There was rain on the Saturday, which limited the audience to about 2000, but a good crowd on Sunday, (although a lot of these got in free due to the aforementioned breakdown in the sponsors organisation. It was a good job that we had sold some tickets in advance, or things could have been worse)
   In addition they lost a £700 sponsorship (about £12,000 in today's money?) due to the recession that had hit the country, which was a bad start, and in the end the organising team was very disheartened by the poor financial result. 
   Before we leave Earlham Park, I must comment on the 'Bloodshed in the park' article. Muskets bangs were made with crow scarers and cannon bangs were produced with electric maroons. There was a chap called Ken Fisher who did special effects, for which he used black powder, and when he saw the genuine Langley Guns he was determined to fire them properly. A bit of a madcap, he loaded them up with black powder and bounced tennis balls off the church tower across the road. However, notwithstanding what the Vicar says, we did delay starting the Battle till after the weddings were officially over - he omits to say that he was running late.
   My job of Camp commandant was originally envisaged as just looking after what would now be the Guard Tent, but in fact developed into general administration of the site, the side shows, the press etc.
   So, when the dust settled, most of the organising team retired back to their purely military duties, but I had no military duty to retire to, and somehow I found myself lumbered with the general organisation of the Norfolk Company of Lunsfords which by now was probably the biggest in the Regiment.

Whitehall   
   On the last Sunday in January '74, Beryl Nesbitt, a Grenville and founder member of the Kings Army in the West, organised a memorial service to mark the Murder of King Charles and Lunsfords were invited. The service was held in Trafalgar Square round the Statue of King Charles. George Potter is leading the Norfolk Lunsfords, and the third chap from the left is my youngest son, Steve, who was killed in an accident a couple of years later.

Hambledon
   I remember very little about this Muster, although my wife Joan has kept some pictures taken there.

           

 
 

Carnforth. 
   The Norwich Company decided to go to this one (not me, though) and had great fun crossing over and fighting on Morecombe Bay. Apparently they were the only mob from the south to support this muster, as was recorded by one Brian McNerney, then a Pennyman, in the Pennyman's Newsletter, Ye Courier Royall.  

 

 

 

 

                                                                                         
Wimborne
   Was a one day event at Spettisbury Manor (Spettisbury Manor was a night club/restaurant and became famous as the first place in the country to be licensed for a Male Strip Show). Norfolk Lunsfords went, and one event is worth recording. We were always a singing Regiment, but in the early days folk songs were interspersed with Rugby songs. We were happily singing away in the local pub, when the landlord complained to me, as the elder statesman, about one of these songs. Now he must have upset me somehow, because my real Army training came into play, I barked out an order, and in no time at all the company was on the march to the next pub, and a very sorry landlord was looking at an empty pub. I think that this was the first time that I actually took command, albeit only on the social scene.
   On a personal note, Joan and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary by staying in posh hotels for that weekend.
                                                                                         
Berkley
   Joan was a fully qualified member of the Red Cross, and went out on the field in costume so she was first on the scene at any casualty, and liased with the ambulance crews when necessary. This became her job for many years, firstly for the Regiment, then the King's Army, and sometimes even for the whole Society.
   I helped Ken Fisher with special effects. The turning point of the actual battle was when the Roundheads breached the wall by cannonade. That breach still exists today, and Ken had constructed a timber and canvas replica across the gap, and my job was to help destroy this at the appropriate time. The Western Daily Press refers to this, and is also interesting in that it shows one of the big guns belonging to the Kings Army in the West. There were three of these under the command of Paul Randal. They looked most impressive, but were in fact fibreglass copies, only the wheels being genuine. They could not, of course fire black powder. There was a 2” steel pipe built into the fibreglass barrel, and electric maroons were shoved down this to make the bang.

     

Powderham
   At this Powderham, (the first of many) I remember the look of amazement on the faces of the audience, who had seen three or four chaps struggling to get a Langley barrel over a wall when a Grenville saunters up with one of these fibreglass jobs slung over his shoulder and hops over the wall with no bother at all. My job here was still with special effects, and I was given the run of the castle attics and roofs and a fistful of smoke bombs to simulate the ultimate sacking of the castle.
       

 

Martinstown
   We had taken a couple of the Langley Guns, and son Mike and I teamed up with Paul Randall to form a Royalist Battery, so at last I had some sort of job to do. This was an exceedingly wet and stormy battle, and contributed to the nickname “King’s Army in the Wet”. For those of you old enough to remember, it was the weekend that the yacht of Ted Heath, the Prime Minister, got washed away and sunk.The camp site and public area was on the top of a hill, approached by a single track lane and fronted by a steep, deep valley with the battlefield on the top of the opposite hill. To get off the camp site you drove half way down the valley side, and a sharp right took you through a field gate back onto the lane. By the end of the weekend the whole place was a quagmire. The mud at the beer tent was wellie deep, and the local farmer made a small fortune towing out those people who missed the turn to the gate and slid on down the hill into the brook at the bottom.There was just one pub in the village, and the landlord went to a great deal of effort to make us welcome. His carpets were two inches thick in mud after each session, but he still managed to get the place reasonably cleaned up before the next. None the less, his carpets were ruined, but as compensation we drank him completely dry, and anyway, he told me, he had sold the place and that was his last weekend. On Sunday lunch time it was still pouring and blowing, and the organisers wanted to abort the Sunday afternoon Battle, but for some reason asked my advice, maybe as the senior person present, and I pointed out that we had advertised it and “the show must go on”. And now we come to the crunch of this battle, and possibly why I remember so much about it.On the Sunday evening, Paul Randall came up to me and said that the three fibreglass guns had been manned by members of his family and friends, but they were now growing up and leaving home, and he was giving up, so the guns were outside for me to take charge of. It was a bit of a problem to get them back to Norwich, but when we did I now had a ready made role in the society in charge of the Artillery.

Bradenham
   At Bradenham there was a meeting in a church when the King's Army, as it had become, had a democratic election for a Council of War, to which I was elected. This was the start of a long involvement with the organisation of the King’s Army, but remember that I was only responsible for the administration of the Norfolk Company of Lunsfords, the main base of the Regiment being in Somerset with Mike Warman.

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   Joan kept a book of cuttings for our first year, which is why I have been able to give so much detail of those events of nearly thirty years ago. I have now come to the end of the book, so from here on out the story will patchy and from memory, and this seems a good time to move on to the next episode. ~
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