Stenigot radar transmitter tower more than makes the grade

SUBSTANTIAL relics, reminders of the 1939-45 War, are to be found in profusion particularly along our coastline and on the sites of airfields. Many were built to last and all, pillboxes and gunsights especially, have done so.

So it was specially heartening this week to be told that the Chain Home radar transmitter tower at what was RAF Stenigot near Donington on Bain, a structure 360ft tall and already listed Grade Two, has been upgraded to Grade 2 Star. This exemplifies the renewed interest in these reminders of the war, a matter with which I have long been concerned.

There is at Cleethorpes a unique relic of the 1914-18 War, a Zeppelin shelter, the only one in Britain. It is listed. And so should be its successors.

Even more interesting in the new tally of listings is a school’s air raid shelter in Redhill, Surrey. During air raids the schoolboys’ art master, a Mr Allen, asked the children to enliven its concrete walls with murals and so distract them from the bombing. Thus appeared scenes from Robin Hood and Treasure Island. And the paintings are still there and now protected.

I wonder if such care is taken in Germany, for I am reminded of a classic deserving cause.

Early in 1957 I was posted to my regiment, the 12th Royal Lancers then stationed outside Wolfenbuttel just a mile or two from the East German frontier.

Our barracks, former home of a Panzer regiment, were superb, untouched by the War, intact and very smart. As the 12th Lancers were certainly the smartest regiment you ever saw they were entirely appropriate.

One long internal wall was astounding. It was painted on its entire length with a scene from a panoply of the German army, infantry, the guns, cavalry and so on

– a monumental mural. But there was no picture of Hitler.

Now, and you may not appreciate this, the German Army was not entirely Nazified. And the second Panzer regiment was descended from the oldest Prussian cavalry regiment similar to our Lifeguards. So many of its officers were noblemen they were addressed not by their rank but by their titles. Hitler and the Nazis were never spoken of in the Mess.

You can follow my train of thought. Was the barracks once theirs? I hoped so.

And the point of this is that revisionism is foolish. What has been has been.

To have whitewashed that mural would be so wrong. I hope it still exists like the air raid shelter in Redhill.