Tim Wilmot was charged with possession of two parts of a machine gun.
These parts were the breech-blocks
of a General Purpose Machine Gun
used by Britain's Armed Forces.
When Tim Wilmot was at Plympton Grammar School,
the Royal Marines had a storage and servicing depot
at Coypool beside the River Plym.
On the opposite side to the river was a disused railway,
with a chain link fence between it and the depot.
For years there was a large hole in the chain link fence
that allowed anyone access to a scrap heap.
As a result, many schoolboys collected souvenirs,
ranging from steel hemets to WW2 radio sets,
to helicopter crash debris to belt buckles and straps,
to parts of weapons that were considered worn out.
Tim Wilmot was by nature a collector,
and he had a box of bits of weapons from the dump.
However, these parts were simply bits of scrap steel,
incapable of being assembled into a weapon,
just as a clutch pedal, an exhaust manifold, and a brake pad
are incapable of being assembled as a car.
The law prohibiting possession of parts of a machine gun
was enacted for a very good reason.
During the counter-terrorism war in Northern Ireland,
paddies found that if one paddy carried one bit of a machine gun,
and another paddy carried another bit,
they could escape liability under law
because they were not actually in possession of a weapon.
However it was not the intention of Parliament
that the law be used against a collector
with old scrap bits that posed no threat.
Tim Wilmot suggests
that the use of that law against him was unreasonable.
The police, engaged themselves in a criminal cover-up
to pervert the course of justice
by allowing Caradon District Council
to escape liability for serious criminal offences,
needed to damage or destroy Tim Wilmot's credibility.
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