Police Dogs Display

It’s a busy day down at the Fort today, so hopefully your willingness to attend the first of the activities won’t be affected by anything you did last night. As part of ‘Fort Day’ there will be a demonstration by the Sussex Police Sniffer Dogs. The highly skilled dogs work throughout the country searching out any sign of illegal substances and particularly explosives. They were used at last year’s Labour Party conference in Brighton, and are often seen with their handlers around the terminals at Gatwick Airport. Look out for Nash, Freddie and Lucy, three of the dogs awarded bravery medals last year.

There’s also an exhibition and lecture, dedicated to the Royal Observer Corps, a defence-warning organisation operating in the UK between 1925 and 1995. Their original role was to create a system for detecting, tracking and reporting aircraft movements over Britain. In the 1950’s they were also detecting and reporting potential nuclear blasts and fall-outs. They were at their busiest during 1962’s Cuban Missile Crisis, before eventually disappearing off the scene in the early 1990’s. The third attraction today is the Worthing & District Amateur Radio Club (WADARC) open day. They have embraced Newhaven Fort’s tradition as an important communications post, and maintain their own fully operational amateur radio station on site. It’s manned throughout the year by the WADARC ‘radio hams’, but today is one of the rare occasions when the visiting public get to see them in action. Tony Hancock would have loved it. NW