The Small Arms Firing Range was located in Badbury Wood a short hike from the house.
Here, the Auxiliers could fire pistols, rifles and Thompson sub-machine guns.
Eddie Cox, an ex Coleshill resident, took Tom Sykes and Bill Ashby to the exact location of the firing range believed to have been used by the Auxiliers who trained at Coleshill. He had not been back to the spot for over 60 years but was certain he was in the right place. When Eddie was a teenager he used to explore in the words near Badbury Hill with his friends and they came across the range. They used to collect the spent rounds and take them home and he said the walls of the range were peppered with bullet holes.
Eddie said the sides were like a sheer drop all around the walls of the range and it was a large horseshoe shape which he said was very different to how it is now.
Whilst there Bill Ashby discovered a large piece of metal armour from a tank. Advice from David Fletcher, historian at the Tank Museum at the time, advised that it was probably from the front of a Vickers Medium tank or one of the related armoured vehicles that company produced. Since then, further research has identified that this is part of the frontal armour of a Vickers Medium MkI tank. Around 80 were produced during the 1920s in 3 versions, MkI, MkIA and MkIA*, differing in their machine gun armament. The piece of armour found at Coleshill has the large round air intake hole, which would have been covered by wire mesh, but also a small polygonal armoured vent to the side which was unique to the MkI series of tanks.
It is known that there were armoured vehicles at Coleshill to be used for demolition practice. These tanks were obsolete at the start of the war but were used for driver training as Britain had so few tanks. After Dunkirk a number were used as pillboxes around the country. Using one of these tanks for demolition would make sense later in the war, when it would have been considered little more than scrap. Quite what this piece of armour was doing on the firing range is unclear. It may have been all that was left after demolition exercises or more likely was moved there specifically from the Coleshill House site. Most likely the rest of the tank went for scrap either during the war or shortly after. While there are 3 surviving Vickers Medium MkII tanks, this may be the only surviving piece of a Vickers Medium MkI tank.
Eddie Cox