Pics : 6" Coastal Battery, Devon

Britain's National Trust until quite recently had a policy of eradicating any 'unsightly' WWII remains on land which they acquired ( this used to drive me nuts - after all, the Tower of London was probably once regarded as an 'unsightly military structure' ).

Happily, this seems to have changed. Quite close to where I stayed recently near Dartmouth is what is reckoned to be the UK's best-preserved 6in WWII Coastal Battery - the Brownstone Battery which overlooks the approaches to the River Dart and across to Slapton Sands. The NT acquired the area relatively recently and are pursuing a policy of consolidating and preserving the remains, with useful information boards . One of the derelict buildings now contains an 'information centre' with sitemaps and contemporary photos.

Built in 1940, the battery featured two linked searchlight and gun emplacements on a very steep cliff. Even today, accessability is difficult. It's worth the hike, though...here's the upper 6in gun position and associated buildings -



- and looking directly down the cliff to the lower gun position -



-and even lower still, the searchlight shelter -




Between the two gun positions is a very interesting feature indeed, a steeply-inclined 'miniature railway' to carry shells from magazine to gun....







Guns remained in situ until 1956 when the site was decommissioned. According to information boards the fate of the guns is something of a mystery, but grubbing around in bushes below the gun positions revealed large chunks of gun mounting which had obviously been dynamited....




Best of all, though, I was delighted to find this relic....




....which is part of the breech of the upper 6" gun, clearly showing where the barrel had been cut, with the 6" bore visible. It would seem that the barrel was cut into manageable pices down to the trunnions ; the heavy breech and mounting then being dynamited and rolled over the clifftop.

Bit too heavy to fit into the back of the car, unfortunately....



Great site, though - and well worth a visit for anyone interested in Coastal defences.

 

What a great find Martin! Too bad that breech is so heavy , but even if you could bring it home it would be a bit large in the middle of the Living-room wouldn't it? Apparently this battery was voluntary dismantled after the war. Did yo ufind other parts of it?

 

Time, as usual, was the enemy........I could easily have spent an entire morning at the site. That was the only piece of the gun which I found, although the hillside was literally littered with very large and heavy fragments of the gun mountings...




And there were many buildings, such as this shell store....




And an air-raid shelter for the lower gun, literally perched on the cliffside...




And although information boards can be incorrect, those at this site actually seemed quite good and gave a good impression of the arrangement....

 

Thanks Martin. Those bunkers roofs seemed quite inneficient in case of a massive attack. I fiigure they would be more dangerous than protective in case of a full hit.

 

Nice pictures Martin, thanks.

 

Great post, Martin...and well worth the wait.

I love exploring places like this, you never know what you'll come across next.

Most of the buildings appear to have railings over the doors and windows, so I assume these were off limits to visitors?

The doorway at the top of the railway line looked like it could have been very inviting.

 

The railings have been put in place by the NT to prevent further vandalism or unauthorized use. According to the information room, if funds are forthcoming, some of the buildings may be preserved further.....

Not much remains to be seen in the buildings, as this shot inside one of the shell-stores shows....

 

An interesting point here is to compare German and US coastal fortifications with these. The thing I note is the British appear to use far more brickwork than the Germans and US does. These two pretty much pour everything in reinforced concrete while the British use some concrete (reinforced?) and alot of brick buildings.

 

That's a good point and maybe someone such as The Historian may be able to answer - for myself, as this is a 1940 construction, I'm wondering if availablity of materials was a factor as many 'pillboxes' of that era were also brick-built.....

 

Hey I'm No Historian, LOL But I Do have a clue Why there's a reason, they provided a number of basic pillbox designs which could be constructed by soldiers and local labour at appropriate defensive locations. In the following June and July FW3 issued 6 basic designs for rifle and light machine gun, designated Type 22 to Type 27. In addition, there were designs for gun emplacements suitable for either the Ordnance QF 2 pounder or the Hotchkiss 6pdr gun(designated Type 28) and a design for a hardened medium machine gun emplacement.

There were also designs for pillbox-like structures for various purposes including light anti-aircraft positions, observation posts and searchlight positions to illuminate the shoreline. In addition, the Air Ministry provided designs of fortifications intended to protect airfields from troops landing or parachuting. These would not be expected to face heavy weapons so that the degree of protection was less and there was more emphasis on all-round visibility and sweeping fields of fire. Many of these were later reinforced.

Embrasures were available precast and factory produced to standard designs, but as these were in short supply some embrasures were improvised from brick or concrete paving. Embrasures were frequently fitted with a steel or concrete-asbestos shutter. From March 1941, some pillbox embrasures were fitted with a Turnbull mount, this was a metal frame that supported a medium machine gun.


British hardened field defences of World War II - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

great photos martin and good investigating.....ya got the right footware for the cliffside!

 

nice pics Martin, nice find.

 

You're right, Martin. There was actually a concrete shortage caused by the anti-invasion defence building programme, but there was also an attempt to save materials in the temporary brick construction idea; buildings were to be constructed in one layer thickness of brick only, with the interior walls later being plastered to about halfway up to finish them.
The pillboxes aren't usually just brick construction though; they're generally of two brick walls used as shuttering for a concrete 'sandwich', the idea being to speed up construction.
Spaniard's on the right track too; there's endless variations in the design of pillboxes, section posts etc in various parts of the country which are as much down to the individual COs's whim as any material shortages.

 

VERY cool Martin, and thanks for the tour ;-))

 

My father took me there in what must have been 1951, I would have been eight at the time. My father was a telephone engineer in what was then the Post Office telephone service, he had to go there to remove the telephones. ( In those days telephones were very expensive pieces of equipment and were the property of the Post Office) My father drove us there in his little Morris 8 Post Office Telephone's van, which had rubber mudguards and there was a fire extinguisher on the nearside one.
There was only a caretaker living there with his family, as far as I can remember they were living in some buildings on the left-hand side as you go through the gate.
The caretakers son who was older than me took me around the site to see the guns. The No 1 gun had already been dismantled and bits of it were lying around on the concrete base, the gun barrel had already gone. What I must have been looking at was the gun carriage, I remember seeing a large bronze bearing which must have been part of the gun elevation or azimuth mechanism.
The No 2 gun was still intact and it looked as if it had been maintained ready for use. The gun was painted dark green and had a half turret, the back of the turret was covered by a canvas cover. The gun muzzle was covered by a leather or canvas boot, which I took off to look inside. The rifling of the gun bore was well greased with a green grease.
Inside the turret everything was painted green, but all the brass wheels and levers were brightly polished. We also went through the tunnel to the base of the gun and all the brass wheels there were also brightly polished.
The little railway to carry the ammunition from the magazine to the gun was still complete with its carriage and cable.

The two searchlights had been removed, but the buildings still had the shutters and doors intact. I remember looking down through the hole in the roof, which must have been the vent for the fumes from the carbon arc lamp and seeing that the building was empty.

The caretakers son took me into the Battery Observation Post and I remember that on the wall facing the windows on the Start Point end of the building was a mechanical device for calculating the bearing of the guns. It consisted of various dials and handles, I saw a similar device on submarines in the seventies, that was used to calculate the angle to fire torpedoes.
When my father finished removing the telephones, we went back to the caretakers accommodation and his wife made us all a cup of tea. That's all I can remember about that day.

 

These guns were originally at Hartlepool and were fired in anger in WW1.
http://www.heughbattery.com/site/history_of_the_site

The black & white picture on the website is exactly how I remember the No 2 gun at Brownstone battery. It had a canvas cover over the back of the Turret to keep out the weather and a canvas boot over the gun muzzle. The whole thing was painted dark green.

 

This is what the No 2 gun looked like when I saw it in 1951.

 

There are several bits of the gun mountings around the site, they would have looked like this before they were blown up.

 

The pictures on the information boards at the site are incorrect, there was no concrete canopy over the gun positions. The 6 inch guns were in enclosed steel turrets which were open at the back and covered with a canvas cover.

 

The two 6 inch Mk VII guns of Brownstone battery are actually quite famous. they were the only shore battery guns in the UK to ever engage the enemy, when they were at the Heugh Battery, Hartlepool in WW1.
With thanks to the Heugh Battery trust for this information
In 1900 Heugh Battery was modified again, at a cost of just over £4,000, to take two quick firing guns. In December 1902 Heugh was armed with two six inch mark VII breach-loading guns, (These guns were later installed at Brownstone Battery in 1942, my thanks to Mike White for this information) with a single mark VI gun at Lighthouse which was upgraded to mark VII by 1914.
It was with these three guns that three German ships were engaged on the morning of 16 th December 1914. Battlecruisers ‘Seydlitz’ and ‘Moltke’ and the heavy armoured cruiser ‘Blucher’ shelled the batteries and other targets in Hartlepool from 8.15am for nearly 40 minutes, killing over 100 civilians and injuring a further 400. Two shells exploded between the batteries, killing seven soldiers but the German ships failed to disable the British guns.
Contemporary reports suggest that the ships fired shells with delayed action fuses which simply bounced off the concrete aprons of the batteries, exploding amongst the houses to the rear. The gun at Lighthouse battery developed a fault and fired only 15 rounds whilst Heugh dispatched 108 rounds in response to the 500-1000 rounds fired by the ships. All three ships suffered minor damage, although sufficient to cut short the bombardment. This was the first and last time that the batteries engaged the enemy.