The Green Pack: Salisbury Plain
The Green Pack: Salisbury Plain, United Kingdom, 2004.
Salisbury Plain is the largest area of chalk grassland in North-West Europe. Large areas are designated as Sites of Special Scientific Interest, Special Conservation Areas and Special Protection Areas for birds. It also contains archaeological monuments including extensive Bronze Age barrow cemeteries, a number of Romano-British villages and the most well-known archaeological monument of them all, Stonehenge. At the same time, it is the site of the Army Training Estate Salisbury Plain (ATE SP), the UK’s largest defence estate and military training area.
The Green Pack is a set of playing cards that was issued to all soldiers using Salisbury Plain for training. It was designed to raise environmental consciousness among troops training on Salisbury Plain, and to give them instructions on what they should and should not do while conducting exercises. There are photographs on each of the 52 cards and 4 jokers which provide information about natural resources, how to treat the land and how to work safely. See the box►
Above: cards from “The Green Pack: Salisbury Plain”, Games & Print Services, United Kingdom, 2004.
By Peter Burnett
United Kingdom • Member since July 27, 2022 • Contact
I graduated in Russian and East European Studies from Birmingham University in 1969. It was as an undergraduate in Moscow in 1968 that I stumbled upon my first 3 packs of “unusual” playing cards which fired my curiosity and thence my life-long interest. I began researching and collecting cards in the early 1970s, since when I’ve acquired over 3,330 packs of non-standard cards, mainly from North America, UK and Western Europe, and of course from Russia and the former communist countries.
Following my retirement from the Bodleian Library in Dec. 2007 I took up a new role as Head of Library Development at the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP) to support library development in low-income countries. This work necessitated regular training visits to many sub-Saharan African countries and also further afield, to Vietnam, Nepal and Bangladesh – all of which provided rich opportunities to further expand my playing card collection.
Since 2019 I’ve been working part-time in the Bodleian Library where I’ve been cataloguing the bequest of the late Donald Welsh, founder of the English Playing Card Society.
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