Ontario Regiment Museum
Published Dec 17, 2023Merry Christmas from the volunteers and staff of the Ontario Regiment RCAC Museum and our friends at World of Tanks. Please enjoy this festive message and get a look into Santa’s Tank Workshop!
This segment originally aired in the TANKMAS 2023 – LIVE Stream on 8 December 2023. Hosted by The Tank Museum (Bovington), and sponsored by our friends at World of Tanks.
https://worldoftanks.com/en/news/live…Full video and stream can be found on The Tank Museum YouTube channel here:
https://www.youtube.com/live/_5cMsW5Z…Meet our hosts from World of Tanks and Wargaming.net:
Nicholas “The Chieftain” Moran and Cmdr_AFMeet our Executive Director: Jeremy N Blowers AKA Tank_Museum_Guy
Wishing you and yours a Very Merry Christmas, and a safe and Happy Holiday season.
PLAY NOW at www.worldoftanks.com
FREE to play and build your own “Tank Museum” garage.Thank you to Wargaming.net for the video production and sponsorship of this museum centered Christmas streaming event.
December 19, 2023
Christmas Message from the Museum – MERRY TANKMAS 2023
December 18, 2023
Battle Taxis | Evolution of the Armoured Personnel Carrier
The Tank Museum
Published 8 Sept 2023Tanks and infantry need to operate together. Tanks provide firepower and protection, the infantry support and protect the tanks. In this video, we look at that vital component of the equation, the Armoured Personnel Carrier and its transition into the modern Infantry Fighting Vehicle.
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December 7, 2023
Carl Gustaf: Recoilless Rifle | Anti-Tank Chats
The Tank Museum
Published 25 Aug 2023From The Falklands to Ukraine; the Carl Gustaf recoilless rifle was introduced in 1948 and is still used by armies around the world today.
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December 5, 2023
See Inside Sherman Firefly | Tank Chats Reloaded
The Tank Museum
Published 1 Sept 2023Inspired innovation or a bit of a lash-up? In this video we look inside the legendary Sherman Firefly, the British Army’s Tiger killer. We also hear from a Firefly veteran, Ken Dowding, ex-14th/20th Hussars.
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November 28, 2023
Light Tank Mk IV | Tank Chats #173 | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 18 Aug 2023Weighing in at five tons, machine gun armed and with a two-man crew, the Tank, Light, Mk IV was one of a series produced for the British Army by Vickers before World War II, seeing service on the NW Frontier of India. Recently restored, the Mk IV is the oldest running tank in our collection.
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November 21, 2023
Centaur | Tank Chats #172 | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 28 Jul 2023Join David Willey as he tells the complex story of how the Centaur and its sister vehicles were developed when the need for a new cruiser tank emerged.
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November 14, 2023
Inside T-72: A Commander’s Perspective | Tank Chats Reloaded
The Tank Museum
Published 21 Jul 2023A fast tank with a low profile and a big gun, the T-72 is a classic Soviet designed Main Battle Tank, in use all over the world. In this video, we talk to Dag Patchett, a former T-72 commander and get his impressions of a tank built in the Cold War era but still very much in service.
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November 13, 2023
QotD: The “queering-the-museum” movement
The so-called queering-the-museum movement, which was launched in Amsterdam in 2016, is all about contemporary identity politics. It rests on the assumption that museum curation is too “heteronormative”. By queering museum collections, activist curators claim they are including and representing gay and gender non-conforming people.
That at least is the objective. But the actual result is an exercise in narcissism. It turns the past into little more than a mirror reflecting the identitarian obsessions of the present back at us. It tells us less than nothing.
And no wonder. Understanding the past through a “queer” prism is profoundly ahistorical. In the 1500s, “queer” didn’t mean what it does today. It meant “strange, peculiar, odd or eccentric“, and had nothing to do with sexual or gender identity at all. Queer only started to be used as a term for gay men at the turn of the 20th century. And “queer studies” was not named as such until the mid-1990s. Viewing the Mary Rose collection through a “queer” lens is to obscure its historical specificity.
It’s not just the Mary Rose Museum that has succumbed to the cult of queer theory, either. Even more bizarrely, the British Library claimed during Pride month this year that the animal world can be viewed through a queer lens. And so Britain’s national centre of knowledge and learning staged events “celebrat[ing] nature in all its queerness”. In particular, it focussed on animals whose sexual behaviour breaks free from standard “gender roles”, from bisexual penguins and lesbian albatrosses to gender-bending fish. “[Researchers’] discoveries”, stated a press release, “show that animal sexuality is far more diverse than we once thought and has been limited by narrow human stereotypes of heterosexuality, monogamy and gender roles”.
This is obviously absurd. Animals do not experience or possess a sense of identity, sexuality or gender. For a fish to “bend” gender it would need to understand what gender is and how to subvert it – quite an achievement for a creature with a five-second memory recall.
Applying “queer” models to the animal world in this way does a disservice not just to our knowledge of animals, but also to our understanding of humans. Non-human animals aim to remain alive and comfortable and propagate their species. Human sex and sexual identity goes far beyond mere survival and comfort. While there may be many interesting reasons why two female penguins pair off, we can be certain that a sense of lesbian self-identity is not one of them.
As the cases of the Mary Rose Museum and the British Library show, queer methodology does not help us to understand history or nature. This is hardly a surprise. Applying a queer lens to species or epochs where it has no place simply exposes the banality of queer theory. It sees nothing but its own reflection. This narcissistic endeavour is now posing a threat to knowledge itself.
Ann Furedi, “The narcissism of queer theory”, Spiked, 2023-08-12.
November 6, 2023
The Army Door Knocker | Pak 35/36 | Anti-Tank Chats
The Tank Museum
Published 14 Jul 2023In this video, we look at the Pak 35/36, the German Army’s first anti-tank gun. Obsolete by 1941, it picked up the nickname Heeresanklopfgerat – the army door knocker – after its inability to penetrate tank armour. In spite of this, it carried on in service until 1945. Chris Copson talks you through the gun and its history.
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October 24, 2023
See Inside The M3 Grant | Tank Chats Reloaded
The Tank Museum
Published 30 Jun 2023With a crew of six and a chaotically crowded interior, the Grant was a US-produced WW II tank more used by the British and Indian Armies than anyone else. Join Chris Copson as he explores probably the best preserved example of this rare vehicle – and listen out for the cheese sandwich …
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September 27, 2023
Knock Out: The Evolution of Tank Ammunition
The Tank Museum
Published 8 Jun 2023Tank ammunition has gone a long way from basic solid armour piercing shot to the high-tech fin rounds of today. In this video we look at the development of tank ammo in its different forms and how it has evolved from the First World War to the modern battlefield.
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September 20, 2023
Wire Guided Tank Killer | Swingfire | Anti-Tank Chats
The Tank Museum
Published 2 Jun 2023In this video, Chris Copson looks at the Swingfire, a Cold War period anti-tank guided weapons system. This powerful and hard-hitting missile was mounted on vehicles including Striker, Ferret, and FV 432. With a range of up to 4km, it had the significant advantage that it would outrange tank guns and could be fired remotely by the controller, enabling the launch vehicle to remain in cover.
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September 6, 2023
Radical or Ridiculous? | T-14 Armata | Tank Chats #171
The Tank Museum
Published 26 May 2023In this Tank Chat, David Willey takes a detailed look at a vehicle that has garnered significant interest and controversy — The Russian T-14 Armata. David explores why this vehicle draws so much attention, and how it has taken a radical departure from previous Soviet design philosophy.
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September 4, 2023
Ask Ian: Donating Gun Collections to Museums … or Not
Forgotten Weapons
Published 24 May 2023Lots of people put together significant gun collections over a lifetime, and want to see those collections preserved after they pass. This often manifests as looking for a museum that will keep a collection intact and display it — which is unfortunately a nearly impossible goal.
First, it is very rare to find a museum whose mission matches the collection focus of a specific private collection. Firearms cover a vast amount of history even firearms-specific museums are usually fairly narrow in scope.
Second, museums already have all their display space filled. Promising to display a new collection means taking down something they already deemed worthy of display — and promising not to take it down in turn if something more suitable comes along.
Third, even if a museum has space and shares the theme of a collection, they will almost certainly already have examples of many of the items in the collection. If a museum is not allowed to break up and sell off parts of a collection, it simply ensures that many of the items will remain perpetually locked away in a reserve archive.
I would propose that we really need to rethink the idea that museums have a duty to keep everything they acquire. We know that virtually all museums have much more in storage than on display, and forcing duplicate items or pieces unrelated to the museum’s focus to remain in museum property simply ensures that those pieces are kept away from the collecting community. It is the collecting community that does most of the research and publication on firearms history, and this practice undoubtedly hinders research and scholarship. That is not to say we should close museums; certainly not! Museums are extremely valuable for preserving artifacts and making them available to some degree to the public, but they are only one part of the historical community.
If you are a collector who really wants your collection to be displayed in full in a museum, you really only have one option: bequeath the museum enough money to build and maintain a new wing specifically for your collection.
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August 17, 2023
See Inside Char B1 | French Tanks of World War Two
The Tank Museum
Published 12 May 2023Chris Copson goes inside one of his personal favourite tanks, the Second World War French Char B1, to discover the quirks and surprises hidden within. Find out why these tanks performed so badly against the German onslaught of 1940, despite being bigger and more heavily armoured than the vehicles they faced.
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