Don’t go bananas: UK public told to stay away as ship’s fruit cargo washes up

Sixteen containers went overboard from the cargo ship Baltic Klipper in the Solent on 6 December, of which eight were reported as carrying bananas. Photograph: Jamie Lashmar/PA

It isn’t quite Whisky Galore! – the classic British film in which residents of a Scottish island attempt to pilfer 50,000 cases of spirits from a shipwreck.

Rather than a warming dram or two, people on the south coast of England have been finding bunches of bananas from containers that fell off the back of a ship and washed up on beaches in West Sussex.