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21
May 2024
Ripon's key link with the Royal Engineers
This is part of a series of articles by Michael Furse, a trustee of the charity Ripon Military Heritage Trust, explaining the significance of the city’s military heritage — and why the trust is fighting to preserve it as part of the the 1,300-home Clotherholme development.
The Stray Ferret is backing the trust’s campaign to save the heritage, as reported here. Please sign the petition here. If it gets 500 signatures it will be debated by North Yorkshire Council’s Skipton and Ripon planning committee.
The Royal Engineers are obliged to be innovators. Not only have they had to cope with the changing demands of warfare since their creation in 1716 in Woolwich, but to act on those changes themselves.
The unit moved from Woolwich to Chatham in 1856, merging with the Royal Sappers and Miners. Its School of Military Engineering became an international centre of excellence for fieldwork and bridging, and has continued to train engineers ever since.
During the Second World War, the German bomber attacks on London led to the school being evacuated from Chatham and moved to Ripon over the winter of 1940/41.
Bridging was taught at Ripon along with a wide range of other topics and by early 1942 the city also hosted a bomb disposal school and an assault engineering school.
An organisation called the Anti-Tank Experimental Establishment was working with flails, snakes, rollers and ploughs in Ripon in early 1942, and much of the work of the assault engineering and anti-tank teams informed the development of the extraordinary range of armoured vehicles that served the country so well from D-Day on June 6, 1944 until the end of the war in Europe.
Two Churchill tanks on a Bailey bridge at the School of Military Engineering. Pic: Imperial War Museum
The allied military operations simply would not have been as effective without the work done at the School of Military Engineering in Ripon.
An overlooked legacy from the months leading up to D-Day are the concrete ramps built just north of the racecourse bridge over the River Ure. Built to simulate the ramps of landing craft, these were used to train tank drivers on how to exit safely onto a beach while minimising the chance of getting stuck.
Tanks would enter, cross, exit and then return via the road bridge, and you can clearly see the ramps and hard standing on Google Earth or other satellite photos.
Besides teaching bridging, the School of Military Engineering developed and tested it, and had examples of every tank in the British arsenal to use with the bridges they were erecting and dismantling.
Terence Cuneo was posted to Ripon where he was able to take advantage of the wide range of different tanks to produce his remarkable 1945 book Tanks And How To Draw Them, which is still available in a reprinted version.
Terrence Cuneo's book was sketched in Ripon. Pic: Imperial War Museum
In 1949 the School of Military Engineering bid farewell to Ripon and moved back to Chatham, having built such strong links that the Royal Engineers were awarded the freedom of the city in 1949.
The link, however, continued after a short hiatus, with the unit's 38 Engineer Regiment based in Ripon from 1959 to 2008.
Its place was then taken by 21 Engineer Regiment, who remain in Claro Barracks to this day. Plans by the Ministry of Defence to close the site in 2019 have been extended twice, to 2023 and then 2026, and increasing instability in the world may result in a further extension.
Read more:
- Stray Ferret backs campaign to save Ripon's military heritage
- Gallery: Tears amid military decorations as Ripon gets ready for D-Day 80th anniversary
- Councillors approve 1,300 homes in Ripon
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