Somebody out there knows all about this !!

[andy brown]

Above letter received some six years ago from th e gentleman who dealt with the tank plates ,although at the time of his writing this this to me had been retired from southerbys for some time but remembered the plates and myself ,not that this is overly important in the way of things but might placate the claims of lack of evidence .....

Strange but it seems never to occured to some that I am the evidence !!

[andy brown]

On 9/8/2021 at 1:08 PM, andy brown said:

[andy brown]

19 minutes ago, andy brown said:

Thought it might be of interest to show these one from MP one from mod two years apart ..reality is both are one and the same ,MP Hammond under signed all communications to me no matter who sent them ...

Thought about speaking to tank museum for a few weeks and eventually rang museum curator ,the words buried tanks had barely passed my lips when I was hit with ,,,,good lord how many of these ridiculuse phone calls do you think I get a week .....and phone went dead ...some much for customer relations......that was 2015...

Regarding first letter Hammond I had put it to him that despite his insistence that the site was clean no checks whatsoever had been done on the area that I had identified as the burial site ..the corporal from munitions said when I brought the subject up ( well if they find something with a digger they can always call us back in to sort it ) by coincidence I pointed a number of sites I had been on that were said to be clean and had turned out to be anything but citing one at Bramley near Basingstoke clean till the JCB hit a barrel of mustard gas corporal laughed said have you been there I said about twelve years ago when they found the gas ,he said you want to see it now mod gave up with it the more we dug the more we found so they ring fenced it with two fences and gave it best cause stuff was everywhere.......

[MrEd]

Do an FoI to get the copies of the scans that have been done. Then publish it here in full.

[andy brown]

1 hour ago, MrEd said:

Do an FoI to get the copies of the scans that have been done. Then publish it here in full.

Thank you for the advice .but you lost me after ( do an )

[MrEd]

16 minutes ago, andy brown said:

Thank you for the advice .but you lost me after ( do an )

Freedom of Information request.

send it to the MOD.

[andy brown]

4 hours ago, MrEd said:

Freedom of Information request.

send it to the MOD.

Thanks for explaning that ..

Not sure that I wouldn't get the same short shrift that I received at Kew, the answers one is likely to get I would have thought would be akin to those I have already received from the likes of Hammond who seems to have his finger on the pulse of every move I have made over the last ten years .what is it these letters do you think would achieve ,this is a can of worms I've been trying to prize the lid off without much success for a long time. The lengths I have gone to have resulted in threats that have arrived where you know you've touched a nerve but that's another story...

As this is your suggestion what would you expect the end result to be ?..

.

[MrEd]

59 minutes ago, andy brown said:

Thanks for explaning that ..

Not sure that I wouldn't get the same short shrift that I received at Kew, the answers one is likely to get I would have thought would be akin to those I have already received from the likes of Hammond who seems to have his finger on the pulse of every move I have made over the last ten years .what is it these letters do you think would achieve ,this is a can of worms I've been trying to prize the lid off without much success for a long time. The lengths I have gone to have resulted in threats that have arrived where you know you've touched a nerve but that's another story...

As this is your suggestion what would you expect the end result to be ?..

.

A freedom of information is not asking someone their opinions. You would be asking for copies of all correspondence and copies of the scans etc. It wouldn’t be freshly written letters, but copies of any documents and reports relating to the site in Question. 

[Ashcollection]

The letters from the MOD and Hammond seem perfectly reasonably and polite to me, you are lucky you got a reply. As for freedom in information act they legally have to disclose anything they have, and it would just be some random researcher with no interest in the back ground. Personally I bet the company doing the development would love to find 325 buried tanks and recover them, it would make world news!

[andy brown]

56 minutes ago, Ashcollection said:

The letters from the MOD and Hammond seem perfectly reasonably and polite to me, you are lucky you got a reply. As for freedom in information act they legally have to disclose anything they have, and it would just be some random researcher with no interest in the back ground. Personally I bet the company doing the development would love to find 325 buried tanks and recover them, it would make world news!

Not I'm afraid how Hammond would see it not as there are multiple tens of millions in this and other sites ,tanks would be something he doesn't need ,an irritant a nuisance deficit .he and I have locked horns before  ,he is a developer first and a M.P.  second..

[Ashcollection]

Well for a delay of 6 months on a few acres of a thousand acre site and a £325 million pay out on a load of ww2 German tanks and the world wide publicity would be well worth it. You seem to be forgetting the effort and money thats spent on archaeological digs on these sites, Roman, Saxon finds etc being dug out with a tooth brush and trowel. the tanks can be hoofed out with a dozer, much quicker. We will all soon know.

[andy brown]

2 hours ago, Ashcollection said:

Well for a delay of 6 months on a few acres of a thousand acre site and a £325 million pay out on a load of ww2 German tanks and the world wide publicity would be well worth it. You seem to be forgetting the effort and money thats spent on archaeological digs on these sites, Roman, Saxon finds etc being dug out with a tooth brush and trowel. the tanks can be hoofed out with a dozer, much quicker. We will all soon know.

It's been a game of patience all along ....A correction the tanks are for the greater part various marks of Churchill and the lesser breeds he did rattle off some of them on odd occasions but for the life of me I can't recall the exact details I recall bridge layers and did ask if any were German and I think he said two or three also that where there were gaps they would squash in the odd bren  gun carrier or Oxford carrier something I forgot to mention he said the pits were lined with railway sleepers ...lined I presumed was lined not just the floor ...

Re the letters I posted from Hammond I wasn't inferring that there was something wrong with them ,only included as a point of interest ...

Ps when he was demobbed in 46 he didn't wander far from the only thing he knew he worked in REME 10 command wks, mill hill east until 1954 last five years a vehicle examiner ...home counties.......so he did his fair share ......

[terryb]

been following this thread for a while, as my dear old dad once showed me some bumpy ground up on Etchinghill and told me me it was a grenade/piat range, and there were 3 tanks buried there.... the resulting dig proved him 100% right. Other gentlemen on here may have come across the larger than life W&P frequenter, who claimed to have found a holy grail of tanks, and produced photos of the glacis plate to prove, and know how that story panned out. but I cant for the life of me fiqure out why at huge expense, this dramatic operation took place at a time when resources were in short supply. Gas axe it and weigh it in. 

[Rootes75]

That is a very good point, at a time when raw material was in such short supply why wasn't it all just weighed in??

[andy brown]

1 hour ago, Rootes75 said:

That is a very good point, at a time when raw material was in such short supply why wasn't it all just weighed in??

Good evening

There are quite a few people on the forum. Who could dot all the I,s and cross all the t,s on the answer to that question.

Basically at the end of the war the U,S, were now the big boys on the block ,a position that was to cost us dear president Truman saw the newly elected Labour government as a load of communist with there need for sociall reform and the NHS...there were five dollars to the pound US could not trade with the world because of such a strong pound and that hurt ...but we were broke Attlee  dispatched lord Halifax to the U,Sto get a loan he represented all that they hated about UK's upper class or class system they gave him a quarter of what he had wanted along with enough strings attached to hang every one of us ..devalue the almost half ,you owe us so many billions on lease lend agreement ,whatever you have still got you have to pay for ,we don't want back if you don't pay for it and scrap it we want the scrap price, alternatively you will have to bury it unserviceable,....those payments went on till Ed Balls made the last payment early ,2000... Although some of the strngs are still attach to this day....

America has a great sense of humour so they say..but can't stand being laughed at.

That a rough outline but you'd need a hundred pages to be a little more precise ..

 

[ruxy]

My  £  bet   , would be that if John Attlee  3rd Earl - reads this then he would make no comment.

[11th Armoured]

I'm probably missing something here, but Churchills weren't in any way lend/lease as far as I know, so why would it matter to the US whether we scrapped them or not? Or did you say that they were buried as another one of Mr Churchill's mythical 'reserves' hidden away for the 'next war' - I forget.

Also as an an archaeologist who has some experience of dealing with contaminated sites, I can guarantee that if anyone's run a magnetometer or ground-penetrating radar across the site, then they will have discovered Caesar's lost armoured division. The same goes for any boreholing & trial pitting that is usually undertaken as a matter of course on any brown-field site that destined for residential use...

[andy brown]

1 hour ago, 11th Armoured said:

I'm probably missing something here, but Churchills weren't in any way lend/lease as far as I know, so why would it matter to the US whether we scrapped them or not? Or did you say that they were buried as another one of Mr Churchill's mythical 'reserves' hidden away for the 'next war' - I forget.

Also as an an archaeologist who has some experience of dealing with contaminated sites, I can guarantee that if anyone's run a magnetometer or ground-penetrating radar across the site, then they will have discovered Caesar's lost armoured division. The same goes for any boreholing & trial pitting that is usually undertaken as a matter of course on any brown-field site that destined for residential use..

As a ten year old I wasn't given a portfolio at the meeting .the tanks could have been in lieu of or we might have owed the Canadians  or they could have been those that my father and others had swopped for scrap ones in the low as countries in 45 ..take your pick ..

 Burial site not checked by munitions clearance team  ..as I keep saying scrambled signal on gpr when I tried .but wasn't bothered as map he gave me in 1959 matched the aprons exactly so wasn't as problem ..ps do have pics of tanks three years before burial and no you can't have them yet ,took me ten years and a great deal of expense to get them. .....  Patience........

[Ashcollection]

5 minutes ago, andy brown said:

As a ten year old I wasn't given a portfolio at the meeting .the tanks could have been in lieu of or we might have owed the Canadians  or they could have been those that my father and others had swopped for scrap ones in the low as countries in 45 ..take your pick ..

 Burial site not checked by munitions clearance team  ..as I keep saying scrambled signal on gpr when I tried .but wasn't bothered as map he gave me in 1959 matched the aprons exactly so wasn't as problem ..ps do have pics of tanks three years before burial and no you can't have them yet ,took me ten years and a great deal of expense to get them. .....  Patience........

haha so all this time you have had pictures of the tanks!

[11th Armoured]

5 minutes ago, andy brown said:

As a ten year old I wasn't given a portfolio at the meeting .the tanks could have been in lieu of or we might have owed the Canadians  or they could have been those that my father and others had swopped for scrap ones in the low as countries in 45 ..take your pick ..

 Burial site not checked by munitions clearance team  ..as I keep saying scrambled signal on gpr when I tried .but wasn't bothered as map he gave me in 1959 matched the aprons exactly so wasn't as problem ..ps do have pics of tanks three years before burial and no you can't have them yet ,took me ten years and a great deal of expense to get them. .....  Patience........

So now it's the Canadians not the Americans preventing us from scrapping them? Thanks for clearing that up...

And you have some photos of tanks three years before they were buried? I dare say I do, too...

And "Patience"...? Of course, we wait with bated breath... 🤣

[Ashcollection]

1 hour ago, 11th Armoured said:

I'm probably missing something here, but Churchills weren't in any way lend/lease as far as I know, so why would it matter to the US whether we scrapped them or not? Or did you say that they were buried as another one of Mr Churchill's mythical 'reserves' hidden away for the 'next war' - I forget.

Also as an an archaeologist who has some experience of dealing with contaminated sites, I can guarantee that if anyone's run a magnetometer or ground-penetrating radar across the site, then they will have discovered Caesar's lost armoured division. The same goes for any boreholing & trial pitting that is usually undertaken as a matter of course on any brown-field site that destined for residential use...

its like the stories of rows of buried B17 engines and jeeps in crates buried on old airfields in Norfolk and Suffolk, so far after 70 odd years has found any, the buried dumps are just that, dumps of scrap and junk. interesting junk though.

 

[Ashcollection]

21 minutes ago, 11th Armoured said:

So now it's the Canadians not the Americans preventing us from scrapping them? Thanks for clearing that up...

And you have some photos of tanks three years before they were buried? I dare say I do, too...

And "Patience"...? Of course, we wait with bated breath... 🤣

my dad was RE in the early post war years and he was involved in demonstrating lots of the old WW2 kit to foreign governments for sale, or donation. didn't ever bury any, it was worth something, use it, sell it or melt it down.

[andy brown]

46 minutes ago, Ashcollection said:

my dad was RE in the early post war years and he was involved in demonstrating lots of the old WW2 kit to foreign governments for sale, or donation. didn't ever bury any, it was worth something, use it, sell it or melt it down.

Some where I've a paper re a chap that was delegated to go from Newmarket post war  to a hanger at Mepal once a month on his motor bike to check the oil and water in 400,bren gun carriers stored there strangely when I was an apprentice at a ford main dealer about 1957 400 V8 engines came in to be overhauled ,did about two weeks in the engine shop cleaning parts an labeling them couldn't breath In there as babbit was always on the boil for metaling the journals.

[Morris C8]

Here are a few. Photo from my collection.

Keith

[MrEd]

I feel this thread isn’t going to go anywhere tbh. It just doesn’t add up to me.