R is for Recruiting Rodneys!

A couple of scans from the Sunday Times supplementary magazine, dated 1960 and 1966 receptively. I don't know what it was like where you are (foreign readers), but from the 1960's and into the 1980's our 'Sunday supplements' were really very good magazines, with minimal advertising (against the glossies), interesting articles and usually very good imagery, and where there were adverts, they could be quite good to!

A pose which could have influenced both messrs Ron Cameron and Bill Farmer? Airfix British Commandos (SLR replaced with a Thomson SMG), Britains Super Deetail (tree-branch replaced with grenade!), couple of Matchbox figures . . . both sculptors would have seen this image many times, as these ad's would run, regularly, or for a year or two on-and-off, in several publications.

 

Also of note is the pre-DPM olive-greens ('OG's'), which replaced the WWII/National Service Battle Dress for a while, having first been used in the jungles of Malaya and Borneo I think? DPM was fully introduced around 1966. This may be the Canadian pattern jacket, but the uniform changes of the 1980's are a murky business with no real timeline . . . the Gloster's wore Battle Dress in Northern Ireland in 1970!

 

Yeah! You got that, Johnny Foreigner? The best in the world 'init! Heay, I can be as jingoistic as an arse-kissing lover of Farage (rhymes with c**t) if I want to! Just a bit of fun!

But joking apart; it was - I think it's fair to say - one of the best for some time, regularly winning inter-nation tank performance and gunnery competitions in Europe and Canada, giving the Israelis the ballistic turret outline of their Merkava and producing a barrel and fire-control system any-other nation who could, immediately tried to squeeze into their existing turrets, and while it was getting a bit long in the tooth against later marks of Leopard (and Iraqi T-72's made a mess of Iranian ones in the original 'Gulf War'), it was really only Challenger I and M1 Abrams which chased it into the history books?