‘I’m paid to blow up old bombs every day – it’s the best job in the world’

At the old RAF Cowden base in Yorkshire, thousands of pieces of unexploded ordnance are being detonated. It’s vital work – and far from over

There are plenty of people who claim, usually to convince themselves as much as others, that they have “the best job in the world”. Paul Duckworth is another one. But he’s adamant.
“It is, though. It’s every young lad’s idea of heaven. Think about it: we get paid to spend our time on a beautiful beach every day, just blowing stuff up,” he says, with a grin. “And the best thing is we’re actually making the public safer by doing it.”
Steve Aldred and Dan Field, Duckworth’s two colleagues from Brimstone, an unexploded ordnance (UXO) risk management company, could not agree more. All three men are former military. Aldred is 66. He was supposed to retire last year. “But I just thought, why would I, when I get to do this?”
As we bobble in a dark Ford Ranger pickup across Cowden Sands, a vast three-mile beach on the Holderness coast of East Yorkshire, their argument is difficult to dispute. On this clement midweek morning, the North Sea is an inviting teal. The sands are smooth and vacant. In the water, a seal watches us with indifference.
“Welcome to the office,” Duckworth, 63, says from the driver’s seat. He draws a hand across the view. “See what we mean?”
Idyllic as it seems, the beach contains a secret – and it’s increasingly bad at hiding it. For around six decades between 1940 and the late 1990s, this 275-hectare patch of the East Riding was a key plank in our military defences, initially as a tank range and infantry training base, then as RAF Cowden, a bombing range used by the British Army, RAF, Royal Navy, Special Forces and Home Guard, as well as other Nato countries.
By the time the range closed in 1998, it was estimated that over 2.5 million ammunition items were expended during its time in operation. In addition to moving tank targets on railways, static targets for RAF planes were set up on the cliff tops and at sea for aircraft – among them Phantoms, Buccaneers, Harriers, Hawker Hunters, Vulcans and American A-10 Thunderbolts – to practise with.
At the time the ammunition was dropped, the targets were set well back from the cliff, or well out at sea. Yet coastal erosion, which nibbles the cliffs at a rate of around five metres per year here, now means more than half a million bombs are being unearthed and exposed to the public, who are free to use the beach as they please. 
Using the bombing ranges, the military had more pressing concerns than to think about what would one day happen to all that ordnance. (Those left out at sea are another matter entirely.) Some of the bombs they dropped exploded on impact, as desired. Some were just props, inert but potentially with small charge. And some may yet go off – after so many years, it is difficult to know. But they are all potentially very dangerous. “And that,” Duckworth says, “is the issue.”
For two decades, the Ministry of Defence (MOD) employed specialist military bomb disposal teams to start clearing RAF Cowden. Among them, for six years, was Duckworth, formerly RAF chief technician of 5131 Bomb Disposal Squadron and a veteran of Iraq and Kosovo. Budget cuts bit, however, so in 2021 Brimstone was awarded a £1.5 million contract to remove the ordnance – the first private company to work with the MOD in such a way. Duckworth left the military in 2004 and set up a business, but he leapt at the chance to restart his old job, albeit in the private sector.
In three and a half years, he and his team have removed a lot of bombs. “I can tell you exactly how many,” Duckworth says, in his portacabin office next to the now derelict RAF Cowden buildings. He nods to Field, 39, a former Royal Engineer, who has the figures on a screen in front of him. “198,627, so quite a lot. That’s 138 tonnes of ordnance since we’ve been here.”
So how many are left? “Oh, God, a lot. Hundreds of thousands. But with the weather and tides, they can get covered up by sand for ages. We can go three months driving up and down the beach without seeing any, but then one storm can unearth a decade’s worth of work.”
That is what Duckworth’s team do each day, come rain or shine: drive along the public beach, remove what they can, and anything that might be dangerous, they blow up with plastic explosives. At the entrance to the beach, we pass a huge sign making clear the risks. “DANGER: Unexploded ordnance on this beach. It may explode and kill you. Do not approach or touch any Military or unidentified objects,” it reads.
“Can’t get any plainer, can it? Unfortunately, there’s always a nucleus of idiots,” Duckworth says. Locals remember playing with the 12kg rusty 20th-century practice bombs, which really do litter the beach by the dozen, clumped around the former targets (this is where the teams begin their work each day) and stick out of the cliffs like the fruit in a block of rum and raisin. They receive reports, either from local witnesses or the police, of people taking bombs off the beach almost weekly. “Some of the worst offenders are the historical collectors.”
Aldred, also an RAF veteran who worked in bomb disposal, once saw some live shells kept under a bed in a caravan. “It’s absolutely mad… People just don’t know what they’re picking up.” Other members of the public are the opposite, and ring the police as soon as they arrive on the beach, panicking that they have seen a bomb. Duckworth had a call to that end yesterday and the day before. But he’d rather those than anything graver.
Given there were at once scores of military target ranges around the British Isles, Brimstone’s near-Sisyphean task could, in theory, be one that has to be repeated all over the country – especially if coastal erosion continues to increase dramatically with climate change. “But it wouldn’t be worse than here, this is a special case,” Duckworth says. The sheer speed at which these clay cliffs are disappearing and emptying of their mysteries is remarkable.
“It’s a hell of a task,” Duckworth says, picking through the small bombs, which are about the size of rugby balls but as heavy as a well-fed dachshund. Most are inert. “But it’s in among all these we might get a nasty one, like an unexploded WW1 shell. They’d cause a problem – if a member of the public came and picked one of those up, it’d be pretty disastrous. So when we find one of those, we blow them up on the spot.” Mercifully there has never been an incident at Cowden. “It’s very satisfying, but sometimes it’s a bit sad to have to destroy something historically significant.”
In the back of Duckworth’s Ford Ranger today is a box containing 5kg of plastic explosive. That ought to take out about 40-odd bombs, so Aldred and Field set to work lining them up in rows, then laying the cream-coloured explosive – which feels like Play-Doh – over each, delicately pinching the edge to stretch it out. It’s like forming a pie crust. They could do more, and sometimes do, but keeping the explosions small-ish doesn’t disturb (or alarm) locals or wildlife too much.
I imagined a kind of heap of bombs, then a stick of dynamite thrown on like a cartoon. “Nah, it wouldn’t work as well. Trust me, we’ve tried every way you could ever think of. This is the most effective and efficient,” Field says. 
A few minutes later, after the bombs have been neatly strung together with explosive and charge, red flags go up on either end of the beach, to signal a controlled explosion is about to happen. Sentries stand guard to stop the public encroaching.
We all retreat 200m. Silence descends. Walkie talkies are switched on. “Clear” is given by all. Buttons are pushed and then, with a sharp whip-crack that echoes all around the coast and a car-sized fiery blast emanating from the pie crust, the bombs are suddenly neutralised. “Wow, I think you pushed the buttons too hard,” Aldred quips, taking back the controller. He titters. Military humour is partly why he loves this.
Returning to the blast site, Duckworth finds now-safe explosive charges within minutes. They could have gone off at some point. It is never worth the risk of leaving it. “We are the litter pickers of war,” Field says, as we load up the back of the pickup with the waste left from the explosion, which will be safely disposed of elsewhere.
Duckworth reiterates his essential message. “It’s a public beach, everybody should enjoy it, but just leave this stuff alone, do not handle it, do not touch it, and enjoy your holidays. Our presence here, daily, is a deterrent, but people just need to know we know [the bombs] are here, and we’re dealing with them.”
They are; slowly, slowly. Back in his RAF days, Duckworth and colleagues used to think it’d take about 20 years to clear all the ordnance at Cowden. “Well, it’s been 25. So I don’t think I’ll see the end of the job. But there’ll always need to be a presence here for a few years. Then there might be a lull for a decade, then the erosion will reach another target…”
Back in the Brimstone cabins, over a fish and chips lunch, he starts an afternoon’s paperwork by double-checking the team’s progress, to make sure the record’s straight. “Yep, 198,627 pieces of ordnance so far,” he says, peering at his computer.
Plus another 40 now, surely? Duckworth brightens. “Oh yeah. Plus 40.” 
Tomorrow, they’ll chip away at the problem a little more. Only half a million or so to go. It may be the best job in the world, but nobody said it was easy.