Page 45 - Mercian Eagle 2012

Unit Welfare Office by Capt P Lewis
As a fairly new Welfare Officer some may state that I am still in the “honeymoon period” and looking at life with rose- tinted glasses. Since our return from
Op HERRICK 15 there have been a number of changes with welfare manning. Firstly I would like to thank Capt Alan Hewitt on an excellent hand-over and wish him all the best on his posting to ITC Catterick. The second change was the welfare 2IC, CSgt Zecca, who handed over to CSgt Dennis CGC in late May; and the final departure was that of Pte Percival on his transition
to civilian life after accepting redundancy. That leaves our long suffering clerk Joanne Hewitt to look after the two new boys in town and keep us on the straight and narrow, and Pte Warmington as driver and rear guard.
Apart from the normal events that catch the welfare eye we are looking at a number of new and exciting things for our wives to
get into in the coming months. The first
to discuss would be the chicken farm we want up and running in the New Year. At this stage I don’t want to claim that this brilliant plan was mine, but a lot of the wives seem really interested in the concept of looking after chickens on a weekly basis and collecting free range eggs. This leads me nicely on to point two, which would be the establishment of a number of allotments here in Palace Barracks, and again there has been genuine interest in that concept of growing your own vegetables; already ideas for the 2 MERCIAN Wives Calendar are flooding in, with mostly rural/countryside themes!
Also on the horizon, shipmates, is my new-found interest in sailing. Having
the great honour of being appointed as
2 MERCIAN Sailing Officer, the opportunities that this will bring the soldiers, dependants and children are endless and we will take full
advantage of them in the New Year. This good news didn’t take long to hit the patch, and I have had a number of volunteering wives looking to be Commodores already.
Finally in this short note it would be insane of me not to mention the real thing that keeps me going on a day to day
basis: without this new opportunity in my life I don’t know how I would cope. To put
it lightly I cannot understand how I have survived the first 23 years in the Army without this in my life; so to that end I would like to thank all of our lovely SWAGS (Soldiers’ Wives and Girlfriends) for the day- to-day brightness and happiness that they now bring into my life. P.S. I’m still working on getting Daniel Craig over for the no- expense-spared Wives’ Christmas Party.
UWO: Capt P Lewis UWWO: CSgt A Dennis CGC
Op OLYMPICS by Sgt Allseybrook, QM’s Dept
Op OLYMPICS began for me at 0130 hrs one Saturday morning when I received
a text message from CSgt Buck saying “Pack your kit, you’re taking the Dept on the Olympics”. “What?” I text back, “this morning?”. “No, Monday morning” he texts back. So I phoned the rest of the Dept
first thing in the morning to let them know. We met up outside C Coy office Monday morning because that’s the sub-Unit we were attached to for the Operation. There were 18 HQ Coy personnel attached
to C Coy to make up the numbers they needed to deploy.
Having got to Aldergrove we were told the flight to Brize Norton was delayed (surprise, surprise), but following a four-hour wait we were in the air. After landing at Brize Norton we made our way to Bassingbourne where we were going to do a week’s training ready to take on the task of running the rapid scanners on the main gate at the Olympic Park in Stratford. After spending
a week training at Bassingbourne we were moved to Felltham camp in Middlesex to get all our security passes and a final brief before we took on our massive task of keeping the Olympic Park secure.
Our next destination was Hainault Country Park where we were going to spend the next few weeks living. It was a big country park in East London, where the Army had placed about 300 portable cabins for the troops to live in while they were working at the Olympics. In each cabin there were four beds and two washrooms, which was quite a novelty and not what we were used to. We split down into fours and moved in our new homes. In my room there was me (Sgt Allseybrook), Sgt Robinson, Sgt Burgess, Sgt Rowe. Sgt Robinson
and I said we would have the two top bunks because of the age and weight of
Sgt Burgess and Sgt Rowe – We thought it would be only fair!
The next day we got on the coaches and headed for the Olympic Park for a guided tour of where we were going to work. It was about an hour’s journey to the Park from where we were living; which we had to factor into the shift patterns we would be working. We had a guided tour of the Park, then we shadowed the soldiers that were working the rapid scanners on the main gates for about an hour before heading back to Hainault Park to wait for our first shift pattern to be told to us. Two days later we got the call that we were starting in the morning. At 0400 hrs the alarm went off prior to morning admin and boarding the coaches for what would become an hour’s daily journey to the Olympic Park. Having got off the coaches, which had to park about a mile away from the main gates, we got to where we were working and opened up the lanes we were manning. There were about 28 rapid scanners on each row, and each team had to run
even started so we knew as soon as the Games started we were going to be busy. Well, seven o’clock in the evening came and we were shutting the lanes down after a hard day’s work ready for the hour-long coach trip back to Hainault Park where we were accommodated.
The first day of the Olympics had arrived and we were back up at 0400 hrs then washed, shaved, breakfasted and on the coaches for five in the morning. I was really tired by now, only having about two hours sleep a night because of having to share a room with the Battalion Snoring Team (Sgt Burgess and Sgt Rowe). We got to the Olympic Park to open up our lanes ready for the public to start coming through.
We had a brief from our Group Leader, WO2 Cook, telling us they were expecting 250,000 people through the gates that day. 0800 hrs and the gates opened and there was again a constant flow of people all day long. At eight o’clock that night we were taken off duty by the RAF, who were on
the night shift, and we headed back to Hainault for a well-deserved sleep ready for the next twelve days of fifteen- hour shifts (no wonder G4S couldn’t get the manpower!). Twelve days later we had finished the task we had been set of keeping the Olympic Park safe and secure. Overall it was
a hard four weeks’ work, with long hours and very early mornings but we had all met loads of famous people and the public were very thankful to us. And we even got to watch some of the events!
two lanes and there
were eleven of us in
each team. In my team
there was myself as
team leader, my 2IC
Cpl “Dave” Newton,
Cpl “Stu” Collins, LCpl
“Spiderman” Parker,
LCpl “Caddy” Cadmore,
LCpl “Smudge” Smith,
LCpl “Spence” Spencer,
Pte Cornish, Pte Eaton
and two female Navy searchers. We turned our rapid scanners on and waited for the main gates to open at 0800 hrs. Dead on eight o’clock and the first people came through. It was a constant steady flow of people all day and none of the events had
At 0400 hrs the alarm went off prior to morning admin and boarding the coaches for what would become an hour’s daily journey to the Olympic Park.
THE MERCIAN EAGLE
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