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Latest comment: 1 year ago3 comments2 people in discussion
A rather bizarre reference to the Swinton connection. Swinton himself actually says that it was during an engagement of the Boer War that he realised the power not of the armoured vehicle but of the machine gun. He later says that he (as did many others) recognised the need for some sort of armoured vehicle in October, 1914, not 1900. If Mr. Ward-Phillips is quoted correctly, then he has misunderstood the facts. Hengistmate (talk) 17:11, 4 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
@Hengistmate: Belatedly coming to this and to the email you sent me regarding the former caption at File:Royal Tank Regiment memorial, Whitehall Place.jpg. Ward-Jackson (p. 432) says the following: "13 June 2000 marked a hundred years from the moment during the Boer War, when after a battle in which machine guns had inflicted heavy casualties, Swinton had become convinced that armoured vehicles were the only way to combat them." The sentence that follows that, from which I got the detail about the armoured Rolls-Royce escorting the Queen to the unveiling, is cited to "Daily Mail, 14 June 2000". Perhaps the incorrect historical detail, if that is what it is, is taken from there as well?
The second point was about the image caption, which used to include the text "The location is where the idea of the first tank was conceived by Ernest Swinton." That photo is exported from Geograph and the caption is also directly from that site, though it now seems to have been amended there as well; here's an archived version of the original page. Ward-Jackson writes that "The precise location was chosen as a focal point between the Old War Office, where the tank pioneer Lt. Col. Sir Ernest Swinton was working in February 1916, and the Metropole Building of the Ministry of Munitions in Northumberland Avenue, where Swinton found an office from which to enlist crews for the tanks", citing Margaret Baker's Discovering London's Statues and Monuments (2002). I do have a copy of the Baker, but not to hand. As the Geograph image is from 2007, before Ward-Jackson's book had come out, perhaps the original uploader had misread Baker. Ham II (talk) 21:06, 11 July 2023 (UTC)Reply
Hello there. The point of all this is that Swinton did not conceive the idea of the first tank in London. His critics maintain that he didn't conceive it at all, and I'm inclined to agree with them, but Swinton states in his autobiography "Eyewitness" that the idea of an armoured vehicle on caterpillar tracks came to him as he drove through northern France "as I bowled along in my car, on my way from St. Omer, in the early hours of the 19th October (1914)"
I had quite a lengthy correspondence with Mr. Ward-Jackson, which I'd be happy to share with you, and he is now enlightened. It's quite common for accounts of these events to become garbled. Swinton was working at the above locations by Feb 1916, but the two prototype tanks, Little Willie and Mother, had already been built by engineers of the Landship Committee entirely without his knowledge, while he was still unsuccessfully hawking his his idea round various military departments.
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