Let’s face it. Battlefield tours can often conjure images of wet school field trips; heavy on visitation, light on appreciation of the battlefield’s place in history. It was for this reason that Paul Trickett and Phil Adams started Kimber Battle Tours: tours of major European battlefields featuring military expertise, personal stories directly related to the visitors to the tour, and, most importantly, passion for the subject matter.
We both love military history and had been on different organised tours before but they always felt slightly hollow, in fact, the only ones where we thought everything was covered were the impromptu ones Phil used to give to interested parties while on deployment.
The aspect of Paul and Phil’s tours that intrigues me most is that of the bespoke research that goes into making the tours as personal as possible for individuals who had relatives fight and die in these battles.
We’re a people orientated company which means that we make our tours as personalised as possible. We undertake free ancestral research for any of the group who has a relative who died or took part in the battle in question and then we integrate those personal stories into the main narrative of the tour, so we have tours within the tour so to speak.
This notion of intimate personal engagement in battles on epic scales extends even as far as the company’s name: Kimber. Paul named the touring company after his great uncle, Frederick Charles Kimber, a Flight Engineer in Bomber Command who served in Lancasters and Stirlings during the Second World War. Paul cites profound detail of his Great Uncle’s final mission, and the sacrifice that he and his flight crew gave, in a way that would make many of us embarrassed about quite how little we know of our own ancestors’ contributions in these conflicts.
Paul’s love of social history is clear, and his appreciation of the battle from the foot soldier to the era it defines. “We spend a lot of time walking across and exploring historical landscapes and actually touching the ground or buildings that were key points in history. Winston Churchill once said, ‘Battles are the punctuation marks of history’ and you really get a feel for what he meant.” A favorite location? “My favourite place we visit has to be Gibraltar. When you stand on the top of Gibraltar and survey the scene you are overcome with just how all encompassing the British Empire was and Gibraltar embodies this feeling; it is both British but so totally alien to Britain in many other ways.”
Any plans to expand into tours in a different location or of a different period? “We do have plans to extend into different locations and time periods but just right now the nine tours that we offer cover a lot of ground. I personally would like to undertake tours to India and the West Indies because one of my historical passions is that great business enigma, The East India Company. A modern day equivalent would be something like Microsoft armed with guns, tanks, warships and planes invading Britain, then imposing strict trading regulations throughout the country whilst sending back profits to the HQ in America…”
Kimber Battle Tours currently operates tours in Ardennes , Normandy , Arnhem, Verdun, Somme , Ypres, Waterloo, Gibraltar and Great Britain. To find out more and book, head to http://www.kimberbattlefieldtours.co.uk/.
