Royal Tattoo Earls Court

[Alisoncc]

Briefly watching the The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo 2023 on the telly. I was in the band at RAF Locking and we got to do an intro at the Royal Military Tattoo at Earls Court. We stayed at Halton overnight. I just made up the numbers, marched up and down with a bugle, which I couldn't play, did much better with a chanter. (Bagpipes)

Funny the things that surface from one's memory banks. Must have been well over sixty years ago.

Alison

[jimtherev]

My most profound memory was of the Field Gun competition. Somehow my FIL - former Gunnery Instructor at Whale Island - managed to get us front row seats and only there could one see how much POWER went into each display. (showers of sweat over us in the prime seats. Certainly, also, two of the lads cut themselves quite badly that night, and I read that later in the week one of them had a gun barrel land on his legs which did him no good at all.

[Rossian]

Picking up on Jim's post. I once attended a day's training session of the Plymouth based gun crews, escorting a French submariner (who was still a tad hungover from the night before). There were several big burly chaps with shoulders and elbows in plaster casts and neck collars who were the walking wounded from previous sessions. It was held in the old coal yard at HMS Drake and we were close enough to hear the crunch of metal and wood on human flesh. It's definitely not a sport for the frail. Not only that they had run as a squad from their training camp which was a fair distance away so they were sweating like horses before they started.
The submariner looked on aghast and his only comment was "Ah les Anglais sont fous bien sur" and wanted to go for another drink.

The Ancient Mariner