Newsletter Number 81
September 2003
Welcome
yet again to Hopton's newsletter.
It
has certainly been an interesting few weeks since the last issue.....
Colchester
was an experience not to be forgotten in a hurry: Scorching temperatures [I'm
sure the account of Cromwell's expedition to Jamaica should have been
investigated before we went to this event], the Great Disappearing Beer Tent
Mystery and more meetings [for some] than a TUC conference! A definite
improvement on Hounslow, though.
Lytchett
Minster: NO MUD! and a promise from Transco to dig us another sconce next
time... did I say 'next'? A great big "Thank You" to everybody who
helped make this event a great success.
Corfe
Castle:Yet again the National Trust were pleased with our performance... it was
a great relief not to have to try and march up and down the hill, and I think
there weren't too many mistakes in 'Mars'. Don't forget - let the officer cock
it up on his own: he can do that without any help!!!
Our
more adventurous souls will have visited Sheffield before you read this [I'll be
sitting on a beach in Corfu!], and forthcoming is the trip to Old Bolingbroke in
October. I know it's an unusual time of year to hold a muster, but the castle is
well worth a visit in it's own right if you are interested in Civil War sites,
and it is a major muster with no other re-enactment groups. Please try to
support this event to round off the year.... it will be George's last muster in
charge!
Negotiations
are underway to secure the pre-Whitehall evening again [last Saturday in
January], and this time it will be a true Oxford Company gathering.
I look forward to seeing you all at Bolingbroke.
Yours
in Loyalty
Martin.
Editorial
That was the season that was! And we still have another
muster to come! The last newsletter contained all there was to remember about
one muster, this one should contain the reminiscences of about seven musters,
should, but wont, owing to the fact that it would take up far to much precious
time, that would go to waste as it would seem that precious few of you actually
read this load of garb anyhow!
But though majorless (unless you call Colchester a major) a
superb season, the weather was good through out, the musters entertaining, the
new recruits have proved very thirsty and our living history (of which more
somewhere else) goes from strength to strength. Not only that but a potential
new recruit is only a blooming landlord!!
Our congratulations and mutual backslapping are due to
Martin and Cathy Phillips, Ken Greaves and the Mizenses (from Lunsfords) for the
effort involved in what was probably (by a short neck from Misterton) the muster
of the year at Lytchett. I, like everybody else thought it was going to be just
another Bank Holiday bash with about 30 a side taking part. What went wrong
then? Why did all those good people turn up and turn it into a mini major. Maybe
the answer lies somewhere between compromise and reality. Compromise inasmuch as
we fought initially at point before reality reared up and we started giving
members the wherewithal to make them join again next season. Although I must say
looking at the membership lists, new recruits and amount of people we have put
on the field this year, I don’t think we are doing too bad, in fact I know we
are doing very well indeed considering the times we live in.
Secondly, thanks to Steve and Nicola for arranging our
habitual playground in September, it was another fantastic muster, the weather
Gods though threatening never came anywhere the castle and we all had a whale of
a time, despite some nasty interjections by a few ex members of the R.A. We also
managed to bag another couple of members at Corfe, lets hope that they manage to
turn up at Bolingbroke in two weeks time.
Pip
Dates
for your diary
10th
– 12th October 2003 – Bolingbroke Castle, Lincs.
Siege,
Living History – Confirmed.
Warning
Order Enclosed
Letters
and Articles
Win
££££££££££s and make a fortune in just ten weeks
Let's
all get rich together. Want to know how? Then read on!
Let
your honest and totally trustworthy officers take away the stress of worrying
about how to get rich quick. We have come up with a scheme which is very nearly
an absolute cert. Somebody, maybe everybody, is almost absolutely nearly
guaranteed'ish to make a return on a small initial investment while at the same
time putting a teeny bit into the 'Let's Keep Concorde Rolling Fund' otherwise
known as the 'Regimental Bank Account'.
How
does this work? Well, all you have to do is read the following, agree that it is
a super whizzo idea, give us a little bit of dosh and then sit back and wait.
To
sum things up, just in case you don't want to bother reading further, you can
join a lottery syndicate and/or a bonus ball competition. Both of these
competitions share the prize money between the regiment and the winners.
Scheme One (Sch.1)
(This
is really just a bonus ball thing)
Each
player (investor), up to a maximum of forty nine (49) pays ten pounds (£10) for
ten weeks (10 wks).
Each
player then chooses one (1) number from one to forty nine (1-49).
The
bonus ball for the Saturday draw of the Lotto competition for each of the ten
weeks (10 wks) will be the winning number for that week and the lucky investor
will receive fifty percent (50%) of that week's investment fund, the rest going
to the 'L.K.C.R.F' (see above). In the event that no investor cleans up, the
'investment dividend' will be carried forward and added to the potential returns
for the next Saturday. In the event that there are no winners over the ten weeks
(10 wk) the next cycle of 'Scheme 1' will start with a
much bigger potential prize in the kitty.
New
investors can only enter at the beginning of a cycle.
Investors
may of course buy more than one bonus ball.
Scheme Two (Sch.2)
(This
is really just a Lottery thing)
Each
player (investor) pays ten pounds (£10) for ten weeks (10 wks).
Each
player chooses three (3) numbers from one to forty nine (1-49). The numbers used
on the playing ticket will be randomly selected from all the numbers provided.
The
game will be played on both the Wednesday and Saturday draws over the ten week
period using the same lines for each draw. The number of lines played will be
fifty percent (50%) of the number of players, e.g. fifty players will share twenty five lines per draw.
Fifty
percent (50%) of all money won will be donated to the regiment the remaining
fifty percent (50%) will be divided equally between the players. The winnings of
the players will be paid out at the end of the ten week (10 wk) period unless
the cumulative winnings for each player exceeds twenty five pounds (£25) in
which case it will be paid immediately.
All records
etc. will be published in the newsletter.
Pete
Breakfast tent calling
I
would just like to say a big THANK YOU to Carole, Lynne, Sue,
Sandra and the two Ann's for all their help in the breakfast tent over the
Lytchett week-end. Without their help it would not have been possible to
feed so many people. I am not quite sure at the moment of the exact profit
we made but I anticipate that it will be in the region of £350/£400.
Once
again, thank you all for your help.
Margaret
……..made
nearly £130:00 as well. Congratulations to your hard and hearty livers, which
should easily see you through another two or three summers!…….Thank you!
…….and
the boozer (part two)
The Corfe weekend had me worried I must admit. I assumed that because of the amount of musters recently, Corfe may see a bit of a dip, and I suppose in a sense it did. Nevertheless you did yourself proud by drinking me out of house and home again and I am truly grateful. So is Ursula who now has a nice set of wendy house wall hangings that we purchased with some of the profits .
Thanks
be to beer
Pip
Knowing
your Enemies (revisited)
Henry
Ireton
The first thing we know about ‘our Henry is that although
he was moderately well off, he married into more money in order to get as
powerful and wealthy as he did. A good idea if you succeed (as he did) but if
you end up with your head on Tower Bridge and your body somewhere else, you must
begin to wonder whether it was all really worth it! The second thing we notice
is that he’s the missing fourth (fifth if your counting properly) Bee Gee
being the identical twin of Barry and without too much doubt the real voice
behind the bands very, very early
hits.
Henry was
born just shy of Nottingham in 1611 and did the sort of things that wealthy land
owning people do when school breaks up, like going to college, Middle Temple and
getting hammered before the money runs out. When the King raised his standard in
1642 Henry legged it all the way down to London to fight alongside the Earl of
Essex but whether he was there when our Lord Ralph chased those particular
rebels all over the west country I don’t know because he was later seen in
action in East Anglia along with the Earl of Manchester, this was to prove his
lucky break, as he met a young spotty faced O. Cromwell here.
These two
got on like a house on fire and Cromwell soon divulged all his dirty little
tactics to his young pretender to such an extent that Ireton was initially
promoted to Commisary General who excelled at Naseby and played a leading role
in the capitulation of Oxford in 1646. This evidently pleased O.C. immensely and
he immediately made plans for his sister Bridget to get hitched to Henry
a.s.a.p.
In 1645 he
decided that he was going to be an MP as well as a soldier and in actual fact he
was rather good at it, emerging as one of the ablest
and most level-headed politician amongst the Army leadership. He drafted most of
the manifestos issued under the name of Lord-General Fairfax in the Army's
struggles with the Presbyterian MPs during the political crisis of 1647 and was
responsible for engineering the expulsion of the eleven members from Parliament.
But it looks like he got bored with all that and it 1648 he trotted off behind
his new mate Fairfax to suppress those rowdies from Kent and Colchester.
In the autumn of 1648, with Cromwell in ‘t north at (the) siege of
Pontefract and with Fairfax a reluctant figurehead anyway, it was our Henry who
demonically set in motion the train of events which led to the trial and
execution of the King. He drafted the Remonstrance of the New Model Army
of 20 November, which demanded that Parliament break off negotiations with the
King. On 30 November, he sent a body of 200 soldiers to escort the King from the
Isle of Wight to Hurst Castle in Hampshire.
Ireton then ordered the Army to occupy London. His intention was to
dissolve Parliament and impose direct military rule, but he was persuaded by
Ludlow and other Independent MPs to purge Parliament of the King's supporters
instead, and Pride’s Purge was duly carried out on 6 December.
Henners as he was becoming known to
those aficionados of Slow Match Special was one of the most enthusiastic
signatories of the Kings Death Warrant being one of the Commissioners of the
High Court of Justice, and he actively supported the trial of the Charlie, which
did him precious few favours later on I can tell you! (Well after he was dead
actually).
In the
summer of 1649, Ireton was promoted to Major General and went as
second-in-command to Cromwell (his first love remember!) on his campaign against
the Royalists and Catholics in Ireland. When Cromwell returned to England in
1650 to undertake his campaign against Charles II and the Scots, Ireton was left
in command of the army in Ireland. He captured Carlow, Waterford and Duncannon
and invaded Connaught.
In the summer of 1651 he
besieged Limerick, which finally surrendered after a four-month siege but poor
old Henry caught (Tydelsley) fever at Limerick, where he died on 26 November
1651, aged just 40.
His body was
returned to England for a state funeral and buried in Westminster Abbey but like
other prominent Regicides his corpse was exhumed after the Restoration and
hanged at Tyburn. His head was exhibited at Westminster for 24 years.
And the moral to
this rather unconvincing tale is………………don’t go round signing willy
nilly on the dotted line before you read the small print!!
Pip
Past Newsletters
The following
gem is reproduced courtesy of the bottom drawer of Lord and Lady Scrabster
a.k.a. Vic and Sheila. It is completely original in as much as nothing has been
edited apart from silly spelling errors. If you find anything in it vaguely
contentious you have to understand that our previous Colonel was want to wander
around with a drunken chicken on his shoulder, and treated the pigs at his farm
as personal pets!
LORD
HOPTONS REGIMENT OF POOTE
ORDER
No 1 IN THE YEAR 1989
Members
of the Regiment, GREETINGS.
This year, it is hoped, to send out a type of Regimental
order from time to time, to aire complaints, compliments and generally keep ye
all informed of the various activities past or about to commence. This has been
in my view (and failure) needed for several years.
OF WHITEHALL.
This
year saw us as quite a small regiment and if it hadn't been for our guests, we
would nearly have been a Companie attached to another Regiment.
Although
I would like to thank those of you who attended the Blue Peter broadcast, it did
distress me to hear that several of you could not then afford the Whitehall
weekend. It would have been far better, and more loyale, to have come to the
parade rather than to appear on TV dressed in another regiments doublets. Please
remember the parade is in memory of our Sovereignes' bloody murder, and is the
most important event of the year, and an event that our friends in the S.K.
would love to have.
However
those loyale members who did attend looked more impressive than ever, with the
new pike beads, (thanks to George), armour
and desert boots, and new standard, (thanks to Mark).
OF SATURDAY EVENING
This
year instead of the normal dinner, George and Margaret Harrison put on a
terrific stew with fruit and cheese etc to follow. Many members were seen to
have two or even three helpings, to prove that it was enjoyed as much, and
perhaps more than a normal dinner. Thank you George and Margaret, what would we
do without you. There was a lack of entertainment however and I think the
regiment must pay for that next year.
OF BEHAVIOUR AND COMPLAINTS THERE OF:
There
have been complaints re the taking of drugs and behaviour within Regimental
events.
While
some of us are perhaps revolted on certain habits within our ranks, we must also
understand that we now live in times when these habits are becoming rife and
even normal. We, unless we wish to loose otherwise good members, must then try
to accept that some of these members may have been 'hooked' unawares by someone
else and are now not able to give up the habit, just as smokers and drinkers. In
fact most of us take one type of drug or another, i.e. tobacco and alcohol.
These are also bad habits for children to pick up.
Please
don't get me wrong, I am not encouraging the use of drugs, but I am trying to
see both sides of the subject.
As
the taking of Hash Coke etc is frowned upon by many of the public, I would ask
that anyone who participates in the habit to do this in the area of their own
tents and not in public or in front of children. Although we must accept this
situation, we will not tolerate the passing of drugs to other members or the use
of them in public places, this will result in the Court Martial of those
responsible.
We
will also not tolerate bad behaviour or the use of foul language in public or in
front of children.
The
date of Hoptons' muster at Lytchett is lst and 2nd July. (Saturday and Sunday),
please come early and help give Martin a hand to get things organised. There's
lots of hard work involved in putting on a muster, so those of you who can take
time off, please help, even I hope to be there the week before and make it a
working holiday.
OF TRANSPORTATION.
This
year, we should have no problems re the transportation of arms and armour.
Thanks to George Harrison and Mick Jordan, who have bought a van for that
purpose. They have given up their weekends to convert it and
get it through the M.0.T. etc. The regiment is deeply in their debt.
Thank you both.
OF THE COMING SEASON.
I
look forward to seeing you all once more Let us all attend as much as we can,
try to recruit new members, and work to make us once more the best regiment in
the Society.
GOD
SAVE HIS MOST GRACIOUS MAJESTIE KING CHARLES 1st.
I
remain, (hopefully) your friend,
Yours
in Loyaltie,
FRED
PALFREY
Col
L.H.R.F.
Pycho…analysing
I
have now recovered from Lytchett Minster and I thought what a great organisation
ECWS is, how lucky I am to be in Hopton’s especially at a time when life is
being a bit shitty!!
I
was really able to let my hair down at Lytchett any more and I would look like
“Slap”. What was that! you had noticed.
Well
a nice little event with 20 a side and one cannon obviously multiplied somewhat
to, was it 350 plus 6 cannon plus cavalry!!
The
living history site was good with a very suspect Korean war hospital tent
pretending to be our new officers tent, more about that latter but it did
provoke a lot of comment especially with bars at the windows, it should have
been double-glazed as well.
The
only downer was some regiments who had quite serious stomach problems, I think I
was sterilised with some of Alice’s strawberry vodka surprise. The surprise
was I was still standing! But I seem to remember being in the beer tent with
some folks saying, “What ever he is on I want some”. Well it did seem funny
at the time but I can’t remember what.
The
ladies are to be congratulated once again on superb breakfasts and the bar-b
–cue on Saturday and Sunday. “Robin- the-Hooded-Man” provided some very
tasty steaks, the first time I’ve tried them absolutely delicious.
We
also got some useful recruits, a landlord well that really can’t be bad. Free
ale at all Hopton’s musters from now on, well perhaps in my dreams.
I
got home hoping I would be at Corfe but it was not to be, well perhaps
Whitehall.
A strange thing happened when I passed a bookshop in Totnes on the Wednesday after Lytchett, there was a book in the window by John Adair called “By the sword divided” eyewitness accounts of the civil war. So I popped in “Are you interested?” said the shopkeeper, was I, so she got out the book and opened it by chance at page87 well knock me down with a half pike. There was mention of Hopton's imprisonment in the Tower of London in March 1642, but what really did it was a rare C17th picture of a general’s tent with musketeer guarding and a cavalry battle in the background. It even had bars in the windows, it was exactly like our new Hopton’s officers tent. So I have to take it all back, our officers are preparing to be appointed to General status. Not the only strange thing to come out of books I have been reading recently. The next bit of info is really frightening, an English Heritage book called “British Battles” has a front picture of Lunsfords muskets. A page titled “The battle of Newburn Ford August 1640 has a picture of Hopton’s pike with Grant looking decidedly knackered. The frightening thing is that in the acknowledgements ranking along side Martin Philips, Jonathan Taylor, Ian & Mary Macdonald Watson is a certain Chris Pullen. He can’t remember anything about this or so he says. He certainly denies being paid the consultation fees for musket drill and “How to cheat at Mars”. Still he is quick no matter how he does it.
Well I will send you the article on Money I promise,
Yours
in Loyalty Psycho
Living
History Hopton’s
Nobody likes
to brag! Well that’s nonsense for a start and I’m going to prove it. Only
I’m not bragging about me or anything that I’ve done but more about you lot
and your contribution to the transformation that has taken place in just about 7
years.
An Officer
(ex now, which gives the game away a bit!) once said that Hopton’s could never
do Living History and in actual fact he did have a point. Once we had only a
couple of soldier’s tents without soldiers and an Officers tent that only went
up if the aforementioned missing soldiers came along. We didn’t cook, drink
(well you know what I mean), drill, make anything, do anything, talk to anyone,
play an instrument or for most of the times, even attend Living
History events.
Making a
transformation into the Living History market wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea
and I guess it still isn’t today, but it’s very gratifying to see hardened
veterans coming along to these events and even expressing enjoyment at them by
getting into the spirit of things.
We are now
at the stage where we can boast two officers tents, a chippy, kitchen, beer hut,
musicians quarters, spinning area, soldiers tents and that huge wendy house that
we’ve just managed to fit out with the latest from Laura Ashley.
We are
coming up with excellent food, probably too good if the truth be known and some
of us (though not me very well) are starting the interaction with the public,
which makes the whole display seem so much more realistic and enjoyable.
I never ever
thought in a million musters that we would be recruiting so easily on the back
of a living history sight, but Lytchett and Corfe and others over the past year
have proved me wrong and hopefully will do so a lot more in the future. So all
in all I/we can stick two fingers up at the prophet(s) of doom that said we
could never do a Living History, never interact with the public and never even
get a decent drill display off the ground! Well done everyone!!
Most of you
I know can’t find the web site. I have my own theories as to why most of you
can’t and a lot of it has to do with the fact that you ain’t typing in the
address proper like which is at the bottom of every page of what you is
‘olding now.
One
wonderful improvement to the web site is the Chatroom. Anybody, after receiving
the confirmation email from me, with the username and password can come on line
and chat with other Hopton’s till their little hearts are content. This
facility will only be able to be accessed by Hopton members, well at least the
password will only be given to Hopton members , please keep this confidential.
Also ‘hot off the press’ we now have a discussion forum, you can access this from the index page of the web site, this is open to all members of the society, which means anybody at all actually. Thanks to Darren Lock for setting this up for me.