news of some WW2 monuments and museums in and around Essex

Today (9th April), an item was broadcast on the BBC television news channel and posted online about a surviving section of the ‘Whale’ roadways which were used during the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944, during WW2. The Whale roadways linked the two famous floating Mulberry harbours to the beaches and enabled the transfer of masses of troops and supplies from ships to land. The section is 24 metres long and it weighs 27 tonnes: it has been restored and donated to IWM (Imperial War Museum) Duxford in Cambridgeshire, where it is now on display. The £3 million upgrade of the American Air Museum at IWM Duxford was announced on the 16th March, and the IWM Tweeted a message about that, also today – Discover the story of two nations united by war, love, loss & duty at the #AmericanAirMuseum, newly reopened! http://bit.ly/1PK4ci8 . IWM Duxford is a former WW1 and WW2 airbase. There are WW2 sites, monuments and museums all over Britain, including East Anglia. The visitor centres are all getting ready for the summer season and, recently, their news has been pouring out!

The Bawdsey Radar Trust also Tweeted a message today and the Trust retweeted it – this Tweet is about the video which the Bawdsey Radar Trust posted on the 25th March on YouTube titled ‘Bawdsey Radar spring clean’. Bawdsey in Suffolk was a coastal military radar station during WW2. Also on the 25th March, the BBC published a news item online about the Naze Tower at Walton-on-the-Naze in Essex: ‘Naze Tower re-opens after £250,000 facelift on Essex coast’ (at www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-35893857 ; the Naze Tower was used by the RAF during WW2). On the 30th March, an item was published online titled ‘£10,000 project will help to make historic Harwich fort more accessible to visitors’ (at www.gazette-news.co.uk/news/14392683. 10,000 project will help to make historic Harwich fort more accessible ): this is about the remains of the WW2 coastal military radar station at Harwich in Essex. Other WW2 museums and monuments in Essex include Boxted Airfield Museum near Colchester, the Martello Tower at Walton-on-the-Naze (which was re-used in WW2), North Weald Airfield, the Waltham Abbey Royal Gunpowder Mills, and the Purfleet Heritage and Military Centre. (Completely coincidentally, on Wednesday, the Trust bought a box of WW2 The Illustrated War magazines – from one of our Trust volunteers!) Our news is that we planning to install a small display on the NAAFI in a corner of the Roman circus centre.

IWM Duxford includes a Grade 2 listed NAAFI institute and dining room of the former RAF Duxford. The Trust’s offices and the Colchester Roman circus centre and – most appropriately – our cafe are all housed in the former NAAFI institute of the Artillery (Le Cateau) Barracks of the old Colchester garrison. Our NAAFI was built in 1937 in the build-up to WW2 and it was in use throughout and after the war. (The front of the Duxford NAAFI looks slightly similar to ours.) Many of our circus centre visitors are interested in the NAAFI and the old garrison or even have personal memories of the garrison. Our former NAAFI is the only surviving building of the old garrison with visitor access.

You can walk round much of the old Colchester garrison – the central Abbey Field and the main road layout survive, as well as a number of garrison buildings, which have now been converted to residential use. Most of the old garrison has been redeveloped with housing, including the Artillery Barracks. There is not much surviving evidence of WW2 in the old garrison, only some of the buildings, including our NAAFI and the adjacent dining hall, the almost-identical NAAFI nearby at the former Cavalry Barracks, three air-raid shelters, and a pill-box on the Mersea Road. Do you know of any other evidence of WW2 at the old garrison? – we would be very interested to identify more! The Trust has collected some WW2 evidence from the old garrison: we have recorded a number of air-raid shelters and excavated artefacts including a Home Guard ‘Molotov cocktail’, a large number of Sten gun parts, a Brodie ‘tin helmet’ and, from our own garden, fragments of cups stamped with the NAAFI logo.

Visit the IWM Duxford web-site at www.iwm.org.uk/visits/iwm-duxford and read the BBC news item about the section of the Whales online at www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-35995178 . Follow the Imperial War Museums on Twitter at @I_W_M . Follow the Bawdsey Radar Trust on Twitter at @bawdseyradar and visit their web-site at www.bawdseyradar.org.uk/ . The web-site of the Naze Tower is at www.nazetower.co.uk/ . The remains of the Harwich radar station belong to the Harwich Society: their web-site is at www.harwich-society.co.uk/ .

The images show our former NAAFI (built 1937) – now the Roman circus centre and Trust offices – and the former NAAFI of the Cavalry Barracks. The third image shows the former NAAFI of RAF Duxford (built 1933): the photo. is titled ‘Duxford old NAAFI building’ and it is copyright Ron Gooding 2004 (Ron Gooding) / CC BY-SA 2.0 – the image is published online at www.geograph.org.uk/photo/92668 and it is posted here under a Creative Commons Licence. [Image to follow.]

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