You gott'a laugh! In the early 70's or so, about 1974 I was on the ranges as a young Territorial REME Corporal doing our annual range classification shoot with a load of other rear echelon bods. There with us were a load of much older, long serving Royal Signals 'valve jockeys' from the Signals TA centre at Frome. Who had been told that the days of having passed their annual shooting (and presumably, PT test....) were over and that they had to shoot/classify to warrant their annual gratuity. This must have brought on the pains a bit because they all turned up in all manner of kit that they'd been issued with in the 60's or so. Not being 'front line' but rear echelon troops (I use the word 'troops' carefully here.....) working from the rear of olde-worlde Mk1 and 2 FFR Landrovers and Humber wireless trucks (which they turned up in). They wore a mix of old early 60's green combat kit with a mix of newer camouflaged kit, gaiters instead of wrap around puttees and a sorry assorted mixture of old threadbare, gungy, ill fitting '37 pattern skeleton order webbing. I don't think that they'd even heard of '58 pattern stuff as the stuff we had was something totally new and alien to them

What a sight........ Shrieks of laughter all round. I'm not sure whether they did actually shoot their rifles or whether they just did the odds and sods range jobs, such as butt markers and ammo point orderlies, dishing out the packed lunches etc etc. At the end of the day they all seemed to have passed though!