Final Niue

Beez Neez now Chy Whella
Big Bear and Pepe Millard
Wed 30 Oct 2013 23:57
Our Final Niue Bimble – A Mixed Old Blog
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Our final day began with an egg event – a sorrowful looking chap on the right until I mentioned pictures for a blog, he immediately perked up.
 
 
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Ready with a pose or two, even letting Bear pick him up, but the skipper wiggled as he was so hot.
 
 
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The first job ashore was to get Bear in his ‘trigger finger’ position by this fine cannon.
 
 
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We began to take a closer look at the engravings.
 
 
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Eardley Bryan provides this information:
In front of the Old Building at RMA Sandhurst are some Blomefield pattern cannons and 'F M Eardley-Wilmot' is stamped on some of them. His great-uncle Sir Thomas Blomefield was previously Inspector General of Ordnance. Frederick Eardley-Wilmot was Superintendent of the Gun Factories from 1855. So here we are on the tiny island of Niue, Bear posing by a cannon that has ‘twins’ at Sandhurst, quite something.
 
The Eardley-Wilmot Baronetcy, of Berkswell Hall in the County of Warwick, is a title in the Baronetage of the United Kingdom. It was created on 23rd of August 1821 for the politician and colonial administrator John Eardley-Wilmot. He was Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen's Land from 1843 to 1846. Eardley-Wilmot was the son of John Wilmot (1750-June 1815), barrister-at-law and one of the Masters-in-Chancery, who in 1812 had assumed by royal license the additional surname of Eardley as the great-grandson of Elizabeth, sole heiress of Edward Eardley, of Eardley, Staffordshire, and the grandson of John Eardley Wilmot, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas from 1766 to 1771. The second baronet was a judge and also sat as Conservative Member of Parliament for Warwickshire South. Another member of the family to gain distinction was Frederick Marow Eardley-Wilmot, second son of the first baronet. He was a Major-General in the army.
The Eardley-Wilmot family shares a common ancestry with the Wilmot baronets of Osmaston and the Wilmot baronets of Chaddesden.
 
 
Royal Artillery
 
The Royal Artillery Institute (later Institution) was formed in 1838 as an educational scientific club for artillery officers. The Regiment had always been scientific, but this was also a time when Howick’s reforms had put education to the fore. The Institute was founded by two young officers, Lt. (later Gen. Sir) John Lefroy and Lt. (later Maj.-Gen.) Frederick Marow Eardley-Wilmot, the former inspired by the precedent of Charles Hutton’s short-lived Military Society of the 1770s. The Institute’s first building of 1838–9, erected under the supervision of Lt. Col. George Harding, CRE, was an observatory, on high ground near the Rotunda, for training in magnetic observations, to assist in a pioneering global survey of the 1840s with which Lefroy and Eardley-Wilmot were closely involved. For its telescopes it had a transit room, flat roofed with paired tall thin windows due north and south for observations, and, further west, a small round equatorial room with a conical roof. On the other side of its entrance lobby to the east a three-bay single-storey and basement block housed a library and, to the north, a reading and writing room.
The Construction of Ordnance - Abstract:-
About thirty years ago, during the raging of the Crimean war, special attention began to be directed towards the improvement of our artillery. The old Board of Ordnance was abolished. The manufacturing departments at Woolwich were put under the control of a newly created Minister of War. That able and high-minded officer, Colonel F. M. Eardley-Wilmot, R.A., was appointed Superintendent of the Gun Factories, July 1855. He commenced his work in a thoroughly sensible and practical manner, and pursued his inquiries for suitable materials for guns both at home and abroad. He was ready to adopt anything, new or old, provided it was of the right sort. Sir H. Bessemer has remarked: “My early progress was known to only a few scientific men, among whom was Colonel Eardley-Wilmot, R. A., who took great interest in the invention.”
 
 
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Dieu et mon droit  is the motto of the British Monarch of England. It appears on a scroll beneath the shield of the coat of arms of the United Kingdom. The motto refers to the divine right of the Monarch to govern and is said to have first been used by King Richard the Lionheart as a battle cry and official motto of battle, then adopted as the royal motto by King Henry V in the 15th century. It is on the front page of our UK Passports.
 
 
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Nemo me impune lacessit is the Latin motto of the Order of the Thistle and of three Scottish regiments of the British Army. The motto also appears, in conjunction with the collar of the Order of the Thistle, in later versions of the Royal coat of arms of the Kingdom of Scotland and subsequently in the version of the Royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom used in Scotland. It means No one "cuts" (attacks) me with impunity, and is loosely rendered in Scots as Wha daur meddle wi me? (in Scottish Gaelic - Cha togar m' fhearg gun dìoladh). It is also alternatively translated into English as No one can harm me unpunished. Like the thistle, anyone trying to cut it gets a handful of painful barbs.
 
 

Charles II King of Scotland (1660-1689)  Blackwatch  RCA

This motto has been used by many including Charles II, King of Scotland. The Black Watch and the Royal Company of Archers.

 

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We paid our respects to the memorials and bade them ‘farewell’.

 

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Next it was to the Duty Free for a few bits to tide us over. Then we had an ice lolly watching a chicken picking at a chicken bone – wrong on so many levels.

 

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I’m afraid we have failed dismally with Niuean, just barely managing “Hello”, but it is a really hard language. So with that a swift libation in the yacht club and to pay our dues. Date night at the café across the road and home for a very rock and rolly night..

 

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ALL IN ALL A FABULOUS ISLAND