Vintage Wargaming: tank development

Showing posts with label tank development. Show all posts

Saturday, 25 July 2015

Today's interwar post - The Royal Tournament 1929

Arsing about with Carden Loyds.

Friday, 24 July 2015

Update on Interwar Tank Development blog

Breamish have kindly digitised the reamaining photographs from the second Vickers Armstrong Lts d album and sent them to me. I have addes these in a small number of new pots on the Tank Development blog. They include a couple of photos of the A1E1 under construction, plus the Vickers 16 tonners, more Vickers Mediums, the 18 pdr gun transporter and the Armstrong Siddeley Dragon.

The blog can be found here.

Tuesday, 14 July 2015

Back to Beamish

I have been back to Beamish today to go through the second album and list all the captions. I have now added these captions and all the interwar photos to the new blog. I have also put a labels gadget early on the page as this is the main means of searching, rather than browsing, the blog.

The new photographs include Carden Loyd Mk VIs of various types, the double half track, an extensive collection of trailers, the Tractor Truck and its variants, Dragons and Light Dragons, bridging, and tilting trials for the Vickers Medium.

Hopefully plenty more of interest. This is all the interwar photos, except some which have not been digitised as yet, possibly because they were too big for the scanner.

These photographs include:
18 pdr tarnsporter of 1922
18 pdr transporter Mk II
Armstrong Siddeley Dragon
Independent Tank - 2 photographs
16 Ton Tank nos 1 & 2
Vickers Medium - 2 photographs
Colonel Breyer D of A (Directorate of Artillery?)
A number of other photos of Mediums Mk i and II.

There are also around 20 photographs of WWII or just post war subjects - 13 of variants of the Valentine, the Tetrarch, Harry Hopkins and several variants of the Alecto. I won't put these on the new blog as they are not interwar but I will look for some other way of making them available.

Next job is to start adding text to posts and methodically looking at the labelling.

There have been more than 6,000 page views on the blog in its first seven days so it looks as if it is proving useful.

Tuesday, 7 July 2015

Exciting times

Well the exciting news is that I came home to a DVD containing the photographs from the two Vickers Armstrong albums held by Beamish Museum.

My first impression was the quality of the photographs. There are also some "action" shots from the trials at Wool in February 1925 and February 1927, and from the Canberley demonstration to Dominion Premiers on Novemeber 13th 1926.

Some Pathe footage of this event can be viewed on YouTube:

Other impressions were how much they were giving half tracks a real go, and there are some very interesting photographs including bridging equipment. I can't remember seeing any of these photographs in print before.

So what next? I think I will set up a new blog for the photographs and encourage knowledgeable people to make comments which can be added to the posts.

This may take some work; my immediate need is to make sure I have all the original captions from the books, which I don't at the moment. I hope to spread a few interesting photographs around here and on suitable forums. I am quite keen on this so I expect to nake substantial progress quickly - if you remember how fast the Georland blog was done I have a similar commitment to this project.

Once I have a reasonable amount of material on line I will go live and then continue to add to it over time. I hope there will be a substantial amount of information made accessible soon.

Sources, permissions and editorial policy

This site uses a range of sources to provide access to information about wargaming, for the most part from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. These sources are mainly paper based, may be ephemeral (catalogues, price lists, painting instructions etc), and in general are not easily accessible elsewhere.

I am particularly grateful to Don Featherstone and to John Tunstill, who have both given their permission for the reproduction of materials from their ground breaking magazines, respectively Wargamer's Newsletter and Miniature Warfare (and later Miniature Wafare and Model Soldiers).

Where possible I have made efforts to obtain permission for reproduction of any material covered by copyright.

Some of the source material is typescript, may be fragile, and in some cases to scan or photograph it may require the removal of staples and the destruction of the integrity of the original publication.

I have tried to deal with this in a number of ways, scanning or copying and adding as an image, or scanning for optical character recognition to provide text based posts. Where the content is more important than the aesthetic look of the original context, I have also taken the opportunity to make minor edits and layout changes to make the material work better on the screen. In these cases I may have edited for sense, corrected spelling or punctuation (including capitalization and the removeal of the wargamer's apostrophe). In doing this I recognise the advantage of working in an electronic format over the original editor working with typescript).

Of course these changes may lead to new mistakes and I would be grateful for any (polite) alerts to these through the comments system.

It is intended that this site will also include new writing on its subject areas.

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