The son of a soldier who stormed ashore in Normandy has made a 30-foot model of the floating harbour that was key to the success of the Allied invasion that started on D-Day.
The spectacular scale model of the Mulberry Harbour will be one of the star attractions at an exhibition being staged in Llandudno in North Wales to mark the 80th anniversary of the operation that marked a major turning point in the Second World War.
It’s been created by former Manchester Fire Service head of engineering John Collier, from Wigan, and his friend, David Collier, from Bolton, who believe they may be distantly related.
The giant concrete pontoon set up on Gold Beach, where British troops landed on June 6, 1944, provided the bridge over which two million men, four million tons of supplies and half a million vehicles made their way into occupied France.
Among them was John’s dad, Bill, a Royal Army Service Corps mechanic whose job was to keep the tanks of the Guards Armoured Division rolling down Hell’s Highway, the road to Arnhem to support the paratroopers who had seized the Pegasus Bridge.
The model will form part of the exhibition at Llandudno’s Holy Trinity Church from Wednesday, October 2, until Sunday, October 27,.
The exhibition, called the Longest Yarn which tells the story of D-Day, is being organised by the local community action group in the seaside resort, the Friends of Mostyn Street.
It will include a series of 80 metre-long 3D panels recreating the historic scenes in wool, all knitted and crocheted by an army of 2,000 volunteers from across the world.
Alongside it at the town’s Holy Trinity Church for the first time will be an accompanying panel featuring the famous Mulberry Harbours built on Conwy Morfa.
The display, that’s even longer than the Bayeux Tapestry, will be the centrepiece of a series of events taking place in Llandudno to commemorate D-Day and the 80 panels signify the 80 days it took the Allies to fight their way across France to Paris.
The new panel, knitted and crocheted by Creadigol Criccieth Creative, a team of up to 25 women from Criccieth, will include a depiction of the launching of the prototype concrete Mulberry Harbour developed in secret at Conwy Morfa where almost 1,000 men worked on the project from 1942 to 1944.
John said his father rarely spoke about his part in the invasion but he did open up after seeing the film A Bridge Too Far about how soon after they landed across the bridges from the Mulberry Harbour to the beach at Arromanches they reached the city of Caen.
There he found a young French woman clutching a naked baby so the resourceful Bill broke into an abandoned church and took a priest’s surplice to clothe the child – as well as a prayer book in French as a memento.
According to John, his dad nearly didn’t make it that far. He and his RASC colleagues were waiting in Tilbury Docks for the order to move when his commanding officer decided they’d waited long enough and gave the order to move out.
Despite a poor weather forecast they embarked for Normandy – the next day, June 18, the Guards Chapel was destroyed by a German bomb and the engineering workshops were also hit: “But for that I probably wouldn’t be here,” John said.
The model created by John and David, members of a modelling club in Leyland, shows the Mulberry Harbour developed at Conwy in action off Arromanches with a series of pontoon bridges crammed with armoured vehicles, trucks and troops heading for the beachhead.
It’s been a real labour of love for John who found a photograph of his father’s showing an old Scammell army truck and he said: “I decided to make a model from scratch and I’ve been doing it ever since.
“Everything apart from the axles has been hand-made based on the old photo of my dad’s and I won a prize at Blackpool Model Show with it in 2019 so I decided I needed a way of displaying the models I’d made.
“In my dad’s belongings I found his service number and the landing craft he went ashore in and that it must have been from the Mulberry Harbour and so I made the model of it.
“There are others but they’re 1/400th scale while this is closer to the 1/14 scale of the truck so I invested in a 3D printer and learned how to use it and made the pontoon bridges – each pontoon bridge took over 100 hours and there are seven of them.
“David thought I was crazy at first but he realised the logic of what I was trying to do with these models of World War Two tanks and trucks and so we built it with the harbour at one end of the bridges and a landing craft at the other and even a tugboat alongside.
“It was an incredible piece of engineering because the pontoons the bridge rested on were even designed to lift as the tide came in but they also had to stay aligned and are crowded with vehicles.
“They lead to the beach with its anti-tank mines and barbed wire and even a group of Gherman prisoners of war being captured on the beach – it’s a real snapshot of what was happening.
“We’ve got smoke coming from the funnel of the tug and from a German pillbox and as you walk along the display there are different sound effects from the ships and the vehicles and at the landward end there’s distant sounds of battle.”
“They actually got the idea for the modern day Conwy Tunnel from the techniques used in building the Mulberry Harbour – without it D-Day wouldn’t have happened.
“It was Churchill who took the decision because he knew they needed a deep water harbour for the invasion to work and he was right.”
The Llandudno exhibition has been co-ordinated by Gini Rivers of the Llandudno-based Friends of Mostyn Street and she said: “I met a lady called Tansy Forster in Normandy and she had had the idea to create The Longest Yarn and I thought that we in North Wales should be part of the story.
“The Mulberry Harbour was first developed here on Conwy Morfa by a Bangor civil engineer, Iorys Hughes, the Home Front Museum is here in Llandudno and so is the Blind Veterans Association while US Army medics trained here before the invasion.
“Nothing has been attempted like this since the Bayeux tapestry was created but in Llandudno we believe in always going that little bit further and the knitters from Criccieth have also created the Gown of Poppies which has a 30 metre train and has been to France for The Longest Yarn launch and will be on display in Llandudno in October.
Bringing “the free exhibition to Llandudno has been made possible thanks to £20,000 in funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund, Creu Conwy Town Team, Llandudno Town Council and Llandudno Hospitality Association.
Among the aims is to attract more visitors to the resort during the autumn to provide a boost to local businesses.
The exhibition will be free to access with donations to local causes and appropriately the annual Poppy Appeal.
For more information about The Longest Yarn exhibition that’s at Holy Trinity Church, Llandudno, between October 2 and 27 go to https://friendsofmostynstreet.co.uk/the-longest-yarn-project/ and to https://www.facebook.com/groups/fomsllandudno/?locale=en_GB
