Blacker Bombard

29 mm Spigot Mortar (Blacker Bombard)
Men of the Saxmundham Home Guard prepare to fire a Blacker Bombard during training with War Office instructors, 30 July 1941.
Type	Anti-tank Mortar
Place of origin	United Kingdom
Service history
In service	1941–1942
Used by	British Army Home Guard Royal Navy
Wars	World War II
Production history
Designer	Lieutenant Colonel Stewart Blacker
Designed	1940
No. built	c. 22,000
Variants	Hedgehog
Specifications
Weight	112 pounds (51 kg)-360 pounds (163 kg)
Crew	3–5
Calibre	29 millimetres (1 in) (nominal calibre – diameter of spigot)
Breech	Spigot mortar
Rate of fire	6–12 rounds per minute
Effective firing range	100 yards (91 m)

The Blacker Bombard, also known as the 29mm Spigot Mortar, was an infantry anti-tank weapon devised by Lieutenant-Colonel Stewart Blacker in the early years of the Second World War.

Intended as a means to equip Home Guard units with an anti-tank weapon in case of German invasion, at a time of grave shortage of weapons, it was accepted only after the intervention of Churchill. Although there were doubts about the effectiveness of the Bombard, many were issued. Few, if any, saw combat.

With the end of the Battle of France and the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from the port of Dunkirk between 26 May and 4 June 1940, a German invasion of Great Britain seemed likely. However, the British Army was not well-equipped to defend the country in such an event; in the weeks after the Dunkirk evacuation it could field only twenty-seven divisions. (The German Army had more than 100 divisions at that time.) The Army was particularly short of anti-tank guns, 840 of which had been left behind in France, and only 167 were available in Britain; ammunition was so scarce for the remaining guns that regulations forbade even a single round being used for training purposes.

Given these shortcomings, those modern weapons that were available were allocated to the British Army, and the Home Guard was forced to supplement the meagre amount of outdated weapons and ammunition they had with ad hoc weapons. One of these was the Blacker Bombard, designed by Lieutenant Colonel Stewart Blacker, the origins of which went back to the 1930s. During the early part of the 1930s, Blacker became interested in the concept of the spigot mortar. Unlike conventional mortars the spigot mortar did not possess a barrel, and instead there was a steel rod known as a 'spigot' fixed to a baseplate; the bomb itself had a propellant charge inside its tail. When the mortar was to be fired, the bomb was pushed down onto the spigot, which exploded the propellant charge and blew the bomb into the air.