The Chief Scout Talks

Taranaki Daily News, 25 January 1930, Page 9 (Supplement)

The Chief Scout Talks

BRICKS WITHOUT STRAW. (By Lt. Gen. Lord Badon-Powell.) I have had complaints' from scouts sometimes that the cost of tracking irons is too great for them and therefore they cannot practise the tracking games of' deer stalking, etc. These fellows are not good'scouts yet. You remember that the Israelites of "old complained that they had to make bricks without being given the straw that was necessary to make the clay bind together properly. Well—-that is half the fun of life —-to make bricks without straw! ' A MAFEKING MEMORY. ■This is how we did it in Mafeking nearly thirty years ago. When we were besieged there we only had half a dozen small guns, old seven-pounders, while the Boers round us were shelling us every day with all sorts of good modern guns —“pom-poms” (which fired a rapid succession of one-pound shells as fast as you could say “pom-pom-pom-pom”), quick firing fifteen-pound-ers, and finally their big hundredpounder gun. Well, our meji didn’t sit down under this and complain that they had no means of getting better guns;, they started to make “bricks without straw,”

that is, they started to manufacture a gun out of such material as they could find in flic place. They got a steampipe out of an engine, heated up a lot of bare of iron like the bars of iron railings and twisted them while red hot round and round the steam-pipe, and hammered them tight until they made a complete iron casing to it, and then they put on a second layer to make it doubly strong. That made the barrel of our gun, the steam-pipe being the “bore.” Then they made wooden models of a big ring with a big knob at each side to form the “trunnions” of the gun, by which it is. supported on the gun-carriage. By means of these wooden models they were able to make a mould—that is the exact shape of the trunnions and ring—out of damp sand. Into this mould they poured molten bronze and thus made a metal trunnion ring, which they slipped onto the barrel while still hot, and then quickly cooled it so that it was shrunk on quite tight. But the barrel was still open at both ends, so a big block of metal called the “breech” was made in the same way in a mould and shrunk on to one end, and our gun was complete.

“THE WOLF’S” SHELL. After that we merely had to bore a tiny hole near the breech ■ through the barrel into the bore, through which the charge could be lit, and also they had to add the sights and to mount the gun on a carriage (which was really part of the carriage of a threshing-machine). And then we had a first-rate gun. They called it “The Wolf.” Major Panzera. was the commander of our artillery a:.d he superintended the making of the gun, , A gun is not much use, however, without ammunition, and shells don’t grow on every bush, nor do you pick up gunpowder wherever you walk. All these things had to be made, and out of the very limited supply of materials which we had in the place. Of course for the .shells’'we had again to make moulds of sand of exactly the right size to fit the bore of the gun and to pour molten iron into the moulds to .make the shells. They were made hollow in order to hold a bursting charge of powder and a hole was left by "which they were afterwards filled with the charge, and in which a cord was inserted, which, after catching fire in the flame of the discharge of the gun, would burn while the ehell was flying through the air until it reached the charge in the shell and 60 burst the whole thing "among the enemy. It all sounds’very easy and simple, but to get hard metal sufficiently hot to run ft into moulds you want something more than an ordinary fire, and we had to make a special sort of “blast-furnace” for the purpose. Here again our men made their “bricks without straw.” Where would . you get 1 firebrick from in your village? They wot it from the furnace of a locomotive. Then they introduced “forced draught” —that ie they pumped air into the furnace as a blacksmith does at his little fire —but on a big scale—by means of a fan driven by an engine through a hosepipe. In this way they got sufficient neat to -melt the metal into a liquid state. Thpn we had to make gunpojvder to fire the gun with, and this we did by making charcoal from charred willowwood and mixing in salt'-petre (which was used in that part of the country for washing the sheep) and other ingredients, until we -made a very fair powder. “BANG!” . / z ._ ’ • 'lt was a great day when we first fired the gun. She was loaded and set ready for firing, and then the gun’s men and onlookers lay down under cover in case she should prefer to burst rather , than send out the she'll. But she didn’t burst. She seemed to know what was wanted of her and banged out the shell with a tremendous burst of smoke and; flame. It was a great success and considerably astonished the other side, who thought we must have had a new gun sent Yip to us unknown to themselves. Well, I have told you this yarn not so that you may know how to make a gun —in these days where scouts all over the world are friends and brothers you are not likely to want- to fire guns at anybody —but merely to remind you that if there is a thing which you want,, and have not got, the thing to do is not to sit down and grouse because you have not got it, but to set to work and get it. There are very few things that you can’t make or get if you want them badly enough. At least that ie my experience, and one of the first things that-1 scouts ought to learn is the making of “bricks without straw.”