Great War truck Posted March 22, 2016 Share Posted March 22, 2016 One of the things that caught my attention at Malvern is this tool box. The owner said it came from Ostend and was a WW2 German tool box that had been then used by a Royal Navy bomb disposal team. The tools are an odd mix but mostly wood working tools which seem unlikely to be for bomb disposal. Inside is a Marines name attached to a RN “dismantling Party”. I have not come across that name before but imagined that it was more to do with taking interesting things away for examination whether it was gun parts, torpedoes, radar etc. He provided copies from a German manual to support his view as to what it was. What do you all make of it? Thanks Tim Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fv1609 Posted March 22, 2016 Share Posted March 22, 2016 Tim yes the woodworking tools seem curious for EOD use. I can see no tools suggestive of being copper or brass that you might expect to see in an EOD kit. I wondered if CH/X2874 might be a stores cataloguing reference of some kind. Of all the various & rather extraordinary different systems used by the RN I could find nothing that resembled that. In fact the only stores category I could find prefixed with "C" relates to Polaris & Trident components, I shouldn't think any of those are made of wood. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris Suslowicz Posted March 22, 2016 Share Posted March 22, 2016 Tim yes the woodworking tools seem curious for EOD use. I can see no tools suggestive of being copper or brass that you might expect to see in an EOD kit. I wondered if CH/X2874 might be a stores cataloguing reference of some kind. Of all the various & rather extraordinary different systems used by the RN I could find nothing that resembled that. In fact the only stores category I could find prefixed with "C" relates to Polaris & Trident components, I shouldn't think any of those are made of wood. You'd be quite wrong there: quite a lot of the Polaris/Chevaline warhead assembly is made of plywood, according to an acquaintance who used to work at the instant sunshine factory. (Since the number of missiles was (and is) quite small, there was no point in tooling up for mass production and plastic mouldings, plus they needed something light and strong: plywood is the obvious choice.) Apparently there's a warhead at the "secret nuclear bunker" museum (minus its physics package, of course) and you can see the internal construction. (Rummage... Aha!) http://www.hackgreen.co.uk/Our-Secret-History/Nuclear-Weapons-Display/WeaponIframe/weaponiframe.html Chris. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ivor Ramsden Posted March 23, 2016 Share Posted March 23, 2016 ....I wondered if CH/X2874 might be a stores cataloguing reference of some kind... It's Corporal Robinson's service number. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fv1609 Posted March 23, 2016 Share Posted March 23, 2016 Ah, so all we have to do now is trace Corporal Robinson & ask him what he used the tools for Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tony B Posted March 23, 2016 Share Posted March 23, 2016 So an e mail to Chatham Dockyard? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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