T is for Two - Mail, Historic Mail . . .

These may be of casual interest, curiosity-wise, and they certainly deserve to be published for what they represent historically, also they may have some specific philatelic interest to stamp collectors, who may or may not visit here occasionally?

Start with the easy one which happens, also, to be the first, chronologically, I assume it is from my Grandfather or Grandmother on Mum's side, and is only of cursory interest for having the "Past by Naval censor" stamp, bottom left, however, the scribble which seems to accompany it, and which is not recognisable as either of my grandparent's hands, would appear, nevertheless, to be in the same ink, and from the same pen, as wrote the address?

 

The suspicion being that someone in grandad's office, like his own secretary or batman (did they have batmen in the Navy?), had the necessary clearance to sign-off mail, without opening it or checking it properly, or to do so, upon the order from him? . . . The sort of low-level corruption in high places [sorry Grandad!] which leads ultimately to the Sub-Postmaster's scandal, or 'Lord' I-ruined-modern-Britain Cameron, or Rishi's wife having a $multi-million financial interest (through Israeli contracts) in what is, or should actually be, Palestinian oil & gas!

It really is the case that there's one set of rules for the rest of us, and another set for those in power. Although you can slide into or out of the select group who get away with such things, Grandad was cheated of his knighthood, as an embarrassment to two nations, one - Albion - almost as old as Rome, the other - The Republic of India - only months new!

 

And that he (or I) would expect him to have had a knighthood in the normal course of events, only proving also, that the honours' system has always been the meaningless, corrupt, box-ticking exercise it still is - no matter how many minor awards they gave to school dinner-ladies, before they got rid of them all!

This is also of passing interest, for the over-stamps indicating things taking a turn for the worst in another war zone, twenty years later. There's also an apparent conflict between the two types of stamp, one suggesting there's insufficient postage paid to forward the letter, the other claiming a suspension of service?

 

But this, which accompanies the Christmas card (see below), it of far more interest, as A) it reveals a time when we, as a modern, advanced, civilised nation, ran a universal postal service which would fully reimburse you (with a written explanation), if they failed to deliver a letter on the other side of the world - can you imagine anything like that happening today, after 45-years of Thatcherite-Ragnomic ideology having hollowed out all our institutions, and/or reduced them to their lowest, cheapest, common-denominators?

And B) it mentions Laos? The inference being that the Browns', as embassy staff, had been transferred to Laos, for reasons lost in the mists of time, and that for equally unknown reasons, the mail system to Laos, not Vietnam (which while still a hot war, was quieter for Westerners in 1960, only five US servicemen killed, probably all MAAG), had actually heated up, which it had, with both American bombing and a Communist insurgency, edited: I was thinking of 1970, 1960 was the start of the Laotian civil-war!

And, therefore, that while the lack of sufficient postage may have been true, someone nevertheless tried to forward the card 'in theatre' rather than send it back, before giving-up and adding the two 'service suspended' stamps?

I thought the card was worth showing you; beautiful oriental, stylised brushwork of sparrows digging in the snow below highland bamboo, I imagine Mum bought the card somewhere like the British Museum shop, or SOAS . . . somewhere like that, but she may have brought it back from her own diplomatic stint in Singapore?

B is for Bookplates - 3 - Mum

And so we get to Mum's bookplate, for which I've found some of the 'working's out', which may be of interest to anyone thinking of designing one for themselves.

 

Listening to the obituary for Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, the 'singing nun' (aka the 'honky-tonk nun'), who was so much more, on the Radio, earlier this evening, it was saddening to learn she won a two-year scholarship to London's Royal Academy, but which, for reasons unknown, she never took it up, because a similar thing happened to my Mother.

 

She won a scholarship to the Slade, but never took it up and I never filly understood why, but it seems it was a combination of Orwellian post-war socialist means-testing, pride within the family and sexism; Uncle Johnny (male, firstborn) did go to Uni'? Doubly frustrating to miss-out, as the period she would have been there (the Slade) was among its high-points.

Anyway, suffice to say Mum clearly had a natural talent for such things, and some of the sketches she produced for her silversmithing designs are exquisite, although I haven't found her wild strawberry watercolour which was always my favourite?

 

These preliminary sketches/further studies are on two sides of an old envelope! Would it be 'airmail' with those blue stripes? She decided upon the family coat of arms (more of which in a future post), within a diamond or - heraldically speaking - a lozenge (when inherited through the female line) and having reproduced it on a photocopier (?) tried out a few layouts, and there may be more lost stages/preliminaries, this is just what I've found. To be honest, I prefer the lettering of the upper one?

The finished article, I don't know what the rule is with bookplates, but I am pasting mine over the bottom-right-hand quarter, so you can still read most of the one underneath and get one whole Talbot (what heraldic dogs are called; a now-lost hunting breed), unless it's a small volume or a cramped position (due to text layout or something) in which case I put mine right-over, which has a sad finality to it, almost the feeling of treading on a grave?

 

EAH, was her maiden name, Elizabeth Anne Hall, while Liz W was obviously for her married name; Walter.

Here's a working drawing for a design she did for a friend, I don't know if it ever went to print, and they eventually fell-out (over a Japanese submarine-commander's Katana parts of all things), despite remaining colleagues for several more years, but the details of such 'skeletons' pass with the parties concerned!

 

Like coins or stamps (or bottle caps, matchbook/boxes, cheese or cigar labels, travel/restaurant sugar packets - all the small collectables/paper ephemera!), the trick with bookplates is to produce a design which is interesting and aesthetically pleasing, yet also carries a certain amount of information in a small area, without it being unreadable and/or too busy or too plain. I'm not going to judge Mum's out-loud, but you can judge mine next!

B is for Bookplates - 2 - Great Aunt 'Nina'

Helena Invicta Hall, was always known as Great Aunt Nina, and I used to think she must have been Mum's Aunt, one of the siblings of my Grandfather? But in preparing this, from the ages of those involved, it's become obvious she must have been Grandad's Aunt, despite outliving him, so Mum's Great Aunt, and therefore My Great Aunt once-removed . . . I think!

 

She is best known publicly for her recent, posthumous memoirs; A Woman in the Shadow of the Second World War, which I have only recently discovered, which is sad, as my mother must have been the person who left the diary with the local record's office, as she handled Nina's estate as nominated executor, but I don't think she ever knew of the book's existence? It was Nina's money which bought us our Austin A35 van, with which Mum furnished the house.

 

She is better known to me, not as a diarist, but as one of the inter-war art mob, who were a mix of tail-end/surviving Arts & Crafts movement advocates, and full-on modernists (Gill Sans typeface) with a hint of Art Deco, which included Eric Gill (who we don't talk about any more, weird sinner), and his brother Gordon, the printer/publisher. Uncle 'Jock' (one of Grandad's brothers) was a keen amateur or naive artist in Suffolk around the same time.

 

I have a lot of her work which I will Blog one day; sketches, templates and proofs for Pub signs, Church and village fête posters & flyers, local authority announcements, shop-window things (opening times, open/closed signs, that kind of thing) she was a busy, jobbing commercial artist and signwriter.

In which skill, she designed two bookplates for herself, one earlier in life, and a later one, both of which we're looking at here. Above is what I believe is the first, printed by Gordon Gill's London works and dated 1900, she would have been about 27 then, but it may be a second printing of a student-days design? To the right is a roughly contemporary picture of her, I think it's dated '97 on the back, and that's the 18's for younger readers!

This, as far as I know was the one she was using up to her death in 1967, I was only three and barely remember the shenanigans of Mum whizzing back and forth to Sussex, but there are vague recollections.

 

A much more austere or simpler design, with nothing more than hand calligraphy, I actually found a box or two still in Mum's papers, but I don't know when it dates from! Reading Gill's history, you can see how Nina, too, was subscribing to the anti-technology/mass production of consumerism with this paired-down, minimalist style.

The Queen is Dead - God Save the King

I was going to give you plaster figures from India this afternoon, but events - as they say - had other ideas, so I think this is more appropriate, file under the nostalgia thread.

This is my Grandfather's baton; not any-old baton, not a sports-day baton, not a parade-ground baton, not an "I'm in charge of this ship today" baton, but the baton of an usher at the marriage of Princess Elizabeth Windsor and Philip Mountbatten (Nee Prince Phillip of Greece and Denmark) which took place on Thursday 20 November 1947 at Westminster Abbey in London.

I would imagine there were several hundred ushers, and I don't suppose any of them got to enter the Abbey or sit through the wedding service, as they were there to hold back crowds and direct people or traffic as a near day-long programme of 'Pomp & Circumstance' unfolded, giving new hope - and a reason for a knees-up - to a nation still struggling to shake-off the aftermath of total war.

The baton's really only a wooden dowel, painted, with a gilded-brass badge nailed to it, but it's not what it is, it's what it represents, it's the symbology of nationhood, of continuity, of the hopes of the age, of service, loyalty, pageant, and it's a reminder of the fact that history is also today.

And - on this saddest of days for our nation - also a reminder that nothing lasts forever, but that we are all the products of that history.

N is for Naval Landing Parties

Another piece of ephemera, nostalgia, family history . . . I think I've mentioned my Grandfather was drafted across from the Merchant Navy to the RN in 1915, in time for the Gallipoli Landings in the Dardanelles, serving aboard HMS London. I've found his copy of the land-fighting manual used by Naval Landing Parties.

'Rifle and Field Exercises for His Majesty's Fleet 1913', so, written/published the year before it all kicked off, lacking anything on trenching and entrenchment.

I wondered at them having marker-pens in 1915, until I realised it was pencil which has lost its shine after 106 years!

'JTS Hall Midshipman RNR HMS London', I don't know if this means they made them substantive RN personnel (RNR is the Royal Navy/Naval Reserve) later, or not at all, neither do I know if he was already in the RNR, or was co-opted into it when leaving the MN? I suspect he had to serve in the Reserve as part of the payback for his merchant naval training, crossed as RNR and became substantive later?

This appears to be an 'emily' or what the Army called the MLE (Magazine Lee-Enfield), the first version of the weapon, dating from 1895, reworked in 1899 and obviously considered good enough for the Navy! The Army had by 1915 switched to the SMLE, lacking the protruding barrel obvious above. The SMLE (Short, Magazine Lee-Enfield) was known as the Mk.1, hence the Mk1* above, to differentiate it from an actual Mk.1! The Mk.1* would still be in use with the New Zealand Mounted Rifles in WWII!

This is very similar to the SLR bayonet I trained with/carried in the 1980-90's, even down to the mounting-catch design, but the blade is longer; the SLR was 8-inches, not 12. This is not the long 17-inch 'sword' bayonet of infantry charges across no-man's-land, nor the 'Desert Rats' of the 8th army in those iconic press-shots (and Airfix artwork) of World War II either, but rather the P1888 Bayonet carried over from the Lee-Metford rifle.

The Webley Scott .45" automatic pistol, far more useful than the revolvers a lot of Infantry Officers were still going 'over the top' with at this time, and would still be doing in another war? But that's the Brit's, always slow to rearm, re-equip or modernise, always fighting the previous war . . . presumably, needing fewer numbers, the Navy were allowed to be daring with the 'new-fangled' weapon! Issues with barrel residue had been solved by the time Granddad got his!

What the figure painters were waiting for, even though they're black and white! I would say the standing firing pose is not pushed forward enough, but he's a big looking chap and can probably take the recoil! The prone figure, not shown clearly, is angled so that the recoil is taken in a line down the right leg.

How the instructions for firing sitting can take precedence over kneeling (the best firing pose of all) is anyone's guess, but they obviously did things differently a century ago! He is shown firing downhill (or from a crow's nest?), which makes sense, sitting to fire level is the worst of all poses!

The final images in this section; there's not many other images in what is a very wordy tome of many pages, but there is some interesting stuff on battalion advances in column, line, echelon etc . . . which I'll get up here another time.

L is for London, HMS London - Gallipoli and the Dardanelles

These all come from an old envelope with an Edwardian stamp and the faded message "Taken aboard HMS London" in pencil, although some of them have clearly been taken ashore at 'Anzac Cove'. My Grandfather, eventually Admiral Hall, was conscripted across from the Merchant Marine (in 1915 - I think?) and served on HMS London, from Wikipedia;

"HMS London was the lead ship of the London class of pre-dreadnought battleships built for the British Royal Navy. The Londons were near repeats of the preceding Formidable-class battleships, but with modified armour protection. The ship was laid down in December 1898, was launched in September 1899, and was completed in June 1902. Commissioned the same month, she served with the Mediterranean Fleet until early 1907. She was assigned to the Nore Division of the Home Fleet for nearly a year before transferring to the Channel Fleet. Rendered obsolete with the emergence of the new dreadnoughts in late 1906, she underwent an extensive refit in 1909, after which she served with the Atlantic Fleet. She was assigned to the Second Home Fleet in 1912 as part of the 5th Battle Squadron, and was temporarily fitted with a makeshift ramp for experiments with naval aircraft until 1913.

Following the outbreak of World War I, the squadron was attached to the Channel Fleet before London was detached in March 1915 to participate in the Dardanelles Campaign, supporting ANZAC forces as they landed at Gaba Tepe and Anzac Cove on 25 April 1915. She remained in the Mediterranean, supporting the Italian Royal Navy in the Adriatic Sea until October 1916. Returning to the United Kingdom, she was inactive until being converted to a minelayer in early 1918, which entailed the removal of her main armament. She served with the Grand Fleet's 1st Minelaying Squadron until the end of the war. Placed in reserve in 1919, she was eventually broken up for scrap in 1920."

The photographs appear to be 'official' or semi-official enough to assume there will be copies in national archives somewhere (IWM or NMM), and apart from the developers stamp and a penciled number (suggesting they are from a larger set) there is nothing else to date or place them, so I can only post them here with minimal blurb and the requested acknowledgement to Alfieri!

Convoying

Seems to be a ship's service with the ship's company to the left, a god-botherer and some officers in the middle and soldiers (presumably ANZAC's) to the right. I don't think this is on London - too many turrets?

Some soldiers getting a bit of sun on deck - note the shadows.

Bombardment in support of the landings?

Landing Fleet

On Board Ship

Summer dress.

Winter dress.

My brief research seems to say London only lost seven crew in the whole war, each death having a different date, so likely to be accidental or medical/natural causes rather than a major action; she had a 'quiet' war, however, there is a second series of Dardanelles shots, which I packed, sealed and took to storage before remembering I wanted to scan them as well (so we'll have them in a year or two now!), among which was a shot which appears to show one of the main six-inch guns blown-up (overheating, cooked-off round, lucky Turkish shot?), which - in doing so - appears to have damaged the pom-pom/12-pounder (?) in the center of the anchor-chain capstan (?) to the left here; that is not their normal configuration!

So; it may be that what we see here is someone getting an award for actions undertaken in that incident? Equally it could be something as boring as a pay-parade, they seem to be receiving something in their hats, and there's a queue behind the guy in the center.

ANZAC Positions

Remarkably similar to the scenes at the end of 'Gallipoli' the movie as Mel Gibson's 'Franc' is running through the line to try and get the message through.

One of those Light Horsemen?

A limber, a stack of bicycles (?) and landing barges in the background.

Relaxing on an unloading pontoon.

Look at the pile of stores at the foot of the scarp.

The previous shot must have been taken from the far pontoon, looking across the nearer pontoon toward where the photographer is standing in this picture, the stores now to the left.

A landing barge up against a pontoon

Eventually I will hand all this archival material to a museum, but this is only a fraction of what I've found, and while most of it is going to storage without being scanned, I will get it all up here over the next few years, god willing! There is a fascinating sequence taken off Murmansk/Archangel, obviously of the 1919 Anglo-American invasion of Russia (one of the last boxes we had to tick! There's only about 15 nations on the planet we haven't at least shot-at now!), which shows shell-damage (presumably from 'Red' shore-batteries), one hole being inspected by a member of the Queen Alexandra's Royal Naval Nursing Service, who was on-board ship! While the bulk of it is later inter-war or RIN/IN stuff.

JTSH is for John Talbot Savignac Hall, Rear Admiral!

Yes - they did naming differently in the Victorian era, I'm plain Hugh David! It's the eleventh of the eleventh today so a bit of a quiet reflection, we looked at his 'Pom-Pom' yesterday and I thought I'd pay what little tribute to him I feel able to.

Looking good in his Tropical or Summer Dress 'whites', there is a slightly sterner picture of him on the Indian Navy website; he's also on Wikipedia, taken when he was older, the above shot is of him when he was a Commander.

JTS - as he was known - was my Grandfather on my mother's side and he rose to become the first Naval Chief of the Indian Navy after Independence - serving in the post for one year, from the 15th Aug 1947 to the 14th Aug 1948, during which time he reorganised the newly independent Indian Navy and - along with Lord Mountbatten, Commodore Nott and Commander AK Chatterji (who would himself go on to command the Indian Navy) among others - prepared a ten-year plan for the development of the new Navy.

The plan was thrown into chaos a year later when a tropical typhoon damaged most of the fleet.

His last ship - isn't she beautiful? At various times - I believe - known as HMS, HMNZS and HMINS Achilles and latterly as HMINS and INS Delhi (I'm not sure about the first prefix of those last two?) she was a Light Cruiser.

The open bridge is a surprise on a ship of that size and date, but there had been a war on and sailors were weathered, rugged sorts back then, they probably enjoyed the fresh air and excellent view!

She is flying the Indian flag, so this must be a 'Delhi' shot, as there is a full ships-company parade going-on and the ship is flying the ensign of a Rear Admiral, it may well have been taken on her name-change day, or even Independence Day?

And - the above image doesn't appear in a Google image-search result's page, so new to the internet?

Airfix made a kit of her sister ship Ajax, which I was given - for obvious reasons - too young to do it justice and I made a predictable hash of it, although I still have the turrets in a spares bag somewhere!

His role as a rather symbolic bridge between the colonial and independent administrations left both governments slightly embarrassed by my Grandfather and he never got the knighthood he probably should have, retiring to farm apples in Kent and run the local Civil Defence, he died before I was born, so I never knew him.

I wish I could ask him about it all now, Gallipoli, the South China seas and Indian Ocean, pirates, pom-poms . . . Achilles! My Granddad drove HMS Achilles . . . get in!

Sorry granddad . . . rest in peace.

P is for Project to Perfectly-Polish Pusser's Pom-Pom

I have nothing in the queue after this, it's not that I haven't got tons in Picasa, not that I haven't got lots lying around and loads of stuff was emailed to me in the last fortnight, it's just that I've been a bit lackadaisical or tardy in processing anything!

I'm sure I'll sort something out today (in the real world) for publishing tomorrow in Blog-world (it's still Monday in the real world!) there's those Moose moshling-things somewhere, but I'm not sure I've got Internet tomorrow either, so when Thursday's will publish - time wise - is anyone's guess, in the meantime I've been working on this for a while and it's satisfying to 'put it to bed'.

There are several stories here; what it is, where it came from and how I cleaned it up!

The story my mother tells is that it was presented to my Grandfather sometime in or just after WWII, by one of his ships' company's, and has always been referred to as 'the Pom-Pom gun', it was supposedly made in the on-board engineering workshop, probably on commission from the junior officers.

Now I'm sure all the bits of the story are reasonably accurate, but as a whole I have problems with it, and I'm sure those of you with equally far-fetched or legendary family myths and tales will forgive the cynicism of the grand-kid, questioning the previous two generations; it is in any event an interesting thing, and my cynicism will be seen as more justifiable as we move down the post.

Now, Mum won't mind me pointing out that she's not as young as she used to be, and the 'Pom-Pom' had become a bit lost and forgotten among the acquired chattels of 80-years on this Earth, I decided to sort it out, but in secret, which involved smuggling it away, doing a 'phase' and smuggling it back, only to repeat the exercise the next time the opportunity presented itself!

Some of the shots in the above pair of collages were taken about a year ago, but the shoot as a whole wasn't a success, so I took some more a while later and mixed them together. We'll look at the cleaning first, and then study the object and look again at its mythology.

1st phase was to just give it a clean, get the real crud and surface build-up off it, which I did with those sealed-packet, treated cleaning cloths, having previously noticed how they will polish-up slightly tarnished silver; I was hoping the result would be better than it was.

Having said that, had I polished harder, for longer, I'm sure it would have removed more, but sometimes it's easier to give up on a bad job and get the big-guns out!

I turned to silver-dip, silver-polishing wad and that old favorite and garage-door saver - Jenolite. Like Clear floor-cleaner, Jenolite was illegal in the army, but we all had some - of both!

Actually that's not quite true, a lot of blokes would persevere with elbow-grease, especially if only a rifleman, but with a GPMG; I was a fan of Jenolite for getting the carbon off the gas parts, when I was carrying an SLR I cheated by having a spare gas-plug and return rod in the lining of my Bergen, which would be snuck out at End-Ex, so I could hand my gatt in quick and bugger-off, cleaning it's actual gas parts later in my room and slipping them back in next time I signed the weapon out!

As to Clear - having mentioned it - we used to use it to put a quick shine on bulled-boots, however if it then rained on the parade (not a euphemism - real water from the sky), all those who had used Clear would get found out as their boots took-on the inky petrol blue-purple sheen of ground-beetles!

Some close-ups, pre deep-clean; the steel, being a decent engineer's grade steel, cut from blocks, hadn't rusted too badly, but there was a surface crust and two slightly poor bits, while the elevating mechanism had collected a thinker layer of crud due to its being oiled in the past and collecting household dust on the quite for years.

The whole had also suffered from a few years sited next to the gas cooker, where its guard duties included a fine layer of cooking oils. Indeed - it wasn't easy to work out what was rust and what was cooking-polymer 'glue'!

Phase 3 Polishing (phase 2 was the silver dip, which I didn't photograph)  - once the silver-polishing wad comes out it all starts to get a bit messy, this is the deck-mounting plate, which was soldered to the base of the plinth, but from which it has become parted at some point in the last 35 years?

Still - that much mess and you know it's doing the trick!

Shrapnel-shield fully polished, both its little brass bolts had also been silver-plated on the ends and not only did they clean-up in the dip, but it cleaned the worst of the black oxidation off the threads too; bargain!

Jenolite applied at phase 4 and for a few minutes (about 20) it actually looks worse as it lifts the lumps of rust and oil off, and they all go black or bright orange, with the pinky-mauve of the Jenolite it all starts to look like an odd pudding, maybe an alien pudding, maybe more imagination is required, if you haven't got the imagination, you're probably on some hick-town, ten-member forum telling them I "is......different? Shall we say"! Robot's pudding!

The steel parts were polished (phase 6) after a wash with shampoo and a toothbrush - phase 5.

Polishing was done with fine steel wool wound round ear-bud/Q-Tips, and is an equally messy job and the very fine steel wool tends to disintegrate to powder as you go, but a powder than can work into your fingers, like swarf if you're not careful, because it is swarf.

Three-quarter views, the heat-signal on the barrel in the right-hand shot is just the flash reflecting off the shield, the whole gun came-up a nice gun-metal, steel-grey.

So - back to the family story; The British had two Pom-Pom's the 2lbr which looks like a naval gun and definitely isn't this, and the 1lbr Vickers-Maxim, which to be fair doesn't look much like this either! The Americans used the Maxim-Nordenfeldt (see below), which looks nothing like this (but quite like the Vickers-Maxim's) but did have a similar mounting.

In point of fact, this looks exactly like a bog-standard Vickers .303 heavy machine-gun, as used by the Army from WWI until the 1950's/into the 1960's. The twin-handles, thumb-button trigger, cocking leaver, all tie-in, however there was also the less known Vickers .5-inch, sometimes known as (and used as-) a Pom-Pom, which is a scale-up - visually - although in Naval service usually fitted with long flash eliminator - but that weapon was an inter-war model, which could be significant to this model's story.

However, the pedestal and shield are similar to those used on some Pom-Pom mountings. So, what we seem to have here is more of a field-modification utilising an MG, rather than an actual Pom-Pom per-se.

Gunner (not seaman) Smith on the USS Vixen with his

Maxim-Nordenfelt QF 1-pounder Pom-Pom MG - 1898

[image via Wikimedia Commons]

Yet there are a couple of question-marks over this, one being the shoulder-rest, which is the sort of thing you do find fitted to fixed-mount 1lbr Pom-Poms as seen above, these weapons were all scaled-up, big beasts and you needed to get your shoulder 'behind it' to move it.

The other being the position of the shelf for the ammunition, which on Gunner Smith's is low and to the right, below the [beautifully polished] brass feed-gates and wooden roller, while on the model it's at the back of the pedestal, near the top but under the gun; not practical at all.

So the first possibility is that Granddad's model is meant to represent the 1lbr Vickers-Maxim Pom-Pom, but that the modeller used a handy .303 or .5" to model from? This is not terribly likely, as servicemen tend to 'know their stuff'.

Although you could then suggest that a civilian metal-smith in India may have made that mistake, but, by the time Granddad was head of the Indian Navy, these mounts were long-gone and forgotten; in all their guises, replaced by quad .5", twin and octoplett 1lbr Pom-Poms and 20mm Oerlikons, so that's almost less likely than the previous explanation.

Re. the USS Vixen shot, note the raked-profile of a three mast clipper (or schooner?) on the horizon, and the bloody great Dreadnaught or pocket-battle-cruiser type (I've said it before - I don't know my ships!) just in shot to the right, also; is that tin can bottom right the ammo-box? The wooden box seems to contain a very small steam-engine!!

The relevant links are here;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QF_1-pounder_pom-pom

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QF_2_pounder_naval_gun

http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WNUS_1pounder_m1.php

http://www.victorianshipmodels.com/autoMG/
http://www.quarryhs.co.uk/Vickers.html

But, you see; Granddad was seconded from the Merchant Navy into the Royal Navy in WWI where he served off-shore at the Dardanelles (Gallipoli) as a nineteen/twenty-year-old, transferring into the Indian Navy later; in 1929.

I suspect this is a model of a local modification, fitted to the various landing and stores barges, hospital ships, troopers and fleet-protection vessels in use in that theatre? There was no dedicated amphibious force then, no specialist vessels; it was all done on a wing and a prayer, with both naval and merchant ships using their attendant boats and tenders as ad-hoc 'landing craft'.

I don't know much about the nascent Turkish (or 'Ottoman') Air Force either, but I'm sure there were also experienced German aircraft/pilots in the area too (if only - training Turks), and AA cover would have been required by the fleet of ships serving the disastrous misadventure of young Mr. Churchill?

I know a bit more now! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Aviation_Squadrons

A .303 Vickers machine-gun would have had a number 2, feeding the twisty canvas belt, leaving the shelf - as modelled - for the water-can used to cool the army version of this weapon? Which would leave the shoulder-piece probably just missing a piece of leather or wood, modelling the original padding at shoulder height?

That Granddad may have served-on, with a/his original merchant vessel equipped with such a deck-gun, before being elevated to warships, would therefore make sense of this model and that while it probably was made in local workshops and presented to him by his comrades for some reason (usually upon leaving, but it's too nice a piece, not the usual plaque, ashtray, desk-lighter, tankard or whatever, so maybe he did something noteworthy, at least in the eyes of his fellow crew?), it was in - or just after - the First World War, not as Mum (who was still very young) thinks - the Second World War?

It's all conjecture, no answers here, but with Wikipedia and the Vickers sites not helping, or only helping to reinforce the question marks I had over it, I think it's a more reasonable scenario.

Equally, it could be that the Indian navy had such local modification later, being less well funded than the parent Navy? I can't find any evidence of that though, they got modern ships like Achilles - with Granddad at the helm!

Therefore; all I need to complete it, is a piece of heavy string, finely-sewn into a piece of chamois and stained-down (with boot-polish), glued to the shoulder piece as padding, which would make more sense for a 'mere' .303 Vickers, than the heavy vertical plate Gunner Smith is snuggled-up-to above?

Hopefully I might inherit it one day, but I might have to fight my brother for it as we both used to get it of the mantlepiec and play with it as kids - Action Man looked 'well sorted' - sat behind it!