Monday 5 September 2016

Royal East Kent Mounted Rifles 1914 but where in Ramsgate


Two more difficult Ramsgate Photos for where in Ramsgate are/were they today?

This time I have used two photos where I am not exactly certain of the locations.

5 comments:

  1. Picture one Jackey Bakers field? No logic, just a feeling.
    Picture two Can't think of anywhere with that boundary wall unless it's out at Quex. But that's not Ramsgate.

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  2. Is picture #2 the old Police St Lukes sports field? The wall at the rear looks like that of the cemetery. I knew the field well in the 50s.

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  3. I don't know the area myself, but I suspect Dumpton Park may be the location. The REKMR didn't hold a Summer camp in 1914, and on mobilization in August, the entire regiment was gathered at Canterbury. It spent the first year of the war moving around locations near Canterbury, such as Broad Oak, and also Dumpton Park in Thanet. Dumpton Park had also been the venue for other Summer Camps in earlier years. I suspect that the photos show a gathering of Thanet Troop, REKMR, shortly before the outbreak of war, and full mobilization. I am just heading to Maidstone, where the county archives hold copies of the "Kent Yeoman " magazine published in Canterbury between 1907 and 1915. I'll consult these and report back!

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  4. My take on the top picture is that the side support on the fencing means that this is a cliff top fence, so probably around the Government Acre, the road on the Westcliff didn’t get built until after WW1

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  5. The "Kent Yeoman" magazine didn't have anything to say about activities in Thanet prior to the mobilization. However, it did include a complete list of all of the members of Thanet Troop at that time. This will, almost certainly, contain the names of every man in your photos. If you want me to let you see a copy, please let me know.

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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.