If at any point during the course of this weekend you decided that you didn’t like the weather, then you only had to wait ten minutes for it to be completely different to the preceding ten minutes. The menu was big wind, heavy rain and fierce sun in variable quantities all of the time. You just can’t beat a British summer can you? Now add the fact that the Muckleborough Collection is right on the north Norfolk coast between Sheringham and Holt and is therefore the first call for anything happening in the North Sea, and you can see that is was a… challenging weekend for campists. Upon his arrival, Rex Hunt was immediately faced with a dilemma of location. The organisers had carefully selected a location for the Club that featured yard-high thistles of the Nasty variety, flint-laden soil, not much view and only one toilet within commuting distance. With an eye to the quality of life, Rex moved the Club pitch some 400 yards up and over the crest of the seaward hill to the wooded edge of the upper field that offered lots of view, acres of fine mown grass, a cornucopia of toilet facilities and a commanding view of everyone coming in. It was also very handy for the cafeteria...

When I arrived, Rex was sitting in his tent on the edge of a huge empty field playing with various aerials and radios; my arrival merely added a speck of red to the vista. Jon and Beth Knight’s arrival was an explosion of vehicles, tents, Toys and people. Within an hour the tented city had been built, the kitchen was operating and the Wilton was being laid in the bedroom. In Cheltenham, someone in GCHQ was at this very moment asking, “What the hell is that thing that’s just appeared on the coast?” – EMLRA was encamped. But if GCHQ were asking that then they were missing the point, for down in the tank ranges and surrounding landscape there were battalions of living history Americans, Russians and Germans digging in. As the evening drew on, and EMLRA had a chip run, sporadic sounds of automatic and rifle fire could be heard as various deactivated or replica weaponry was unpacked and put into place.

Saturday dawned with full sun, blue sea and sky and a pleasant breeze. At this point the Waffen SS seemed to be outnumbering everyone else by quite a margin, which made me wonder how the re-enactments would end. Our comparative modernity and hilltop location kept us out of most of it, but down in the prickly field it must have been getting rather intense. Or even in tents. Only rarely was our stand busy, although there was a steady trickle of people having the Rex Radio Tour. By comparison, a later chat with Mr Buddle of 5 Airborne revealed that they had spent most of their time under siege by hoards of people, most of whom didn’t know the meaning of the words “Don’t Touch”. So perhaps we were getting the better deal. Our elevated location certainly gave us better warning of incoming weather, it being both increasingly frequent and unfriendly as the day went on. Not that this dampened the tank battle recreations taking place out on the ranges – the rabbits were having that effect. Overnight they had nibbled the wiring laid out to control all the carefully placed explosions and maroons for the setpiece manoeuvres. The core event was repeatedly delayed before eventually being abandoned for the day. Not having a view of the fun, we were having to make do with the commentary over the PA. It would have been equally as informative to have listened to Radio Peking; plenty of enthusiasm, undoubted knowledge of the subject (tanks, and possibly only tanks), but no idea how to use a microphone or construct a sentence.

By late afternoon the crowds had gone home and the sun came out, so a few of us took up the offer of the chance to play on the ranges. Rex spotted a significant fact; we were not allowed to play until the public went home. The tracks around the ranges looked very impressive from a spectator’s point of view when being used by a Challenger. However, place a much smaller vehicle out there – a Land Rover for example – and it suddenly all looks very tame. The Big Hills and Steep Drops suddenly become mildly interesting bumps, the biggest problem being the corrugations left by the tank tracks causing all sorts of unexpected vibrations within the Rover. The other problem was the dust – there were huge clouds of the stuff hiding behind you that immediately caught you up when you stopped and covered everything with a layer of sandy grey stuff. Then another heavy and prolonged squall came in and immediately turned everything into sandy grey sludge stuff. Time for dinner…

Just a few of Keith's toys on display...

Sunday: Rex reported that the night had been clear enough to see the oil rig flares on the North Sea horizon and the navigational buoys running up towards Hull and the north-eastern ports. This also meant it had become rather chilly. But now the rain was back to warm things up. On the plus side, the rabbits had been unable to sabotage the pyrotechnic wiring, so the tank battles were able to run as planned. The commentator proved himself able to string some sentences together, but the improvement was largely hidden by his habit of leaving the microphone on for most of the time in the wind while chatting to his mate. It also meant we had to listen to every explosion twice—the tinny PA version followed immediately by the full percussion of the real thing. It was an interesting weekend, the edge being taken off only by the weather. Rex had dragged his radio club out into the real world and had been able to demo all sorts of odd things with them, including a radio “helmet cam”, the wearer of said camera enabled hard hat having been driven around the tank course during the previous evening at a suitably exciting speed in a 110 without being sick. The Muckleborough Collection is well worth a visit in any case, and getting in for free makes it even more worthwhile. Now, if the Museum could just deal with their thistle invasion by next year…

Report and photo: Mike Allmey