Stories of the rifle range passed down over years
AS the glorious weather continues, I felt sure that Crowden Great Brook was sure to be packed last Sunday morning. But what joy, two families and a couple of dog walkers was all, leaving this beautiful wilderness as attractive as in the days when the area was basically the Bleak House back garden, complete with whinchats, stonechats, a lone peregrine and an abundance of swallows feasting on the noon-day host. I wanted to show my friend Joanie the site of the old rifle range which was used continually from before the First World War until relatively recently, and relate some of the stories passed down over the years.
The butts were made from railway sleepers and positioned strategically in terraced rows above the Rifle Range building and billets, now the Youth Hostel and Outdoor Pursuit Centre. These butts allowed the soldiers to lie down and fire over the Crowden Great Brook at a range of traditional targets of the circular red, white and blue variety, and also, I have been told, targets with the outline of a man. Local legend also has it that, during the Second World War, some wag, trying to inject a little humour into the situation, substituted the regular targets with pictures of Adolf Hitler, much to the amusement of the regulars but, landing him an hour or two in jankers for interfering with the King’s property.
The term jankers appears to be first recorded after the Boer War, 1899-1902, and for certain before the Great War, 1914, and may have originated from a much earlier reference to ‘janglers’, soldiers in chains carrying out laborious and repetitive tasks, such as peeling potatoes, or cleaning floors. If I was a betting man my money would be on the term ‘Janker Wallah’ as the original source of the expression, a Hindu term that refers to a fellow who does menial labour.
Some of the officers were not above bending the rules themselves though, ‘do as I say not as I do’ type of thing, and I found the evidence as I uncovered in 1981, and continue to find in 2018, bullets from hand guns. I believe the officers could not resist having a pop themselves, whereas in real-life action these weapons were only meant for short-range use.
There are also a couple of random inch-thick sheets of metal with holes punched in them which must have come from something a little bit more substantial than a Royal Enfield. And random stones like those pictured here were shot at just for the fun of it. The brokenup shale scree received most of the fire opposite the butts, and it is here that the business end of the bullets keep showing up as the rain gently washes away the years to reveal more.
My prize possessions are the bullets which hit this soft ground and stayed intact, as most of the finds are smashed to smithereens.
One ex-army guy I met in early 1981 painted a particular vivid picture of how, when the officers were not looking some of the men would try their hand at shooting white hares and red grouse from half-a-mile away, and if successful, a veritable ticker-tape of feathers filled the Valley, before alighting on the Great Brook, and drifting off as a large raft of down towards the weir and Woodhead Reservoir beyond.
He described the resultant flurry of feathers as, “It wer’ like an explosion in a mattress factory tha knows!”
He pointed me in the right direction, and although the bullets were mostly mangled where they had hit a piece of stone, which immediately made me think what would happen to a person if one of these hit a rib or a thigh bone, there were some pristine examples where the bullet had obviously hit soft ground, and then many years later had come to the surface again, a little bit of history in everyone one of them.
I returned home to Bleak House that day with a collection of bullets filling both pockets, and I still have many of them but, after the first few visits, I became more discerning and only kept the finest examples, and typically these were about an inch long and had to be unmarked.
Best of all although smaller, were the bullets fired from the officer’s pistols.
The model used at Crowden was a Webley Mk IV revolver, produced by Webley and Scott in Birmingham, the standard issue British pistol, with some 300,000 produced during wartime.
The Mk IV model, which debuted at the close of the nineteenth century, was a 11.6mm calibre weapon and proved immensely reliable in wartime conditions even among the muddy trenches of Flanders Fields.