David Fletcher - Battling B-Types

[The Tank Museum]

 

Above: This vehicle was apparently photographed at Hornchurch in Essex with a very mixed crew, presumably engaged on home defence duties.

 

David Fletcher MBE, former Tank Museum Historian, presents another in his series of exclusive articles inspired by the extensive archive of unique historic documents and photographs held at The Tank Museum.

---

 

The idea of a bus becoming an armoured fighting vehicle seems faintly ridiculous although it has happened and if we go back to those days when there was relatively little to choose between a bus and a lorry chassis, there are two very good examples involving the legendary B-Type in the early months of the First World War.

 

The body of one of the buses can just be seen in the background of this picture, taken on the premises of the Dunkirk shipyard.

 

On 17 September 1914 the Dunkirk engineering firm Forges et Chantiers de France delivered an armoured vehicle, based upon a B-Type chassis to a detachment of the British Royal Naval Air Service, located nearby, a second vehicle followed four days later. We must assume that they were more or less identical although such photographs as we have seem to show only B752 but whether this was the first or the second to be delivered is unclear.

 

The general appearance may be judged from the photograph but describing them as armoured might be pushing the truth a bit far. In reality each vehicle was covered, in parts, by panels of steel plate, the kind of thing you might find lying about in any small shipyard. It would probably stop a rifle bullet at a reasonable distance but it was not proper, heat-treated armour such as appeared later. Nor did the vehicles carry any form of fixed armament, such as machine-guns as far as one can see, but relied upon the firepower of their passengers, twelve Royal Marine riflemen who were supposed to squat down in the back and shoot through loopholes in the sloping sides. To that extent the vehicles could probably be better described as armoured personnel carriers, although that term was not current at that time. In addition to the riflemen, who were known as the Motor Bandits to the rest of the Royal Marines each bus would carry a driver and presumably a vehicle commander in the cab at the front, but whether there was a division between the cab, and what we might call the fighting compartment we do not know.

 

B752 with a party of Royal Marines aboard. As you can see the only way to board was over the side. There was no door, or anything fancy like that.

 

The officer in charge of these two, along with a selection of equally home made armoured cars plus some transport and a few crude aircraft was Commander Charles Rumney Samson R N.; a man apparently cast in the same mould as Sir Francis Drake. Fearless, innovative and eternally optimistic he virtually introduced the idea of armoured motor vehicles to the British forces and developed techniques for using them. Unfortunately he was also frantically impatient and he soon found that with the two ‘armoured’ buses trundling along his tactics of high-speed raids to intercept German cavalry patrols were just too slow so most of their time was spent guarding a cross-roads by the Chateau Motte au Bois near Morbecque which Samson had appropriated as his headquarters.

 

Samson’s column entering Antwerp. Armoured cars are preceding the buses but no sign at all of either of the armoured buses which are supposed to have been there.

 

However they did have one glorious moment. On October 3rd 1914 Samson was entrusted with the task of escorting 70 double deck buses from Dunkirk to Antwerp as part of the evacuation plan. The buses seem to have been Daimlers, drawn from the Gearless and M. E. T. fleets, still in their blue and white livery, still with their civilian crews and still bearing advertisements for such things as Dewars Whisky. Samson was also able to muster eleven armoured cars (new ones were slowly being delivered from Britain) and he also took along the two armoured B-Types. He claims that he halted and reorganised the convoy on the outskirts of Antwerp, first the eleven armoured cars, then the two armoured buses and then the long column of motor buses although it has to be said that photographs of the convoy arriving in Antwerp show armoured cars and Daimler buses but never the two armoured ones, which are never mentioned again.

 

Antwerp was in a state of utter chaos and, having delivered the buses to the Marine Brigade, Samson seems to have had his work cut out just getting his own armoured cars and aircraft away but the buses seem to have been appropriated, and indeed misappropriated by just about everyone so that the departure from Antwerp was not such a well-organised affair and indeed some of the buses had to be left behind due to shortages of fuel.

 

Those with a sense of history might see this as a practical application of the exercise held in England in December 1908 when some 500 men of the Territorial Army were lifted and transported to the Thames Estuary in a fleet of twenty four buses hired from the General, Union Jack and Vanguard companies.

 

Events in Flanders in 1914 are worth a full-time study in themselves and it is amazing to find that much of it came under the responsibility of the British Admiralty through the offices of the Royal Naval Air Service. They employed aircraft of course, plus armoured cars and gun lorries, three armoured trains and the buses which, incidentally, were organised by Wilfred Dumble, a Canadian and a retired officer of the Royal Engineers who later became general manager of the LGOC and ultimately a Lieutenant-Colonel of Royal Marines to organise the military buses. Indeed, although it has no bearing on the present story Wilfred Dumble was one of the founder members of Winston Churchill’s Admiralty Landships Committee so to that extent he also played a part in the evolution of the tank, which was also sponsored by the Royal Navy, at least to begin with.

 

Now, however, we must move on to the British Army and to a parallel scheme which is the main motivation behind this article since it is shrouded in a certain amount of mystery which, one hopes, readers may be inspired to help solve. The project seems to have begun with a scheme, possibly attributable to Lord Kitchener – then Secretary of State for War – which involved earmarking a fleet of 700 London buses to be held in readiness if it proved necessary to evacuate the Capital or deal with any similar emergency. Seven hundred does not seem to very many given the size of the Metropolis, with a total carrying capacity of less than 3,000 people but perhaps it was part of a larger scheme, or maybe these 2,450 people were deemed worthy of evacuation and the rest were not.

 

Anyway this is unimportant since it never happened but it would be useful to have a date for this project since it has a bearing on the first controversy. The point is that, in order to provide protected escort for these buses the War Office instituted a scheme to build some armoured vehicles on the same chassis. The design of armour for these vehicles, if armour it was, seems to have been entrusted to the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich where a prototype was apparently built. Again we hardly need to describe it since a photograph shows it all but it should be recorded that, in addition to riflemen this vehicle carried mountings for machine-guns at the front of the cab, at the back and along both sides.

 

DX1284, which we believe to be the prototype of the War Office armoured B Types.

 

One story, widely accepted, is that in April 1915 or thereabouts the Royal Naval Air Service was approached by the War Office to provide an officer, with experience of armoured cars, to advise them on their own design. The officer chosen, the only one available at the time, was Flight Commander Thomas Hetherington, who had served with Samson in 1914 and knew what he was talking about. He reported to Kitchener at the War Office on 12 April 1915 where he was questioned closely by Lord Kitchener and Generals von Donop and Guthrie-Smith. Hetherington was then sent to Woolwich to cast his expert eye over the finished vehicle. He was not impressed and said so; the War Office had not taken advantage of Admiralty experience on the development of thin armour and the material applied to the Woolwich vehicle was entirely unsuitable.

 

There is, however, an alternative claimant to this story, a certain Captain Bede Bentley. Bentley, whose regiment is not recorded, claimed that he was invited to visit Kitchener, at his private address, in October 1914 where he handed over his design for a tank, although this claim was subsequently rejected. In fact Bentley did not bring his case before the High Court until 1925 by which time the true origins of the tank had already been settled. Indeed it seems improbable that anyone could have seen the need for a tank as early as October 1914, let alone designed one although it is on record that Bentley did visit Kitchener around this time, using family connections to gain the invitation.

 

Bentley’s story in respect of the armoured B-Type is not dissimilar to Hetherington’s, except that it is set some six months earlier, on 19 October 1914. Bentley claims that he visited the War Office, at the invitation of Lord Kitchener, and was sent down to examine an armoured vehicle in a quadrangle within the War Office complex which he, likewise, condemned as unsuitable, although on what grounds is not explained. Bede Bentley’s claim to have invented the tank tends to colour everything else that he says and one tends to regard Hetherington as the more reliable witness, but a lot hangs on the dates, which is why this aspect is so important.

 

One way or the other, however, it appears that a prototype vehicle was built to this design but it is what happened after that which provides the essence of our second problem, the one that could involve bus enthusiasts in various parts of the country, but in particular the east coast. So far we have identified up to four different vehicles although only one of these is a London registered B-Type; one is totally anonymous while the other two have registrations ranging from Ipswich (DX1284 - seen above) to Norwich (AT2508) which raises other interesting issues.

 

If this was a pure War Office project, based upon armour produced at Woolwich and fitted to LGOC B-Types then you might expect new chassis, fresh out of Walthamstow, but they do not. Rather the vehicles appear to belong to provincial bus companies along the east coast, fitted with armour and used locally. Maybe the armour was supplied in kit form from Woolwich and fitted locally, we simply don’t know.

 

This photograph is reported to have been taken at Ramsgate in Kent but we do not know the identity of this particular vehicle.

 

Which is about all we know so far. Since the scheme to evacuate London never happened the buses seem to have been employed on home defence duties, which is presumably why they were concentrated on the East Coast, but it would be fascinating to know more.

 

To find out more about The Tank Museum's Archive & Reference Library, click here.

[fesm_ndt]

All very interesting :tup::

[GeePig]

Lovely bit of history there

 

I don't know a lot about buses, so is this the B-Type that you mean: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGOC_B-type

 

Trevor

[Great War truck]

Yes, very interesting. Thanks for explaining that David.