by Guy Martin
The Mark IV tanks were either male or female. The males had two six-pounder cannons and two Lewis machine guns, while the females had five Lewis machine guns. The one they dug up was a female, called Deborah, the only tank to be left in the village of Flesquières. It’s now stored in an old farm building. From one side it looks in good nick, but there’s a hole where a shell has gone in. Walk round the back, though, and you can see the explosion has ripped the tank apart. The crew wouldn’t have been much worse off in a bean can.
As part of the display there was a framed photo of Deborah’s tank commander, Second Lieutenant Frank Heap. As I was looking at the portrait of Heap, Philippe told me his grandson was staying in his hotel. It sounded like TV bullshit, but it was a total coincidence. Philippe rang the hotel and the grandson, Tim, a bloke in his late fifties or early sixties, came to meet up and tell us about his granddad.
Each of these first tanks needed a crew of eight to go into battle: driver; commander; four gunners and two gearsmen operating the gears for each track. You could say it was a bit cosy in there. When bullets hit the tank they wouldn’t go through, but the crew would be showered with metal splinters coming off the inside of the tank’s armour. They were given chainmail facemasks, but I don’t know how many wore them. Conditions inside one of those early tanks were terrible, even without the enemy trying to kill you. There was heat coming off the engine and exhaust, the noise of the unsilenced engine sat in the middle of a metal hull right next to the crew, and then the serious threat of carbon monoxide poisoning from the fumes. No one had thought much about putting any kind of extractor fan in them, and they’d only do two miles to the gallon, so you can imagine the amount of fumes they were kicking out. It was so noisy in the tanks that the crew had to use simple sign language to communicate.
On the day Deborah was blown up, 23-year-old Second Lieutenant Heap and two of his crew climbed out to stretch their legs and see what was going on just as a shell hit Deborah, killing the other five crew. His grandson explained he lived to the age of 65, which was some kind of achievement considering how much he drank. He also said the family didn’t know why the tank was called Deborah, because his wife was named Ruth.
Looking at this 100-year-old tank made me wonder what I’d have done in their position. The Mark IVs were dead unreliable and I love the challenge of keeping stuff working. The government would advertise in motorcycle newspapers for the right kind of blokes to crew them. I wouldn’t want to be there, but I’d do what needed doing at the time, just like the millions who did just that in the 1914–18 war.
It was July when I visited France and met Philippe, and was filled in on all the background. We wanted to have a working replica made by November. The TV lot had found some great people and companies to try and make it happen, but we were starting from scratch and only had six months, at best.
One lucky find was a 20-year-old German physicist, Thorsten Brand. He loved building models, but had found the ones he could buy weren’t detailed enough for him, so he’d started making his own one-offs. His latest project was going to be a Mark IV. He’d been researching for years and had used old photos to make a near perfect 3D CAD solid model of a female Mark IV, the same as Deborah. By ‘solid model’ I mean a computer design, like industrial designers use. He was happy to share the CAD file, saving us a load of time. The TV lot had also got JCB on board, and they put one of their chief engineers, Martyn Molsom, in charge of their side of the job.
All Thorsten’s data was fed into JCB’s system and one of their young designers, Tom Beamish, spent weeks turning it into something JCB could manufacture within the time we had. Tom still had loads to do on the design side, because Thorsten had only drawn the exterior. When Tom was done I visited JCB’s World Headquarters, at Rocester, Staffordshire. I was given a virtual reality headset and I could ‘climb’ into the tank Tom had finished drawing. I could open the doors, look down the gun barrels. I was crawling around on the carpet inside this virtual tank, ducking down to make sure I didn’t bang my head on something that wasn’t there. What a great system. It’s the future.
Another important part of the team who made the tank a reality was Steve Machaye at Norfolk Tank Museum. He described himself as a self-taught mechanic, who started working on tractors at the age of 10 or 11, before moving into the military history side of things. He was massively excited when the TV lot contacted him. He admitted that he had thought, This isn’t going to happen, but I like the sound of it so I’ll talk to them. I can understand why he was sceptical. It was a massive, massive undertaking.
We visited his museum and Steve sketched out what had to be done in the simplest terms. He drew the sides of the tank, what he described as two rhomboids and what I called two oblongs on the slosh. Then he added the tracks.
He let me drive one of his collection, an ex-British Army Saladin Armoured Car. It is an 11-ton, 6-wheel-drive reconnaissance vehicle built in 1960. It does 45mph flat out, and about 30mph off-road. What a toy.
Other than Steve’s knowledge, we needed him to supply a motor, gearbox and back axle. There are no original engines available for the Mark IV. The original one was a Daimler-Foster six-cylinder, German, and there was only one in existence. Going out in the Saladin was fun, but it was relevant too, because the motor Steve suggested for our tank was the same as in his six-wheeler. It’s a Rolls-Royce B80 8-cylinder, 5.6-litre, water-cooled petrol engine that makes 160 horsepower.
The engine he was donating had never run. He’d owned it for 25 years and had bought it for £100. Damp had got to it over the years and it looked like it had been to the moon and back, but it was brand new, needed a check over and a lick of paint. We whipped the head off and saw it was all moving freely. Then Steve took us to a local agricultural salvage yard, where we found a suitable back axle, diff and gearbox still fitted to an old digger. This digger looked like it had been dumped there, years ago, to rot, but Steve got it going and I drove it around the yard to make sure the gears were all there. It was spot on. We’d bolt that to the Rolls-Royce engine back at the museum.
Back at JCB they were ready to start cutting and welding. The original tank panels were riveted together, but ours would be welded. To make it look like an original, JCB had made 3,000 rivet heads to weld to the body of the tank. The bottom of the hull of the original tank was made from a load of different plates, but our replica would be just two plates. No one would ever see under the tank, but it was still fitted with the right number of rivet heads. The attention to detail was impressive and the quality was something else. They were bending steel bar to an accuracy of +/- 1mm over an eight-metre length. Every piece of the puzzle was crucial, but the tank wouldn’t have been built without JCB. What a brilliant company.
I spent most of the day with Chris Shenton, one of JCB’s best welders, and he gave me a few pointers. His welding kit was a league above anything I’d ever used before. I wouldn’t want their electricity bill.
Another company, Chasestead, a specialist prototype steelworking company, got involved to make the plates for the tank tracks. It was another bloody impressive place. They make equipment for the automotive and aerospace industries, top-secret stuff. They used a 4,000-watt laser to cut through the 12mm thick steel that the tank tracks were made from. It was cutting through it as quickly as you could draw the shape on a piece of paper. They made a load of the hatches, too. Our contact there, Justin Sedgwick, was dead impressed with the 100-year-old design and made it clear that even with their millions of pounds’ worth of cutting-edge CNC kit it wasn’t easy copying what the original engineers and factory had made. And back in the last century, Fosters of Lincoln went from making a few prototypes to producing summat like 1,000 tanks in six months.
To give the programme some relevance to the present day, the TV lot arranged for me to visit some of the current Royal Tank Regiment on Salisbury Plain. They were the same regiment that had been formed in 1916. A current tank commander, Lieutenant Winters, and a driver, Trooper Williams
, showed me around the outside of the tank, telling me the Challenger 2 has the best armour of any tank in the world, but not even they know what it’s made of that makes it so good. They reckon the British have never lost a Challenger in action against the enemy. The cannon is accurate, deadly accurate, up to two kilometres. It’s not a case of maybe hitting something: if it’s within that two-kilometre range, it’s going to hit it.
They handed me the black overalls, or coveralls as the commander called them, that only the Tank Regiment are allowed to wear. I could see from what he was wearing that there were loads of reminders of the Battle of Cambrai. The cap badge, worn on their berets, has a male Type IV on it, and the regimental colours are the same as flown on the flags that went into battle at Cambrai, the same brown, red and green I’d seen hung off the back of Deborah. Lieutenant Winters explained that the colours signified ‘From mud, through blood to the green fields beyond’.
Even though the Challenger 2 hasn’t been built since 2002, it’s still current. I could climb into it, but the crew weren’t allowed to film inside. The British Army has 52 of them and they cost £4 million each.
The Tank Regiment have 150 square miles of Ministry of Defence land to use on Salisbury Plain, and they took me out in a Challenger 2. It has 1,200 horsepower, so eight times more powerful than our 160 horsepower Rolls-Royce engine. It’s got tracks, loads of metal and guns, but that’s where the resemblance with the Mark IV ends. The new tank weighs 62 ton and will do 40mph. It needs only half the crew of the original tank, just four men, but it’s more cramped than a Mark IV, because there is so much kit, gubbins, wires, boxes, guns, kettles, pissboxes … The ride was comfier than I expected. They can live in them for days.
They couldn’t let me drive it, but I had my head out of the top while we were going full chat across the countryside. They were jumping the thing: sixty-two ton of tank, jumping! It would take off into these huge puddles, drenching everyone on board. It was covering ground a Land Rover would struggle with. It feels like it’s shifting on the flat, but when it’s going up hills it nearly peters out and starts cogging down the gears. You don’t doubt the tank is going to get to the top of everything, but it knows about it.
To show some of what it could do they turned on the smoke generators, spraying neat diesel straight onto the exhaust and sending out a massive cloud of white smoke to act as a smokescreen. I was amazed how manoeuvrable these massive things are. They can do a neutral turn, spin 360 degrees on the spot. They don’t like doing it, but they can do it when they need to. It was a brilliant day, another money-can’t-buy experience to add to all the others I’ve had.
Back on our job, the main body of our tank had been finished and delivered to the Norfolk Tank Museum, in bare metal. It was an impressive thing. Steve was speechless when he saw it and painted the bare metal that night to stop it going rusty. Next time I went to see him we tried starting the engine, but it wasn’t having it, so we spent the time fitting the track plates.
When I think back, not only was making the tank in less than six months a massive undertaking, there were so many other parts to this whole project. If I was going to drive a tank down Lincoln High Street, I needed to pass a test to prove I could be trusted with a tracked vehicle. A place called Total Driving was chosen to give me a lesson in a CVRT Stormer Shielder mine layer. It looks like a tank, with a flatbed on the back.
Another Steve was the instructor and he had me out on the road. I got the hang of it, but I did scare the shit out of the driver of a silver Transit van when I strayed into his lane. Steve had me parking, doing an emergency stop, the lot. This ex-army vehicle was dead responsive, but I went straight into the test feeling nervous. The driving part was all right, but I made a meal of answering the Highway Code questions. I still passed, though.
Everything was happening quickly, like it had to. Steve Machaye at the tank museum had investigated what was up with the engine and got it running a few days later, nearly blowing his hand off when it backfired through the carb. The next time we went to Norfolk, just a month before Remembrance Day, the engine and all the drivetrain was in the tank. Martyn, Chris and Tom from JCB came down to see the first test drive. We rigged up a piece of flat steel to operate as a temporary throttle. I was in charge of that and the clutch. Chris, JCB’s welder, was the gearsman, and Steve was in charge of brakes that are used to steer the thing. The decision had been made to leave the top section of the hull off in case of fire, probably after seeing the mobile phone footage of Steve burning all the hair off the back of his hands.
We started it up and it sounded like a Lancaster bomber. Steve was nearly pulling levers out of the floor to allow him to turn. Going in a straight line was no bother. Everyone was all smiles. Then we tried to turn – and bang! The force of trying to steer the 30-ton tank caused one of the main drive sprocket bearing housings to smash. A catastrophic bearing failure is how we ended up describing it, but it didn’t damage anything else.
JCB went back to the drawing board and designed and made a billet steel housing for the bearings, then welded mounting plates to hold it captive, right in situ in the tank. They did an amazing job. As soon as one problem was solved we had something else to deal with, but this was nothing some clever engineers would not be able to knuckle down to and get sorted. It was tight.
Parading the tank up Lincoln High Street on the 100th anniversary of the tank’s first successful battle was always the plan, and I was looking forward to it, but it went pear-shaped. The police weren’t happy and wouldn’t let it happen. All the effort, all the significance of the place and the date, and it wasn’t going to happen. Lincoln wasn’t just number one on a list of possible places to do this: it was the only name we’d ever considered.
We were told the police said 11 November, Remembrance Day, is the busiest shopping day of the year and they couldn’t risk having an untested vehicle driving through the pedestrian high street. Someone was obviously talking shit. All I could think was, You weak-kneed c***s. What that city did, in making the tank, and what it should have meant to them. Had they no respect? The whole idea was to show respect for those who had fought and died, and to show respect to Lincoln for the part it had played in the birth of the tank. I wasn’t going to be at the helm and go mowing through Marks & Spencer or Costa fucking Coffee! When I heard their decision I was embarrassed to be British.
We needed a Plan B and that was to take the tank to the site of the battle, so on a wet 11 November we unloaded our replica Mark IV tank in the village of Beauchamp, near Cambrai. All the main folk involved in the programme and the making of the tank were there, from Thorsten the modeller, who’d spent four years researching and drawing it and could now see it in real life, to Martyn from JCB and Lieutenant Winters from the Royal Tank Regiment. By now the tank had been painted just like those that had fought at the Battle of Cambrai, and had been named Deborah II, in honour of the tank we’d visited.
With eight crew inside, picked from some of the loads of folk who’d helped make the tank, we drove up a country road towards the site of the front line. Steve, from the tank museum, had only done another ten yards’ test drive in it since the bearing failure, so we were going into the unknown, but it worked a treat. All the rattling, clanking and engine revving was just like it would have been 100 years ago.
After the short drive we parked the tank and were joined by locals and some friends and family, before a bugler sounded ‘The Last Post’ and we had a minute’s silence. Philippe, who was so passionate about everything to do with the tank and the battle, reckoned there couldn’t have been a better place for Deborah II to make her proper maiden journey, but it was a shame we couldn’t have done it in Lincoln, like we had planned and like so many people wanted.
The tank did go to Lincoln the following year. Steve from the Norfolk Tank Museum took it there, but they wouldn’t let him start it, because of health and safety. If it wasn’t for them who died for us we’d be leading a very different life to the one we lead now
. I was still annoyed that they hadn’t shown respect by allowing these things to happen.
The police got a lot of stick for their part in it, but came out saying it wasn’t them who’d made the decision, that it was down to the council. I even had a word with the Freemasons but not even they could pull strings to get permission to drive a replica First World War tank up Lincoln High Street. What is the world coming to?
CHAPTER 9
‘Married a Latvian former Nazi conscript; brought up five children, saw all those grandkids being born …’
OTHER THAN KATE, my youngest sister, who lives in the Lake District, the Martin family hasn’t moved far from where we grew up. Sal is running the pub in Kirmington, I’m a few miles away and Stu, my brother, is a few miles in the other direction. Since my dad retired, in April 2018, Stu has taken over the running of the truck business and changed the name to Martin Commercials. He has a couple of blokes working for him, including our cousin, Nick.
I don’t see Stu often. I’m busy and he’s living the job now, too, so he doesn’t have much spare time either. I wasn’t sure how he was going to do when he took over. He’s been a retained firefighter for years, one of the part-timers who work other jobs, but do shifts on call and are paid for their time. If there aren’t any calls they still get paid, but how busy they are, and how many calls they get, depends on the area they’re in.
Back when I worked for my dad, which is going on for ten years ago now, I felt me and my dad would do anything to get the job done on time, working our bollocks off, but when my brother’s beeper went off he’d clear off, however busy we were. Retained firefighters are dead important, I realise that, and he was doing a service to the local community, even saving lives, but I won’t lie, it still did annoy me a bit.
