A man who found an unexploded German bomb in his cellar waited until the next day to call police, because he "didn't want to wake up the neighbours".

Stephen Sin, 44, was halfway through spring cleaning his cellar when he stumbled across the device, and reported it the next day after running errands.

Mr Sin, who is a civil servant, said: "Because I had to see some Scouts off to Brussels this morning I thought, it's been down there for 50 years, another couple of hours isn't going to matter."

He and his family researched the bomb online after he casually mentioned it at the dinner table.

His wife Janice said: "It wasn't until we were having dinner yesterday and I asked how it went cleaning out the basement and he said, 'oh, I think I found a bomb,' in a joking way.

"We decided to do a bit of research. There were markings on the bottom and it said 1936 on the side."

The family realised that dealing with the bomb would take a long time and cause a commotion, so decided to wait until the next day.

"We thought rather than wake up all our neighbours and get them all standing on the street in the dark we decided we would leave it to the morning and work out who to ring and what we are going to do," Janice said.

"To us it didn't seem like it was going to blow up any moment now because it hadn't blown up the whole time we have been here."