Has anyone ever seen or use a DRAMA report?

Hi

I have had a reply back from the royal artillery museum and they have something called DRAMA reports for certain units. Has anyone ever seen what they are like? Can’t find them anywhere.

Cheers

 

I know this is really dumb, but, if the museum have them, can't they help?

 

Sorry what I mean is they have said they have one about 52 field artillery and that it is pretty detailed.

What I meant was has anyone seen one for another unit etc. As they are £25 for a copy of it and it takes about a month for a reply so I am trying to save time on waiting for if it’s worth a route going down etc

 

I've not heard of DRAMA report but if this is a printout of the information they hold on their database for many RA Regiments then the report I received for my Dad's Regiment was worthwhile.

Tim

 

Just a wild guess but could DRAMA stand for D???? Royal Artillery Museum Archives.

Gus

 

Possibly. I have been trying to work it out

 

Maybe digitised

 

Funnily enough I've just received a reply from the RA museum too, about an enquiry I put in a month or so ago, and they mentioned DRAMA. From the way it was put, I think it's a database of war diary summaries:

"Coming on to 139 Field Regiment, we have our War Diary precis database, DRAMA, which has the 1940 action described in a couple of pages but you probably have the War Diary already. If you don’t then the charge for this is in the attached document."​

From this I'm guessing that someone reads the war diary of a regiment and writes a summary of what it contains, so if you've already got the regiment's diary it's not going to reveal any additional information. If it's £25 then it would probably be better value to ask one of the archive chaps on this forum to copy the full diary for you - at least then you've got the original source and not one person's interpretation of it. Certainly I've found that it can be the little incidental details and appendices in the war diaries that can reveal a lot of useful stuff, and you'd miss all that with a summary.

There's some stuff I'd really like access to in the RA museum but frustratingly most of their WW2 records are off in deep storage following the move from London and it may be a very long time before it sees the light of day. Understandably they seem to be concentrating on WW1 data at the moment.

 

Prior to obtaining the report from the RA archives they warned me that I might learn little additional information if I already had the Regiment's War Diary. In the event the RA report did contain quite a lot of detail not available in the War Diary I had. Why this should be I'm not sure but I found having both documents worthwhile.

Tim