Saturday, April 5

"Firing into the Brown" #76 - William Billinge, camel mounted gatlings and stuff...

"So Carnehan weeds out the pick of his men, and sets the two of the Army to show them drill and at the end of two weeks the men can manoeuvre about as well as Volunteers. So he marches with the Chief to a great big plain on the top of a mountain, and the Chiefs men rushes into a village and takes it; we three Martinis firing into the brown of the enemy".

Kipling "The Man Who Would Be King"

Time for another update..
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....this a copy of the original - the old stone was falling apart so it was replaced in 1903 by public subscription...


Now that's a life!

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Fascinating..  the pickie pays to be embiggened.. 😊
"The front page of the Scientific American on March 2, 1872, had a story of a new model of the Gatling gun produced by Colt's Armory. It was called the battery gun and featured a Broadwell drum with 400 cartridges. Here it is shown in a proposed mount for camels (elephants were also considered)". Piccie courtesy Wiki


There are two things to bear in mind here..  one, if you fired that thing past the ear of an already overexcited camel while still mounted, you'd probably find yourself in Bucharest or Paris before the damned thing stopped running - the intent was that the gun would be fired from the camel when it was on it's knees/dismounted..  and two? There was never, ever, any record of camel (or elephant come to that) mounted gatlings actually being fielded - for transport yes, but not as mobile artillery.. 😏

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Laters, as the young people are want to say...

Saturday, March 29

"Firing into the Brown" #75 - old prints, schools, and stuff...

"So Carnehan weeds out the pick of his men, and sets the two of the Army to show them drill and at the end of two weeks the men can manoeuvre about as well as Volunteers. So he marches with the Chief to a great big plain on the top of a mountain, and the Chiefs men rushes into a village and takes it; we three Martinis firing into the brown of the enemy".

Kipling "The Man Who Would Be King"

Time for another update..  appreciate it's light on wargame nonsense, but hey, the boat is in the final throws of being got ready for launch this weekend..

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Found this while doing some browsing on something else...  brilliant stuff...

Print from 1765 showing a slightly stylised view of (some of) the fortifications around Portsmouth at that time - of main interest is Kings Bastion (labelled #7) is in the center just to the right of the road and the Saluting Battery (#6) as they allow you to orientate the view..  the building left is Southsea Castle

...and this is where they are on that excellent 1860 map..

...which tells us that the road we can see in the print is the current sea front road..  fascinating stuff.. well to me anyway...   😀

Print orientation - Southsea Castle (ringed red) on your left looking in the direction of the arrow..  many (all) of the landward fortifications are long gone (1870's) but Kings Bastion is still there (ringed yellow) and Long Curtain Wall is also still there (green line) .. The Saluting Battery is also still there - must get down and get some pictures..

Better view following.. the Saluting Battery is marked Battery Wall..  we shall be revisiting this area in the future as it is also near one of the gate locations..



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I blame Ben for this minor rabbit hole..  😁

In a comment last week he had cause to assume my school dated back to the same time as the Bastions the houses were named after, and while that was not the case, it did give me pause for thought - exactly how old was my old school building?!

Turns out - it's a 100 years old this year..

It started off as Hilsea College in various locations local to the building I attended..

  • 1915 In London Road, west
  • 1917  London Road, south of Green Posts (a pub)
  • 1918-1928 London Road
  • 1928 London Road - new college buildings (I think this was the building I eventually went to secondary school in)
  • 1928/9 Expanded with two new wings, one girls, one boys
  • 26 Jul 1930 New wings opened by Colonel Sir William Dupree 
  • 1934-1940 London Road, between Northwood & Elmwood Roads
    • School evacuated to Leigh Park House (location is North of the island but Portsmouth was a major Luftwaffe target because of the dockyard and there was a lot of collateral damage in the city)
    • During the war Hilsea Barracks and the school were taken over for the use of US troops. These were quartermasters and other supply troops, who supported the many US forces that were based in Hampshire.(Interesting story - at some point in time during my schooling I had a need to go into the attic space - no idea why - but I distinctly remember there being beds up there..  at the time I just assumed that maybe the school had been boarding once..  it wasn't, but those may well have been the beds the GI's had been using..)
  • 1944  Hilsea College and Grounds owner sold to the City Council for use as Junior Technical College
  • 1955 Building School & Technical Schools merged 
  • 1958 Amalgamated with Portsmouth Building School
  • 1960-1973 Education Committee, Portsmouth Technical High School, London Road (which was the school I attended) - the Headmaster was T McNeil from 1960-1973 (he'd also been headmaster of the Building School since '48 so had a combined career of 25 years in charge of sweaty pre-pubescent boys - the bloke deserved a medal! 😊)
  • 1976 City of Portsmouth Secondary Boys - Headmaster M Pipes 1973/5 or 6 and 1987/9 (which was my school post the move to Comprehensive)
  • 2008 Plans for complete rebuild Renamed Trafalgar School (we're nothing if not traditional in Pompey)
  • Sep 2015 Planned to take in girls as well (outrageous.. and 50 years too late..😏)
...the old alma mater..  the bow window top left was the prefects room - on Tuesday lunchtimes we were all in there waiting for the new top 20 on Radio 1.. ahhh Kate.. note also the attic windows - that was where I saw the beds

From the Portsmouth local history site (reference Schools)..

Cheers Ben ..  enjoyed that.. 😀

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 Laters, as the young people are want to say...

Saturday, March 22

"Firing into the Brown" #74 - Beeston's, Bourbonnais and stuff...

"So Carnehan weeds out the pick of his men, and sets the two of the Army to show them drill and at the end of two weeks the men can manoeuvre about as well as Volunteers. So he marches with the Chief to a great big plain on the top of a mountain, and the Chiefs men rushes into a village and takes it; we three Martinis firing into the brown of the enemy".

Kipling "The Man Who Would Be King"

Time for another update..
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Another in the occasional "regiments of renown" series featuring the histories of various regiments painted in haste at the beginning of a project but which were not documented here for posterity.. so we come to French infantry regiment "Bourbonnais", part of my War of the Spanish Succession collection.. 

There is a very (very) good potted history of this regiment on the Kronoskaf WSS site (link below) so there's little point in me repeating the good work completed there, but by way of a framework to hang some 'rabbit holes' on (😏), the regiment was first created in 1584 from the old Bandes* de Montferrat. On 6 March 1597, it became part of the regular French Army and apart from a 10 year period at the start of the 1600's (when Louis XIII instigated a massive reorganisation of the French army) has been a permanent regiment of the French Army to this day.

Louis de Brichanteau, Marquis de
Nangis (painter unknown)

The regiment is included in those six regiments who, by their ancestry and lineage and therefore ranking, were considered to be the "Petit Vieux" (the 'little olds') giving them the privilege of not being disbanded at the end of any war, and making them second only to those four regiments in Les Vieux Corps (Navarre, Picardie, Piedmont and Champagne). 

By the time of the War of the Spanish Succession, the regiment counted three battalions, but at Blenheim the regiment was two battalions strong, numbering about a 1000 men, and were in Nangis' brigade (who was also their Colonel), entrenched in and around the central village of Oberglau with fourteen (!) other regiments under the overall command of Lieutenant General Jean-Jules-Armand Colbert, Marquis de Blainville (who was to die during the battle). 

By all accounts they fought stubbornly and resisted Allied attacks under Prince Holstein-Beck, which at the end of the battle allowed the remnants of Tallard's Corps to retire in an orderly fashion - they then retreated in column per battalion and formed the rearguard of the defeated army.

During the War of the Spanish Succession, the regiment was commanded by:

  • from 15 January 1700 by Louis de Brichanteau, Marquis de Nangis - he lived to a ripe old age and their are some fascinating snippets about him on this blog [clicky] - he shared a mistress (not at the same time! 😁) with a colonel of regiment Navarre we have already met.. "...Nangis, who was more plausibly reported to have been the lover of the duchesse de Bourgogne (hence of a woman in line to become queen of France), served heroically in his youth, though he would live to become a lackluster (sic) marshal of France. In his prime, however, his amorous exploits were rivaled (sic) only by his exploits on the field of battle...." (from Ladurie & Fitou, "Saint Simon and the Court of Louis XIV")
  • from 1 January 1709 till 1 July 1727: Louis-Antoine de Gramont, Comte de Lesparre - I reckon he was about 20 when he got the Colonelcy and I would think that his might well have been due to the influence of  his much better known father (pictured following) who by that time was a Marshal of France (and was wounded at Malplaquet in 1709) ..  Louis-Antoine (the younger) got his colonelcy the same year..  he was to later die at Fontenoy

Undated portrait of Antoine de Gramont (the elder)

*The Bandes (there were many) by the way were the first permanent, paid, infantry units in the service of France, and were modelled on the organisation of the Swiss units (mercenaries in French pay). You may remember (who would? 😏) that when I did the unit history for Navarre, they also originated from one of the old Bandes.


These are Dixon's and painted and based my me some time pre-2006 - the flag is from the old Warflag.com site which is still - regrettably - down...

Other reading:

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A little rabbit hole presented itself.. 

I was having another look at that 1860 map of the Portsmouth fortifications and happened to notice this in the top corner..  Beeston's Bastion...  now Steve the Wargame is of an ancient enough age that the secondary school he went to, whilst not private in any way, still had a house system, and my school had four houses of which the sorting hat put me in Beeston's (where we then had the privilege of wearing a yellow button badge on our blazer lapels).

The houses (of which there were four) were named after notable bastions in the old city defences, so there was Beeston's, then Guy's, King's and I think Pembroke's (not so sure on this last one but I do remember that the other three houses wore red, green and blue badges) but either way I've often wondered who or what said Beeston was.. this seemed like an opportunity to find out!

My reading would indicate that by all accounts the Beeston's were big cheeses in Portsmouth back in the day (and we're talking Queen Elizabeth the First era). Under a grant from the Corporation in 1574, Thomas Beeston became proprietor of the Sea Mills (a flour mill based on a tidal creek or basin between Portsmouth and the Dockyard), he also constructed a new carriage bridge near it connecting the two locations, he was Mayor in 1591, and in future years both his son and grandson filled the same office, other later descendants were Burgesses of the town.

In 1709, the land the mill was standing on was taken under an Act of Parliament to improve the fortifications, Thomas Beeston (the family had a habit of naming the oldest son Thomas, so he was either the third or fourth generation of the first one.. 😏) was still the proprietor, and sold the mill and the Mill pond. 

It was later renamed King's Mill, by the way, and it produced flour for the Victualling Commissioners of the Royal Navy - you can see it on the map just north of the bastion, it in turn was protected by it's own bastion - the Mill Dam Bastion. Which in itself represents another little rabbit hole, as Milldam Barracks was built on the reconfigured Mill Pond - and the building still exists...🤔

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 Laters, as the young people are want to say...

Saturday, March 15

"Firing into the Brown" #73 - Huey's and gates and stuff...

"So Carnehan weeds out the pick of his men, and sets the two of the Army to show them drill and at the end of two weeks the men can manoeuvre about as well as Volunteers. So he marches with the Chief to a great big plain on the top of a mountain, and the Chiefs men rushes into a village and takes it; we three Martinis firing into the brown of the enemy".

Kipling "The Man Who Would Be King"

Time for another update..
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Was there ever a sight that more represented the conflict in Vietnam than massed Huey's?? I'm an old hippy*  but still remain gob smacked at the sheer impact of such sights as this of a sky full of them in support of ground troops..

Photo Credit: The Associated Press

..a lot of people forget that the Australians also did their bit in Vietnam..  and got their air lifts as well.. 

"1965-07-14. Troops of 1st battalion, the Royal Australian Regiment (1RAR), take up defensive positions after leaving United States Iroquois helicopters that carried them into Viet Cong infested country during operations north of Saigon. The helicopters air-lifted the Australians into action from the Bien Hoa air base".

"Air mobile" love this one.... straight out of Full Metal Jacket, Platoon or Hamburger Hill...😏

"Hueys prepare to pick up members of Company A, 5th Battalion, 7th Cavalry to airlift them to a reported enemy ammunition dump in Thang Binh province, 24 miles north of Chu Lai, Jan. 17, 1968".

Just astonished at the number of roles they were adapted to do..  gun ship, troop carrier, first aid, air ambulance, recue..  the list goes on..  they even fitted them with rockets for close ground support..

More than 16,000 of them built to date#.. 

"7,013 UH-1s served in Vietnam and of these 3,305 were destroyed. In total, 1,151 pilots were killed, along with 1,231 other crew members" (source Wiki).



If I was to embark upon another period or project - this would be the one..  only at skirmish level though..

* I'm not really.. I was about 5 years too late, but that was the time and music that I still most associated with as a spotty youth, so bear with.. 😁
# Amazingly, the Huey still remains in production!

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Bit of a grey day when I visited, but I finally made it to the Landport Gate.. 😀

The gate is now part of the perimeter for one of the Royal Navy's sports grounds, but is actually owned by English Heritage..


Note the Crown above the gate - I have read elsewhere that this is all that remains of the previous gate that was demolished when this one was built to replace it.. 


Still imposing - but not as well looked after as I think it deserves..  I'm guessing those arches on the sidewalls are not fireplaces, but passing points - somewhere for pedestrians to stand when a wagon or wide load is going through - or maybe sentry positions? The smaller arches at the back are doorways, and now open to the outside of the structure but I'm guessing that they may originally have led to guard rooms perhaps..


Better view of one of the doorways..




Side view of the gate - following - excuse the exercise mattresses! Guessing the damage you see is from where additional building works that were originally on the side of the gates was removed..  you can see the outside of that side opening I mentioned above


..originally the whole thing would have been much wider - the "wings" on this gate have been removed - if you compare it with this picture, following, you can see how much of it has now gone..  the wings on either side look to have been the same size again as the central arch section.




... a bit of local news.. 😏

It pays to embiggen this one..  a "blackguard horse"..   😁

Lastly - for this gate - this is fascinating..  there's a bit of artistic imagination gone into this, but it looks remarkably accurate..

St. James's Gate next I think..  but all in good time..  😏

More interesting reading:

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 "Laters", as the young people are want to say... 

PS. All the freebies mentioned last week are still available - they go in the recycling if no takers..

Saturday, March 8

"Firing into the Brown" #72 - City gates , giveaways, and stuff..

"So Carnehan weeds out the pick of his men, and sets the two of the Army to show them drill and at the end of two weeks the men can manoeuvre about as well as Volunteers. So he marches with the Chief to a great big plain on the top of a mountain, and the Chiefs men rushes into a village and takes it; we three Martinis firing into the brown of the enemy".

Kipling "The Man Who Would Be King"

Time for another update..
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...and so a local history mini project starts...  😏

Back in the day Portsmouth (my local city), was far smaller than it is now..  so small, and important a site in fact, that they were able to surround it with a defensive wall. This was mostly to protect the dockyard supply depots, ammunition stores, and the inhabitants of the city a lot of whom who would have either worked in, or supported, the dockyard. To give access to the city there were four ornate gateways - so I thought it might be fun to go and visit them in turn.. 

First though some preamble....

1797 Ordnance Survey map - the walls were well developed and encompassed both city and dockyard in almost a single uninterrupted length by this point in time..

The defences of the city went through multiple stages of development (of course 😏) - and given this is about the city gates, I have focussed purely on the city defences, rather than work also done to defend the dockyard..

  • Earthen ramparts protecting the land side of the port were first built in the 14th century
  • These were strengthened by Henry VIII in the 16th century as part of a general improvement in the area (Southsea Castle was built about the same time, and was famously where he was supposed to have been when Mary Rose sank) - by 1542, Portsmouth was surrounded by defensive ramparts and towers built from earth and wood.
  • Improvements continued through Elizabeth's reign with many of the towers being converted to stone, and in some cases becoming full on bastions
  • By far the most significant update to the fortifications was done during the 17th Century though, when in 1665, Charles II ordered Bernard de Gomme to begin the reconstruction of Portsmouth's fortifications. I think from my reading, De Gomme was a military engineer on a par with with the (probably) better known Vauban. Among many other things
    • The city walls were rebuilt.
    • A (second) moat was also added with a new defensive line being constructed between the two moats.
    • A ravelin was added at Landport where the London road entered the city (see map below).
  • About 1730 the double moat system used around Portsmouth was abandoned with the outer moat being filled in - the sheer number of men required to defend it was too much
  • In the 18th century, as Portsea continued to expand and grow around the dockyard a further series of ramparts and moats were constructed to protect this new settlement in the 1770s - the 1797 Ordnance survey above gives a view of the fortifications at the time .
...and that was largely it - all future work was then focussed on protecting the whole island rather than this very specific area.. it's kind of interesting that in much the same way as the Hilsea Lines were outdated before they were even built, the same eventually happened to these walls - as artillery range improved, landward protective defences for a location needed to move out and out.. the walls simply became irrelevant, and with the continued growth of the city would have been an impediment to any expansion - the majority of the town walls were demolished in the 1870's.. 

So...  having to start somewhere I thought I'd start with the Landport Gate - why start with the Landport Gate??  Well mainly because it's the only one of the four gates in the walls of Old Portsmouth to survive in its original position and is/was considered to be the main gate. 

So starting with a the following, this is a copy of de Gomme's map of 1668, which shows the huge difference a 100+ years has made when compared with the 1797 map above. Note that by then the city and the dockyard are a single entity, whereas at the time de Gomme was working, the dockyard was still very much separate ..  I've ringed the Landport ravelin mentioned above as that's our starting point.. I've also coloured water so that moats and water levels are more obvious..

In 1760 it was decided that for defensive purposes it made more sense to have the this gate in the centre of the northern ramparts rather than were it was (you'll note in de Gomme's map that the ravelin is not central to that stretch of wall, and the military mind was ever ordered.. 😏) so the old gate at the end of the High Street was dispensed with, and the Landport Gate constructed half way between Town Mount Bastion and Guy's Bastion (the two bastions at either end of the wall). 

The design of the gate has been attributed to Nicholas Hawksmoor, though it was constructed after his death. It features a simple stone arch built of Portland stone with octagonal turret above. It would originally have been flanked by ramparts, and had a drawbridge which led to the Landport Ravelin, from which a smaller drawbridge would lead to solid ground (a lot of the area outside the old city was marsh back then) and to what was then known as the London Road.

Landport Gate (outer view, so front face) taken c1870 - note ramparts/moat are still in place - note also Landport Town Mount (cheers Jim! 😁) ravelin in the left foreground and the bridge leading from it..

One last map - this one dates from 1860 and shows the access to the London Road via the ravelin..


Sorry - I lied - I do like a map 😁. This one dates from 1797 and also shows the drawbridges/bridges ..


Time for a visit to the actual site I think!

Other reading:

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Been having a clear out - can anyone use these??  Yours for the price of postage - either leave a comment (I won't publish), or use the 'contact me' button over on the side to contact me with an email address..  after two weeks with no takers they head for the recycle bin..  😁

First off a couple of Arquebusiers.. these date from 2010

Journal of the Pike and Shot Society

Next - some Solo Wargamers Association Journals - published quarterly:

  • Lone Warrior June/Sep/Dec 1998
  • Lone Warrior 1999 - Mar/June/Sep/Dec
  • Lone Warrior 2000 - all four
  • Lone Warrior 2001 - all four
  • Lone Warrior 2002 - all four
  • Lone Warrior 2003 - all four
  • Lone Warrior 2004 - all four
  • Lone Warrior - Mar 2005

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       "Laters", as the young people are want to say...