It was, as we have said, apparently not until the Admiralty Committee had been at work for some time that the Director of Fortifications and Works, on behalf of the War Office, ascertained that the Admiralty had designs for a “Land Cruiser” in hand.
The two Departments met at Wormwood Scrubs to witness the Admiralty’s trials of a Killen-Straight tractor. It was a remarkable occasion, for a number of men who were destined profoundly to influence the history of the Tanks now saw a foreshadowing of such an engine for the first time.
Among them were Lord Kitchener, Mr. Lloyd George, Mr. Balfour, and Mr. McKenna. Mr. Winston Churchill was also there, but to him an armoured tractor was no novelty.
After this gathering the Tank enthusiasts of the two Departments fell upon each other’s necks, swore eternal friendship, and in the middle of June formed a Joint Committee, of which Lieutenant Stern was Secretary.
Tanks—when any existed which would work—were to be a military service in the Department of the Master-General of Ordnance.
The Admiralty was to continue its work of designing, was to provide cash for experiments, and Mr. Churchill, its late First Lord, was to continue his invaluable work as a propellant. All seemed prosperous, for the representatives of the two Services appear to have worked pretty harmoniously, and the better informed and more progressive heads of Departments on both sides showed an interested benevolence.
But unfortunately—especially at the War Office—there appear to have been a certain number of obstructionists.
One senior Officer, fearing, one supposes, to be diverted from his ideal of the official attitude by the sight of these ungodly engines, refused so much as to attend the trials. The Adjutant-General (then no doubt, poor man, sufficiently harassed) rigidly refused a single man for the new arm. Fortunately, the Joint Committee was resourceful, and, after a preliminary appeal to Mrs. Pankhurst for militant suffragists,[4] they induced the Admiralty to turn over to them the 20th Squadron of the Armoured Car Reserve, and to increase the strength of this unit from 50 to 600 men.
By July Colonel Swinton—another of the Tank’s best sources of power—had returned to France. G.H.Q. was later to be more propitious, but now the taste of those inconclusive experiments was still in its mouth, and their chief technical adviser had begun to have horrid doubts about the whole affair. “Caterpillars,” he remarked, that he had lately seen “could only go at the rate of 1½ miles an hour on roads, were very slow in turning, and nearly every bridge in the country would require strengthening to carry them.” “It was necessary to descend from the realms of imagination to solid fact.”
Colonel Swinton explained and exhorted and expostulated.