Our August day visit took us from Palmerston to Eisenhower, Napoleonic Wars to D-Day. A morning in the D-Day map room at Southwick House inspired an excellent turnout, undeterred by a summer downpour. Formerly HMS Dryad, the site is now an inter-service police training establishment, so we had to be escorted from the guardroom. Our guide, Monty, gave us an entertaining and sometimes creative account of the site’s history and role in the Battle of Normandy. After the presentation we were free to look at the map room, Admiral Ramsay’s and General Eisenhower’s rooms in our own time.
Eisenhower’s room is now a bar. Perhaps luckily, since we had a schedule to keep, it wasn’t open.
After about an hour we moved on to the Royal Armouries site at Fort Nelson and took lunch in the excellent (albeit noisy at the time) café there. This was followed by a walking tour led by our excellent guide, Sarah, who took us through the fort’s history, construction and features. One of a line of Portsdown Hill forts planned to defend Portsmouth against attack from the rear, the defences of Nelson evolved to match rapidly changing artillery technology. The original smooth-bore guns (illustrated) were obsolete before the fort was completed, and supplanted by rifled artillery in (then) bombproof shelters or on ‘disappearing’ mounts. The museum includes examples of military and naval firepower up to the late twentieth century. Sarah was accompanied by a retired Gunner officer who answered the trickiest questions our friendly crew could put to him.
Almost all the content was new to me, at least.
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