Wiltshire's war effort exhibition, Crofton, Wiltshire

[Moonraker]

On 28 and 29 July, Crofton Beam Engines, near Marlborough in Wiltshire, will be hosting free activities around the theme of Wiltshire’s contribution to the Great War effort.

 

Click

 

(A nice part of the country: canal, beam engine, restored windmill, Savernake Forest, Wolf Hall.)

 

Moonraker

[Stoppage Drill]

The beam engine at Crofton was working three years before Waterloo, and is still going, though it only uses steam power on special occasions now to keep the Kennett and Avon canal topped up.

 

Glorious place, middle of nowhere, next to Wolf Hall. 

 

Please stay away so it can remain a little local gem.

[Moonraker]

In my early days of writing speculative articles, I once thought of writing one about all the interesting spots in the two or three square miles around Crofton - there's more that I didn't mention in my first post.

 

Nothing much of Great War interest, though the Midland & South Western Junction Railway ran very close by, carrying thousands of soldiers to manoeuvres and training camps on Salisbury Plain. Pressure from the War Office during the Boer War and the need for  better rail access to Tidworth led to improvements being made at Wolfhall Junction (one mile south east of the two stations that the hamlet of Savernake boasted), where the MSWJR crossed the Great Western Railway; the £1,000 costs were shared equally between the two companies, the new arrangements being brought into use on July 28, 1902.

 

Moonraker

[Guest]

MR-another thread of Accessions to Repositories shows that my local archives, London Borough of Redbridge, has acquired some material of a man in 5th Wiltshires. Would you like me to take a look and report??

Edited 22 July , 2018 by Guest

[Moonraker]

Thanks for the offer, GUEST, but my interests are restricted mainly to what went on in the county of Wiltshire, rather than in the Wiltshire Regiment (which, apart from its HQ at Devizes, was barely evident in the county once the war had got underway).

 

Moonraker

[Moonraker]

I visited the exhibition today. It's been touring Wiltshire for some time and I mentioned it here several years ago (though I can't find the thread). It consists of 13 panels packed with info, some of which was new to me. There was good material on horses, including Purton Remount Depot, farming and munition workers but, strangely, hardly anything about aviation, despite Amesbury authority Norman Parker's name being among the credits.

 

There was a rather good map of military locations in the county and I swelled with pride when I saw a credit to my book at its bottom. Then I twitched when I noticed that Bustard Camp was rather far south. On returning home, I checked both editions of my book, and there it was correctly placed in the first, but missing from the second. I'd prepared artwork for the first edition's map myself, but that for the second was done by the publisher, based on a photocopy I'd  marked up. To be fair to the publisher, it must have been a very fiddly job squeezing in all the camps in the Lark Hill area (and I did include in the book a reproduction of an Ordnance Survey map of this).

 

The exhibition continues to tour Wiltshire, but the "events" section of the

website

 

is a bit clunky.

 

I also visited St Katharine's Church, Savernake, where I spotted

 

this memorial

 

to  Captain Cyril Wasey, Royal Warwickshire Regiment, attached to the RFC.

 

Details of the man

 

here.

 

Moonraker

Edited 29 July , 2018 by Moonraker
correct spelling of Katharine