A SQUAD of workers spent hours carefully dismantling a mass of steel scaffolding that had blown across a garden in Headington in early 1973.

Only three fruit trees had prevented it from crashing through a greenhouse at a neighbouring home on January 26 that year.

The dismantling had begun the previous day after the huge structure, covered in plastic sheeting, had blown down from the side of the neighbouring Headington telephone exchange, where a two-storey extension was being built.

It fell across the garden of Thomas Magee in Osler Road, who said he had heard a rumbling sound, before looking out of the window and seeing the scaffolding hanging over his garden.

He said: "It could have been worse: had it been a summer morning, when we would probably have been working in the garden."