Why Britain Built Armoured Cars From Scrap Metal And Oak Planks After Dunkirk –  Hw

 

Late July 1940, Canley works, Coventry. Workers at the Standard Motor Company are bolting 9mm mild steel plates onto civilian car chassis. Behind each steel plate, 3 in of solid oak plank. The armor is so thin, a heavy rifle round will punch straight through it. The oak is there because every ton of armor plate is committed to tanks and aircraft. The vehicle has no roof.

The engine is a 46 horsepower touring car motor, never designed to haul armor. The brakes belong on a family saloon and the man who ordered it built, Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian press baron turned minister of aircraft production, has named it after himself, the Beaverette. It looked like a joke. Roughly 2800 were built.

It became one of the most produced British armored vehicles of World War II. To understand why Britain built armored cars from scrap metal and oak planks, you need to understand what Dunkirk actually cost. Between May 26 and June 4, 1940, the Royal Navy and Civilian Flotilla rescued 338,226 Allied soldiers from the beaches of Northern France.

The men survived, their equipment did not. According to War Office records, the British Expeditionary Force abandoned approximately 64,000 motor vehicles, 700 tanks, 880 field guns, and 11,000 machine guns on the roads and beaches. After the evacuation, the entire British army at home possessed just 167 anti-tank guns.

Ammunition was so scarce that not a single round could be spared for training. Equipment on hand was sufficient to properly arm only two divisions. Then came the invasion threat. On July 16, 1940, Hitler issued his directive ordering preparations for Operation Sea Lion, a cross channel assault. The German plan called for 11 divisions in the first wave landing between Folkston and Brighton.

The Vermach assembled over 1500 transport barges. Whether the invasion could have succeeded remains debated, but in the summer of 1940, the British government believed it was days away. On September 7, 1940, General Headquarters home forces issued the code word Cromwell, meaning invasion imminent. Home Guard units misunderstood the alert and rang church bells across southern England.

The accepted signal that enemy troops had already landed. Three guards officers died driving over an unmarked minefield laid in the panic. Britain had the men. It had none of the weapons. The Home Guard swelled to over one and a half million volunteers. But at its peak, roughly 739,000 of them had no rifles at all.

Churchill wrote to the War Office demanding every man receive a weapon. Even if it was only a pike, civil servants took him literally and ordered 250,000 pikes, bayonet blades welded to steel tubes. The sticky bomb, an adhesive grenade meant to bond to tank armor, was just as likely to stick to the thrower. Churchill personally overrode the ordinance board’s refusal to approve it.

Other improvised weapons included the north over projector, a length of pipe using black powder percussion caps. Technology that had been obsolete for nearly a century. Britain was fighting with anything it could find. Into this chaos stepped Lord Beaverbrook. William Maxwell Atken, first Baron Beaverbrook, had built the Daily Express into the world’s biggestselling newspaper.

Churchill appointed him minister of aircraft production on May 14, 1940. In his office hung two signs. One read, “Committes take the punch out of war.” The other read, “Organization is the enemy of improvisation.” His results with aircraft production were extraordinary. In his first four months, fighter output more than doubled compared to the previous period.

Sir Hugh Dowing, head of fighter command, later said that Beaverbrook gave them those machines and that no other man in England could have done so. But Beaverbrook saw his role as more than building aircraft. He wanted to protect the factories that built them. That meant defending airfields and production sites against expected German paratrooper attacks.

There were no armored vehicles available. So Beaverbrook went directly to Captain John Black, managing director of the Standard Motor Company. Standard happened to have roughly 500 unsold civilian car chassis sitting idle after peaceime production was halted. Beaverbrook’s solution was simple. Armor them up with whatever materials were available.

The first Mark used the standard Flying 12 chassis fitted with the Flying 14 engine, a 4-cylinder side valve petrol motor displacing 1776 cm. A double reduction gearbox was added in front of the differential to handle the extra weight. The body was open topped and open at the rear with 9 mm mild steel plates on the front and sides backed by 76 mm of oak planking.

The rear was protected by oak alone. Armament was a single Brenite machine gun fired through a slot in the front plate with stowage for eight magazines and two Leenfield rifles. Crew was two, a driver and gunner. The vehicle weighed roughly 2 tons and could reach approximately 40 mph on a good road, though later heavier marks managed only 24.

The MK addressed the most obvious weaknesses. The exposed vertical radiator was replaced with horizontal armored slats. Folding hinge steel panels were added to protect the rear. These first two Marks consumed all 500 available civilian chassis. The Mark III, nicknamed the Beaverbug, was a complete redesign on a purpose-built shortened chassis.

It was fully enclosed with roof armor and a one-man turret. Armor was 9 mm of steel throughout. Turret options included twin vicar’s K machine guns, a single Bren or the.55in boy anti-tank rifle. Some received number 19 radio sets. The crew expanded to three. The MarkV refined the glacus plate design to improve driver visibility and increased front armor to 12 mm.

Production moved at remarkable speed. The first vehicles rolled off the line in late July 1940, barely 2 months after Beaverbrook took office. According to production records, 2250 units were accepted in 1940 alone with a further 558 in 1941. Production ceased in 1942 with a total of approximately 2,800 vehicles.

Now, before we get into where these vehicles actually served, if you’re enjoying this deep dive into British wartime improvisation, hit subscribe. It takes a second, costs nothing, and helps the channel grow. Right, let’s get into the operational record. The Beaverette was conceived for airfield and factory defense, and that is where it served.

No Beaveres were deployed overseas. Known units include the 4th, 7th Royal Dragoon Guards, re-equipped after losing their vehicles at Dunkirk, the 12th Lancers, and the 9inth Royal Tank Regiment. The newly formed RAF Regiment operated Mark III’s on patrol at stations including RAF Duxford and RAF West Mulling. The vehicle’s one confirmed combat action is one of the strangest stories of the war.

On the evening of April 16, 1943, a Mark III beaverette of 2769 Field Squadron RAF Regiment was on routine patrol at RAF West Mulling in Kent. A single engine aircraft approached and landed. It was a Fauler Wolf FW190 of Schnelcom 10. The pilot Feld Vable Otto Beck told taxied to the control tower, opened his canopy, and shouted for ground crew in German.

He had mistaken West Ming for a Luftwuffer airfield. The Beveret driver immediately swung the armored car into the aircraft’s path. The gunner jumped out and pushed the rudder hard over. Beck told surrendered. The intact fighter was repainted in RAF colors and test flown at Farnbr, yielding valuable intelligence on German aviation technology.

Minutes later, a second FW190 landed. Its pilot lit Fritz Setsza realized his mistake and tried to take off. The Beaverette commander opened fire with the Twin Vicers Kuns. The aircraft sued off the runway and caught fire. Sets was captured alive. Two more German fighters crashed nearby that same night.

An armored car built from scrap metal and oak had captured a frontline Luftwaffer fighter and forced a second into a fiery crash on takeoff. According to wing commander Peter Townsend, the famous Battle of Britain ace who accepted the surrender, the whole affair was over in minutes. The comparative picture puts the Beaverette into proper context.

The Dameler Dingo Scout car, which entered production around the same period, carried 30 mm of front armor. More than three times the Beaver’s protection. It could reach 55 mph, had four-wheel drive, and featured five forward and five reverse gears. Over 6,600 were built. The Humber armored car carried proper turret-mounted weaponry and real armor plate.

Even the 1914 Rolls-Royce armored car managed 45 mph, making it faster than a vehicle designed 26 years later. The Beaverette was not competing with any of these vehicles. It was filling the gap until they arrived. Internationally, only the Soviet Union matched this level of desperation. During the siege of Odessa in 1941, workers bolted naval steel onto agricultural tractors to create the NI tank, a name meaning for fright.

Between 55 and 69 were built with 10 to 20 mm of armor. Unlike the Beaverette, they saw actual combat. 20 of them charged Romanian infantry in a night attack with headlights blazing and sirens screaming, routing the enemy position. What it was like inside a beaverette is best described by Phil Homer of the Standard Motor Club, one of the few people to drive a fully restored example.

He reported that vision was limited to narrow slots in the armor at high level, that each could be closed, at which point visibility dropped to nothing, and that someone ought to have provided a periscope. The engine produced a loud roar with no sound deadening whatsoever. Top Gear delivered only 20 mph, and the overt tax brakes made stopping a matter of faith.

Canadian forces who received 52 Beaverettes for training described them bluntly as fast, dangerous, near useless vehicles. An Irish veteran’s son reported that his father always said driving the bareet was what started his hair loss. Ireland purchased 30 Bevetses in 1943, designating them Mark 9 armored car, and operated them for over 20 years until retirement in 1965, the longest operational career of any Beaverette.

New Zealand built 208 of its own variant on Ford truck chassis with armor salvaged from scrapped merchant ships. Today only a handful survive, including examples at the Imperial War Museum Duxford, the Tank Museum Boington, and the Cobaton combat collection in Devon. Field Marshall Alenbrook, who commanded home forces in 1940, was scathing about the entire concept.

He argued that individual factories could never have held out against a proper invasion and that the armored cars diverted scarce steel from tank production on the military merits. He was right. The Bevet was too slow, too fragile, and too limited by its civilian origins to be a real weapon of war. But the Bevet was never meant to win a war.

It was meant to survive the summer of 1940. Newsre footage of hundreds of these vehicles training across the countryside told the British public and any watching German intelligence that the island was bristling with armored cars. It gave thousands of soldiers their first experience of armored vehicle operations.

It embodied the principle on Beaverbrook’s office wall. Organization is the enemy of improvisation. In the summer of 1940, Britain had almost nothing on land. Oak planks and scrap steel and a 46 horsepower engine built for Sunday drives. From that, British engineers and factory workers produced 2,800 armored vehicles in under two years.

The biverette was absurd, inadequate, and occasionally dangerous to its own crew. But it was there when nothing else was. And 2,800 of something is better than zero of something perfect. That is the story of British engineering in 1940.

QQ4 Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The friendship began on a live television program in November of 1986 in the 11 seconds after Bob Dylan called Keith Richards music derivative on camera. Keith Richard’s response to that assessment, one sentence said without anger, without performance, with the specific directness of a man who has nothing to prove and knows it made Bob Dylan laugh.

Then made Bob Dylan go quiet. then made Bob Dylan say two words that people who know Bob Dylan say he almost never said to anyone. This is the story of those 11 seconds and the 40 years that followed them. The program was a live music interview special broadcast on an American network on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The format was simple.

Two musicians, a host, an hour of conversation about music and the state of it. The producers had assembled the pairing of Bob Dylan and Keith Richards with the specific calculation of television producers who understand that two people with equally strong and potentially incompatible views about what music is and what it should do will produce better television than two people who agree about everything.

The calculation was correct, though not in the way the producers had anticipated. Bob Dylan was 45 years old in November of 1986. Bob Dylan had released Empire Burlesque the previous year and had been on the road for most of the intervening period as part of the True Confessions tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

Bob Dylan was in November of 1986 in one of the most prolific and restless phases of a career that had consisted almost entirely of prolific and restless phases. A career that had moved through folk, rock, country, gospel, and back again, that had been declared finished at least six times by the music press, and at each time continued with the serene indifference of a river to the opinions of people standing on its banks.

Bob Dylan had been redefining what music could be. Since 1962, Bob Dylan had invented and reinvented himself so many times that reinvention had become his defining characteristic, not in the superficial sense of a performer changing costumes, but in the deeper sense of a musician who had never allowed his work to settle into a form that could be anticipated or categorized from the outside.

Bob Dylan understood influence and originality and the relationship between them better than almost anyone alive in 1986. Bob Dylan had spent 24 years thinking carefully and specifically about where music came from and where music was going and what it meant that those two things were always in constant conversation with each other.

Keith Richards was 42 years old in November of 1986. Keith Richards had been playing guitar professionally since 1962. Keith Richards had built a career on a foundation of American blues and rhythm and blues. A foundation that Keith Richards had studied with the systematic devotion of someone who understood that the tradition he was building on was not incidental to the music he was making, but essential to it.

that you could not understand what Keith Richards did without understanding where Keith Richards had come from and what Keith Richards had been listening to since he was a teenager in Dartford with American Import Records and a secondhand guitar and no teacher except the recordings themselves. Keith Richards had never pretended otherwise. Keith Richards had in fact spent considerable energy across his career making the lineage explicit, naming the artists, citing the recordings, insisting on the acknowledgement of influence that the mainstream music

industry had a long history of suppressing or ignoring or crediting to the wrong people. If anything, Keith Richards was more transparent about his sources than most musicians of his generation. Keith Richards had always said openly that the Rolling Stones came directly from the blues, that Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and the specific tradition of the Mississippi Delta were not background influences, but foundational ones.

The music Keith Richards made was in direct and sustained conversation with that tradition, something Keith Richards considered not a limitation, but a responsibility and a form of respect. The interview had been running for 8 minutes when the host asked Bob Dylan about the current state of rock and roll.

Bob Dylan answered with the density and the indirection that characterized Bob Dylan’s responses to direct questions, turning the question over, approaching it from an unexpected angle, finding his way to what he actually thought through a series of observations that moved like a river rather than a road. Bob Dylan was not a straightforward interview subject.

Bob Dylan had been asked about rock and roll in hundreds of interviews across 24 years and had developed the habit of treating the question as an invitation to think out loud rather than a request for a prepared position. The producer Gerald Sherman said afterward that in the first 8 minutes of the interview, he had been slightly anxious, not because anything was going wrong, but because nothing was going anywhere in particular yet.

The interview had the feeling of two conversations happening simultaneously. Bob Dylan’s internal one and the external one visible to the cameras. And Gerald Sherman was not certain in those first eight minutes that the two conversations would converge into something. Bob Dylan talked about influence. Bob Dylan talked about originality.

Bob Dylan talked about the difference between music that absorbed a tradition and transformed it and music that absorbed a tradition and reproduced it. And then Bob Dylan made his assessment. And then Bob Dylan said with the precision of a man making a musical assessment rather than a personal judgment that the Rolling Stones work, and Bob Dylan was specific, naming Keith Richards as the guitarist whose approach he was discussing was derivative in a way that Bob Dylan found limiting.

Bob Dylan said it without hostility. Bob Dylan said it as a technical observation about the relationship between source material and the work that came from it. Bob Dylan said that Keith Richards played the blues the way the blues had already been played, rather than using the blues as a starting point for something that had not yet been played.

Keith Richards had been listening to this with the specific attention Keith Richards gave to things being said about music by people who knew music. Keith Richards did not interrupt. Keith Richards did not shift in his chair or display any of the visible signals of a person preparing a defensive response. Keith Richards listened to Bob Dylan’s complete observation all the way to its conclusion without interrupting and without displaying any visible signal of preparing a response.

Then Keith Richards said one sentence. The sentence was not a rebuttal. The sentence did not defend Keith Richards music or argue for its originality or challenge Bob Dylan’s characterization of what the blues meant in the context of rock and roll. The sentence was something else entirely, something that required a specific kind of confidence to say.

The confidence of a person who has spent long enough thinking about the same things as the person they are talking to that they can locate the exact point where their thinking diverges and say something useful about that point rather than simply defending their own position. The sentence acknowledged everything Bob Dylan had said, the assessment, the distinction Bob Dylan was drawing, the specific musical concern underlying the observation, and then turned it 90°.

Keith Richards took Bob Dylan’s own framework, the one Bob Dylan had used to analyze Keith Richards relationship to the blues tradition, and applied it back to Bob Dylan’s work with the same precision Bob Dylan had used to apply it to Keith Richards. Spare aimed. The sentence asked Bob Dylan something about Bob Dylan’s own music, about the relationship between Bob Dylan’s sources and Bob Dylan’s output that Bob Dylan had not been asked on television before.

The sentence did not attack. The sentence illuminated. Bob Dylan laughed. The laugh was not the polite laugh of someone responding to a joke. The laugh was the involuntary laugh of someone who has been genuinely surprised. The specific kind of surprise that a person of exceptional intelligence experiences when someone else’s intelligence exceeds their expectations.

Bob Dylan laughed for 4 seconds. Then Bob Dylan stopped laughing. Then Bob Dylan was quiet for 3 seconds in the way that Bob Dylan was quiet when Bob Dylan was thinking rather than performing thought. Then Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” The producer in the booth, a man named Gerald Sherman, who had been working in television for 14 years, said afterward that in 14 years of live television production, he had never heard Bob Dylan say those two words in a public forum.

Gerald Sherman said he had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions and had observed Bob Dylan in numerous other contexts and that you’re right was not a phrase that Bob Dylan deployed easily or often because Bob Dylan had spent 24 years being right about music in ways that other people eventually caught up with. And the experience of being right ahead of everyone else does not generally produce a man who says you’re right readily when someone else makes a point.

The host of the program, a journalist named Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said afterward that the 11 seconds between Bob Dylan’s assessment and Bob Dylan saying, “You’re right,” were the most extraordinary 11 seconds of television she had been present for. Patricia Wells said that what she witnessed in those 11 seconds was not a debate or a confrontation or a celebrity exchange of competing opinions.

Patricia Wells said what she witnessed was one musician recognizing another musician as an equal, which was in the specific context of Bob Dylan in 1986, not something that happened in public very often. The interview continued for another 42 minutes after those 11 seconds. The conversation between Bob Dylan and Keith Richards in the remaining 42 minutes was described by everyone who watched it as fundamentally different from the first 8 minutes.

The host, Patricia Wells, who had been conducting music interviews for 12 years and understood the difference between the performance of conversation and actual conversation, said that at approximately the 9-minute mark, something shifted in the studio. That the formal interview, architecture dissolved, and what replaced it was something less structured and more genuine.

Bob Dylan and Keith Richards talked about influence and originality and the blues and what it meant to build on a tradition without being consumed by it. They talked about specific recordings and specific musicians with the specificity of two people who had spent their entire adult lives thinking about these things and rarely found another person who had thought about them with equivalent care.

They talked about where music came from and where music was going and whether those two questions were actually one question or two. Patricia Wells said afterward that she had asked approximately four questions in the remaining 42 minutes because Bob Dylan and Keith Richards did not require questions. They required only a room and a camera and the shared understanding that what they were saying together was worth recording carefully.

She said it was the best interview she had ever conducted and that she had conducted the smallest part of it. After the program, Bob Dylan and Keith Richards were in the corridor outside the studio when the host Patricia Wells passed them. Patricia Wells said she did not stop because she did not want to interrupt.

She observed them for approximately 30 seconds from a distance. She said they were talking with the ease of people who had known each other for years rather than people who had met for the first time 2 hours earlier. She said that something had shifted between them during the broadcast that the broadcast had made permanent rather than temporary.

She continued down the corridor and did not look back. She said in her account of that evening that she had decided in that moment not to interrupt the conversation because some conversations are more valuable than any question a journalist might ask and that the conversation she had observed for 30 seconds in the corridor outside the studio was one of them.

She had been a music journalist for 12 years. She recognized the difference. Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have maintained their friendship across four decades. They have appeared together at various events, most significantly at the concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, where people who were present described them as inseparable for most of the evening, occupying the same corner of the backstage area and talking with the concentrated attention of people who only have a limited amount of time together and intend to use it

well. Bob Dylan has spoken about Keith Richards in interviews with the specific thoughtful care that Bob Dylan reserves for musicians whose work Bob Dylan considers genuinely important rather than merely culturally prominent. Keith Richards has spoken about Bob Dylan in similar terms with the specific respect of someone who recognizes in another person a commitment to music that goes deeper than career.

Neither Bob Dylan nor Keith Richards has made a public statement specifically about how the friendship began or about the November 1986 interview. Bob Dylan has not mentioned the 11 seconds. Keith Richards has not mentioned the sentence. The interview exists in the archive. The 11 seconds are there. The laugh is there. The two words are there.

What is also there for anyone who watches the interview from its beginning and pays attention to the shift that happens at the 9-minute mark is the specific moment when two people who thought they were appearing on a television program discovered they were actually talking to each other. What Keith Richards said in that one sentence has never been officially reported.

The people who were in the studio that evening, Gerald Sherman, Patricia Wells, the floor crew, the two camera operators, the makeup artist who was watching from the side of the set, have described the sentence in consistent terms. They have described its effect. They have described Bob Dylan’s laugh and Bob Dylan’s silence and Bob Dylan’s two words.

They have not repeated the sentence itself in the specific understanding that the sentence was said between two musicians on a television program and that its power resided in the specific context of that exchange and would not survive removal from it intact. What can be said is this. Keith Richards said something to Bob Dylan about Bob Dylan’s music that used Bob Dylan’s own observation about Keith Richards as its starting point and arrived somewhere that Bob Dylan had not anticipated.

Keith Richards turned Bob Dylan’s assessment 90° and showed Bob Dylan something about the music they had both spent their lives making that Bob Dylan recognized immediately as true. And Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” Two words said by Bob Dylan in public on live television in 1986 to Keith Richards in response to a single sentence Keith Richards had said about music.

Two words that Gerald Sherman, who had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions, said he had never heard Bob Dylan say in a public forum. Two words that Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said were the most significant two words she had heard in those 12 years. Not because of their content, but because of who said them and what it cost to say them and what it meant that Keith Richards had produced them in 11 seconds from a conversation that began with Bob Dylan calling Keith Richards’s music derivative. And Keith Richards and

Bob Dylan have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The sentence did its work in 11 seconds on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The work has been ongoing ever since. If this story moved you, subscribe and leave a comment below. Have you ever said something to someone that turned a potential disagreement into an unexpected and lasting connection? Tell us about it in the comments below.

Share this with someone who needs to be reminded that the right sentence said at the right moment can completely change the entire direction of a relationship. Ring the notification bell for more untold stories about the extraordinary human beings behind music’s greatest legends.