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THE REOCKATIES

Wilfred Ellis, ex BSM (AIG) Royal Artillery

Humour has been in evidence in the services since well before Bruce Bairnsfather began drawing his cartoons in WW1 and sundry people put together the 'Somme Times' and the 'Wipers Times' and printed them on battered old presses for the troops in the trenches.
With this in mind I make no apologies for the fact that my contributions, such as they are, relate in the main to the humorous side of service life.

It was 1942 and the Coast Artillery School had been removed from South East England and relocated in Llandudno, where we would disport ourselves by firing practically every variety of land service ordnance at seaward targets, and in the evenings would watch the shows broadcast by the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Variety Department from a local theatre, they too having been relocated to Wales for the duration of hostilities.

I was training to be a gunnery instructor and one day a grizzled old warrant officer senior instructor had to instruct a group of junior officers on observations of fall of shot. He asked me to accompany him to his lecture room and then said ‘Just watch this’.

He marched into the room, resplendent in the school’s uniform of blue jacket and white trousers, and spoke for some time about ranging salvoes and other matters, illustrating his talk with chalk diagrams.

In conclusion he drew a splash on the near side of a ship and a splash on the far side of the ship and reminded them of the fact that they could have a false impression of fall of shot caused by the shell skimming off the surface of the water.

He then fixed them with a basilisk stare and in his rich Norfolk brogue said ‘Ar, you’ve got to watch out for the reockaties!’

The officers looked from one to the other, shuffled their feet, sniggered and muttered asides to each other ‘He means ricochets’.

He turned, looked at me, and gave me a huge wink.

It was the same man who being seconded to the Military College of Science visited me in Dover and expressed a desire to see a local anti-aircraft battery in action against the V1 buzz bombs. The lookout on the guns, seeing that we were interested, gave us a long monologue on exactly how they worked and to his credit my friend, who knew every nut and bolt of the gun, without batting an eyelid thanked the gunner for spending the time with us before we walked away. It was a lesson in noblesse oblige, although knowing his sense of humour he would quite probably have called it nobbles obliges.

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