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I found an old rusting 303 rifle

• Message 1. 

  Posted by bandick (U14360315) on Saturday, 13th March 2010

  
  Long ago a policeman came to our school to warn us not to enter a field at the bottom of the road. We all had to sit cross legged on the floor while he went on about the dangers we’d come across if we ever entered into this forbidden territory…(boring)… I think we all knew that it was a piece of wasteland with worked out gravel pits that you couldn’t see for the tall grass and thick shrubbery and it was fenced off by rotten posts supporting a mass of broken and rusted barbed wire… I think we all kept out because of tales told locally of several sinister child drowning’s etc…
  
  I think most of us boys were playing marbles on the floor while PC. Plod droned on and on… that is until he said… ‘so don’t go in there children because you might find some of these’… holding up some bright shiny things we all recognised as bullets. What a reaction… electrifying… and he went on… or, ‘you might find some of these’… even bigger bullets… ‘or these’… mortars… ‘or these’… grenades… ‘or these’… the list went on and on… and at the end we all filed out the assembly room desperately trying to catch a glimpse at the deadly array of military hardware set out on the table in out infant school.
  
  And to this day, I still believe that was the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard or witnessed. Just fancy telling a bunch of 6, 7 and 8 year old schoolboys where you could find such stuff… and so you can guess where all the boys disappeared to as soon as the bell went.
  
  The following morning in the playground, there was an eerie strangeness about it… instead of the usual high pitched screams associated with the rigours of playground football etc… it was very quiet… no movement just little groups of small boys huddled around strange looking piles of stuff on the ground in a scrum like fashion… swapping this for that… you could easily tell who’d been over the fence… it was no use denying it by the stinging nettle rashes on bare legs, and hideous scratches from the dense bramble undergrowth. My friends had feared just as fruitful as me… some a lot more so, along with pocket full’s of ammo there were old rusting hand grenades… tin helmets… gas masks, one lad had even found a radio backpack with such an impressive long ariel… we had enough gear to start our own army… I found an old rusting 303 rifle… caked in mud that took an age to retrieve. I should have left it well alone, and got a pistol instead as there were plenty to choose from, it was bigger than me anyway, and I got such a hiding when I got home.
  I always had an inkling that my dad kept it… and it was only after many years when we were moving I found it again, wrapped up in a well greased sack under a bench in his shed… (he was a Tool maker, with a workshop in our own back yard) and it was in a lot better condition than when I found it… of course the rest of the stuff was all confiscated much to our dismay.
  Come to think of it… I was always coming home with all manner of stuff like that I found in the fields.
  
  Was it common to dump or abandon military hardware around the countryside like that… for instance, would a home guard unit (Dads Army) have access to that type of equipment… could they have been the previous custodians of this arms cache? I can’t imagine Capt. Mannering allowing anything like this to happen… not in Warmington on Sea anyway.
  µþ²¹²Ô»å¾±³¦°ì…
  

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• Message 2

  , in reply to message 1.

  Posted by Backtothedarkplace (U2955180) on Wednesday, 17th March 2010

  it wasnt common but it did happen.
  
  Dumping of so much equipment together is a bit odd though. Theres a few possibilities it could have been part of a supply dump for one of the Â鶹ԼÅÄ guard units that were supposed to stay behind after the german invasion to provide the core for a resistance movement, cant remember the name.
  
  if the field had been part of an army barracks or concentration area for d day.
  
  Two if the feild was used as a regular pit stop for troops on excersise they might have dumped heavy bits of kit rather than carry it. Certainly I know a girl was killed on dartmoor a few years back by what the police thought was a container of 2" mortar bombs buried on one of the tors.
  
  The other possibility is that at some time in the past the police buried confiscated weapons in the feild.
  
  In a town near me when the park lake was drained they found a fine selelction of late 1800's to mid 1920's weaponry as the local police force had been in the habit of dumping confiscated weapons into it they only stopped when the police forces merged into a county force and by the time of the discovery had forgotten that they ever used to use it for that.
  
  

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  , in reply to message 2.

  Posted by bandick (U14360315) on Thursday, 18th March 2010

  Backtothedarkplace
  
  My neighbour, and elderly lady now sadly deceased some twenty years ago, told me that the building next to hers started its life between the wars as a wooden clubhouse for some tennis courts at the rear of our two gardens… later becoming a night club, a church hall, a library, a bank, and then a clinic… but during the war years was used as a billet for military personnel… she tells me she remembers them burying loads of stuff in a big hole within its grounds and then they all disappeared the following day. Must have been about the time of the D-day invasion she reflected.
  
  After the war when the building was being extended to become the local clinic, that hole was rediscovered, dug up, and found to be full of boxes of tinned foods and other interesting bits and pieces, with a small amount of military equipment… she being an inquisitive sort dug around a little herself after the workmen had gone home and uncovered more food, which she told me was all in perfect order, and enjoyed by the whole family…
  
  Her husband who survived her and until recently grew vegetables on the undeveloped part of the garden next door, often dug up the occasional remains of by then well rusted war rations.
  
  Regards µþ²¹²Ô»å¾±³¦°ì…
  

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