The Spandau MG 08.
You may wonder why much of what I write about as a kid in Brogborough is a world of Cowboys and Indians, and battles with Germans and Japanese.
We had shields and helmets, bayonets, knives and swords. We had toy guns, airguns, bows and metal-tipped arrows, catapults and ball bearings. Our battles, ambushes and raids, were not video games, they were real rough and tumbles with hand to hand combat. Cuts, bruises, black eyes and ripped clothing were common. Did anyone get killed? They didn’t, there was no malicious intent, but we were fortunate. In the 21st century, we’d be considered feral, a Social Services’ nightmare. But, attitudes were different then, it was accepted that’s what kids did for fun.
In 1960, World War II had only been over fifteen years, it was current history. Most young men in their early thirties had experienced war. Our lives were full of stories, medals, cap badges, uniform flashes, army paraphernalia and military contraband from foreign parts. We also had a local dump where we scavenged discarded MoD army surplus.
We had comics like Commando and War Picture Library. With titles like Unleash Hell, No Surrender, Kill or be Killed, and Cold Steel; we weren’t short of heroes, enemies, spies and traitors. Things weren’t very PC then, we were soldiers, cowboys and knights, tooled up and ready to wreak havoc on our foes.
The Firearms Act of 1937 didn’t help. It raised the minimum age for buying a firearm or airgun from 14 to 17. However, Section 19 paragraph (2) said:
“No person under the age of fourteen years shall accept as a gift or borrow any firearm or ammunition to which Part I of this Act applies, and no person shall give or lend any such firearm or ammunition to any other person whom he knows or has reasonable ground for believing to be under the age of fourteen years”.
So there you have it. If you were over the age of fourteen, you could legally carry a firearm and ammunition provided you borrowed it, or it was given to you by someone over seventeen.
Now you have an idea of what we Brogborough kids got up to in the late fifties early sixties I’ll proceed with my story.
In 1960, I went to the newly built Fulbrook Secondary School in Aspley Guise. With kids up to the age of fifteen to mix with, it was a much tougher environment than Ridgmont school. I failed my Eleven Plus examination, but I must have been reasonably bright because I was put into class 1A. Fulbrook was an egalitarian place, we Brogborough kids mixed in with the children of bank managers, company managing directors and the like. In my first year, Stuart Langridge, the son of singer Cleo Laine, who was married to John Dankworth, the jazz musician, attended the school.
I became friends with Peter Worthington. It was an unlikely friendship, he from an English middle-class family in the village of Woburn Sands and me from an Irish immigrant family living in the Marston Valley Brick Company’s workers’ estate in Brogborough. However, we had a lot of common interest: Roman and post-Roman Anglo Saxon Britain was one, Vikings was another. Often on Saturdays, I would ride to his house on my faithful two-wheeled steed, Babieca, named after El Cid’s warhorse. We would take our swords and shields to Danesborough, the old iron age Viking hill fort in Aspley Woods just across from his house. The fort was long gone, all that was left were the remains of the three defensive ditches that encircled the hill at different levels. Evidence of these ditches was overgrown and difficult to find, you had to have a good imagination to visualise the old structure, but we did. Many a battle was fought on that hill leaving the place awash with Scandinavian Norsemens’ blood. In the evening, after resting and eating the sandwiches Mrs Worthington made for us, we would wander home. Sometimes Peter would come to Brogborough, and we’d explore the worked out clay pits or spend time rummaging in the municipal dump at the bottom of Brogborough hill.
We were both interested in science. Many an hour, when we weren’t reading Mad magazine, was spent with our heads in Knowledge magazines looking for something to build. We decided on liquid propellant rockets. Peter’s interest was chemistry, and we set about making the fuel and creating a venturi nozzle for a combustion chamber. This involved wrapping a wax former with copper wire, putting the assembly into a bowl of copper sulphate solution and connecting it to a car battery. This coated the whole thing by copper deposition electrolysis. After weeks of innovative evolutions, we took our device to a nearby field for launching. The idea was to pressurise the fuel tank then, from a distance, ignite the engine by detonating an open pan of gunpowder beneath the venturi with a battery-operated primer. Understandably, our ballistic missile developments and hard work generally ended in balls of flame.
Our most outlandish interest was collecting old military hardware. Between us, we had an assortment consisting of: one WWI eighteen-inch and one short modern bayonet, various swords, one 2 inch and one 3 inch diameter mortar shell, a Bakelite hand grenade, different types of anti-tank bullets and small arms ammunition, a Very pistol and an 18 ponder artillery shell.
When our form teacher asked the class to give a talk on our various interests, Peter and I brought in our collection. To her dismay, we explained the purpose of the blood groove running the length of swords and bayonets. We described the mechanisms, fusing and detonation of the explosives in the shells that we had learned from Peter’s Encyclopaedia Britannica. All this was in stark contrast to needlework, stamp collecting, fishing, music and other more genteel subjects that were presented by the class.
We acquired a reputation as collectors. One day in the playground, we were approached by a boy called Paul Jay, who said he had a machine gun he wanted to sell for ten shillings. That was a lot of money in those days. I didn’t have that sort of cash, but Pete just had his birthday, and he was loaded. We arranged to go to Paul’s house on a Saturday to check out the hardware.
The place was on Aspley Heath, a super posh area. A substantial detached house with a double garage in a secluded setting in the woods, Paul’s dad certainly wasn’t a heavy fitter in a brick-works.
The gun was pristine with oiled metal and a polished wooden stock. It was similar to a British Sten but German engineered. Paul said it was a 9mm Steyr Solothurn MP34 sub-machine gun. We asked if he had any ammunition for it, but he said he didn’t, which was probably just as well. However, he did have some 32 calibre automatic pistol ammunition. You couldn’t feed it from the magazine. Still, if you wrapped some insulating tape around the cartridges and put them into the chamber one at a time, you could, ‘probably’, fire it single shot. Peter said he wasn’t impressed and didn’t want it. That may have been a middle-class bargaining technique, I noticed they did that sort of thing.
Paul said he had something else we might be interested in and took us into the garage. He pulled back a tarpaulin to reveal a Spandau MG 08 heavy machine gun. Not the WWII Spandau that looked like a length of metal pipe, but the larger water-cooled, tripod-mounted version that was similar to the British Vickers. There was no ammunition for it, but it was so impressive we bought it anyway. Wrapped in a hessian potato sack with me at the front carrying the barrel and Pete behind at the trigger end. We struggled back from the Heath down Church Road past the Old Oak pub, the clock tower in the square by the Swan Hotel and then down the street back to Bow Brickhill Road. I don’t know what Mrs Worthington made of it all as we entered the house exhausted with the machine gun, but she was a lovely, patient woman and she made us lunch.
In retrospect, a 7.65mm Spandau machine gun with a rate of fire of 500 rounds a minute probably wasn’t covered by Part 1 of the Firearms Act of 1937.