Raleigh Battery Plymouth - July 2019

fluffy5518;360462 Also said:

The armament in these batteries was ex Battleship ordinance from scrapped, obsolete ships, and being of such a large calibre was slow to load and fire. Also they were long range guns - hence the time of flight was much longer than the smaller calibre QF ordinance. Plenty of time to manhandle the shells and propellant cartridges into the breeches.

Interestingly; when I was a lad, the old sidings that were situated under Hexthorpe Bridge and beyond in Doncaster used to be full of 16 Ton Wagons full of redundant wartime scrap. Much of this came directly from Ministry Stores and we all had an empty Mills Grenade body to chuck around when we played soldiers. Mind you, there were also plenty of the 'real thing' to be found at the backs of fathers' sock draws. Relics of those dangerous times when our fathers lived by their nerves 24/7. Experience tells me that all the ones I came across at that time were still fused, but had either never been filled will explosive or the explosive filling had been removed. Apart from grenade bodies, there were also wagons full of empty shell bodies - one could see the grooves in the steel where the copper driving bands had been chiseled out. All this lethal steel ware was on its way to the blast furnaces of Sheffield, to be converted into steel for RSJ's to support the vast rebuilding going on, or steel plate for the car body plants like Briggs Motor Bodies (part of Ford UK I think). Kids still played marbles back then and we all wanted a 'bolly' in our bag, just a bloody great steel ball out of a large ball bearing. The individual steel balls seemed to be between 1" and 2" in diameter and I have no idea what they came from, but Doncaster had plenty of wartime engineering factories where they could have come from.

Click to expand...