May 1945, Vauxhall Motors Factory, Luton. Six brand new tanks rolled off the production floor. Each one carrying the most powerful anti-tank gun in the British arsenal behind 152 mm of frontal armor. They were the answer to every problem British tank crews had faced since the first Tiger appeared in North Africa 2 years earlier.
They were also 2 weeks too late. The war in Europe ended on May 8th. The production contract for 300 vehicles was cancelled on May 30th. The A43 Black Prince, the ultimate Churchill, the most heavily armed and armored British infantry tank ever built, never fired a single shot in anger. This is the story of a tank that could have changed everything.
Designed by engineers who solved every technical challenge except the one that mattered most, time. To understand why the Black Prince existed, you need to understand the crisis that created it. British tank crews in 1943 were in serious trouble. The Churchill, Britain’s primary infantry tank, mounted a 75mm gun with the same ballistics as the American M3.
It was adequate against infantry positions and lighter vehicles. Against German heavy armor, it was useless. The Tiger 1 carried 100 mm of flat frontal armor. The Churchill 75 mm gun could not penetrate that plate at any practical combat range. The Panther presented 80 mm of glacis armor sloped at 55°, yielding roughly 139 mm of effective thickness.
The 75 mm could not defeat that either. British crews were fighting tanks they simply could not kill from the front. German crews knew it. The first Tiger tanks appeared in North Africa in early 1943. The situation was so urgent that the first 100 prototype 17 pounder anti-tank guns were rushed to the front mounted on 25 pounder howitzer carriages came before proper gun carriages even existed.
Britain did have a weapon that could solve the problem. The Ordinance quickfiring 17 pounder was a 76.2 mm anti-tank gun capable of penetrating 163 mm of armor at 500 m with standard armor-piercing ammunition. With the newer discarding Sabbath round, that figure jumped to 256 mm at the same range. This gun could kill a Tiger frontally at well beyond 1,700 m.
As a towed weapon, it was devastating. The challenge was putting it inside a turret where it could move with the armored advance. The problem was fitting it inside a tank. The 17 pounder was physically large and heavy. No British tank turret in production could accommodate it. The Churchill’s hull was too narrow, constrained by pre-war railway loading gauge restrictions to accept a turret ring wide enough for the weapon.
Multiple programs ran in parallel to solve this crisis. The Challenger mounted the 17 pounder on a lengthened Cromwell hull, but suffered production delays and was disliked by crews. The Sherman Firefly squeezed the gun into a modified Sherman turret and became the first successful 17p pounder tank, proven in combat from D-Day onward.
The Archer mounted the gun backwards on a Valentine chassis. Each was a compromise. None combined the 17 pounder with the heavy armor protection that Churchill crews depended on for survival. In September 1943, the War Office asked Vauxhall Motors to produce something that did. Vauxhall at Luton had designed every variant of the Churchill since the tank’s inception.
Their engineers knew the hull’s strengths and limitations better than anyone. The formal specification for the A43 was issued on December the 2nd, 1943. It called for a widened Churchill hull carrying the 17 pounder in a new turret adapted from the A41 Centurion design with frontal armor of 152 mm and a target weight of approximately 50 long tons.
The name chosen was Black Prince after Edward the Black Prince, the 14th century English military commander. According to tank archives, many Royal Navy ships had carried this name over the centuries, though with mixed fortunes. Before cutting any steel, Vauxhall conducted a clever preliminary test. They took a standard Churchill, fitted it with a new 5-speed gearbox, and added ballast to bring it up to 50 tons.
On December 28th, 1943, this weighted tank was tested against the A 33 Excelsia heavy assault tank and performed in Vauxhall’s assessment hardly worse. This gave the engineers confidence to move forward. The hull grew roughly 70 cm wider than the Churchill Mark 7. An extra road wheel was added on each side. Tracks widened to 24 in to distribute the additional weight.
Air intakes moved from the hull sides to the hull top. The turret ring expanded to 1880 mm to accept the 17 pounder. The tank carried 89 rounds of main gun ammunition in three types. Standard armor-piercing discarding Sabbat and high explosive. Two 7.92 mm Bisa machine guns provided secondary armorament, one coaxial and one in the hull bow.
A crew of five operated the vehicle. The engine was the critical weak point. Vauxhall retained the Bedford Twin 6, a horizontally opposed 12-cylinder petrol engine, producing 350 brake horsepower. This was the same engine that powered the 40 ton Churchill Mark 7. In the 50 ton Black Prince, the powertoweight ratio dropped to roughly 7 horsepower per ton.
According to tank archives, the director of the Royal Armored Corps pointed out that using this engine in a tank 10 tons heavier, would make it critically underpowered. His protests were brushed aside. Plans existed to install a 600 horsepower Rolls-Royce Meteor, the same engine that would make the Centurion so successful. This upgrade never left the drawing board.
Tank Archives notes it would have required major redesigns to the hull, defeating the purpose of what was meant to be a rapid adaptation of existing Churchill components. In May 1944, six prototypes were ordered alongside a contract for 300 production vehicles with deliveries projected to begin the following spring. A full-sized wooden mockup was completed by August.
The first prototype rolled out in January 1945, delayed partly because Vauxhall received the wrong gun variant from the factory. By May, all six were delivered. The war ended in the same week. Now, before we get into how this tank performed in trials and how it stacked up against everything else on the battlefield, if you are enjoying this deep dive into British engineering, consider subscribing.
It takes a second and helps the channel grow. Now, let us get into the results. Each prototype was assigned a specific testing role. Two stayed at the factory. One went to Lworth in Dorset for gunnery trials. One underwent penetration testing. One was subjected to extended usage trials. The sixth tackled deep water waiting tests.
The Lullworth gunnery trials in March 1945 produced an encouraging official report. It praised the armament and turret arrangement as successful. The tank proved to be a stable firing platform with effective ventilation and good visibility from the commander’s position. The 17 pounders performance in the roomy new turret was everything the designers had promised.
But the problems ran deeper than any gun could fix. Top road speed was 10.5 mph cross country. That dropped to roughly 7.5 mph. To put that in perspective, a person jogging at moderate pace would outrun this tank. The five-speed gearbox that replaced the Churchill’s four-speed unit made things worse.
The gear ratios were too close together, and drivers had to change within 1.5 seconds to avoid stalling the engine entirely. A firstirhand account adds texture to the official records. Rob Cook, whose father, John Cook, was stationed at Bovington and drove the Black Prince during trials, later recalled his father saying the tank was difficult to drive because it had no brakes.
Drivers relied on the gears exclusively. This is consistent with the Churchill’s regenerative steering system, but the experience was clearly worse at 50 tons. Testing crews also criticized the flat fronted hull. They recognized that sloped armor was the way forward. A lesserknown detail explains why the Black Prince kept its archaic flat face despite British engineers having studied a captured Panther and fully understanding the advantages of angled plate.
The A43 was intended to double as a flamethrower tank. A sloped front would have made that conversion very difficult. This secondary role never materialized, but it constrained the primary design throughout development. One persistent myth deserves correction. Some accounts claim Blackprints prototypes were sent to the front lines, but arrived after the fighting stopped.
According to historian Yuri Pasholock, working from original wartime documents, this is not true. Unlike the Centurion, which was indeed dispatched for frontline evaluation, the Black Prince never left British testing grounds against the tanks. It was designed to fight. The numbers told a compelling story. The Tiger 1’s 88 mm gun firing standard armor-piercing ammunition could penetrate roughly 151 mm at 500 m.
The Black Prince’s frontal plate was 152 mm. That single mm margin meant the Tiger could not reliably penetrate the Black Prince’s front at typical combat distances. The Panther’s 75 mm gun achieved roughly 149 mm of penetration at pointblank range. still insufficient to defeat 152 mm, even with the muzzle touching the plate.
No other Allied tank in 1945 could make that claim. While simultaneously carrying a gun powerful enough to destroy both German heavies at long range against the Sherman Firefly, which carried the identical 17 pounder, the trade-off was brutal. Both tanks could kill the same targets. The Firefly had nearly double the power to weight ratio and more than double the road speed at 25 mph.
Over 2,100 were produced and battle tested across northwest Europe. The Black Prince offered superior protection, 152 mm versus the Sherman’s 50 to 89 mm, but the Firefly already existed in quantity, was proven in combat, and could keep pace with an advancing army. The AmericanM26 Persing and Soviet Yes2 both use sloped armor to achieve comparable or superior effective protection at significantly lower weight.
Both were far faster. The IS-2’s 122 millimeter gun delivered devastating singleshot power, but fired only two to three rounds per minute compared to the 17 pounders roughly 10. The Black Prince was the most heavily armored tank in its weight class. It paid for that armor with mobility that was already unacceptable by 1944 standards.
The 300 vehicle production contract was formally cancelled on May 30th, 1945, 3 weeks after VE Day. The War Office’s attitude toward the program had been telling from the start. Only six prototypes were ordered, compared to 20 for the Centurion. Tank Archives notes that department leadership saw such low figures as proof the military had never taken the Blackprint seriously.
It was ordered more as a way to cover all their bases than as a genuine commitment to production. A photograph from the trials shows a Black Prince prototype parked beside the rather sorry remains of a Churchill Mark1. Tank Archives describes this image as one that was supposed to show progress, but instead makes for an effective epitar.
Britain’s first and last infantry tanks side by side. The Centurion offered the same gun with equivalent effective frontal protection through sloped armor, used the meteor engine the Black Prince never received, achieved a top speed of over 20 mph, and weighed 5 tons less. It was a superior vehicle in every measurable respect.
The Black Prince’s influence endured through an unexpected lineage. Work on the A45, a heavy tank concept from 1944, eventually produced the FV201 prototype. That vehicle’s hull was repurposed for the FV214 Conqueror, Britain’s Cold War heavy tank, which served with the British Army of the Rine into the 1960s. The chain of development runs directly from the Black Prince’s canceled ambitions through to the tanks that faced down Soviet armor in Germany.
Five of the six prototypes were scrapped. One survivor sits at the Tank Museum Boington, restored to running condition, and demonstrated at Tankfest events. Tank Archives notes that even in museum appearances, the gearbox routinely gives trouble. A fitting final echo of the design’s original curse. May 1945, Vauxhall Motors Factory, Luton.
Six tanks that could shrug off a Tiger’s best shot and kill it in return at ranges the German crew could barely see. Six tanks too slow to keep pace with a man on a bicycle. The Black Prince was the last British infantry tank ever designed. It proved conclusively that the infantry tank doctrine had reached its end point.
You could not keep adding armor and armament without addressing the engine underneath. The Centurion answered that lesson and went on to serve for half a century across dozens of nations. British engineers at Vauxhall solved the gun problem. They solved the armor problem. They solved the turret ring problem. The engine problem defeated them.
Not because they lacked the talent, but because the schedule demanded an interim design built from existing components. The Meteor installation that would have transformed the Black Prince required a redesign there was no time to complete. The A43 Black Prince stands as proof that British engineers could build a tank the enemy could not kill.
It stands equally as proof that in war, arriving late, no matter how good your engineering means arriving irrelevant. The documents confirm it. The specifications prove it. And one surviving prototype at Bovington, gearbox still grinding after 80 years, tells the story better than any words ever could.
British engineering was not the problem. Timing was
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.
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