Join Lady Emma Barnard on a tour as Friends of Shoreham Fort receive the King's Award for Voluntary Service
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00:00You can see he's got his white gloves on his lapel there. If he was to issue the gunpowder
00:17bag, it was in a bag of cartridge paper. If that was split, it would leave a black residue
00:24on his gloves. He wouldn't then issue that to the men up the top, because you'd get a
00:28double ram and then a breech explosion killing all the men on camp. So that's the biggest
00:34responsibility.
00:35Two land army girls were actually living in this Nissen hut for 56 years when it was in
00:44Chidham, near Chichester. They both passed away within six months of each other, and
00:50we found out about their home. And the reason that we know that it's a first world war Nissen
00:54hut, it's actually four or five. They've got green over there, which is the army. You've
00:59got white, which is the medical corps. Brown, which is the catering corps. And then blue,
01:05which is the Royal Flying Corps. So it's actually four or five Nissen huts that they've taken
01:10down after the first world war. Put it in storage and then dragged out at speed, and
01:14it didn't matter what colour panels they were in. So it is now recorded as the last usable
01:20first world war Nissen hut.
01:22Draw Room 4, as I said, was the prototype to all of those fortifications around the
01:27country, and we are now actually the last fort of our kind to use a carnal wall and
01:32a caponier system in the world.
01:34So that's why it's so important, and we're now a scheduled ancient monument, which is
01:42the same as obviously Stonehenge.
01:44Up until this stage, a 1760s gun battery was just an earth mound with cannons on top. So
01:49that's what we look like as well. The cannons of that era could only fire 800 yards, but
01:55we have the first ever rifle cannons that could now fire 4,500 yards.
02:00That's it. And because we've got the first Sussex artillery, and we're the Royal Sussex
02:06Regiment, there is nowhere else in West Sussex now. So this is the last place that will become
02:11a military history hub, about bringing history to life. And the best way that you can teach
02:17kids is to let them physically do what the soldiers are doing. So you can see we're here
02:22with Worthing College, and they're doing replica rifle training. They strip down the
02:26vicar's machine gun, run it across the tennis courts, put it all back together. They're
02:30really doing what the soldiers were doing at that time. Even if they don't comprehend
02:35it then, they might be watching a war film in 20, 30 years' time and think, I've actually
02:41held one of those. And we got hold of Northbrook College in Durrington, and we said to them
02:46we need machine guns. So they made these, and they're plastic. So even if the gun laws
02:54change and we have to sacrifice our originals, we've got things that we can put out as props
02:59and they can still strip them down and do everything that we need to. So we're trying
03:03to think of the future as well. The first ever film studio complex. And that all started
03:10just here at Shoreham Port. So he was a set designer for the theatres. He hand-painted
03:16the canvas backdrops. I'll introduce you to that man that had the beard on after throughout
03:20the film. Well that's Martin Leonard Langford, and you can see that he's listed here as
03:25the bandmaster. And you can see him there at the top of this photo as well. And this
03:30is a picture of his grave at Hove Cemetery. And what you probably can't read is on there,
03:37it says that he was responsible for sounding the charge of the Light Brigade in Balaclava.
03:42So really, he should have been a really famous man. And we're very fortunate, but I'm hoping
03:48it will work now if I turn that up a bit, that we've got the first Edison wax recording
03:54of him playing his music.
04:12There you go.
04:16This is all the shells of the cannons. And those cannons are 514-1, as you can see.
04:22So that's now part of New Haven, and part of the town from here. 26 tons of rubble was
04:29removed just from this room by 10 volunteers in six days. So yeah, we worked hard.
04:35One work on this break, and then he'd come back, and then take one turn all the way around.
04:41So if you've just been on your break, you're waiting 22-15 minutes before your next break,
04:45a long time. So you're looking on the outside of the ditch. These windows are on the inside
04:51of the ditch, the inside of the wall. So even if the French climbed over, then we could
04:55still shoot at them.
04:57I love the floor.
04:59Electricity comes through, then we've got that.
05:05And because it's a scheduled ancient monument, we can't drill anything into the walls. But
05:10they've done it all in the old-fashioned way, so nothing is actually drilled in. It's
05:14all done with blocks and wedges. The idea being that you had to come in, take off your
05:18poplar boots and your jackets with the metal buttons, and then step over the barrier to
05:23put in your lab coats and lab slippers before going in to make up the rounds in the magazine.
05:28So it's all health and safety.
05:32Shakers in the seats that will all rumble underneath you and all that sort of stuff.
05:40It's now been listed by the Imperial War Museum as an official war memorial.
05:46And a few people have commented, well it's not even a real trench is it, because it's
05:50too low at the front. Now the idea is that this is supposed to be disabled access. We've
05:54got Heronsdale School, places like that. I didn't want to get wheelchairs in here and
06:00then give them a trench periscope and all they could see was a sandbag. So that's why
06:04this is dropped, it's wider, it gives you a turning circle. Where the training trenches
06:08were all made, and that's why you've got the lush grass at the top, because it could sink
06:12into the trenches and the water is held for the grass to grow better up there. So we're
06:18even overlooking where all that happened. And the best thing is, because I can walk
06:23along the sandbags in full kit and everything, sometimes we get the kids to pick up a pebble
06:28and then they do the grenade training.
06:30Good morning everyone and thank you. I'm afraid we've kept you waiting because we've had the
06:35most fascinating tour and I'm absolutely overwhelmed by what you've done here. It's fantastic,
06:41absolutely amazing. You have done so brilliantly to get it and it fills me with joy. Gary you
06:48are an extraordinary person, you are all extraordinary people, because you've saved something which
06:54is really deeply important. It's more important than words can say. It's living history this,
07:02it's so important that we never forget. And I love to hear your plans also for the future,
07:07I wish you well with those. Congratulations, from the bottom of my heart, congratulations,
07:13it's absolutely fantastic.
07:16Charles III, by the grace of God, of the United Kingdom, of Great Britain and Northern Ireland,
07:27and of our other realms and territories, King, Defender of the Faith.
07:34To friends of Shoreham Fort, dedicated to preservation, education and the safeguarding
07:47of our heritage for future generations.
07:53Greeting, we being cognizant of the said group's outstanding voluntary work in the community
08:04and being desirous of showing our royal favour, do hereby confer upon it the King's Award
08:17of Voluntary Service.
08:20I had the dream as a 14 year old boy, but it's the community that makes it reality,
08:25so thank you to every single person that's here today for making my dream come true.
08:40I've been doing this for 30 years now, I had the dream of what this place could be, and
08:46I'm hoping now that I can show you what the future is.
08:56So the idea is now that we are going to rebuild all of the barrack block that was out the
09:01back of Shoreham Fort, by rebuilding that we're going to have a perimeter back which
09:06will give us back our security, it will allow proper CCTV cameras, it will be a much better
09:12place, and if we've got the perimeter back, the Royal Armouries actually have two of
09:21the cannons at the Tower of London ready to come back, and they'll be fully firing.
09:26So I'll be going back to Jo to get a couple of my firearms.
09:33Well we won't be firing any of them.
09:35It's a high velocity, 1,400 yard artillery wasn't it?
09:38That's it.
09:39So the idea is that we're going to become a resource centre, so we've got over 3,000
09:43books of military history ready to go back in this area, you can have Find My Past, Ancestry,
09:49all those things on terminals that people can use for free, and then we have the museum
09:54area, which I want to get together with local regiments, because they haven't got their
09:59own museum anymore, but it will be on the foresight that if they have one of our cabinets
10:04they have to change it every six weeks, because then they get more of their collection viewed
10:09and we don't have a static collection.
10:11Yes, which is what you're doing.
10:12That's it.
10:13And then this main chamber in the middle, you can see that we've mapped out where all
10:17of the walls would have been, so I can still do a tour and say that this is a cell, but
10:23it gives us...
10:24So you can have that marked?
10:25Yeah, on the foresight.
10:26Very good, yeah.
10:27And then with a stage at the back, that means you can have weddings, you can have Zumba
10:31classes, which of course means that the day goes from nine till five to actually probably
10:36eight till ten o'clock at night.
10:39With a cafe in there, we've been approached by people like Fish Factory to potentially
10:44have a restaurant in there, and by having the fold-out walls it means that on a day like
10:49today where it's a bit cloudy we could make the cafe a bit bigger, but on a sunny day
10:53we can make it smaller and have more activities in there.
10:57The cookhouse is actually built exactly where the cookhouse was for the soldiers.
11:02And then you'll now see that around the back you've got the trench coming around now.
11:07As I said, we're very much about teaching through experience, so we have built a trench
11:12that I will show you in a minute.
11:142,800 sandbags all filled with sand and cement in two weeks.
11:19Amazing work.
11:21During COVID as well.
11:24As I say, we're very much about living history, so we want to return some of the rooms.
11:29This room, we have now got back exactly as it was in 1857, so I'll show you that in a
11:34minute.
11:35But these are the magazines where all the gunpowder was stored.
11:38And with my huge gun collection, which is potentially the biggest on the south coast,
11:43we have got this smaller room, which we can then make armour-plated to make it a gun cabinet
11:48rather than doing the whole room.
11:51The South Caponia, we'll have to go down a tunnel for that, so I'll take you down there
11:55a little bit later.
11:57That's going to become an experience room with a ghostly soldier that will tell you
12:01what it was like to be down there.
12:03And then the air raid shelter experience, this is what we're working on at the moment,
12:07so I'll show you that in a minute as well.
12:10Now, people say to us, we've got these lovely flat roofs.
12:13Wouldn't it be nice if we could get the telescopes up there?
12:16All the local astronomy groups.
12:18They can get the telescopes up the top.
12:20Worthing Astronomy Group, at the moment, have to cancel all of their events if there's clouds
12:25in the sky.
12:26But of course, we have that massive room with the pull-down screen, so they can then tell
12:31people how to find the stars, so they don't have to cancel their events.
12:35So it's all multipurpose.
12:37And then with the Nissen hut down here as well, it means that if we are closed for private
12:42functions, such as weddings, then the public can still see our history in the Nissen hut as well.
12:49So you're going to still use this?
12:51Yes.
12:52That's good, I think that's very up-to-date.
12:54Yeah, definitely.