WEST WIGHT RIFLE & PISTOL CLUB
A Short History
The Club was formed from the local Home Guard unit on the 2nd of July 1945. We shot initially in the Drill Hall, now the Memorial Hall in Freshwater, then at the underground cellar range in Crocker Street Newport the club range of Newport Rifle Club.
However it was a chore to commute to Newport every week and to share a range with another club, so we decided to build our own. A period of planning and fund raising followed. Also the School of Infantry at Warminster were consulted on the safety requirements necessary in range design.
We negotiated a ground lease from the West Wight Football Club in Camp Road Freshwater and purchased three wartime "Prefabs" from a former bomb site in London. These were shipped to the Island and assembled as one long building to form a single range and club room.
This was no small undertaking as the ground is low lying and prone to flooding with a shallow water table. Foundations proved difficult filling with water as soon as they were dug.
While the prefabricated panels were easy to bolt together they needed strengthening with RSJs to stop the long run of the range wall wobbling.
The butts are a major steel construction forming several "venetian blind" sheets of steel to deflect caught bullets down at 45 degrees.
In subsequent years we improved the ventilation with large industrial fans, installed extra lighting and dug out and concreted the entire range floor.
It was decided to extend the range use from 22 to full bore pistol. This required an up armouring of the range to meet the stringent safety requirements. It was fortuitous that at this time B Butts at Newtown Ranges was being demolished and a large quantity of thick armoured plate became available.
Having agreed a price for this metal the mammoth task of moving it to Freshwater began. Each sheet weighed several hundredweight and needed to be carried by eight men to load onto a trailer.
Having got all the sheets to the indoor range the laborious task of cutting and fitting the sheets to the precise specifications of a range plan drawn up by the Small Arms School at the School of Infantry.
All the steel sheets had to be covered by 2" thick wooden boards to prevent splash back of any stray rounds. Commercial timber would have been very expensive so while the cutting and welding team laboured on another group went and cut down some mature fir trees belonging to a member and got them planked up by an obliging farmer on a tractor saw bench. It took two years to do all this work and it was officially inspected and given a range certificate one month before the Government banned all pistol shooting.
This made the handing in of all the members' pistols more painful than it might otherwise have been. On the plus side we now have a range that is protected to a far greater standard than the calibre of weapons we now are allowed to fire.
Further improvements have included reproofing the whole building when the wartime wooden prefabricated roof trusses finally gave way.
We had been flooded out several times so the digging of a drainage ditch filled with a porous pipe and shingle greatly helped.
Trees have also been planted to soften the effect of the building
The Club room and firing point were insulated with cladding from industrial freezers and flooring and carpets were laid. More recently a moving target range has been installed allowing scaled down versions of the Running Boar competition to be fired.
The Club members currently fire .22 rifles in prone competitions also light weight sporting rifles for standing leagues.
A full shooting programme is conducted from September to April each year competing in several leagues in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. Some members also shoot air rifles and air pistols also black powder pistols are used. In the summer some members join up with other Island clubs to shoot full bore rifles at Newtown Ranges.
The Club also has the use of an outdoor 50 and 100 yard range in Afton Marshes Freshwater which it took over from the Home Guard.
