F.R Simms – War Car Designer.

[The Tank Museum]

 

Above: The Simms War Car.

 

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.

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I have been rummaging around in old files recently and amidst the bits and pieces that surfaced I found quite a few documents, articles and old cuttings, regarding the pioneer automobilist and armoured car designer F. R. Simms.

 

Further stimulus came from my friend Stuart Gibbard who unearthed more information and some new photographs. Not that I propose to revisit all of that here, I have another object in mind. Freddie Simms is just the excuse. However we should acknowledge Simms’ place among the pioneers – he was not the only one by any means. His earliest essay dates from 1899 and involved fitting a Maxim gun to the handlebars of a Beeston Quadricycle, powered by a 1½hp De Dion engine which he demonstrated at Richmond in Surrey in that year (right). However much of what Simms did, his motivation if you like and many of the people he interacted with were more involved in the general history, the early history, of the automobile in Britain and the application of mechanisation to agriculture so what I really want to show is how a study, albeit a fairly superficial study of these factors will improve our understanding of his place in the history of armoured warfare.

 

I imagine most people with a passing interest in armoured vehicles, and indeed many who are more focussed will at least be aware of the Simms War Car. It turns up in virtually every book on the subject of armoured fighting vehicles as if to prove that, from the very start the attitude of those bewhiskered old codgers at the War Office was dead set against anything mechanical or modern that might upset the even tenor of their way of life. Of course it wasn’t really like that, not quite anyway, but that well-known photograph, now almost iconic, of Simms’ massive vehicle, filled to the brim with top-hatted toffs outside the Crystal Palace in April 1902 seems to say it all (left). More than one writer has commented on the fact that there is not a uniform in sight, not even a policemen; indeed The Autocar commented on this at the time in the most disparaging terms. Incidentally the Crystal Palace seems to have been a popular venue with F, R, Simms. When he began importing Daimler cars in 1895 he demonstrated the first one at the Crystal Palace.

 

However my interest at the moment and the object of this article is to take a look from another angle, in a way that Frederick Simms illustrates admirably.

 

A friend of mine refers to it as ‘mixing your disciplines’ although in his case it usually means making a model with one hand with a glass of single malt in the other and nothing wrong with that, it has to be said. Simms was not a military man, indeed I can trace no military influence on Simms’ life at all unless he was a member of the Motor Volunteer Corps, as most of his associates were, so one is forced to ask where his military interest comes from. The answer seems to be that he had a wide range of interests extending from ordinary motor cars and lorries through these armoured designs and internal combustion tramcars to farm tractors and mechanical lawnmowers.

 

Those photographs that Stuart Gibbard sent me, which I include here, are what inspired this piece because they illustrate my point precisely. Two are of the Simms War Car, parked on a road somewhere while the third shows his prototype farm tractor (right) and Stuart was interested to know whether I thought that this machine showed, in effect, the chassis of the former – in other words was it possible to say that Simms used the tractor as the basis for his War Car?

 

My immediate reaction is to say no; Simms had a number of interests, each of which was unique in its own way and apart from the fact that both vehicles featured a four-cylinder engine and four wheels there was no direct link. I base this view on the fact that Simms had such a broad range of interests – mixing his disciplines if you like – that each project was a concept in its own right with only the most basic features in common. In any case the War Car pre-dates the tractor by a year; the latter was built and demonstrated at Ipswich in 1903.

 

I think this becomes obvious when one compares the tractor chassis with the sectioned drawings of the War Car that appeared in The Autocar (right); the War Car is a lot bigger than the tractor and it has coil springs on the front axle whereas the tractor, as far as one may see, has leaf springs all round. The tractor also has a power take-off at the rear, for driving other farmyard implements – a typical agricultural application. We are told that the War Car was driven by a 16hp Daimler engine while that of the tractor is rated at 20hp; both are described as four-cylinder and might well be the same while the War Car, we are told, had a four speed Canstatt gearbox while one would expect no more than two speeds on a tractor; in addition to the power take-off of course..

 

The layout of the tractor is entirely conventional, even by today’s standards, but the War Car is not. The engine is located in the centre on the War Car and although it is described as a four cylinder unit it hardly looks big enough and there is no obvious location for a radiator. On the other hand the tractor chassis is laid bare, you can see the radiator at the front and the cylinder blocks, each of two cylinders, in line behind it. This leaves a lot of questions concerning the War Car unanswered; where is the exhaust for instance? According to the article in The Autocar, which reads a bit like an official handout or press release, the War Car’s engine was cooled by a Canstatt fan, driven off the engine, which sounds like an air-cooled arrangement; there is certainly no indication of a radiator or a water system, or indeed, any evidence of an exhaust pipe; while as the drawing shows the gearbox is apparently located behind the driving axle, which is a very odd arrangement. Perhaps someone with a better engineering brain than mine can make more sense of this.

 

Now my idea of mixing disciplines involves more than single malt, although I have no objection to including that at all, but it extends to the point that my book shelves hold titles on early tractors and motor cars in addition to armoured vehicles, among many other things, but these will do just for now. The tractor itself, I think, can be dismissed fairly quickly. At this time Simms was acting as something of an entrepreneur, designing things, sometimes building prototypes but in the main offering his ideas to others to develop. From a couple of my books I learn that the tractor was developed, at least to the point of a working prototype, by the Ipswich firm Ransomes, Sims and Jefferies; although their Mr Sims was not our Mr Simms, nor even related as far as we known. They built and demonstrated a prototype tractor based upon Frederick Simms’ design in 1903 but failed to attract any customer interest at all and seem to have let the project drop.

 

Simms himself of course was also interested in capitalising on the motor industry in whatever way he could think of although he, like many others, realised that this was a long term process – an idea that would only catch on if influential members of the public, followed as a matter of course by the public at large, took to automobilism in a big way. Thus, among his immediate circle he numbered the dedicated motoring enthusiast Sir David Salomans, the wealthy Evelyn Ellis and, inevitably, the Hon. Charles Rolls. A less exalted but in many ways more influential character was the diminutive businessman Harry J Lawson whose business methods, while not strictly speaking a model of probity, at least ensured that things got done. Simms, one suspects got tarred to some extant by Lawson’s brush which is why, some say, he never got the knighthood he might otherwise have deserved.

 

Now, perhaps, you can see what I mean by mixing my disciplines. At one level, including Simms himself of course, we have some quite fascinating military connections. Ransomes, Sims and Jefferies not only built some of the early Thompson Steamers that Colonel Crompton acquired when he pioneered military haulage in India they were also involved in the production of special devices for 79th Armoured Division during preparations for the invasion of France in 1944 – so there are sound military reasons to study that company, but for similar reasons the firm that Charles Rolls and his partner Henry Royce founded in 1904 has had significant links with the military, almost up to the present day.

 

But those things aside my point is this, that the whole subject, whether it be the history of tractors, or cars, or the persons involved is fascinating in its own right and the more one studies these things, the more one learns, the more interesting it all becomes. What horrifies me, and I come across it all the time, is the attitude that says ‘this is my interest, this and nothing else’. Believe me if you do not study the subject as broadly as possible; follow every avenue as far as it leads you will miss a lot and never even get a true grip on your core subject.