Tank Tour Two – the story behind the world’s first tanks

A two hour show with a midway break of 20 minutes, sponsored by the White Hart Hotel, Lincoln. There will be a bar! Presentations by Andrew Blow (ex-Yorkshire TV), who found the only known film of the WW1 tanks on William Foster & Co’s test ground, and Military Historian Richard Pullen, author of “Landships of Lincoln,” whose grandfather worked on the tanks. The social and engineering story of the Lincoln tanks will unfold rather than a muck and bullets report from the Western Front. Hear about legendary figures like inventors William Tritton and Walter Wilson, draughtsman William Rigby and test driver Chalie Maughan. And not forgetting the munitionettes, including Ruby Cocking and Flo Bonnett, who played a vital role. Rigby, who was 89 when Andrew Blow met him in 1979, was the third man in the room when Tritton and Wilson met in secrecy at the White Hart Hotel, Lincoln, in the late summer of 1915 . It was his engineering drawings, done at their behest, that were used in Foster’s Wellington Foundry and were sent to factories elsewhere as tank production was increased. This event will include a small exhibition of historic exhibits from the Friends of the Lincoln Tank.