Quick-thinking neighbours managed to save a retired teacher’s hand after he severed it while doing some home DIY.

Edryd Jones was cutting wooden batons while working on a bedroom ceiling at his house in South Wales when he accidentally cut his left hand off with a power saw.

His neighbours plunged the limb into a bowl of ice, and after a nine-hour operation doctors managed to reattach the 69-year-old grandfather’s hand.

He can now move it and even drive again, and has donated £1,000 to the hospital that gave him back his hand.

Edryd was at his home in Ferndale in the Rhondda Valley when the accident happened.

He said: “I didn’t realise my hand had gone until I went to pick up a piece of wood and it wasn’t there. It was on the floor. I thought I was going to bleed to death.

“There was nobody in the house with me so I went downstairs and walked to my neighbour’s house. I knocked his door and he was absolutely shocked when I said, ‘I’ve cut my hand off’.”

Neighbours called an ambulance and used a belt as a makeshift tourniquet to stem the bleeding, and one fetched a bowl filled with ice.

“Someone said, ‘Where’s his hand?’ It was still upstairs in the bedroom. A neighbour had to go up and get it. My watch was still on the wrist so he took it off and brought the hand down and put it into the bowl of ice.”

Edryd was taken to the Royal Glamorgan Hospital where surgeons stopped the blood flow and took X-rays, and he was taken to the Welsh Centre for Burns and Plastic Surgery at Morriston Hospital in Swansea.

Surgeon Andrew Bebbington fixed Edryd’s bones together, while his colleague Dean Boyce repaired his nerves, blood vessels and skin.

After his first operation he spent 11 days at the hospital, and following another operation began physiotherapy. Movement has now returned, he is back driving again and is even carrying on with his DIY!

Now he has presented the hospital that helped him with £1,000 to show his gratitude for their skill.