Bought a £3.00 torch for our camping trip with our two dc's and it started

[sweetbloom]

a electric malfunction,I'm relived it happened at home, I put brand new batteries at home switched it on and within 5 minutes it stopped working.
My son gave it to me and it started letting outa foul smell and started smoking.
Not impressed and to be honest its not about the money its dangerous im not happy what are my rights,becuase tomorrow I will be having strong words.

Your rights are to receive a refund

yanbu, if there is a fault the manufactors can put it right

Did ring the store they apolgised, said they will recall the item and refund the money but I hope they do as its dangerous.
Thank you I had a night of all nights tonight its certanlet been eventful.

that happened with a controller for a remote controlled car that I bought for DS. I put the battery in the wrong way around and it started smoking. It would have caught on fire if I hadn't have been there.
It did say in the instructions to be sure to put the battery in the right way but it was an easy mistake to make!

Hang on. "It caught fire on its own" - badly made - a big problem, not being unreasonable.

"I put the battery in the wrong way around and..." - not the same surely?

Sorry, but how can 2 x 6 volt batteries and a small bulb ever be dangerous?

Next time, buy a better quality torch. When you buy cheap, you buy dear.....

(More helpfully, yes, you should be able to get a refund ut YAstillB a bit U)

It's almost certainly not the torch, rather the batteries. It's hard to see what the torch itself could do to make a problem, or (unless for managing to get enough energy into it to start to combust a plastic body, which is fairly implausible) what part of the torch could smoke anyway.

But if one of the batteries has an internal short circuit, or if it takes more than two batteries and one of them is in the wrong way around, you can easily get one of the batteries warm enough to start making a fairly noxious smell. Have a look at the batteries and see if one of them looks like it's got hot, or if you've got a tester see if one of them is dead-er than the rest. If so, either it was put in the wrong way or it faulty.

This is why, by the way, instructions tell you not to mix types of batteries and not to mix new and older batteries: especially in higher current applications like torches or anything with a motor, the safety of the thing relies on the batteries all being in the same state. If one of the batteries is electrically different to the others, the "odd one out" can get rather warm. Taken to the extreme (one out of six in the wrong way, say, or mixing Alkaline with rechargeable batteries in something with a motor in it) and you can get some entertaining smells.