But since then I have found a couple of press photographs and a press cutting, and these show it to have been unique.
There was still no set format for the Whitehall Parade, and it depended on the whim of the police at the time. This one was strange in that the service took place round the statue of King Charles on the island of Trafalgar Square with the traffic still whizzing by. The two pictures that I have are stamped "Daily Telegraph, Feb 1st" on the back, but whether or not they were ever published I do not know.
The pictures are interesting in that they show how things have changed over the years. In those days, authenticity meant giving the public what they expected to see, and that meant Roundheads with dull clothing and short hair and Cavaliers with bright clothing and long hair, which is why I am wearing a wig. You will see a motley selection of footwear, and much less uniformity of costume than you see today, as the feeling then was that, although a regiment might originally have been dressed uniformly, after a period in the field they would have lost some of their original kit, and replenished this with anything they could scrounge or loot from the countryside.
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I have just returned from the 2002 Battle of Powderham Castle, I think the eighth at this venue, and as always a superb weekend. But now that I have retired from active participation on the field I was able to sit back and watch, so when I saw a bald headed Royalist officer, without a hat, leading immaculately uniformed troops I realised how things have changed over the last 25 years, and for the benefit of newer members I would like to reminisce for a moment.
In the first place, battles were always scheduled to last for between two to three hours, and on three day bank holiday weekends there were battles on all three days. I think it is generally accepted that the second day’s battle is always better than the first, so usually the third day was superb. Nowadays battles only take place on two days and rarely last longer than an hour
On the other hand there was no organised drill in the mornings.
When I first started in this game, as an ex wartime Army Officer I started to organise a bit of foot drill and marching in step, only to be told by the then experts that this was completely unauthentic, and that no such discipline existed at the time. How different from this Powderham where complicated displays of foot drill were given all morning!
The actual battle at Powderham 2002 was comparatively static, with much emphasis on musket blocks. Twenty five years ago muskets were comparatively rare and were bits of ½” water pipe on a crude wooden stock, and were fired by pushing a crow scarer down the tube and lighting the fuse at the muzzle end. The bulk of the soldiers were pikemen and the action was between pike blocks trying to gain ground by pushing their opponents back in pike presses, like large rugby scrums with the addition of long sticks.
Scripts were very simple, and merely laid down who came on from where, who won, and possibly if there was to be a pause for a parley. There were no walkie talkies or mobile phones, and communication within the Army was by runner, and situations could change before the runner could return with new orders or help, so that once the battle started you were very much on your own out there—just like the real thing really--and the end result was lots of individual encounters and movement.
There was much discussion about how pike were used for fighting in the actual Civil War, and the then experts decided that point of pike as practiced now was impossible because in real life you would have finished up with opposing front ranks impaled on each others pikes and stopping any further advance. We did try a sort of fencing action but it is not possible to control the movement of the pike accurately enough and after a few teeth got knocked out we gave this up, so the pike press became the norm.
Lunsford’s, like most Regiments, were much bigger in those days. We had a full company from Norwich, another from Coventry, and contingents from Bristol, Somerset, Jersey et al. sufficient to put another company on the field, a company being about 20 pikemen.
Pike blocks could be 30 or 40 strong and you went into a pike press with the object of pushing your opponents back and gaining ground. Once a press collapsed the side that could disentangle and reform first had the advantage, and this was one thing that we in Lunsfords did drill at.
The whole thing was very physical and injuries did occur. Joan’s first aid report each day would normally include 20 or 30 people treated at the first aid posts, and often two or three sent to hospital. The surprising thing was that Joan’s biggest problem was stopping the walking wounded getting back into the fray!
Lunsfords had the reputation of being tough fighters and were often used to get the army out of a difficult situation. They also had no great respect for authority, although always exceedingly loyal to me. This, of course, was very authentic and followed the antics of the original Regiment exactly. They were always last on parade because they liked to be active and on the move, and there was always a lot of waiting about in the wings prior to a battle. They got there in time, but only just. Remind me to tell you about this at the Sorn battle later on.
Before I continue with the events, a word about the artillery.
Now that I have taken over the Regiment on the field, son Mike is left in charge of the guns, Remember that there was a basic stock of three fibre glass big guns belonging to the KA and five genuine small guns on loan from Langley School, and these were all kept at Norwich.
Whilst Lunsfords did not necessarily attend every major, the guns had to, and what with these extra majors and sundry small events that also needed a gun Mike and his gunners were out most weekends. In the end they found themselves unable to satisfy the demand and it became essential that guns were not all stationed at one location. At the same time it was decided to become more authentic and to do away with the use of maroons and use only gunpowder. This, of course, meant that the fibreglass replicas could not be used, and the genuine guns that we had were only borrowed and could not be dispersed round the country. So Regiments were offered a fairly generous travel allowance if they would provide a gun. Unfortunately most Regiments did not have the funds, and in the end it came down to enthusiastic members who paid for the gun out of their own pocket, and took the travel allowance when available. Mike himself acquired three such guns, and we unspiked the Langley guns as well, so that Lunsfords still had eight guns available. However the KA could not finance the powder or travel for too many guns so the use of the Langley guns gradually died away, and out on the field there was no longer a centralised battery, the guns stayed with and were controlled by their own Regiments.
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Now back to the events of 1976
Powderham Castle
The second of many at this excellent site. The problem with so many is that one’s memory finds it difficult to sort out one from t’other, but I think the following story does belong to this one.
The castle stands on a small hill, and between it and the evil smelling river was a flat meadow** on which the battle was to take place. The script was that the castle was held for the King, and was being attacked by the rebels (and ultimately taken by them). There was a star fort for the defending guns constructed in the middle of the meadow, and because Lunsfords had the guns we were given the task of defending this outpost.
Now the organisers had made a wonderful job of constructing this fort. A four foot wide by four foot deep trench had been dug by JCB, with the excavated material forming a rampart inside the ditch, and the rampart bristled with pointed stakes. But there was just one snag! The sewer from the castle ran across this field and by sod’s law almost the last scoopful by the digger had severed the pipe and the whole ditch filled up with raw sewage and river water (which was not much better).
I looked at this situation and decided that if I had to attack the fort I would send in a wave of intrepid and athletic troops to jump up, grab a spike and swing over the ditch. Now, as built, the spikes were buried a couple of feet into the embankment and were quite firm, so when nobody was about I had the lads pull them out so that only a few inches was buried. Come the battle, and sure enough down comes this wave of rebels, reach up and grab the posts and Splash! the whole lot are “up the creek”!
In the end we did get over-run, as those already in the proverbial stayed there and formed a human bridge for the second attack.
Having secured the fort, the rebels then attacked the Castle itself. There was a high retaining wall, (memory says about 20 ft.), with a 4 ft. castellated fence wall on top behind which were the royalist muskets. Somehow the rebels got hold of some ladders and started scaling the wall and the musketeers responded by pushing the ladders down. Fortunately the ground was marshy, and as far as I remember nobody got seriously hurt, but it was taking authenticity to the limits!
** The “flat meadow” is now an ornamental lake and the site of the star fort is lost beneath it.
Going back to 1976, here is another little anecdote about this weekend. At the time I had a Ford Zephyr, a big car with a bonnet like a football pitch. Even so, it was pretty crowded, with Joan and myself and three teenage/early twenties offspring inside, on the roof rack a load of pike surmounted by one of the fibreglass canon on it’s carriage, and in the boot the canon wheels and all the necessary kit and camping gear. We had been seven or eight hours in the car on a very hot day, so we weren’t too pleased to be stopped for a traffic census halfway between Exeter and Powderham.
The questions went something like this, with me getting hotter and more frustrated the more stupid they got.
Q—where are you going to?
A---Powderham
Q --where’s that?
A---about three miles down the road
Q---where have you come from?
A---Norwich
Q---where’s that?
A---about 120 miles the other side of London
Q---too far away, where was the last big town that you came through?
A---why, Exeter of course, even you must know that!
Q---what are you going to do at Powderham?
A—blow up the Castle, that’s what the canon is for
Q---why didn’t you come by public transport?
The answer to that one is too rude to repeat here, and I drove off.
What the purpose of that census was I do not know, but whatever it was the results could not have been much use if all the officials were as stupid as that one!
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Chaddesley Corbet
We did not go as a Regiment. Looking at the dates, three majors in August and another in early September would have been too much for the finances if not for the stamina!
Bramham Park
This is just off the Great North Road near Wetherby, and an improvement to the road had bypassed the village of Bramham so that it was no longer a staging point along the road but was slowly dying.
The village, with a lovely old pub, was just to the east of the new road whilst the battlefield was a mile to the west.
Of the Battle itself I remember nothing. Joan’s Diary records that we “left Norwich at 10.20 on the Friday, and arrived at 4.20—floods” and I know that it must have been wet because Lunsfords spent a lot of time in the pub, and drank it dry.
I called in that pub a couple of years later and chatted to the landlord—only it turned out that he wasn’t the landlord at all, but the landlord’s father who had just stepped in whilst his son had a day or two off, just as he had on the weekend of the battle. His son just hadn’t believed him when he returned and found that Dad had banked the equivalent of two months takings after one weekend. No wonder pubs are always willing to have us back!
Cranbury Park
This one followed just a week after Bramham, and I see from the diary that Joan and I spent the week between on holiday in Cardiganshire in Wales—energetic, but still, I was young at the tender age of 57!
Again I have no particular memories of the military side of this event, but Joan recalls it as “a good battle”. What does stick in the memory is this. We had fairly recently acquired a dog, a Border collie called Roy. Roy had been trained from a puppy as a contender in Sheep Dog Trials such as “One man and his dog”, but was not quite good enough and was surplus to his owner’s requirements when we got him. Nevertheless he was the most amazingly obedient dog and even in the heaviest traffic would always walk to heel and never needed a lead.
He just had two faults. He could not stand loud noises like gunfire, and at this battle he went missing at the first cannon shot. It took us a couple of hours to find him after the battle, a mile away in a farmhouse.
His other fault was that occasionally he would go missing from the heel position, but he could always be found fairly quickly. All you had to do was retrace your steps until you found a pub door open, and Roy would be inside entertaining the locals. He was psychologically incapable of passing an open pub! (Just like his master?)
Eshwinning
I have no record or memory of Lunsfords at this one. Wasn’t it nice to have so many majors that you could pick and choose?
Norfolk Banquet- 6th November
Was all planned to be back at the fruit farm, but the owner turned funny at the last minute so we found a new venue at Park Farm, Hetherset, on the outskirts of Norwich. Park Farm was an active farm, but the house and outbuildings were gradually being turned into a hotel. There was a mediaeval barn that they used for dances etc. but we had to provide all the catering, tables chairs etc. and we were able to sleep there after the Banquet.
There was an old chap, Stan Clarke, who had joined us from the Knot, and he made the local paper. Stan was with us for several years, and loved the companionship of the Regiment.
We were even then renowned for our singing, which in those days was led by Tim Kelly from Bristol.
