{"id":210125,"date":"2025-12-25T11:14:17","date_gmt":"2025-12-25T11:14:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/210125\/"},"modified":"2025-12-25T11:14:17","modified_gmt":"2025-12-25T11:14:17","slug":"i-sold-1965-meteorite-fragment-to-buy-a-new-bike","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/210125\/","title":{"rendered":"‘I sold 1965 meteorite fragment to buy a new bike’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Matt Taylor,Leicesterand<\/p>\n

Ben Jackson,BBC Radio Leicester<\/p>\n

\"BBCBBC<\/p>\n

David Radford said he bought a new bike with the money he gained from selling a meteorite fragment 60 years ago<\/p>\n

“I think I’m the only person that can say their racing bike fell from the sky.”<\/p>\n

When a meteorite the size of a Christmas turkey broke up over a small village 60 years ago, David Radford was a teenager who had a second-hand bike.<\/p>\n

This changed after he found a fragment of the largest meteorite to hit the UK in Barwell, Leicestershire, on Christmas Eve 1965.<\/p>\n

David said he was playing with friends at the park when his foot fell down a hole made by falling debris. It was in that hole where he found the 4.5 billion-year-old piece of space rock. <\/p>\n

“We took it round to my friend’s house and we weighed it on his mother’s cake scales,” David said.<\/p>\n

“And she was not amused. It weighed two pound and 14 ounces (1.3kg).<\/p>\n

“I took it back home, showed my parents, never told a soul.”<\/p>\n

A week later, there was a knock at David’s front door.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

A plaque is in place in Barwell to mark the meteorite falling there in 1965<\/p>\n

It was the late British astronomer Sir Patrick Moore<\/a>, who presented the BBC programme The Sky at Night.<\/p>\n

He was joined by an official from one of the museums in London, David added.<\/p>\n

“They just turned up, they asked to see me and the meteorite and they wanted to see if it was real and authenticate it,” he said.<\/p>\n

David believed word had spread around the village about his discovery.<\/p>\n

After the two visitors confirmed it was a meteorite, David said the official asked if the museum could buy it from him.<\/p>\n

He said he was given \u00a323 (\u00a3393 when adjusted for inflation), as the going rate was 10 shillings per ounce of meteorite.<\/p>\n

Eyewitness Joseph Grewcock describes the moment a meteorite landed in Barwell in a news report from 6 January 1965<\/p>\n

“I was wanting a new bicycle, and I’d got the family hand-me-down, so I wanted to replace that,” David said.<\/p>\n

He bought a 10-speed Raleigh racing bike, but said his mother made him set up a bank account with the remaining money.<\/p>\n

“I was over the moon, literally,” David added.<\/p>\n

“I love space, I love astronomy, and I’m into sci-fi, and if I ever got the chance, I’d like to go up there.”<\/p>\n

David went hunting for more fragments after this, with the use of a magnet, as the meteorite had iron in.<\/p>\n

He found another piece of rock and has kept it for 60 years, but it is likely slag, a material left over when iron has been smelted.<\/p>\n

\"GrahamGraham Ensor<\/p>\n

Graham Ensor, posing here with a meteorite he found in Oman, has travelled all over the world pursuing his hobby<\/p>\n

The arrival of meteorite to Barwell was followed by a sonic boom and a frantic search for the hundreds of scattered fragments began.<\/p>\n

Graham Ensor was nine at the time and lived nearby, and the event sparked a passion in him for space rocks.<\/p>\n

He said: “It’s taken me all over the world. And this very meteorite has taken me to America. They did a special exhibition over there about meteorites that hit things.”<\/p>\n

Graham said meteorites are not easy to identify but offered some tips.<\/p>\n

“What you need to look for is this fusion crust, which is a black melted exterior that’s formed when it’s doing 30,000 miles an hour as it comes in,” he said.<\/p>\n

“If you find a piece of rock that’s got lots of little thumbprints all over it, that is a good indicator, and especially if it’s black on the outside and light on the inside, that it could be a meteorite.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Matt Taylor,Leicesterand Ben Jackson,BBC Radio Leicester BBC David Radford said he bought a new bike with the money…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":210126,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[61,60,82,247],"class_list":{"0":"post-210125","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-ie","9":"tag-ireland","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-space"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=210125"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210125\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/210126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=210125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=210125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=210125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}