Many Tanks
We'd planned to get to Portsmouth early in the day to give us most of two days to explore the town and its historic shipyard. Several hundred tanks got in the way. We thought we would stop for an hour or so at the Tank Museum in Bovington. The 'or so' turned into four hours, with some exhibits only glanced at when we felt obliged to move on. The museum has hundreds of tanks from the very earliest (the Brits invented these "landships") to those most recently take out of service. The history and collection is comprehensive and interesting, both to Frances, a neophyte on the subject, and to me, with my vast minutes of experience with armored vehicles from, oh, fifty years ago.
I must have taken thirty pictures of tanks, arbitrarily chosen. The collection of Britsh tanks is exhaustively complete, but the German, French, Russian and American collections are also quite comprehensive. The lower right picture is a WW I armored vehicle built on a Rolls Royce chassis. I knew this once, but had forgotten. Tank research started within the Royal Navy branch with the active support of Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty. He was canned after the Gallipoli failure and was hardly heard from again. Oh, wait, there was WW II, wasn't there.
We'll Be Back in Portsmouth in Ten Years
We did get to Portsmouth in time to do some looking around, but reserved the main event for our full day in town. This was a visit to the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, with its HMS Victory, the Mary Rose Museum (Henry VIII's flagship, recovered from the sea after four centuries), several other restored ships, and multiple museums. We exhausted ourselves getting to as many attractions in the day as we could. The tickets are good for a year, so if anyone named Dallen finds themselves in the area, we've got some passes for you. Reconditioning of the HMS Victory is ongoing, with the upper masts to be reinstalled sometime in the next decade. Reconditioning of the Mary Rose is a complex process with water being replaced with polyethylene glycol in every cell of the wood. (The recovered timbers were kept wet for twenty years after being lifted from the seabed, until the replacement and drying process was started.) The museums varied in their ability to hold our interest, but the other ships we boarded and toured (the iron clad HMS Warrior 1860 and a WW I Gallapoli campaign veteran, HMS M.33) kept us late, too late to take the planned harbor (er, harbour) cruise.
Scenes in Portsmouth. Top: Spinnaker Tower and the Royal Garrison Church. We watched a woman rappel down the tower. The church was left unrepaired after WWII bombing damage. Bottom: One of many tributes and memorials to Horatio Nelson, and the harbor outside our B&B. We may have dropped George Washington from our textbooks, Abraham Lincoln from our holidays, and Alexander Hamilton from our ten dollar bill to conform to modern sensibilities, but the British do not forget their heroes.
Top: HMS Victory, technically still a commissioned ship of the Royal Navy, and the HMS Warrior, revolutionary for its time and the king of the seas for about ten years--until it, too, was rendered obsolete by fast moving marine technology. Bottom: A recovered cannon from the Mary Rose and a shot of some of the timbers of that ship now undergoing preservation. Middle right? I found it, Brian: the Mudlarks statue.
It is a short haul to Winchester, our next stop, where we will be staying in the shadow of the cathedral for a night. There may be another Evensong in store. Then again, just maybe we'll squeeze in that Portsmouth Habour cruise before we go.