D is for Defence Works & Dragons Teeth!

I shot these the other evening in Guildford. When I was going to collage there in the 1980's they were hidden in the undergrowth either side of the old sort-cut path, but, in the 1980's the population of the UK was half what it is now, and the necessary development which has filled the years between has lead to them being revealed, as more formal paths were arranged through them, and in 1998 they are formally recognised with a plaque (bolted to one of them) and are watched-over of not actually looked after! They are yards from the London Road railway station in the centre of town.

One or two are still overgrown in the background, and a better-surviving example was seen here on Small Scale World, many years ago, about a mile to the south, which would all have been part of the same defence plan - to prevent German invasion forces coming up from the South East corner of Britain, getting though the Downs at the  'Golden Ford' and having a clear-run across Surrey Heath toward London.

 

When you realise how many gargantuan flack-towers (Flaktürme) are still blotting the landscape around Germany and Austria, a few Dragoons teeth look quite innocuous! These, unlike the ones down by the river, don't seem to have any pattern to them and may have been individually cast on a Monday morning, or Friday night?!! Built by 578 Army Field Company of the Royal Engineers in February 1942 . . . a bit late really!

G is for Gribeauval System - Field Forge & Crew - Historex No's 741 & 743

So, I started the year with every intention of getting all these done, and while about half of them have been scanned (memo to self - do the rest this weekend so they are on the system), and a good start was made with the character figures and a few of the horse-drawn transport posts, other stuff and real life put the brakes-on!

So I'll get the last five horse-drawn sets out now (they've been on the desktop since March I think?!), and make more effort next year, but they'll all stack-up under the Historex tag, with the show plunder re-branded (heat-branded!) Elastolin 40mm's which were found at the May PW Show!

 

There was also a crew of three blacksmiths or 'Artillery Artisans' available;

Because Historex was rather all about the uniforms they are relaxed upright poses, if you wanted to get them more active, you married them to bits of Airfix 54mm Collector Series 'multipose' figures and ordered extra arms!

If I had the time and the skill I'd love to do a diorama of these chaps heat-shrinking a new iron-tyre onto a wheel. And many thanks to Mr Foy of the Prometheus in Aspic Blog, who sent all these to Small Scale World many years ago.

D is for Demolition Men

As the pond becomes hideously over-used I have found it necessary to look further afield for photographing wildlife and found myself on the Army land the other side of the Motorway this summer, where I encountered these . . .

. . . eleven sand pits, each a few feet across, and about 10/15-feet (five meters) apart. They are arranged on a well-mowed field, like the playing-pitch of some weird French ball-game no-one else has bothered to learn the rules to! The actual pit is only a foot or two but the 'spillage' makes them look bigger.

About a 150 feet away (60/70-odd meters?) is a similar structure or arrangement, this time of ten 'holes' arranged in a circle, as if someone from Central Planning has marked out the position of a Henge with sand, for builders, coming later with a load of Blue Granite!

The foreshortening of the photographs necessitated the rendering of this quick sketch to explain the above 'crop circle' and a sort of blunt arrow-head! However, scattered around the field and/or half-duried in the sand are the clues as to the sand's use;

Detonators . . . or their remains! These pits are for the young engineers to learn one of the tenets of their craft, namely; blowing stuff up! And further, to learn sequential detonations.

We often hear them at this end of town and in the past it was a case of thinking "Oh that's the engineers learning to blow stuff up", but now I count the explosions, and sure-enough; they often come in ten's or eleven's!

Presumably the ring is used for simple sequences or synchronised 'blows', while the arrowhead can be used for alternate detonations, or paired explosions running up to the point, or back from it.

And using just detonators or small charges, the whole can be observed safely by students and instructors from the hill on the other side of the road - you can see in the background of the first shot?

Some of the other paraphernalia associated with the exercises, which was lying around. To be fair - and given the frequency with which they can be heard - they do a good job of cleaning the site between visits, but once I was 'on the case', I quickly found these which had been blown about the field by wind or explosive-design!

I must stress that with the exception of the labels; which I posed for the camera, I didn't touch or move anything, it's just not worth the risk.

Possibly a piece of smoldering hessian from the sandbags they may place over the charges or maybe a piece of white phosphorous, if they also learn how to destroy munitions at the same location? It looks like something which came down from space . . . Thwaaak!

In high summer this is the sort of thing which starts 'range-fires' and leads to (or contributes to-) those dark, cloudy backgrounds on otherwise clearly sunny days, you see in old photographs of Barbarossa, or Kursk; two years later.

B is for Bridge

Bridges are good things, they ease our passage on any journey, whether to the shops or through life and carry us over obstacles; real or imagined. Here's one what I built in the woods the other day, Tesco's is now 15 minutes nearer and not one more car has been put on the roads.

When I joined the Army in 1984, my ambition was to be a Plant Op-Mech (Operator Mechanic) in the combat engineers, however; although I got technician grade on four of the joining tests (spelling, dominoes, logic puzzles and IQ thingies) I kept failing the [basic] maths paper, so the MOD would only offer me Infantry, Artillery and Pioneer Corps...

...now I knew from my Father that the peacetime Pioneer Corps spent most of their time digging latrines and making wooden floats for civic KAPE type events, and in wartime spent most of their time digging latrines, trenches and graves (sometimes probably using the same hole for all three in sequence!), so they were out, likewise the Artillery seemed to have to hump a lot of heavy kit about and then wait for counter-battery fire to ruin their day, so the Infantry it was.

I kept putting in for a driving cadre, and kept being promised the next one by company commanders who's Sgt. Major's had no intention of giving me the ammo I needed to apply for a transfer, so in the end I 'did my bit' and got out, pity as I think I'd have a made a half-reasonable engineer?

Yes...it's just a pile of logs!!!! Maybe it should have been the Pioneer Corps!

S is for Southwood

All my life I've been surrounded by the military, I was an Admiral's Grandson, Soldier's 'brat' and would have been the nephew of a Navy Flier if he hadn't died, stuck to the giant-firework that is a hooked-up missile on the ranges off Lossimouth. And for some reason I then joined-up myself...must've been mad...oh! I am.

My brother and I lived on ranges, roamed training areas and were surrounded by soldiers - toy and real, we collected empty cases (sometimes not so empty!) and had Schermuly flares on Bonfire night so that we could range the heath the next morning looking for the parachutes which Action-Man then made good use of out of the bedroom window!

When our parents split-up (very fashionable at the end of the 1970's!) we left our heath and moved to the teeming metropolis [sic] of Fleet in Hampshire, were I - as one of Mrs (she's no Lady) Thatcher's long-haired victims of Tory cuts (plue les change...plus les change!) - would get out of the house for hours by taking the dog (Finn; he was a red setter - if you know your Irish tales) for long walks round Fleet Pond and the areas surrounding it. One area that bordered the pond was the woodland at Southwood, where the engineers had been based for years before the whole thing became a retail/commercial park.

One piece hadn't been developed and is still being used today, behind/to the south of what was NGTE and is now Qinetiq. There was in the woods what looked like the remains of a WWII barracks/training area, although it was probably used after the war, but it was derelict by 1980. Usual collapsed shacks in the undergrowth, concrete paths running between the floors of long gone Nissan (Quonset) huts, even a couple of Nissan huts still in situ, no doors or windows but dry enough for a surreptitious teenage cigarette out of the drizzle! However there was also a structure which fascinated me as I had a fleet of Airfix Matador artillery tractors...

...so the other day I went back (nearly 30 years later!) to see if it was still there. Vandals have sadly destroyed it since I used to scrummage about on it, but the remains are still discernible. Basically - what it was in former days was the back-end (troop compartment) of a Matador or similar 8 or 10-ton rated lorry, mounted on concrete posts, presumably as some sort of convoy air-attack/ambush drill practiser?

You can still see the concrete posts, but what remains of the rusty frame (it was still upholstered in wood when me and Finn studied it) has been taken off and dumped against an old ammo/rubbish-bin bunker.

This structure remains in a much better state of repair and the feeling is it was part of some bridging/obstacle exercise, or even for teaching the placing of demolition charges? The reinforcing-rods suggest it was never completed, perhaps due to the wars end? Someone has had a go at the main pillars though.

These structures also hang about rather forlornly, no clue as to why man once had a desperate need to clear woodland and force his signature upon the landscape in quite such a brutalist style.

The small angle-iron barricade is interesting as compared to both modern barbed-wire pickets and the old WWII German ones all over the Channel Islands (we once collected enough still-good German pickets to pen a sheep-field!), this is a very flimsy thing of thin-gauge steel, more of a temporary road-traffic/checkpoint measure than a serious attempt to prevent enemy insertion!