Nigel Marshall Posted 13 December , 2005 Share Posted 13 December , 2005 This has been bugging me for years! I made my first trip to the Somme as part of a Company Exercise when I was a young army apprentice aged eighteen and I clearly remember the guide (a bearded chap called Alex, TA officer?) pointing out to us a pile of unexploded ordnance sitting in a farm yard owned by an elderly widow in the centre of one of the Somme villages. The pile of shells was the product of her long dead husbands years of ploughing his land and each time his plough clonked a shell he would chuck it on to his tractor and bring it back to the farm. Alex said that should a car crash through the flimsy chain-link fence around the farm yard, the village might be blown over the horizon. Since the husband had died the French Government had approached the widow asking her to hand the stuff over for disposal, but she had refused each request. Apparently under French law the government was powerless to demand that she allowed the shells to be made safe, some form of property law gave her the right to keep it. We were told that the old lady was very protective of her beloved collection of assorted nasties and would roundly abuse anyone she caught taking photos of her "rockery"! What I would like to know is this..... Where was it? Has it now gone? Anyone who had seen it would know, it was very neatly stacked and would have been about the size of an average garage.......BOOM! It would have been about May 1990 when I was there, and by the look of it it had been there for many years. I'll await the results of your brainstorming! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw Posted 13 December , 2005 Share Posted 13 December , 2005 If it is still there, it would be useful to know where so that the village can be given a wide berth ! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tom Morgan Posted 13 December , 2005 Share Posted 13 December , 2005 It sounds as if Dogflud might be describing the pile of shrapnel cases piled up just inside a chain-link fence in the garden of a house in Thiepval. If so, the guide was dramatising things slightly, as they are the empty cases which remain after the shell has burst in the air. Still there. Tom Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nigel Marshall Posted 13 December , 2005 Author Share Posted 13 December , 2005 Thats a relief Tom! Ian and I can breathe easy again. I have to admit that it was the powerlessness of the government which never rang true for me..... well that and Alex's beard. Beards? Officers? Non, non, non! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paul Reed Posted 13 December , 2005 Share Posted 13 December , 2005 This has been bugging me for years! I made my first trip to the Somme as part of a Company Exercise when I was a young army apprentice aged eighteen and I clearly remember the guide (a bearded chap called Alex, TA officer?) pointing out to us a pile of unexploded ordnance sitting in a farm yard owned by an elderly widow in the centre of one of the Somme villages. The pile of shells was the product of her long dead husbands years of ploughing his land and each time his plough clonked a shell he would chuck it on to his tractor and bring it back to the farm. Alex said that should a car crash through the flimsy chain-link fence around the farm yard, the village might be blown over the horizon. Since the husband had died the French Government had approached the widow asking her to hand the stuff over for disposal, but she had refused each request. Apparently under French law the government was powerless to demand that she allowed the shells to be made safe, some form of property law gave her the right to keep it. We were told that the old lady was very protective of her beloved collection of assorted nasties and would roundly abuse anyone she caught taking photos of her "rockery"! You are referring, I am sure, to the garden of a life long friend of mine, located in the village of Pozieres: you have to pass this garden going to Thiepval or Beaumont Hamel from the main road. The wall of shell casings are visible from the road to this day, but as Tom (above) has hinted at, there has been some degree - to say the least - of dramatisation here. The lady's husband was a former CWGC worker (47 years) who picked these - and many other things - up during his lunchtime by walking the fields. The casings were all from shrapnel shells, so they contained nothing except compacted Somme mud - the contents having been discharged during their explosion during the war. They were not dangerous in anyway, unless they collapsed on top of you. Amazing what 'tours guides' will tell you... And by the way there is no such thing as 'some form of poverty law' which allows mad French (or otherwise) peasants to keep live ordnance on their property. Far from it, in fact. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tom Morgan Posted 13 December , 2005 Share Posted 13 December , 2005 Thanks for your additional info Paul - it immediately made me think, "Of course, the garden is in Pozieres. So why on earth did I just say Thiepval???" I have been stopping coaches to point out this pile of shrapnel cases, on average once ever ten or twelve days during the season, for some years. The last time was a few weeks ago. You'd think I'd still be able to remember where it is! Tom Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nigel Marshall Posted 13 December , 2005 Author Share Posted 13 December , 2005 Thanks gents, we're agreed on Pozieres are we? I'm quite sure that Alex was an (over-) enthusiastic amateur. I can't remember his pedigree but he was a friend of my Coy 2 i/c or the Company Sergeant Major (a Coldstreamer - no abbreviation allowed!), and not a professional guide. Some of the things he told us impressionable teenagers have since been corrected in my memory, such as nicknames for landmarks., etc. To be fair to the man though, it was his enthusiasm for the place that really fired my interest and ensured I returned to visit some of the places my granddad would have seen. Rfn Fred Kilkenny 1/7 (Leeds Rifles) W Yorks Regt., a survivor. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nigel Marshall Posted 14 December , 2005 Author Share Posted 14 December , 2005 Oh and Tom, no offence intended about the references to beards! I think Alex had got his from a chap in Borneo who had a panchant for crawling through hedges in reverse Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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