We have now completed and uploaded Bob Millard’s story of his time at Coleshill.
Bob has been very helpful and has provided a lot of info for this site.
We interviewed Bob over the phone for this video and it recounts his time at Coleshill House.
Enjoy…
I should point out that these tours are not available to the general public so please do not bombard the Coleshill office with requests.
We met Keith the Estate Manager and he was very warm and welcoming. We started by viewing the guards office before heading on to view some of the stable blocks where the admin staff and officers worked.
Amazingly the names are still on the doors of each room. We then went to meet the resident of the Clockhouse who again was very friendly and gave us coffee. Whilst there we also met another resident who was concerned about us drawing attention to the village and site as they are keen to keep to quiet for the tennants. We told her we would do all we could to reduce the amount of people trying to gain access to the site and have made changes to the website inline with this.
We then walked around the foundations of the house which is now a lovely garden. It suprised us just how small the footprint of the house was, bearing in mind the size of the grounds etc.
Keith then escorted us through the woods to the site of the training bunker or OB. Again I should point out that most of the Coleshill site is private property and not accessable to the public and this area is no exception. Please do not try and find this bunker as it’s locked and you will not be able to gain entry.
He took us inside and told us all about it. Read more on the Bunkers page
We ended the trip with a quick look at the ammo dump building located in some nearby woods.
The trip really brought alive the history and research we had been so carefully working through and it has spured us on with the project.
Tom & Paula
On this page you will see links to pages where the website has been promoted.
Stay tuned folks !!
We are meeting Keith Blaxhall who is the National Trust warden at Coleshill next Wednesday and he is going to give us a full tour of the site.
We are also meeting the main resident who lives in the Clockhouse and hopefully she will be cool with us filming there later this year.
I was also contacted by a local guy called Peter today who has good military knowledge and he has also reseached the Auxiliary Units so he will be joining us on our trip.
I will keep you all posted on our findings.
Today we updated our Training page with a new aerial map and a lot more detail of the site and the training that took place.
Why have a new read?
In order for Coleshill to stay un changed and for the estate to remain open and well kept please help me raise funding for The National Trust.
Give anything you can to help please. http://www.justgiving.com/coleshillhouse
The last few days have been a busy time for us. Yesterday we interviewed Bob Millard over the phone and have today been editing “His Story”. We aim to have this live on the site soon. We have also added new images to the Training page and also created a Bunker page. We have been in touch with Imperial War Museum about using some of their images on the wesbite but they want to charge us I think so that may well be a no no….Shame as we are trying to keep history alive as well. Stay tuned for more news and updates soon.
We have just published our 2 page guide to the Time Pencil.
You can read all about this amazing detonator here
Today we also had a great chat with the National Trust’s Film and video unit about filming at Coleshill….Watch this space.
We are slowly adding more info to the site so stay tuned.
We have now obtained contact information for some of the key survived staff from Coleshill House.
They are very elderly so we plan to approach the gently about their time at the house.
We are compiling a lot of material currently and looking for a local historian to help us really !!!
We will post more when we have it.
Today we found more men who had been trained at Coleshill and this info will be added to the site soon.
We also learnt that up to 5,000 men were trained there and not the 3,500 we had thought.
We also designed our new web banners. Please see below and add them on as many websites as possible.
We have more plans in the pipeline for events connected to Coleshill so stay tuned.