We had a Course Cannon at TTTE Cottesmore in the early Eighties. It was built out of ex-Airmens' Mess catering-size baked bean cans, boasted a calibre of approximately six inches, and was fuelled by lighter fluid. The projectile was a tennis ball, wrapped in many layers of newspaper and covered in bodge tape. It weighed about two pounds.
The cannon was 'christened' in the bar annexe at Cottesmore during a NATO duty-free-fuelled Christmas bash. The target was a hapless German Navy navigator (whose name now eludes me), who bravely (?) stood in front of the folding doors to the main bar with an empty wine bottle on his head and humming the theme from Rossini's 'William Tell' overture as the gun crew tried desperately to warm the thing up, being initially rewarded only with a pathetic popping sound and the projectile falling uselessly out of the barrel onto the floor. Not surprisingly, after a couple of repeats of this disappointment, the hitherto considerable level of interest from the assembled (increasingly inebriated) crowd began to wane; people began to turn away and interrupted conversations started up again.
However those who had so inconsiderately failed to honour the occasion with their continued attention were suddenly brought up short by a truly colossal detonation. The onlookers saw a very surprised 'gun crew' surrounded by a cloud of wispy blue smoke, an even more surprised German navigator, still with the wine bottle on his head and, about four feet above him, an impressively large, round hole in the wall. The cannonball came to rest on top of the suspended ceiling of the main bar.
The PMC went suborbital, and issued an edict to charge every officer present the princely sum of £5 towards repairs to the wall. However he was forced to reconsider this strategy when he was presented with a photograph, taken the same evening, starring himself as a quite properly enthusiastic member of the firing party...
I think the phrase went 'Ve haf ze negatif'.
