Stephen Nunn hunts down old gun in Maldon's Promenade Park

She grew up in Church Street and so it was her childhood playground.

In later life, she ran the tea-rooms there with her second husband, Great War veteran Clem Last.

She worked for the Lasts long before she married Clem and I have some of her photos from that time.

Among those old sepia images there is an intriguing shot of her and other members of staff sitting on what looks like a gun.

It must have been taken some time between the wars and looks like it was near to what was then the park-keeper’s house (now the Museum in the Park).

The Great War had a massive impact on communities, not least here in Maldon and, when it was all over, people wanted to remember.

The Avenue of Remembrance starts not far away from where the gun once stood. It originally consisted of 180 numbered trees, dedicated by the Lord Lieutenant of Essex, Brigader-General Sir Richard Colvin KCB and Canon IL Seymour, the vicar of All Saints’.

At the time it was said that the trees would act as “a remembrance for many centuries to come, to be cherished and cared for by the townspeople and guarded with loving care”.

Most of the trees are still there today, but what of the gun – what happened to it and where does it fit into the story?

There are quite a few surviving photos of it. My late friend, Paddy Lacey, reproduced one in his book Maldon and the Dengie Hundred (Tempus 2002) with a caption that suggests it was a “14lb gun, a relic from the First World War”.

That particular photo shows “participants (from) Bermondsey Sunday School (on an) outing to Maldon in the early 1930s… using it as a climbing frame”.

One of the girls is identified as Elizabeth Daniels and the now long gone St Mary’s Infants School can be seen in the background.

My shot (pardon the pun) shows Nan poking her head around the group to the left and staring straight at the camera, the tea-rooms behind her in the distance.

I was recently shown another photo from the collection of the late Wilf Bright (1923-1990). Like so many family snaps there is nothing written on the back of it, because they all knew who was in the picture and when it was taken - but all these years on we don’t.

The staff from the Prom tea rooms (author’s collection) (Image: Stephen Nunn)

That gun has always fascinated me but, search as I might, I struggled to find much about it.

I know that a gun briefly appeared outside All Saints’ Church in 1918, shown off by members of the Royal Garrison Artillery, but it’s not the same one. That example is clearly a camouflaged British 6-inch (152 mm) 26-cwt howitzer and was linked to a promotional tour to encourage the purchase of savings to support “the guns that have won the war”.

Many years later, when I was a youngster, what is now 20a High Street was an open yard and an ancient field-gun stood there with its barrel pointing menacingly at passers-by.

Returning to the Prom gun, I am fortunate that, over the years, I have made contact with a number of experts in their historical fields.

I showed one of them the images. He immediately identified it as not British, but German – a 15cm sFH 13 (150 mm) heavy field howitzer that fired a 42kg (93lb) shell.

It was, apparently, one of a number of “war trophies” that were distributed across the country.

The approximate location of the gun (Image: Stephen Nunn)

Local populations, however, were not keen on them – an enemy gun that had killed British soldiers was still a bit too raw.

Consequently, some of these guns were known to have been spirited away and buried. One example was even thrown into a local river. It is possible none of the German guns brought over to the UK for this purpose survived for very long on public display.

After all, as much as the posed views on the gun show smiling faces, those very same Maldonians had, throughout 1914-18, when the wind was in the right direction, heard the same guns firing at the front.

The victims of those relentless barrages were now represented by named and numbered trees in the Avenue of Remembrance.

Little wonder then, that the gun quickly disappeared and no record seems to have survived of its fate.

All we have left to remind us of its story are those few faded images of posed groups who, despite impressions, must have been experiencing very mixed, personal emotions about the gun on the Prom.