In 1919 the Royal Commission On Awards to Inventors assembled at Lincoln’s Inn under the Chairmanship of Mr Justice Sargant to consider claims for payment. Their findings began with a tribute to one of the men who claimed nothing: ‘In the first place the Commission desire to record their view that it was primarily due to the receptivity, courage and drive force of the Rt Hon Winston Spencer Churchill that the general idea of the user of such an instrument of warfare as the Tank was converted into a practical shape.’ This could not be gainsaid.
Of the serious claimants Wilson and Tritton, who put in a joint claim, were given £15,000 between them. D’Eyncourt, because he had been a Government official on full pay, had to be content with £1,000. Colonel Swinton, who merely said that ‘I claim a very large share of the credit and, so far as the Army is concerned, the sole credit for the introduction of the Tank as a weapon of war’ received the same. Stern claimed nothing. Crompton put in a claim but was turned down. Mr de Mole was awarded sympathy for ‘a very brilliant invention’ but got no money. Not all the armourers throve. Murray Sueter demanded £100,000 but his claim was dismissed. He wrote a book to complain about the unfairness of it all.
There were many claims not far from the frivolous. A Naval officer who asserted that he had invented a detachable running-board for armoured cars got short shrift. Best of all was a lady, a Mrs Capron of Louth. Tritton wrote to Wilson warning him of her probable descent upon him. Mrs Capron, ‘a young woman who wishes to be very fascinating’, was in the habit of going into trances of several hours’ duration. In the course of one of these she had invented the tank. It does not appear that her claim was pressed very hard.
Stern, in his book, praises Sir Eustace Tennyson d’Eyncourt, ‘who was the real father of the Tanks and nursed the development from the beginning to the end’. He also speaks generously of both Wilson and Tritton, along with Mr Dudley Docker and Mr Squires whose Metropolitan Carriage Wagon and Finance Company turned out something like three-quarters of all the tanks produced in the UK. It is pleasant to be able to record how their fierce quarrels came to an end. In 1939 Mr Churchill, once more First Lord of the Admiralty, sent for Sir Eustace, Sir Albert, Major Wilson and Mr Ricardo, charging them to do once more what they had so well done earlier. Each was now in his sixties and in the front rank of his chosen profession but the years dropped away and they worked once more as in the happy days at the White Hart, Lincoln. The tank they designed was christened by Stern. ‘TOG’, he called it; ‘The Old Gang’.
TOG would have been a splendid tank for about 1920. You may see it in the yard of the Tank Museum. It turned the scale at 80 tons, carried armour as thick as a brick wall and mounted a 17-pdr. From the outside it looks big enough to accommodate a small private dance. Sad to say its maximum speed was only 8½ mph. It was bigger by far than even the German Royal Tiger; but the Royal Tiger carried an 88 and could travel at four times the speed. TOG, like the great Tortoise that followed it, was never more than a curiosity. But it brought old friends together again. If they had indeed participated in ‘the absurd scramble for credit’ it was forgotten now. The last monument is the gear-box of the ‘Chieftain’. Wilson designed it.