D is for Discovering Shire Albums in the Shire Library

Continuing with the meander through my collecting library, both for the general interest and/or hell of it, and as an illustrated bibliography which may or may not be of interest to readers, new or loyal, as to suggesting titles they might want to track down.

 

Shire Publications began with UK-specific travel and local geographic guides, known as the Discovering series, which I don't think ever got a full numbering system, even as they expanded into wider hobby interests, beginning with cultural/rural/folk stuff. That led to the larger format Shire Albums, which were renamed Shire Library when Osprey bought the intellectual property a couple of decades ago, now Osprey itself has been bought by Bloomsbury, and the future is unknown. Shire Albums were numbered more formally, and there are a couple of useful lists of early volumes, here;

Discovering series -  https://www.publishinghistory.com/discovering-series-shire.html 

Shire Albums -  https://www.publishinghistory.com/shire-albums.html

The main storage collection, as it stood about five years ago, these are the smaller Discovering series, with a few similarly formatted softback/pamphlet type publications. I don't know the full argot or jargon of book sizes, and as anyone who has a library will know, they creep in either height or depth by increments of millimetres, with hardbacks complicating things by having internal pages smaller than the dimensions of the whole 'box'. But both formats from Shire Publications were 'standard' sizes used by many other publishers/printers.

 

Here we see a MAP (Model [and] Allied Publications) guide to early plastic kits, which I mentioned while looking at the Burns guides in previous posts on the far right, and on the left a Hamlyn 'All Colour' guide to war-gaming on the left.

 

The Discovering's cover war-gaming and modelling, uniforms and militaria, artillery, horse-drawn transport and horse furniture, and while they are all small, are still very useful for research, especially when you are looking for something specific, or on the tip of an increasingly forgetful tongue (old age bites!), each is like a better illustrated Wikipedia page, you only need to reach for, no Googling lots of useless crap!

 

The larger format Shire Albums include an early tome by James Opie, and are in an even commoner format (A5), so we see an Argus Publishing plans book, and several self-published efforts, including the late John Clarke's diorama's, Britains [horse-]racing colours, and both the Spot On guide and overview of a private collection of cartoon die-casts are self-published, I think.

 

The Airfix history was one of the last new titles added to the Shire stable, numbered at 598, while the W&H list should be with the catalogues, where I have several more, it was a yearly thing for some years, I believe.

 

Added the next day - I thought there were a bunch missing! The core of the toy-related volumes are in the larger format Shire Album size, and here's their shot! 

 

Cropped out of a larger image we'll see in a future post, I grabbed this in the last few years, firstly because 'once you're collecting these things . . . ', and secondly I thought it might help ID some farm/Santon type stuff, and lastly, there is a bit of a costume sub-library in any case!

 

These were all issued as 'free gifts' in Military Modelling magazine, and used to be stapled into the centre-fold, but (with the exception of the one on top, which was a different size for some reason), they were all A5.

 

Private publications, there is very little in these which is still relevant or useful now, but they remain in the library, as all books should, in part as part of the history of the library, and against the concept of 'you never know'; always worth a flick if you're looking for something specific, like a code-number. I have no idea how many titles were issued in this private, or club (?) series?

 

Covers are different, contents are the same, -Album versus -Library.

 

Another MAP, they tended to be compendiums of material previously published in their stable of hobby magazines, and interesting to see an early publication from Pat Hammond, who would go on to become better known for his work on Hornby, Tri-Ang and Binns Road.

 

The MAP is an ex-library copy, both a useful source of old titles, and a guarantee of cheap-price, as true 'collectors' (Bibliophiles) don't rate them, so neither do the second-hand book trade!

 

 Four more minor publisher/self-published types, including more trams (all useful for manufacturers data), and three peripheral tomes, but it all builds the whole, and appendices often have useful stuff in them, lists of manufactures, or after-market (now 'garage') producers.

 

 More of the same.

 

One of the first of the new Library titles, and a useful little overview. Really belongs with the Atlantic Wall/Channel Island subsection of the military library, but should be with its brother volumes, a perennial problem when a figure or book sits firmly in two camps. Does it belong in Cake Decorations, or Ceremonials? Is it Fantasy or Medieval? Bought new, a few years ago, from Waterstones in Basingrad.

 

A visit to the secondhand bookshop in Alton, 2021.

 

Three titles I inherited, as I was sorting my late Mother's estate out, over the last few years, I have a subsection, or subsections on tiles and mosaic, so a useful work, while Shire Archaeology is a third series, running - to date - to 91 titles, listed here;

 

Shire Archaeology - https://www.librarything.com/nseries/15546/Shire-Archaeology

 

Three more interesting tomes, particularly the schools one, not something I have much on, in the library as a whole, an old ex-Public Library book on school architecture in the arts section, maybe? But an interesting read.

 

I don't know if anyone caught the history of Boarding Schools by Nicky Campbell, the Radio1 DJ, on Radio4 recently, but as someone shoved through that flawed and damaging system, I found it both poignant and nostalgic in equal measure.

 

Also inherited, these share one code in the partial numbering of Discovering's

Mum's own fields included furniture, silverware, and latterly oriental art and ceramics.

 

 Another visit to Alton!

 

The most recent but one visit, and seen before, we've also seen Horse Drawn Commercial Vehicles and a second edition of Antique Maps, from a visit this year. While 487, Garden Gnomes, has so far escaped me, but it's only a matter of time! Discovering Book Collecting is a good full stop to this post!

QAIMNS (R) is for Angels!

One of the more unusual things in my possession is this old kit bag, about twice the size of the one I was issued with in '84, but half the strength of material, being quite soft, compared to mine which is like a canvas belt material, only bags bigger!

 

The base is heavier though, to prevent wear on trains, mud-tracks and ferries! It's brown, I don't know if there's a colour code, but I think the Navy have always been white, ours were standard 'army green' and the RAF had theirs in the same blue as their best dress, so there maybe/may have been a code, with women's' forces or reserves in brown?

 

It's marked MK DALY - QAIMNSR - BEF, which is the name of the owner, the unit (Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service Reserve), these days you tend to put the 'R' in brackets, but back then they clearly didn't! And British Expeditionary Force, our troops in France.

A little non-arduous Googling quickly revealed some of her history, she seems to have served from at least 1916 sometime (one of some 10,000 women), probably earlier, with a war diary in the National Archive revealing;
 

"Recommendation for 1 months’ sick leave for Miss M. K. Daly, QAIMNSR, 1 General Hospital, suffering from neurasthenia."

A euphemism for what we later called shell-shock (see below), and now call PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), from Abbeville (the Somme) on the 15th October 1916, suggesting she had already seen more than most of our generation ever will, and most of it pretty bad.

However, they were made of sterner stock in Edwardian Britain, and the same diary's entry (I couldn't ascertain the name or sex of the author) for 15th June 1917 reveals;

"To Frevent (Frévent, about 18km NE of Abbeville, ed.), to 6 Stationary Hospital, arriving at 12.15 noon. Went round the hospital with Miss Daly, the A/Matron, and the CO, Lt. Col. Harding. All in excellent order – had been evacuating largely – about 350 cases in hospital at the time of the visit. Saw the new hut for officers suffering from shell shock – not yet in use, to be opened next week, which will greatly relieve the existing Officers’ Hospital, which was overcrowded on the day of my visit, owing to a large number of shell shock cases. 59 officers in hospital altogether. Had lunch in the Sisters’ Mess, most comfortable and well kept."

 

So, she had returned to work, and was helping officers recover from what she had herself suffered from a year earlier.

The third mention of her I could find was her gazetting in the King's birthday honours list for 1919, where the British Journal of Nursing reports on January 25th;

"The King has been pleased to award the Royal Red Cross, second class, to the following ladies in recognition of their valuable services : — . . . Miss M. K. Daly, Staff Nurse, Q.A.I. M. N. S. R. . . .  "

 

At no point was her Christian-name or middle-name revealed, there were at least two other Daly's, one seems to have spent her war in the hospitals at Colchester, the other gets a brief mention in Scotland (I think, it was 'in passing'?), and one wonders what happened to her, all three of them, or indeed, the many thousands who 'answered the call', after the war?

The Quims (as they were 'affectionately' known), would become the Queen Alexandra's Royal Army Nursing Corps (QARANC), in 1949, commonly known as QA's. I briefly dated a QA after I'd left the Army, and once fell in love with a Captain, but she (along with two nurses, who were 'in on it') played a terrible trick on me and 'Snoz' Reed, which is another story for another day!

L is for Last One For Now!

 I know it's not everyone's cup-of-tea, but I find this stuff fascinating, and there's plenty still in the queue, both from Alderney and closer to home, but this is the final part of the recent visit to Hazeley Heath and the cable-testing station of the Royal Engineers and their antecedents.

This is the building or structure the winding mechanism/s was/were housed in, it was far more substantial, but all the reclaimable steel and reusable elements are long-gone now, leaving the two outer walls, some floor mounting stuff and a protective plate.

 

There's enough roadway in front of the structure for flat-towing tests, as well as the extreme tests allowed for by dragging things up the ramp we looked at last time! The top of the ramp is in the far distance in both shots, in-line with the structure and roadway.

 

This was apparently the mounting for the main winch/winding engine, presumably bolted to the two rails with a drip-tray between them to collect all the gunk which tends to find its way out of such machinery!

 

Beyond it is what looks like an inspection-pit, all filled in, but the blurb suggests another machine mounting, so I assume someone has dug it and found it to be not deep-enough for inspecting things?

In front of them is this, which probably mounted a pulley to carry the cable a bit higher over to the ramp, where a similar pulley, and its mounting have long-since been removed.  Also, there may be a secondary function of preventing whip-lashing broken-cables from damaging the machinery?

 

Heavy steel RSJ remnants hint at a heavy-duty, or over-engineered roof/shelter, designed again, or primarily, to protect the machinery and operators/observers from snapping cables, rather than enemy action, having been probably build long before the Second World War?

 

I gave them a quick tug, and they are set-fast in the landscape, whether they are old telephone cables or the old three-phase power-supply . . . Your guess is as good as mine!

 

I either read somewhere, or heard as hearsay from some MOD-procurement chaps or BAE Systems bod's, that how it works with these things, is that you decide you want a 50-ton main battle tank, for instance, you give the job to Vickers Engineering, and if you’re happy with the prototypes, order, say 250, with ten driver-training versions, plus a number of recovery variants . . . and cables (etcetera!).

Those cables then get rated at 55-tons, by the Royal Armoured Corps, who will have to use them, the MOD-wallah's up in Whitehall, agree to 55, and add another 5-ton rating to be safe, that gets sent to Vickers, who tender-out the contract, because they've now got 260 tanks to build and some recovery vehicles to design, and can't be arsed to start twisting wire hawsers! They add 5-tons capacity to the contract!

GKN take the wire twisting gig, and add an extra 5-tons 'just to be safe', before their hawser and cable division plait another few tones of capability into the finished cables! You end up with a steel-rope, which is specifically designed to be carried by 50-ton vehicles, but which can recover 70-ton vehicles from sticky mud! All that early work seems to have been done behind a little village in rural Hampshire, in the 1930's and 1940's!

B is for Brain Fog

As I said the other day, we used to play out on the heath, all day! Mum would fill our water-bottles with orange squash, I had Dad's old Palestine one, with the tan, strappy-cage holder, and my brother had the green US Vietnam one with the two poppers at the neck (the SAS used them in the jungle), and a couple of cold sausage sandwiches, and we'd go off and play 'Army men' all day, ranging for miles and sometimes meeting other kids, sometimes having a 1000-acres to ourselves, if we avoided the Gypsy camps!

One of my childhood memories was finding a tank-testing inclined ramp, in fact, I remember two, side by side, about 30º and 40º each, but what has now been opened-up and left on display, is A) nothing like my memory, and B) somewhere else!

And while it may be that the others are somewhere else, on the more private land a few-hundred yards to the east, hidden in the undergrowth, I suspect that my memory of this (below) has become conflated with various pictures of similar ramps in tank or AFV books?

What is there now is more of an architectural channel, with various features and a steepness of around 45º, rather than the two flat roadways I remember? It could be slightly shallower, but as we'll see in a second, I don't think so, if it is, it's no less than 40º.

 

There is a bog at the bottom, now, it's ironic, but you wouldn't build a military testing facility in a bog, near a bog, if you are testing towing (as they were, according to the historians who've done the blurb on the info-sign), maybe, but not 'in' a bog, so the fact that there is a bog there now, or that a nearby bog has extended back to the ramp, is almost certainly an unforeseen consequence of building a ramp there in the first place, and channelling a lot of water straight down the hill!

 

There are signs of a metal slider type thing running along the tops of the two raised 'rails', obviously someone back in the 1950/60's removed the bulk of the metalwork for scrap (probably the Gypseys?), but they cut either side of the sections anchored into the concrete. And you can see, if I'm standing vaguely level, and holding the camera naturally, it's about 45º

Here's one that has been pulled out, or weathered-out at some point, so you can get some idea of how deep the anchors went, it's filled with dirt now, mostly sandy, so weathered concreate running down the slope and filling any holes it finds!

This was lying in the channel where some kids probably pulled it out of the bog, or found it in the undergrowth, it's a solid chink of steel with a blunt-point at one end and might be another kind of anchor, for either the hawsers under test, or the test weights/vehicles?

Life will find a way, and eventually even the pyramids will be no more.

In the central grove are these equidistant holes, which I suspect formed a ladder of scaffold-sized bars, which might have made climbing up or down the ramp more easy, or may have been for fixing anchors or stops to prevent the test-item running back down the ramp uncontrollably if/when the hawser failed?

T is for Tank Tracks

I popped over to the BMSS show on Saturday to pick up a few things including a tub of bits for the Blog from Adrian, two days after a brilliant parcel from Chris Smith dropped-in, so lots in the queue, and I've been bumped into looking out all the Motorcycle stuff for a round-up or two!

 

Coming on the heels of the dragons teeth post, and on the way back from Reading, I thought I'd stop on Hazeley Heath and look at the tracks they dug out of the undergrowth/bog a few years ago, we used to play around there as kids, but it's changed a great deal, and memory failed me at one point, but they are subsequent posts, this is the tracks!

 

Apparently the above is Valentine Tank track, the area was used to test towing cables by the REME, previously probably the Ordnance Corps, or an offshoot of the Royal Engineers MVEE testing facilities at Deepcut/Chobham, up the road (A3), or the vehicle testing site at Rushmoor, across the way, between Fleet and Aldershot?

While this hasn't been ID'd, but I think it's a Vickers Medium Mk.1's tracks from the 1920's, also used on early Mk.2's before the ones with the plates that have a double-cross cut in them, was used. The site was in use for testing, since before the First World War, so interwar track is quite possible. It's so heavy and so rusted, I couldn't lift it to see the underside of even one link.

 

The information board is also tracked, and while seemingly cobbled together from recovered parts (there was half a Sherman turret sticking out of the bog at one point), with [possibly!] three Churchill road wheels and two Valentine return rollers?

 

But the tracks are very thin, they almost look imaginary, however, up close, have both age and casting marks, so a small carrier or one of the late 1930's cruisers? Obviously, the diamond-plate fabricated 'hull' is a modern fancy.

S is for 'Soldiers'

I wonder how many loyal readers from the UK (or elsewhere if it was syndicated?) will remember, in the autumn schedules for 1985 (or '86/'87, maybe, elsewhere?), a broadcasting-extravaganza of a televisual production, with all the Reithian boxes ticked - Educational, Informative and Entertaining - called Soldiers, and presented by the mighty author of airport-carousel paperbacks, Frederick Forsyth, no less? A strange anti-war, Brwreakshiteer conservative!

Below is the promotional leaflet/marketing press release, which doesn't appear to be copyrighted, so I don't have to worry about the 'fair use' paragraph or anything! It is one of many pieces of crap in the stash which will have to be dealt with over the next few years, and recycled properly or sold to some other mug, but which might jog your memory of the series;

No? Well, it was a long time ago, and I certainly don't remember it being on the telly-box, despite staring in it! But then I had gone off to Austria (pretending NOT to be a British Soldier - they were neutral!) to do my Ski Instructors Course and be lectured into the benefits of regular colonic irrigation by a BASI instructor who had gone beyond Hippy, and was full-on nut-job, but he knew how to ski, and teach skiing!

 

You see, the supposedly 'independent' BBC, are not above getting so close to the Ministry of Defence (MOD), they can save a small fortune in extra's fees, by employing the British Army - for nothing! It's called low-level corruption, and happens in 'so called' democracies (favourite phrase of Trumpies and fuckwits), all the time!

The real reason Napoleon lost the battle of Wahterrr'looo, was not because he had the shits all day, nor was it because he'd spent the previous two decades killing the flower of France or leaving them casually in Egypt, or all over Eastern Europe, it was because the Allies had superior transport - heay; the camera never lies!

 

A-Company, 1 Glosters, being a company of somebody else;

 

"Form squares! And prepare to defend against cavalry!"

 

I'm in there somewhere, but I can only - now - name Benefield, Thomas, Carl Kerry, possibly Freebrey & Cpl Cordingley? Waiting, endlessly waiting for something violent to happen, the lot of the Infantry.

 

And you see, the reason we never got paid, was that the Army are considered to be paid 24-hours a day (which of course means they are well below the minimum hourly wage!), so 'didn't need' paying twice?

 

Prouse and Alan Greathurst? I have a friend who made her living as an extra, Natwest commercials, London's Burning, all sorts, and when she did a non-speaking role as body-double for the remake of Lost in Space, she made enough in eight weeks to allow her to emigrate (Canada), with her family . . . I reckon that the good-old 'Dear Aunty Beeb' owe me about ten-grand, more with interest & inflation, the thieving shitbags!

 

While we were in Kenya, earlier the same year, some elements (Support Company, I think?) were used in anachronistic kit, to do a WWII beach assault from Landing Craft, I don't know if it was the same production, or some B-movie which ended-up straight-to-video, or on the cutting-room floor, but it was another dodgy deal, using British troops for free labour, for profit! But then, so was building Daniel arap Moi's private airstrip . . . another story for another day!