LOST memories of wartime Christchurch have been regained by the Red House museum two months after the tapes containing them were stolen.

A woman who walked into the museum in Quay Road left a carrier bag containing the 10 camcorder cassettes but not the Canon video camera which was taken at the same time.

The woman, who waited until staff were busy, dumped the bag on the counter and left without giving her name or any details of how she came to have them in her possession.

"I am delighted to have the tapes back, although the lady in question did not return the stolen camcorder," said Red House visitor services manager John Lewis.

The collection of tapes containing interviews with local people who had lived in the town during the Second World War was compiled by Mr Lewis for the Home Front Recall oral history project to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of the war. But the recorded recollections - many of them irreplaceable - and the camera obtained by the Friends of the Red House with a £5,000 lottery grant were snatched by a sneak thief from a back room of the museum in June.

Mr Lewis said the tapes were all in tact and the interviews would now be edited and transferred to DVD for safekeeping at the Wessex Film and Sound Archive in Winchester.

The DVDs will also be available for visitors to view at the museum and for showing at talks given by Mr Lewis to outside organisations. He said: "It is a bit bizarre, but the publicity over the theft has obviously jolted someone's conscience.

"The interviews on the tapes could not really be done again. One man is now desperately ill and another one was only in Christchurch for a short time before going back home up north."

First published: August 16, 2005