Welcome to another trench chat on the old front line and I'm really pleased this week to be joined by Richard Fisher of the Vickers Machine Gun Collection and Research Association to talk about machine guns in the Great War. Welcome, Richard. Hi there, Paul.

Thanks for joining us. Obviously, I always start this and ask people, do they have a personal

connection to the Great War, which has brought them to this subject? Yeah, so I do, but it hasn't brought me to this subject. So my connection to the Great

War is a really local one. I mean, I suppose in a roundabout way it does bring me to the subject,

but it started with, as many people's collections do, some family medals. We were cleaning

out some of the houses from the family

back in the early 90s and I was nine or 10 years old and showed an interest. So very much, you

know, given the medals, death penny and certificates, my great, great-uncle, who was in the 6th Battalion

Wiltshire Regiment and killed on 21st of March, 1918. He served alongside his brother from when

they signed up in 1914 into the Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry and with the infantryisation of that

in 17. Yeah, they became 6th Battalion. And that got me interested in military things

as things happen at that age, which got me talking my grandfather. So actually, my great-great-uncle's

nephew, my grandfather, who was a Vickers machine gunner in the Second World War in the Cheshire

regiment and served at Anzio so he so my

in my sort of geographical sort of connection to the great war is you know with the vicar's machine gun

is with italy and you know i've been over there a few times probably more times than i've been to the

western front actually and uh you know the the western front and has always been sort of something i've passed through i i've been to the Western Front, actually. And, you know, the Western Front has always

been sort of something I've passed through. I've been on a couple of trips over there, but passed

through. But then the Vickers machine gun itself is, is what interested me from, from Parr's

interest. And 25 years ago, 26 years ago now, yeah, we went on a trip to the Royal Marines Museum in South Sea,

and he sat there and took one apart that was on display, and I was sort of hooked from then on.

But the Vickers machine gun doesn't just encompass the Second World War. It doesn't just

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