Snapper

Pop down the donkey sanctuary and buy yourself a classic military vehicle. Recovery is cheaper and it will recycle your leftovers.

The English: A nation divided by a common language. This is my only contribution to this thread, which is excellent but in danger of going :offtopic: Keep up the info chaps. I'll leave out the cockinese or estuary English innit.

Sounds like a midlife crisis. If I were you, Jack, I'd buy a decent PW motor. I wish i had. KEEP THE JIMMY....

Beugny is NE of Bapaume - the road goes to Cambrai from there in a round about way. The cemetery stands in a field with a water tower behind it. Water towers are always marked on IGN maps and make for excellent reference points on a journey. Just near Beugny is the Louverval Cambrai memorial - a superb place. You can also get to many of the other 1917/8 cemeteries with ease - beautiful countryside there as with all Picardy and Artois. The five sons lost were the Beachy boys. Only one has a grave - at Warlencourt. Went there in October. The cemetery included a man from my firm called Frank Whistle and a Southend High school teacher. There are lots of RFC/RAF people in it. We were also looking for three or four shot at dawns - but someone had stolen, or removed, the register which is common. We hadn't got the references off CWGC before we left,

Happy birthday. I hope Richard is buying the drinks.....

Brian sold one of his Antars to a museum in Australia - the Snowy Mountain project, or something like that. I had a great day at his place several years ago with the Antars, a Militant and an ex Bermuda fire truck. He's since added a Centurion, another Militant and a 432 and I think he has a trailer to make a full rig with the Cent and the Antar.

:-D Top banana.

Cheers Baz, see my PM you are very kind. Mark

Very interesting. I will instruct Stryker James to look. Thanks a bundle Barry. If you're still happy to sell a SLR cleaning kit - I'm in. The boy will love one. All we need now is the SLR!!

Great - please review it for us when you've got time.

Interesting census. How's your compressor truck coming along Matt???

The book is Band of Brigands by Christy Campbell....I'm awake today

Agreed. Not sure what made the publisher merge his books into one - but the detail is fantastic. I really liked this book. The German book still interests me. Any chance you could expand on it a bit for us???? Ta MB

I've just got an associated book on the first tank men. It is a stunner from the off. Will report later after I've got some shuteye. My daughter is a budding olympic swimmer and I have to get up in the middle of the night to take her to train. I need some kip, but the waiting time is good for reading...so they tell me.

Good, during the particular period there was a real hotchpotch of kit before officers learned to make themselves less conspicuous. Not sure about the Guards anyway, where spit and polish were always paramount. The rifles thing is interesting. The Somme thing meant well, but they will always cut corners at the Beeb. I dream of the day we have a really decent film made on the war with the production standards of a Spielberg movie. But the cost alone would be huge and we all know the audience would be lacking unless we could get Matt Damon to say cor blimey guv'nor or I say old chap (quite apart from anything from t'other latitudes north of Pinewood. I wouldn't care as long as the film was true to the men and the times. Read McCrae's Battalion by Jack Alexander. It is Band of Brothers in every sense and the multi layered stories are wonderful. Jambos forever. It's a pipe dream.

I agree with your replies gentlemen. We are a bit different to most people and vive la difference! But outright crass insensitivity is beyond the pale (as my dad would say - even if I can't spell it). Stuff 'em.

I've been to Dud Corner where Jack Kipling's name is listed on the monument to the Missing. There is also his alleged grave in nearby St Mary's ADS cemetery which is an extremely contentious spot. The decision to identify the grave as his has never had universal agreement amongst the genuine experts and many feel it was a 'political' decision, made for some bizarre reason long after the Kiplings had died. For me they represent an enormous tragedy, given the later death of their daughter in the USA which Mrs Kipling really blamed on her husband. Poor Kipling, one of the greatest writers in the English language ruined by his own ambition for his children. There is a lesson in it for us all. I'm planning to visit the Kipling grave in January. Loads have been already, but it will be nice to do it. The battles of Loos and Festubert claimed tens of thousands of men and are very much ignored in favour of looking at the Somme and 3rd Ypres in the mainstream. I missed the programme, but will catch up. Cheers MB

I was stuck in the office all day and at the appointed hour the fire alarm went off to signal the two minutes silence. One of my colleagues decided to talk through it, telling us what a waste of time it all is and how nobody is bothered. She shut up after twenty seconds. Then another idiot walked in and asked if the fire alarm went off and should we leave. I quickly told him it was the two minute "silence" and he promptly gibbered sorry...sorry over again for the next thirty or forty seconds, squeeling how insensitive he was. That was 11am in my office. My son James marched out with the ATC in Southend in the rain. They have a Christian minister, a Rabbi and the locall Imam address the throng there. The three clerics message is broadly the same. Just as the Imam was doing his bit, a cheerful soul in the crowd yelled out GO HOME!. Having seen many hundreds of Indian army and labour corps muslim graves as well as French equivalents on my travels around the western front of both wars I suppose I feel sick at this crud. My wife wanted to have words with hm, but the idiot vanished in the throng. She was not alone apparently. Maybe next year.....

When I was a kid my school used to send groups to stay at Marchants Hill Rural Centre near Hindhead and we used to hike over to Hankley Common to watch service types parachuting from a balloon. We used to walk up past the golf course to get there and then sit and watch the hardy souls making their jumps. On one occasion some gentlemen were on Ex and were hiding in a small cluster of trees when good old Mr Thurley and the third year breezed past making a racket. My mate Leonard found a mortar bomb and we all got spent shell cases. The mortar bomb (just a tail unit) was too much for Mr Thurley and we never went back with him. They were good times escaping from the real life of the "East End". I'm never sure Hackney really qualified as such, but it didn't make the squalor any better. MB

Welcome John. Keep the fish and chips hot or there will be trouble.

This all sounds good. I agree with the sentiment that saving the memorial is very important. My company threw there's in a skip when they moved buildings and only realised when it was too late. They tried to buy it back from two people who saved it, they said NO. Fair do's, I say. I've been slowly visiting the graves or memorials to the company men of WW1 and managed to visit five more this year. My mad bunch are also visiting the graves of former pupils of Southend High School for my mate's sister, who is a teacher there. It adds focus to visits. We'll be back around Armentieres in December. The only thing I don't like about it is the feeling that it's a bit like collecting engine numbers, but the merit of it is a lot higher. I'm stuck in the office all day tomorrow and won't see my son parade at the Southend Cenotaph for the second year running. Work can be a pain in the derrier. Best wishes to everyone stepping out tomorrow.

Thinking about it, the other major ports were German enclaves and did not fall until some time. The Canadians took Calais and I think they took Boulogne, too.

What about Le Havre? The dockworks there were extensively wrecked too.

It was discussed in a recent TV documentary. They did the shot several times and by the end John Mills was as a newt.

they all have a ring of truth. Good fun. :-D