Hear about ‘The Landships of Lincoln –Tank Development in WWI’ at the next talk organised by The Friends of Gainsborough Old Hall. Richard Pullen will be the guest speaker on Tuesday 1st November at 7.30pm at The Old Hall/
All are welcome. Admission is £4.00, which includes light refreshment.
If you go to the White Hart Lincoln, there is a room called The Tank Room. On 22nd July 1915, a commission was placed to design a machine that could cross a trench 4ft (1.2m) wide. To get away from the noise and distraction of Foster’s factory, a suite was taken at the White Hart Hotel, in Lincoln.
Secrecy surrounded the project with early models reportedly being painted with Cyrillic letters to back up disinformation they were snow ploughs for Russia.
A first design, little more than an armoured box on US tractor tracks, known as Little Willie, was tested on 19th September. It failed. And eventually a breakthrough happened which was to change war strategy forever.