Thursday morning, an enormous blast rocked the village, smashing windows, flattening greenhouses and damaging parts of Wemyss Castle, 750yd away and 100ft above the shoreline.

As Andrew Nicol, who was sitting next to Peter Graham's brother at the local primary school, recalled: "The bang was tremendous and we knew something serious had happened. Within a few minutes someone came and called Peter's brother away. We were only told that school would end early and that we were to go straight home."

The local doctor, Dr Khambatta, had one of the few cars in the village and was quickly on the scene. Two men, George Storrar and David Laing, and the boy, Peter Graham, had died instantly, but Mr Smart and Mr Anderson were still alive, despite having suffered horrific wounds.

Among those who rushed to assist was a Mr Todd, an architect and factor at Wemyss Castle, who as a veteran of the First World War knew what to expect, but still the sight shook him badly.His daughter, Nancy, still remembers him coming home "pouring a stiff whisky and downing it, something we never saw him do. He was still shaking and had obviously been shocked."

The two survivors were taken to Randolph Wemyss Memorial Hospital in Buckhaven, where Mr Anderson died at 2:15 pm that afternoon, while Mr Smart clung on to life until 3 February.

Yesterday the bravery of the five men was remembered with the unveiling at 11am, the 70th anniversary of the hour of their death, of a three-and-a-half-tonne memorial sculpture of the mine, carved from whin stone, with which the miners had worked, with each of their names inscribed on stainless steel spikes. More than 350 people attended the ceremony and a service at St Adrian's Church.

Jake Drummond, who organised the memorial and spearheaded the 10,000 fundraising campaign, said it was a fitting tribute. He said: "We've inscribed the memorial with the words of a Greek philosopher. Thucydides, who said: 'The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it'. We think that sums up exactly what these ordinary men did that day, which was an extraordinarily brave thing to do."