Hi everybody!
An introduction, I'll keep it short and sweet -just like myself!
Despite my relatively young age (I'm still the right side of forty) I'm getting to be one of the old timers down here.
I've collected militaria virtually since birth -we always had gasmasks and helmets around. My father was in the Home Guard and then the Royal Artillery, serving in India -the last days of the Raj. His brother -my uncle- was a "D-Day dodger" with the DCLI, fighting in North Africa and landing at Pantelleria and then Anzio, Italy. Following injury he was flown back to Blighty by Dakota.
Anyway, back to me. I was fortunate in that one of the early pioneers of private military vehicle ownership -Charlie Mann- had his museum down here. Most of you will have heard of him from his providing vehicles for the film industry -most notably "A Bridge Too Far". I have several pictures of myself (not for publication!), aged seven, with some of the vehicles when they returned from Holland. Film buffs can now work out how old I am!
Later, purely by chance, I was visiting Falmouth where there was a display of MVs. Until this time I didn't realise that "ordinary" people owned such things. One was an old friend of my father. At that time he had a Dodge Weapons Carrier and a Daimler Dingo, in which I was to take part in several parades. This in turn lead to me acquiring my own vehicles, the rest, as they say, is history.
So there it is, thanks for reading!