Re: Compass (and War)


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Posted by Peter Ceresole on September 12, 2003 at 07:18:52 from 80.177.22.49 user PeterC.

In Reply to: Re: Compass (and War) posted by Laurence Monkhouse on September 12, 2003 at 06:38:33:

Commander Walker was newly appointed Commander of HMS Ganges, the Naval Ratings Training School. He would surely have been able to borrow an elderly Naval boat compass, just the sort that would have been marked in points - there must have been any number at Ganges.

That's possible but seems unlikely to me. I always assumed that they were using the kind of compass that I used as a child; a simple shop-bought job that had the points of the compas on the card- certainly nothing as detailed as degrees. It just had a cheap, undamped needle with a central cap, mounted on a spike. The only way to read them was to look down on them from above. They cost pennies in souvenir shops.

After WW2, of course, they would have had cheap access to loads of Army surplus prismatic jobs; sighting notches, luminous aiming points, well damped needles built in to rotating cards; absolute luxury. In the '30s, those would have cost a bomb.


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