Fish 'n' Chips on Hayling Island
- and a WW2 Heritage Trail
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24th March
West London’s fishy tale.
A bright, crisp Spring morning with a fish ‘n’ chip lunch stop, enticed 11 members of HOWL on 10 bikes to leave the mainland and venture across the water – to Hayling Island.
As we criss-crossed our way, we picked up several ‘strays’ swelling our numbers to 15 at one stage. It can be a bit confusing if you’re leading a run and look in your mirror to see more bikes in your ‘train’ than there were when you started off – it does look quite spectacular though. And so we eventually arrived at The Inn on The Beach
We were all very impressed with the service and quality and quantity of food. Amy, our host kept Steve Hill in check, suggesting a £10 surcharge for the extra sugar sachets he'd insisted on ordering if he should not use them - but he didn't pay his dues 😉.
As you can see, we were blessed with blue skies and sunshine so we set out on the World War 2 Heritage Trail - a lasting record of Hayling's role in the war years - in particular the heroic, clandestine exploits of local volunteers code named COPP - Combined Operations Pilotage Parties.
The top secret COPP Depot was set up in 1943 on Hayling Island under the instruction of Lord Mountbatten. Small teams of sailors and soldiers trained as frogmen and canoeists for covert beach reconnaissance and other essential clandestine operations prior to the Allied landings on enemy occupied territory throughout the world. This unit of less than 200 men won over 90 medals and commendations. The information gathered safeguarded the lives of thousands of Allied servicemen during the D Day landings in Normandy
On New Year's Eve 1943, Major General Logan Scott-Bowden, Engineers Major, boarded a motor gunboat at Gosport, with his companion Sergeant Bruce Ogden-Smith, for a top secret mission to survey the Gold Beach area around Ver-sur-Mer.
The D-Day planners needed to know what lay beneath the sandy Normandy beaches, to ensure the safe landing of tanks and heavy armoured vehicles. Under the noses of the enemy, the pair took detailed measurements and core samples along the beach with metal augers, storing them in special containers for analysis back in the UK.
When the Americans heard of this audacious mission, they asked the team to survey the US landing sites as well, so three weeks later, they boarded an X-craft midget submarine at Gosport, and were towed by navy trawler to within a few miles of the French coast. They surveyed the defences through the periscope by day, and each night Scott-Bowden and Ogden-Smith clambered into their cumbersome swimsuits and life jackets, to swim 400 yards to the shore, all the while dodging the enemy searchlights.
Their work was vital to the success of the D-Day landings.
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