Royal Garrison Artillery

Up-and-down bangy things.

And then there's the Royal Garrison Artillery, and they've got the medium and heavy guns.

They go in size, all sorts of sizes, I would say.

And the artillery sort of

Not that many because a lot of them were unattributable.

But this one was.

And this is Lieutenant George Franks of the Royal Garrison Artillery.

And he says this.

It is of little use in the present state of the British Army to attempt to define its extent or composition, for it is in such a state of flux that the numbers of battalions, regiments, and batteries of a year ago are as obsolete as the Snyder rifle.

There used to be a hundred and fifty-seven battalions of infantry, thirty-one regiments of cavalry, and about a hundred and eighty batteries of horse and field artillery, together with about a hundred companies and nine mountain batteries of Royal Garrison Artillery, forming the principal strength of the British Army.

To these must be added the Royal Engineers, the Army Service Corps, the Royal Ordnance Department, the Royal Army Medical Corps, the Army Pay Corps, and other non-combatant units necessary to the domestic and general internal working of an army.

Today these various forces are increased to such an extent that no man outside the War Office can tell the strength of infantry, cavalry, and artillery.

In normal times the Royal Horse Artillery consists of some twenty-eight batteries distinguished by the letters of the alphabet together with a depot and a writing establishment.

On parade the Horse Artillery batteries take precedence of all other units with the exception of Household Cavalry.

The Royal Field Artillery consists of a hundred and fifty batteries and four depots, and the Royal Garrison Artillery consists of one hundred companies and nine mountain batteries.

A battery of the Royal Horse is officially designated the Chestnut Troop from the color of its horses, and the Horse Artillery as a whole is one of the few corps of the service which retains the stable jacket for parade use.

And that's a great picture of, thank you for popping that up, great colourised image of Alec Russell.

He was commissioned in the Royal Garrison Artillery on October 1914 and served on the Western Front during World War I where he too was twice wounded, won the military cross, and in 1918 was promoted to acting major.

So he married Jess Lucy Fairburn, daughter of Frederick Fairburn, in 1917.

And the Fairburns themselves were just a remarkable family.

That's the day, the only day of the Battle of Elbers Ridge, north of here.

My grandad was there, mending telephone wires for the Royal Garrison Artillery.

For three days and nights, he was out in the fields just behind the lines, mending the telephone lines that were being destroyed by German shellfire communication lines, feeding information back from the forward observation officers, the FOOs, to the gunners so they knew where to fire.

He kept that communication going through his own bravery.

Russell had studied civil engineering abroad, so he'd spent a semester at Cambridge and so shared a university tie with Mackenzie.

He also joined the British Army while there, serving in the Royal Garrison Artillery.

Russell's engineering skills would come in very handy later in life.

A year before his Australian Open triumph, Royal Melbourne had acquired that land along Cheltenham Road and the club had plans to utilise that land for golf.