Royal Navy Royal Marines Charity Field Gun Competition
Navy News – digital edition
The most spectacular event at HMS Collingwood’s open day is the the historic Royal Navy Field Gun Competition.
Crews representing units of the Royal Navy and Royal Marines as well as the British Army and Royal Air Force, will compete and as such the event is well supported by the senior ranks of all three Services.
Each crew of 18 highly disciplined, motivated, and physically fit field gunners, races to assemble an antique field gun and run with it, disassembling and reassembling as the competition requires, before dramatically dragging the gun home, maintaining the spirit of the Royal Navy’s contribution to the relief of Ladysmith.
Records for completing the course have continued to be broken. The Royal Marines set a new record in 1924 of 1 min 24.4 secs. This was beaten in seven subsequent years and eventually in 1938 HMS Excellent achieved 1 min 13.4 secs. After the war with a different course and drill Victoria Barracks achieved 1 min 27.4 secs in 1954. HMS Collingwood cut that to 1min 26.6 secs in 1962.
The present record is held by HM Naval Base Portsmouth of 1 min 17.78 secs achieved in 2010.
More information on the field gun crews etc can be found at https://pdevportal.co.uk/field_gun