Showing posts with label military. Show all posts
Showing posts with label military. Show all posts
Saturday, 18 April 2015
Damnation trolley
Saturday, 29 March 2014
Locked in the bastion
View Larger Map
I had a short wander around Gosport town centre on Tuesday, including a visit to the Number 1 Bastion (also called, locally, Trinity Bastion or Vicar's Bank), part of Gosport's fortifications remaining from the days when the town and its associated military installations served a major role in the infrastructure of Portsmouth Harbour as a naval base.
Sunday, 9 March 2014
Exmouth Battery exposed
Tuesday, 31 July 2012
Fort Gomer
I've mentioned the Palmerston forts of Gosport, Hampshire, a couple of times previously: see Fortifications ... and Gosport (19 Aug 2009) and Priddy's Hard (5 July 2012).
I briefly mentioned Fort Gomer, which no longer exists. I just about remember it from my childhood; my mother worked as a secretary at the school opposite, and sometimes she took me in along the lane that ran to the east of the fort. It was sold and demolished in 1964, and in my teens we lived for a time on the housing estate built on the site.
View Larger Map - the site as it is now.
The estate does in part retain a 'ghost' of the fort; the western edge and south-western corner follow the original outline. Here's a superposition of that outline on the modern Google aerial photo.
In connection with all this, I just found in my scrapbook a clipping from the Portsmouth Evening News thirty years ago. They kindly granted permission for its re-use here.
Fort Gomer
The memory lingers on in street names
by Chris Yandell
Gomer is Gosport's forgotten fort. It was demolished 18 years ago and only the names of several streets give a clue to its former whereabouts.
The streets - Martello Close, Moat Walk, Tower Close, and Moat Drive - form part of the Gomer housing estate, which was built in mid-Sixties.
The northern end of Galemoor Avenue roughly follows the course of the moat which surrounded the fort, and provided the soldiers with fish.
Gomer, completed in 1858, was released by the Army Department and fetched 169,000 at a Portsmouth auction in June 1964. Bidding began at £50,000.
The fort was bought by a Midlands-based construction company and demolished by a Fareham firm, which took several months to complete the project.
Included in the sale was the western side of Gomer Lane, from some Admiralty houses near Privett Road to a cottage at the Stokes Bay end.
Little has been written about Fort Gomer, and precise information is hard to come by. Few records, or photographs, appear to have survived the passage of time.
Books about Britain's coastal defences have largely ignored the fort. One published several years after Gomer was demolished said it was still in use.
Gomer was begun in 1853, when Gosport was protected by a fortified wall which ran from Trinity Green to the southern side of Forton Lake.
It was one of a row of forts built across Gosport's landward flank from Stokes Bay in the west to Portsmouth Harbour in the east.
The other forts were Rowner, Grange, Brockhurst, and Elson. All are still standing, but only Brockhurst, completed in 1862, is open to the public.
The five forts, known as the Gosport Advanced Line, were the first of their type in Britain.
Built to defend Portsmouth from attack by the French they were designed to keep the enemy further away from the harbour than the ramparts could.
An attempted landing on the Solent coast somewhere near Titchfield, followed by an attack on Gosport, was thought to be the most likely enemy strategy.
Then relations between Britain and France began to improve, and the forts guarding the Gosport peninsula stood waiting for an enemy which never came.
Gomer was considerably smaller than its nearest neighbours, and unlike Rowner, Grange and Brockhurst, did not have a circular keep.
The forts cost a total of £300,000, but the development of increasingly powerful weapons meant they were obsolete.
Ordnance development in the late 1850's, stimulated by the Crimean War, led to minor modifications at Gomer and For Elson.
But the invention of the Armstrong Gun meant the Gomer-Elson line was too close to the harbour to protect it from bombardment.
Gomer, the first of the forts to be built,w as nearly 500 feet wide, and about 800 feet long.
The eastern side of the ten-acre fort comprised of defensible barracks, built in the shape of a shallow V, and a rectangular parade ground.
The barracks contained soldiers' and officers' quarters, servants' roooms, a gaurd room, cells, an orderly room, a kitchen, and a hospital with two wards.
Ten magazines were dotted around the inside of the fort, plus two other side arms sheds. Other buildings contained stables, a coal store, and a wash house.
The entrance to the six-sided fort was about 500 feet from [sic] Gomer Lane, near what is now its junction with Broadsands Drive.
Nearby Number Two Battery was surrounded by a moat, linked to the River Alver.
The area in fron of Fort Gomer was marshland, and the water would have been used to flood the marsh if the fort was threatened.
Gomer's design was criticized in an 1856 essay about Portsmouth's fortifications. *
The author, Mr James Fergusson, said the sides were vulnerable to attack. The road at the back of the fort was another weakness, he added.
In 1886 Gomer was armed with two 13-inch mortars and 20 seven-inch rifled breech loaders. Heavier guns were placed in the more powerful forts to the north.
The exhibition at Fort Brockhurst contains a photograph taken at Fort Gomer in May 1889, of soldiers belonging to the 40th Foot Regiment.
Gomer and Elson had a fairly primitive design and it is thought unlikely they would have presented much of a threat to an attacking army.
They were reputedly used mainly as barracks for soldiers, who could have been quickly deployed to other parts of the Line if the need arose.
Gomer, the link between the other four forts and the Stokes Bay bateries, would probably have provided the men need to man the sea defences.
The fort was surrounded by open land, and when the threat of invasion was removed, all it was left to guard was a quiet countryside.
Moat of dinners, and death
Incidents in the history of the Fort included a man who murdered his family, and a soldier who drowned in the moat during an escape attempt.
One of the first men who served there married a Gosportgirl. The marriage ran into trouble when they moved to the Isle of Wight several years later, and he murdered his wife and their six children.
Hundreds of people lined the streets to catch a glimpse of the killer when he was brought back to Gosport on his way to Winchester.
Gomer was a hive of activity in the early part of 1900, when it was used to train troops for the Boer War.
Hut battle
A few years earlier, a riot had broken out among a detachment of the Dublin Fusiliers, and several men were reported to have been injured in what became known as 'The Battle of Hut Four'.
A private in the Northumberland Fusiliers died at the fort in 1914 when he climbed over the walls and sank into the mud at the bottom of the moat.
Martin Quinn was in detention, but desperately wanted to visit the theatre in Portsmouth and decided to risk the ill-fated escape attempt.
The 7th Royal Tank Regiment was stationed at Gomer in the late 1940's.
Soldiers supplemeted their rations with fish from the moat, and two troopers appeared before Gosport magistrates, accused of poaching pheasants on a nearby estate.
- © The News, Portsmouth. Reproduced for non-profit use by permission.
* This most likely refers to James Fergusson's 1852 The peril of Portsmouth; or, French fleets and English forts.
- Ray
I briefly mentioned Fort Gomer, which no longer exists. I just about remember it from my childhood; my mother worked as a secretary at the school opposite, and sometimes she took me in along the lane that ran to the east of the fort. It was sold and demolished in 1964, and in my teens we lived for a time on the housing estate built on the site.
 |
| Fort Gomer, 1938 OS map. Historic map data is (© and database right Crown copyright and Landmark Information Group Ltd. (All rights reserved 2009). Low-resolution image reproduced for small-scale non-profit use under the terms described in the Old Maps FAQ. |
View Larger Map - the site as it is now.
The estate does in part retain a 'ghost' of the fort; the western edge and south-western corner follow the original outline. Here's a superposition of that outline on the modern Google aerial photo.
In connection with all this, I just found in my scrapbook a clipping from the Portsmouth Evening News thirty years ago. They kindly granted permission for its re-use here.
The memory lingers on in street names
by Chris Yandell
Gomer is Gosport's forgotten fort. It was demolished 18 years ago and only the names of several streets give a clue to its former whereabouts.
The streets - Martello Close, Moat Walk, Tower Close, and Moat Drive - form part of the Gomer housing estate, which was built in mid-Sixties.
The northern end of Galemoor Avenue roughly follows the course of the moat which surrounded the fort, and provided the soldiers with fish.
Gomer, completed in 1858, was released by the Army Department and fetched 169,000 at a Portsmouth auction in June 1964. Bidding began at £50,000.
The fort was bought by a Midlands-based construction company and demolished by a Fareham firm, which took several months to complete the project.
Included in the sale was the western side of Gomer Lane, from some Admiralty houses near Privett Road to a cottage at the Stokes Bay end.
Little has been written about Fort Gomer, and precise information is hard to come by. Few records, or photographs, appear to have survived the passage of time.
Books about Britain's coastal defences have largely ignored the fort. One published several years after Gomer was demolished said it was still in use.
Gomer was begun in 1853, when Gosport was protected by a fortified wall which ran from Trinity Green to the southern side of Forton Lake.
It was one of a row of forts built across Gosport's landward flank from Stokes Bay in the west to Portsmouth Harbour in the east.
The other forts were Rowner, Grange, Brockhurst, and Elson. All are still standing, but only Brockhurst, completed in 1862, is open to the public.
The five forts, known as the Gosport Advanced Line, were the first of their type in Britain.
Built to defend Portsmouth from attack by the French they were designed to keep the enemy further away from the harbour than the ramparts could.
An attempted landing on the Solent coast somewhere near Titchfield, followed by an attack on Gosport, was thought to be the most likely enemy strategy.
Then relations between Britain and France began to improve, and the forts guarding the Gosport peninsula stood waiting for an enemy which never came.
Gomer was considerably smaller than its nearest neighbours, and unlike Rowner, Grange and Brockhurst, did not have a circular keep.
The forts cost a total of £300,000, but the development of increasingly powerful weapons meant they were obsolete.
Ordnance development in the late 1850's, stimulated by the Crimean War, led to minor modifications at Gomer and For Elson.
But the invention of the Armstrong Gun meant the Gomer-Elson line was too close to the harbour to protect it from bombardment.
Gomer, the first of the forts to be built,w as nearly 500 feet wide, and about 800 feet long.
The eastern side of the ten-acre fort comprised of defensible barracks, built in the shape of a shallow V, and a rectangular parade ground.
The barracks contained soldiers' and officers' quarters, servants' roooms, a gaurd room, cells, an orderly room, a kitchen, and a hospital with two wards.
Ten magazines were dotted around the inside of the fort, plus two other side arms sheds. Other buildings contained stables, a coal store, and a wash house.
The entrance to the six-sided fort was about 500 feet from [sic] Gomer Lane, near what is now its junction with Broadsands Drive.
Nearby Number Two Battery was surrounded by a moat, linked to the River Alver.
The area in fron of Fort Gomer was marshland, and the water would have been used to flood the marsh if the fort was threatened.
Gomer's design was criticized in an 1856 essay about Portsmouth's fortifications. *
The author, Mr James Fergusson, said the sides were vulnerable to attack. The road at the back of the fort was another weakness, he added.
In 1886 Gomer was armed with two 13-inch mortars and 20 seven-inch rifled breech loaders. Heavier guns were placed in the more powerful forts to the north.
Gomer and Elson had a fairly primitive design and it is thought unlikely they would have presented much of a threat to an attacking army.
They were reputedly used mainly as barracks for soldiers, who could have been quickly deployed to other parts of the Line if the need arose.
Gomer, the link between the other four forts and the Stokes Bay bateries, would probably have provided the men need to man the sea defences.
The fort was surrounded by open land, and when the threat of invasion was removed, all it was left to guard was a quiet countryside.
Moat of dinners, and death
Incidents in the history of the Fort included a man who murdered his family, and a soldier who drowned in the moat during an escape attempt.
One of the first men who served there married a Gosportgirl. The marriage ran into trouble when they moved to the Isle of Wight several years later, and he murdered his wife and their six children.
Hundreds of people lined the streets to catch a glimpse of the killer when he was brought back to Gosport on his way to Winchester.
Gomer was a hive of activity in the early part of 1900, when it was used to train troops for the Boer War.
Hut battle
A few years earlier, a riot had broken out among a detachment of the Dublin Fusiliers, and several men were reported to have been injured in what became known as 'The Battle of Hut Four'.
A private in the Northumberland Fusiliers died at the fort in 1914 when he climbed over the walls and sank into the mud at the bottom of the moat.
Martin Quinn was in detention, but desperately wanted to visit the theatre in Portsmouth and decided to risk the ill-fated escape attempt.
The 7th Royal Tank Regiment was stationed at Gomer in the late 1940's.
Soldiers supplemeted their rations with fish from the moat, and two troopers appeared before Gosport magistrates, accused of poaching pheasants on a nearby estate.
- © The News, Portsmouth. Reproduced for non-profit use by permission.
* This most likely refers to James Fergusson's 1852 The peril of Portsmouth; or, French fleets and English forts.
- Ray
Thursday, 5 May 2011
To The Last Round
I've been meaning for a while to mention Andrew Salmon's award-winning To The Last Round ("The Epic British stand on the Imjin River, Korea 1951" - Aurum Press, 2009) and now is an appropriate time, as the BBC recently featured a large section of commemorative/historical news marking the 60th anniversary of the Battle of Imjin River (see www.bbc.co.uk/imjin60).
Although To The Last Round focuses on the Battle of Imjin River, this is within the framework of a well-researched history of the Korean War itself. A little-remembered war of the Cold War era, this was fought for possession of the Korean Peninsula, when a United Nations army fought the Communist forces of North Korea and China.
Initially, the war took the form of a series of sweeping attacks and counter-attacks: North Korea crossed the “38th parallel” (the post-WWII frontier) to invade South Korea; a largely American United Nations force counterattacked, driving shattering the North Korean army and pushing north almost to the Chinese border; then the overextended UN army was forced to retreat south by the Chinese, back to a line little different from the original frontier. (In hindsight, it’s fortunate that the messianic General MacArthur was relieved of command before putting into effect his plan to use nuclear weapons). The UN forces further reinforced, a long stalemate ensued until April 1951, when China launched a massive “human wave” attack forcing further UN retreat. This is the context of the Battle of Imjin River when the 29th Infantry Brigade fought a rearguard action, outnumbered 7:1, and a group of British forces were surrounded on “Hill 235” and made a last stand until their surrender and capture.
Without diminishing the role of the Gloucester Regiment, which is central to most accounts, even now, To The Last Round doesn’t gloss over controversies that still exist, notably the media focus on the “Glorious Glosters” at the expense of other central UN combatants (the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers, Royal Ulster Rifles, 8th Kings Royal Irish Hussars, as well as the Belgian Battalion), and the question of whether the Gloucesters and other battalions were stranded through mismanagement of the general retreat. Nevertheless, the stand at “Gloster Hill” remains iconic in what was the most bloody battles involving the British army since WWII.
To The Last Round also covers the aftermath: the two-and-a-half year internment of the British survivors, which reads as a mix of the harrowing and the comic (as in the many ways the prisoners wound up their Chinese guards by walking imaginary dogs and playing tennis with imaginary balls and rackets). And for those who returned, the aftermath continued with a general lack of recognition in a country still depressed by World War II and, for many, what would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder. While I’m neither pro-war nor pro-military, I can’t help coming away from the book astounded by the sheer resilience of ordinary men, many of whom were conscripted straight from peacetime National Service into the most hellish experiences.
Andrew Salmon's account is a little completist in places; although necessary to a serious historical account, there are only so many details of troop movements and hardware you can absorb in one reading. But it’s generally highly readable, conveying the horror, confusion and indeed the strangeness of this particular war, such as the appearance of the still-unexplained “Witch” aka “Black Widow”, a long-haired robed figure seen leading Chinese troops. The official site for To The Last Round is tothelastround.wordpress.com.
On a personal level: if I've delayed writing about To The Last Round, it's because the whole Imjin episode gives me strange existential jitters, as my father Morris was in the Gloucester Regiment and was a survivor of the battle and subsequent internment. If he hadn't survived, I wouldn't have existed - and indeed I suspect that his status as a war hero directly led to his rapid marriage to my mother on his return. But equally, I don't doubt that his experience of war and internment - he was invalided out of the army, I guess with what would be called PTSD these days - were what led to the equally rapid divorce. The consequences have been complicated. However, it's a lasting delight that we were able to draw some of the threads together half a century later; there can't be many people who successfully acquire an excellent father and a large and equally excellent extended family at 50. Morris, who is 80 soon, was interviewed for the book and for the BBC coverage: see Private Morris 'Brassy' Coombes recalls Imjin River battle.
- Ray
Although To The Last Round focuses on the Battle of Imjin River, this is within the framework of a well-researched history of the Korean War itself. A little-remembered war of the Cold War era, this was fought for possession of the Korean Peninsula, when a United Nations army fought the Communist forces of North Korea and China.
Initially, the war took the form of a series of sweeping attacks and counter-attacks: North Korea crossed the “38th parallel” (the post-WWII frontier) to invade South Korea; a largely American United Nations force counterattacked, driving shattering the North Korean army and pushing north almost to the Chinese border; then the overextended UN army was forced to retreat south by the Chinese, back to a line little different from the original frontier. (In hindsight, it’s fortunate that the messianic General MacArthur was relieved of command before putting into effect his plan to use nuclear weapons). The UN forces further reinforced, a long stalemate ensued until April 1951, when China launched a massive “human wave” attack forcing further UN retreat. This is the context of the Battle of Imjin River when the 29th Infantry Brigade fought a rearguard action, outnumbered 7:1, and a group of British forces were surrounded on “Hill 235” and made a last stand until their surrender and capture.
Without diminishing the role of the Gloucester Regiment, which is central to most accounts, even now, To The Last Round doesn’t gloss over controversies that still exist, notably the media focus on the “Glorious Glosters” at the expense of other central UN combatants (the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers, Royal Ulster Rifles, 8th Kings Royal Irish Hussars, as well as the Belgian Battalion), and the question of whether the Gloucesters and other battalions were stranded through mismanagement of the general retreat. Nevertheless, the stand at “Gloster Hill” remains iconic in what was the most bloody battles involving the British army since WWII.
To The Last Round also covers the aftermath: the two-and-a-half year internment of the British survivors, which reads as a mix of the harrowing and the comic (as in the many ways the prisoners wound up their Chinese guards by walking imaginary dogs and playing tennis with imaginary balls and rackets). And for those who returned, the aftermath continued with a general lack of recognition in a country still depressed by World War II and, for many, what would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder. While I’m neither pro-war nor pro-military, I can’t help coming away from the book astounded by the sheer resilience of ordinary men, many of whom were conscripted straight from peacetime National Service into the most hellish experiences.
Andrew Salmon's account is a little completist in places; although necessary to a serious historical account, there are only so many details of troop movements and hardware you can absorb in one reading. But it’s generally highly readable, conveying the horror, confusion and indeed the strangeness of this particular war, such as the appearance of the still-unexplained “Witch” aka “Black Widow”, a long-haired robed figure seen leading Chinese troops. The official site for To The Last Round is tothelastround.wordpress.com.
On a personal level: if I've delayed writing about To The Last Round, it's because the whole Imjin episode gives me strange existential jitters, as my father Morris was in the Gloucester Regiment and was a survivor of the battle and subsequent internment. If he hadn't survived, I wouldn't have existed - and indeed I suspect that his status as a war hero directly led to his rapid marriage to my mother on his return. But equally, I don't doubt that his experience of war and internment - he was invalided out of the army, I guess with what would be called PTSD these days - were what led to the equally rapid divorce. The consequences have been complicated. However, it's a lasting delight that we were able to draw some of the threads together half a century later; there can't be many people who successfully acquire an excellent father and a large and equally excellent extended family at 50. Morris, who is 80 soon, was interviewed for the book and for the BBC coverage: see Private Morris 'Brassy' Coombes recalls Imjin River battle.
- Ray
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