I saw this picture on a Shropshire page, it is titled Minsterley.
My initial thought was a Home Guard bicycle, but looking at that rifle is it all much older?
Attachment 127611
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I saw this picture on a Shropshire page, it is titled Minsterley.
My initial thought was a Home Guard bicycle, but looking at that rifle is it all much older?
Attachment 127611
Could it be a territorial soldier in WW1? Many territorial battalions were equipped with the Charger loading Lee Enfield rifle, which that rifle appears to be.
I think that well may be WW1 as well.
This postcard photograph of mine is believed to date in the time frame of the very late 1800's to the very early 1900's and so probably about 1900. Looking at your photograph, the uniform looks a little more modern and so I would say, in the time frame, after my photo was taken up to just before WW1.
...at the 'Oar House.
Great picture!
Is that electrical wiring on the eaves just behind the soldier's head?
If so, when was that part of Britain 'electrified?
The WW1 bicycles - the 1914 Raleigh "Military Model"
Ver light restoration of original Bicycle with reproduction tool bag (below cross-bar) :
Hey guys it wasn’t the last time a bicycle was able to help troops , not that it wasn’t important for the allies but the Japanese took the island of Singapore by riding bikes down the Malay peninsula to take the alleged island fortress run by poor British leadership . Many of my countrymen never came home due to being captured and place in Changi prison and then being forced on many of the marches up the Malay peninsular .
Absolutely, many ANZAC veterans and their families felt justifiably very bitter towards Britain for the disastrous leadership in Singapore.Quote:
Originally Posted by smerdon42
It was a very dark point in the war and their Japanese captors were cruel and brutal beyond belief.
Agreed, & of course, many Britons also felt bitter about British leadership failure at Singapore.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bruce_in_Oz
I think it's a on a railway station. The porcelain insulators will be part of the telegraph system. The railways had their own telegraph network, which was separate from the Post Office system.
The uniform looks South African war, or slightly later.
I have been actively involved in the extraction and full military honours to be carried out for the 250 Soldiers who were bayoneted by Japanese soldiers on the 14th February 1942 in Alexandra Hospital in Singapore.
They were then placed into a large pit which is today the hospital football pitch.
DNA is the stumbling block with all identifications, along with that old favourite inter Governmental politics..........but it raises hope where there was none.
I hope before I leave this earth all those killed and buried in that way on that fateful day can finally have their own marked grave.
I lived in Singapore for three years as a child when my father was in the Forces and it was a big thing in the sixties, but the tracing of NOK would have been horrendous back then.
I went back with three veterans and elements of 2 PARA in 2015 to honour two of our lads killed in 1965 at Plaman Mapu by Indonesian SF who attacked a border outpost, where we wanted to build a cairn in the jungle on the hillock, and called into Kranji Cemetery in Singapore on the way home, to give the lads full military honours and respect, from local UK units stil based there.
Thats the cemetery these soldeirs should have as a final resting place run by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission so beautiful and so peaceful.
Gil Boyd and mr Clark , my uncles father was on the HMAS Perth which wen town with the USS Houston in the battle for Singapore he was last seen on a life boat but he never made it home . My mums uncle was not he artillery in Darwin ww2 and he wa sa real bushy he had some stories about Japanese pilots being eaten by crocs .my dads dad was in the 16th VDC in Townsville ww2 mainly coast watch duties .i guess the bike was a easy way to move large amounts of troops with out the motorized complement which had more chance of being bogged down .
Mark,
The Japanese efifciency on cycles was outstanding in the circumstances, down through the whole of Malaya, to sit in high points in Jahore Bahru to overlook the fortifications on the island of Singapore with the full knowledge of General Percivals Officers, and then to leave the causeway in tact was disgraceful. Once they realised ALL the artillery was on the other side of the island facing out to sea.......................the causeway was basically an invitation to capturing the massive prepared force in Singapore even easier. The Japanese were so understrength at that time, and the Commonwealth Forces should have simply anialated them!!
They were totally unprepared due primarily to the speed of their arrival on bikes in the wrong direction!!
Military medical staff also got bayoneted as well as a patient on the operating table. Have any remains of army nurses been found at Alexandra Hospital, Singapore?Quote:
Originally Posted by Gil Boyd
All staff and soldiers killed were serving military. The whole subject is very vague and many of the locations of the mass pit given by so called witnesses when they were alive, have still turned up very little, although a GPR search was done a few years ago, I am sure better technology will eventually find it in a very large area on the site.
Surgeons, Doctors and nurses were all killed too, and again the total has also been changed so many times, due primarily to Japanese occupation for three years after it.
The Japanese really didn’t care for taking prisoners and saw it as a disgrace in surrendering . I have copies of letters from my uncles dad who served on the HMAS Perth in the Mediterranean against the Italians and Germans and was part of the blockade in North Africa for the british and commonwealth troops also the evacuation of Crete . They respected the Germans and Italians but they where a formidable enemy , i feel that the British really thought that the Japanese where not a threat to them but they proved that wrong .
Many doctors and nurses where captured and some where lucky to survive IE weary Dunlop the surgeon he survived changi after being captured , then Vivian bullwinkle who is hte only nurse to survive the mass shooting by the Japanese on Bangka island .
Changi is still a desolate place, once a prison always a prison. The thousands that died in there during the 3 years of Japanese occupation of the island will never be forgotten.
Spent some time in and around there as RAF Changi was close by.
We were at RAF Seletar a much bigger camp split in half with all the facilities you would expect on an RAF camp!!!!
Like many countries, they wish we had stayed as a nation. I am sure with whats happening in the South China Seas we wish we had too.
Hongkong/Malaya/Singapore/Borneo/Brunei/Gan/Malta/Maseirah and so many more, all wish we had remained now the dust has settled.
We cared for a lot of people then, who struggle today to make ends meet!!
It really is...right there. You folks sure have/had some excellent and interesting postings. I remember discussing with my Scots Borderers exchange OC about his time as an 18yr old 2Lt in Hong Kong...with pics.Quote:
Originally Posted by Gil Boyd
The Viet Minh / NVA / VC were pretty creative with bicycles , too. A couple of small, fit blokes pushing a well-built bicycle loaded with a couple of sacks of rice or a few slabs of small arms ammo can cover a LOT of ground discretely in a fairly short time. A bamboo pole was rigged like a reverse tiller off the handlebars. One person pushing from beside the bike and the "helmsnman" pushing and steering with the pole.
Not surprisingly, the bicycles made in the Hanoi factory were somewhat "overbuilt" compared to the French pattern civilian jobs from which they were copied. Not many left now.
Then, there are the wonderful contraptions used in southern Africa during the Boer War and later. These were basically two tandem bikes with a spacer frame between them and "biolt-on" wheel flanges. Thus a couple of these monsters could rapidly carry a combat-ready patrol quite quickly along the railway tracks. I saw some period photos a while back: Time to re-post them hereabouts?
Said railway bicycle was on view at the Schanskop Fort in Pretoria. Not sure if it is still there. Doubt if there more than a few as railway lines weren't all that widespread.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bruce_in_Oz
All sorts of variations and adaptions in WW1 :
Twin Maxim Tricylcle
Here's South Africa's most famous scout, Danie Theron, with his bicycle. He led Theron se Verkenningskorps (Theron's Reconnaissance Corps), and twice crept through the British encircling lines at Paardeberg, though not on a bicycle. Charlize Theron is his great great niece.
Attachment 127696.
What a great topic and lots of different stories , i have a great great uncle who served with the Australian 55th in ww1 he wa wounded in the 2nd battle of the Somme shot through the leg, he recovered after several bouts of VD from French houses of ill repute , to go back and be blown up and buried for several hours in the 3rd battle of the Somme on 1917 . He was later found and taken off th e line due to shell shock / PTSD. He returned to australia and was working on my great grandfathers property near Wagga NSW , he was doing better but had a fall off a bike and hit his head and ended up passing away from his head injury in early april 1918. One of our relatives is john hurst edmonson VC Tobruk ww2.
Danie Theron was in charge of the "Wiegelrijderskorps" early in the war. Meaning his corps of scouts were on bicycles. This faded as the war dragged on, bicycles couldn't be replaced and horses were more readily available.
Charlize, stunning lady and great actress, don't think if she had been riding the bike back then, she would have been allowed through British lines so easily:bow:
Gil, I just had a word with Charlize [en in Afrikaans, nogal] and she tells me she fancies you, too.
The chickens of Loos, the Somme, Passchendaele and the rest came home to roost in WWII. A nation's biological resources are a fixed quantity, and when they are squandered past a certain point the damage often is irreparable.Quote:
Originally Posted by Roger Payne
It has been said that nations last as long as their top soils; they also last as long as their birthrates. Kitchener typified the idiocy of the time when he blithely remarked that he could easily replace the 7000+ men and 700-odd(?) officers lost for nothing at first Loos.
Had he and his ilk the wits he might have remembered that each one of those men was a thread that stretched over countless generations, a thread that out of hundreds of others had survived unbroken to that day, and once cut off there is no knitting it back together. Shells and guns can be made to order, men cannot.
The Spartans IIRC did not allow a man into battle until he had at least two sons alive, albeit children. For all the classics read at public schools, this lesson was apparently forgotten.
F.M. Dill remarked in 1940 or 41 that most of the senior officers he had at his disposal were simply unfit for their positions, but he had no one else! Whether he included himself in that we are not told. Hence the Can-Loan officers and other such programs, though of course those were only junior officers.
The moral(e) decline in Britain post-WWI can be laid largely at the door of the simple demographic decline - as it can be in the Commonwealth at large. WWII was another nail in the coffin. Not for nothing did the then Japanese PM gloat in 1914: "This is the end of Europe". When a nation or a sports team or a company loses too many of its best people the result is inevitable, unless extraordinary measures are taken.
As for the Japanese, they chose their moment to pull the lion's tail while he was busy elsewhere. One has to look at these things through the lens of the times, not retrospectively. The Japanese invaded China in 1937 and never did conquer the entire country. It was well withing living memory when a puny expeditionary force had taken Peking during the "Boxer Rebelliion", but the Japanese could not??
The Soviets gave them a bloody nose at Nomonhan in 1939 and the world took note of that, and from a Red Army which was in the throes of being purged by Stalin's NKVD. The next year what seemed to be the same Red Army was humbled by the Finns. Naturally Japan's military reputation suffered severely as a result: lower than the Soviets who are lower than the Finns, who "are certainly no better than us British/French etc.":rolleyes:
So the duffers tended to be sent to the Far East where climate, comfort and imperial power served to induce even more complacency. Percival seems to have had some sort of mental-medical problem as he served quite effectively in Ireland in 1920-21, but had become a complete "wet" by 1942. Why naval officers should be automatically court-martialled for the loss of their ships, but army officers let off scot-free for their failures, I've never understood!
What was needed as Churchill later said of the North African campaign, was "a field court martial and a firing squad". Had he sent Ironside out there things might have been very different.