A wooden construction designed to house about 80 men in 6 arms or legs with a central ablutions area. Each leg had 12 bed spaces (or 24 if double bunked) and sometimes a Cpl’s room next to the room entrance door. The passages between legs always had the sand filled fire buckets with the red fire extinguishers mounted nearby.
The ablutions had the row of stalls, some with and others without a bog roll.
White sinks all lined up as if on parade, none of which had a plug.
Shower cubicles and baths were also available but where do you hang your towel?
The drying room was nearby. A place that contained all the empty lemonade bottles for later conversion to cash at the NAAFI to bolster the training Sgt’s benevolent fund.
Also a place to dry all your neatly Blancoed webbing. You soon learned that if you wanted to lose your webbing you’d dry it in there for somebody else to claim. Hence all the radiators in the rooms would be festooned with freshly Blancoed webbing. I don’t know why we used the rads as they were very rarely hot or even warm.
The furniture supplied was always the same where ever you were serving, a wooden cupboard on which you mounted your top kit and boots and sometimes a bedside locker to keep your fags handy and that’s it. Did we always have lampshades? I recall at some time having to sit on shoulders to dust a few. Windows were always above the radiators and rarely curtained.
When not in a spider the accommodation still consisted of a wooden construction in a terraced form. Still a wooden box. Even the accommodation in the Far East (Kluang) were wooden! This includes the WO’s and Sgt’s mess.
Only in Detmold did I ever have accommodation of brick construction.
Thank goodness things have changed and today’s men have decent accommodation to relax in.
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