The year was 1956 and two civilian able seamen set out with the Admiralty Yard Craft Service to provide support for divers operating from HMS Burleigh.
Fishermen Richard Kirby and Leslie Nye were sailing out into British waters, off The Lizard in Cornwall, when they spotted a huge shark near the ship and Diving officer Lt Commander Brooks led an expedition in a small motorboat to scare it away.
The plan was to throw boxes of TNT overboard near the predator in the hope that the explosions would drive it off, The Mirror reports.
However their plan went awry after the boxes of explosives were thrown a little too close to the shark, and a rope that bound two of the boxes together snagged around the animal's dorsal fin as it was swimming away.
Even that might have been fine if the creature had not decided at that very moment to turn itself into a kind of living torpedo.
Commander J Bailey of HMS Burleigh told the coroner at the time: “It was a very good shot.
"The line linking the two charges straddled the shark and caught round either its dorsal fin or its tail so that they were hanging either side of the shark with fuses burning.
"The boat started to turn away from the shark but the shark turned around, made for the boat and was underneath when the two charges exploded.”
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Tragically, the two fishermen, Kirby and Nye, were killed after the speedboat was completely destroyed by the force of the explosion.
Lt Commander Brooks and one other man survived.
The shark is also presumed to have perished in the incident.
Shark attacks are incredibly rare in Britain, with no unprovoked attacks said to have occurred since records began in 1847.
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