David Fletcher's Tank Museum Tank Chats on TouTube

In pursuit of my current interwar interest I have just come across these.

The Tank Museum have published a set of short films about some of the vehicles in the collection, presented by David Fletcher MBE, and titled Tank Chats. These are available on YouTube (below).

I have set up a new page on the Interwar Tank Development blog to post these in a more permanent way.

The ones of particular interwar interest are:

#2 Carden Loyd





#3 Vickers Medium Tank MkII*





#4 Vickers Armstrong Type E





#5 Lanchester Armoured Car





Others in the series are

#1 The A13 Cruiser


#6 Vickers Light Mark VI B


#7 Mark II



An ideal way to use up a few spare minutes

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.