A military veteran who endured five bomb blasts during Britain’s nuclear test programme in the late 1950s has finally received his medal — through the post without fanfare.

Sixty-six years ago, Terry Quinlan sat on the beach at Christmas Island in the South Pacific and witnessed the detonation of Grapple X, one of Britain's first nuclear test bombs.

Then a young National Serviceman in the Royal Army Service Corps, Mr Quinlan and his army colleagues were knocked flat by the blast wave, even though the explosion was on a tiny atoll 23 miles away.

The explosion had been the equivalent of 1.8 megatons of TNT — or 120 times more powerful than the Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima during the Second World War.

Tents were swept away and trees felled in the blast - and Mr Quinlan was injured in the throat by a piece of flying shrapnel.

For decades, the Kent veteran has been one of the key figures in the campaign to persuade successive governments to give some form of recognition to the 22,000 British servicemen who were involved in the UK's nuclear test programme.

Now after finally receiving his accolade, Terry Quinlan, from Leybourne, said: “It’s very disappointing. I had hoped for some kind of presentation ceremony, that’s what we veterans had been led to expect.

“Instead it [the medal] just arrived with the postman – it wasn’t even registered post.”

Like many of his nuclear test veterans, Mr Quinlan went on to develop a range of health problems associated with the radiation fall-out - with some problems even continuing into the next generation, with a high instance of birth defects in the veterans' children.

Successive governments had repeatedly refused to give the veterans a medal, partly, it is thought, because they didn’t want to open the door to claims for compensation from those who suffered poor health as a result.

For a long time, the government argued that the test veterans were not exposed to the same imminent danger as those on active service, and it rejected as unproven links between the bombs and the veterans' subsequent ill-health.

Mr Quinlan, who suffered his first cancer tumour just two years after his service ended, when he was only 24, disagreed.

Eventually, a campaign led by LABRATS (Legacy of the Atomic Bomb, Recognition for Atomic Test Veterans) and by BNTVA (the British Nuclear Test Veterans Association) succeeded in persuading politicians to have a change of heart. The Conservative MPs Johnny Mercer and Tom Tugendhat, the SNP's Ian Blackford and Labour’s Angela Rayner all lent their support to the campaign.

Mr Quinlan’s own experiences have been aired in a documentary by American film-maker Brian Cowden which went out in the USA, and in another, filmed by the Nippon Television Network Corporation, which went out in Japan.

Eventually, last November, 70 years after Britain’s first nuclear test explosion, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced that all the servicemen and scientists involved in the test program would be awarded the Nuclear Test Medal.

The PM described it as “an enduring symbol of our country’s gratitude for those involved in the test programme”.

Britain was the last country in the world to commit to awarding its nuclear test veterans a medal.

And now 10 months later, the medals have begun to arrive.

Mr Quinlan said that at the time of that first explosion, he and his colleagues were ordered to sit on the beach with their backs to the blast and to cover their eyes with their hands.

They were issued with no PPE. Indeed, in the tropical sun, most were wearing only their shorts.

He said a flash of light lit up the sky and Mr Quinlan swears he could see the bones inside his hands like an X-ray.

Once they had picked themselves up off the ground after being knocked flat by the blast, they stood to watch a giant mushroom cloud fill the sky.

Two weeks later Mr Quinlan was in a sick bay, suffering the after-effects of radiation exposure.

Research has shown that the children of test veterans were 10 times more likely to be born with birth defects or suffer sterility later in life than the average in the general population.

Most of the personnel involved were National Servicemen - teenagers - with no concept of the dangers they were being asked to run.

Although nuclear weapons were a relatively new invention, the dangers of radiation had first been made public decades before by Marie Curie, the famous French scientist, who had herself died of radiation poisoning in 1934.

The devastation resulting from the two atomic bombs dropped by the Allies on the Japanese at the end of the Second World War was also widely known.

Many of the veterans now believe that rather than ignorance being behind their exposure to radiation, they were in fact deliberately used as guinea pigs.

Serving with the Royal Army Service Corps, Mr Quinlan's job was to drive huge trucks delivering supplies and materials all around the island - including construction materials for the bomb shelters for the scientists' equipment erected near to the test site on the southern corner of the Pacific Ocean atoll.

He recalled how trucks, boats and even two tanks were deliberately left at varying distances from point zero to see what the effect of the explosion would be on them.

After the bomb blasts, he and his comrades - dressed under the blistering tropical sun usually only in their khaki shorts - sometimes had to drive the boffins from the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment to their forward bases to carry out their tests.

He said: "They would wear full protective gear and masks, while we were wearing next to nothing. No one ever suggested we also needed protection."

To be honest, for it just to come in the post has made the whole thing fall rather flat

Mr Quinlan was present on the island during five nuclear explosions.

Now aged 84, he said: “I don't want to sound like I’m some kind of moaning Minnie.

“I’m very grateful that we have at last received our medal.

“But to be honest, for it just to come in the post has made the whole thing fall rather flat.

“I was rather hoping the King, or at least a member of the Royal Family would make a presentation to us.

“If not to all of us individually, at least to a representative cohort.”

A spokesman for the Ministry of Defence said: “It is quite normal for medals to be sent out in the post.

“The only time there is a presentation ceremony usually would be to a specific Regiment or unit on their return from a posting abroad, such as coming back from Afghanistan for example.

“In this case, the large number of potential recipients would make any presentation ceremony even more difficult.”

But he did add: “We are looking at some kind of ministerial event where a member of the government would meet some of the veterans to mark the occasion.”

No firm date has been set.