Shared sentiments Tim, Happy birthday indeed. Hope you are well.

I aim to add your signature to the 40 or so already on my Hurricane picture one day in 2014 🙂

I was given this a a few years ago by an old friend who served in the RAF in the mid 1950’s
It is a lovely condition 20mm round that has had the Kings crown and RAF Eagle soldered onto it. It has also had 99 Squadron engraved very neatly underneath the eagle.
The headstamp is ‘BMARC’ dated 1940 and 20mm IZ. These stamps I have looked up read about, so I understand that part of the item, including the fact that apparently this is very early 20mm round.

Now,as you are aware, 99 were a bomber squadron, it was a bomber squadron that Group Captain Pickard of the later Amiens gaol raid was on in 1940. Equipped with Wellingtons, they transferred to india in 1942 where the Squadron later operated Liberators.

So the 20mm is not common to either of those aircraft, and certainly not in 1940, so an armourers piece I should think. I have posted about this round before on another forum and one of the replies was that it is indeed a very early round. It has been soldered onto another item in the past, possibly an ashtray and the base of the casing is contaminated with solder…that I would like to remove somehow!

Email sent to IWM, again many thanks twinotter23

…thread creep over 🙂

No “They” do not have the resources to repair such damage. The local council were reluctant to get involved ( although did eventually) , but the current guardians of the memorial, the RAF benevolent fund ( RAFBF), who took over from the BCA as guardian, had to request and separately raise monies to cover the repairs.

Thank you for correcting me David. As builders of two small memorials on former airfields, we maintain a Thousand pounds or so in a bank account specific for such eventualities. I mistakenly thought a prominent memorial such as this would have a similar arrangement.

I have taken many photos of boundary markers around airfields and other military and govt sites, Tower Hill is no exception, as having just googled Boundary Marker images, the very same ones are displayed.

Some of these markers date back a fair old time, and apparently its becoming fashionable to include them in geocaching ! 🙂

It is definitely a boundary Marker. WD although generally taken to be War Department, does also refer to government bounds or boundarys, usually military structures. A similar set of these can be found around tower hill in London.

There is a Tiger at Vimoutiers on the D979, plenty on the web about it. Here is an image I took of it when I passed it again last October on the way back from Hill 262, and the Falais Gap memorial at Montormel.

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Excellent, thanks for sharing the film clip.

There are not many sharp noisy pointy things I’m interested in, but the EE Lightning has always been a type to turn my head !