A Fort Nelson Foray

The Royal Armouries artillery collection is at Fort Nelson, Porchester, near Portsmouth. Fort Nelson is a Palmerston fort from the mid-nineteenth century, designed to deter the dastardly Frenchies under Napoleon III. 

My daughter and son-in-law live just up the road, so when we last went to visit she asked me if there was anything I fancied doing. I said it would be nice if we found time for her dear old dad to go and have a look. After all if is free entry (i.e. NOTHING for a world class collection). Car Parking is £3 on site, but you can park across the road for FREE. I put aside a couple of hours for an afternoon visit. What a mistake. Barely enough time to walk round, let alone actually pay real attention to the exhibits, and no time at all for tea and cake in the café.

The entrance is dominated by a Mallet Mortar.

I say "a". There were only ever two built. This one was never fired. Designed in the mid-19th century to lob a one ton projectile onto a vaulted casement building, it is claimed to be the largest bore gun ever built. Never fired in anger, model number one suffered from technical problems during testing and was abandoned by the War Ministry after spending nearly £10,000 on the pair. That's just over £1.5m in today's money, so judging by modern procurement standards they got off lightly.

The museum has an indoor section, which is linked to the tunnels under the fort. This has historical themed galleries, plus exhibitions on the building of the fort and military medicine in the mid-late 19th centuries. It had a small Falklands Exhibition when we went. 

 

Talking of large bore guns that were never really fired, this picture shows not just some random industrial tubing, but one of the tubes from the infamous Iraqi Supergun. That's Mrs T standing by it for a sense of scale. This is in the indoors museum.

This is the other end of the tube. It is two of the sections bolted together. That white line to the left of it on the display panel is a scale model of what the final gun would have looked like. The discoloured section near the top is one of the two sections in the museum. The panel on the far wall explains the story, and is unsurprisingly written to avoid controversy, although it does make mention of Alan Clarke's laissez faire attitude to the export of dual use industrial parts.

I took quite a few photos, but I forgot to take my SLR, so fewer and of poorer quality than I really wanted.

There's a good range of exhibits from all periods. I was really taken by these early wrought iron pieces:

That's quite a good sized bombard, but not quite as impressive as the Ottoman piece in the entrance space:

This comes in two parts. The smaller section unscrews so you can load the gunpowder charge into it.

Here's a montage up of some mortars. The one on the left is a 250mm minenwerfer, the one on the right a 9" naval mortar, installed in its original defence position for the fort. The one in the middle is a Coehorn, with Mrs T for sizing again. From this visit I learned my 1/72 scratch built models are a little too big.

And who doesn't love a three barrelled French gun from the War of Spanish Succession that went a bit limp after being fired?

There are outdoor exhibits as well. These are some in decent condition:

Regretfully some of the other outside display items are showing signs of weathering badly and are missing explanatory panels.

In addition to the indoor museum there's a big gun shed:

This has got most of the more modern guns from late 19th century onwards (although their 88mm flak gun is in the other bit of the museum).

For the WW1 buffs they have the three classic QF field guns, the "soixante quinze", the 77mm Krupp, and the good old 18 pounder, here again in a montage:

This one caught my eye, as I don't have a model in my collection:

As did this one, for the exact opposite reason:

The shed is so big because it has one of these in it:

Alas the sliding doors were shut, so it was hard to get a really good picture of it. This is the British Army 18" railway gun. Completed too late for the Great War, it was fired in the Second. The sign claims it is the largest gun the Royal Artillery has ever used, and I guess they should know.

I said they had an 88mm above. Alas without my super wide angled lens I couldn't get it all in:

These pictures are only scratching the surface, and I really need to go back on my own. To do it justice you probably need to put aside about four hours I would say.

As I said we didn't get a chance to try out the café, so I can't say if you need to take a packed lunch or not. The bookshop had a good range of general books, and some specialist ones too. When we were there they had a three for two offer on the Royal Armouries introductory guides, which scales up to six for four:

Some of these are written by Thom Richardson, Bob Woosnam-Savage and Toby Capwell, all of whom I've heard speak and all of whom know their subjects. The other authors I don't know, but I'm working on the basis that they'll be as well informed.

Recommended day out if you like guns of all shapes and sizes.