Late 1940, Bovington Tank Training Ground, Dorset. Seven brand new British Cruiser tanks roll off their transporters. They are low, sleek, and modern-looking with clean lines that make every other British tank look like a relic from the last war. There is just one problem. They arrive without instructions for how to start them.
Nobody at Bovington can figure out the ignition sequence. When engineers finally get the engines running, what follows is, according to Tank Archives, a torrent of unkind words. Ammunition bins are fouled by projections inside the turret. Changing the batteries takes 4 hours, and the engine temperature begins climbing toward a number that will define this machine forever.
This is the Cruiser Tank Mark V Covenanter, designation A13 Mark III. 1,771 were built between 1940 and early 1943. Not a single gun tank ever fired a shot in combat. This is the story of Britain’s most produced failure, and why the British Army kept building it anyway. To understand why the Covenanter existed, you have to understand the crisis that created it.
In the late 1930s, Britain was rearming against a Germany building tanks in secret for years. The Wehrmacht already fielded thousands of Panzers. Britain had a few hundred scattered across the Empire. By early 1939, Britain’s Cruiser tank program was in serious trouble. The preceding heavy Cruiser designs, the A14 and A16, had both proved too expensive, too heavy, and unreliable.
The War Office needed something cheaper, lighter, and fast. The General Staff specification demanded a 2-pounder gun, Christie suspension in a lowered hull, 40 mm of armor on vertical surfaces, at least 300 horsepower, and high speed. The problem was that Britain’s established tank manufacturers were already stretched thin.
So, the government turned to a company that had never built a fighting vehicle in its history, the London, Midland, and Scottish Railway Company, one of Britain’s big four railway firms. They built locomotives and rolling stock at their Crewe Works. Now, they were being asked to design a tank. LMS assigned their special drawing office at Euston to the hull and chassis.
Nuffield Mechanization and Aero designed the turret. Henry Meadows Limited created the engine. On April 17th, 1939, with war 5 months away, the War Office approved finance and placed orders for one pilot model plus 100 production vehicles based on nothing more than a wooden mock-up. No prototype had been built. No prototype had been tested.
This decision, ordering straight off the drawing board, would prove catastrophic. By September, English Electric and Leyland Motors had joined the program with another 250 tanks on order. 400 tanks committed before a single one existed in metal. The first mild steel pilot did not reach the testing establishment at Farnborough until May 23, 1940. It arrived without a turret.
At 16 tons with a top speed of 37 mph, testers called it a basically sound machine. That initial optimism masked what was coming. The Covenanter’s fatal flaw came from an engineering decision that seemed perfectly logical if you built railway locomotives for a living. The specification demanded a low silhouette, just 7 ft 4 in tall.
Henry Meadows designed a horizontally opposed 12-cylinder petrol engine producing 300 brake horsepower at 2,400 revolutions per minute. The engine was impressively compact vertically. It was also extremely wide. That width left no room for cooling radiators in the engine compartment at the rear. LMS solved this by mounting two radiators in a V arrangement at the left front of the hull.
Hot water and oil then had to travel through pipes running the entire length of the fighting compartment to reach the rear-mounted engine. For a railway company accustomed to piping hot water through train carriages, this probably seemed natural. For a tank, it was a death sentence.
The second pilot vehicle arrived at the testing grounds on September 29, 1940, and the horror became clear. Water temperature hit 167° Fahrenheit after just 50 minutes of running. Oil temperature reached 350° Fahrenheit after 2 and 1/2 hours. The engine began misfiring after 1 hour. Most dangerously, petrol in the side fuel tanks grew hot enough to boil, creating an explosion risk.
The cooling pipes running through the crew compartment turned the fighting space into an oven. Crews were being slowly cooked inside their own tank. Four marks were produced, each attempting to fix the cooling without ever changing the fundamental layout. The Mark I used louvred vents over the radiator compartment.
Field units resorted to removing the armored covers entirely. The Mark II added a radiator-mounted oil cooler and a louvre at the rear of the engine compartment. The Mark III attempted the most radical fix with twin oil coolers mounted either side of the engine to eliminate oil pipes through the fighting compartment. The Mark IV combined features of the second and third marks.
Marks III and IV were declared fit for overseas use in an emergency. That emergency never came because better tanks were always available. The radiator stayed at the front. The engine stayed at the rear. The long piping through the crew space was never eliminated. Production continued across three factories. English Electric at Stafford built slightly over half of all Covenanters.
LMS at Crewe built approximately 160 gun tanks and performed around 500 Mark I to Mark II conversions. Leyland Motors at Kingston upon Thames produced the remainder. Across 16 contracts, every one of the 1,771 ordered vehicles was completed. Now, before we get into why they kept building a tank they knew was broken, if you’re enjoying this deep dive into British engineering, hit subscribe.
It takes a second, costs nothing, and helps the channel grow. Now, back to the Covenanter. The decision to continue production is the most controversial part of this story. The context is critical. After Dunkirk in June 1940, the British Expeditionary Force returned with only six light tanks and seven Cruiser tanks. They had lost 691.
Only about 340 modern tanks remained in all of Britain. German invasion seemed imminent. Churchill ordered production of all existing designs. Any tank was better than no tank when your island might be invaded next month. The Covenanter was also the cheapest British tank at 12,000 pounds per unit compared to 13,700 for a Crusader, 14,900 for a Valentine, and 18,000 for a Matilda.
Disrupting any production line was considered potentially catastrophic. What is harder to justify is that just over half of all Covenanters were delivered during 1942, by which time the invasion threat had passed and better alternatives existed. David Fletcher titled his history of British wartime tank procurement The Great Tank Scandal.
The Covenanter featured on the cover. The Covenanter served exclusively as a training vehicle within the United Kingdom. The 1st Armored Division received them after losing most of its tanks in France and used them for Exercise Bumper in autumn 1941. A massive East Anglia drill directed by Lieutenant General Montgomery testing Britain’s ability to repel a German invasion force.
Thousands of troops and hundreds of vehicles participated. The Covenanters broke down regularly, but they filled a gap that would otherwise have left entire armored regiments without tanks to train on. After the exercise, 1st Armored Division traded their Covenanters for Crusaders before deploying to North Africa.
The 9th Armored Division became the largest user. The 13th/18th Royal Hussars Regimental History recorded that the regiment considered the Covenanter a very bad tank, unreliable mechanically, lightly armored, and carrying only a 2-pounder gun. The Guards Armored Division and 1st Polish Armored Division also trained with them.
By mid-1942, roughly 600 Covenanters made up about a quarter of all tank strength based in the United Kingdom. A remarkable number for a vehicle deemed unfit to leave the country. Four Mark IV tanks were shipped to North Africa for desert trials in September 1942. They never saw action and almost certainly confirmed that the cooling system could not handle the climate.
Against the tanks it would have faced, the Covenanter was outclassed. The German Panzer III carried a 5-cm gun that could penetrate the Covenanter’s 40-mm frontal armor at combat ranges. The Panzer III’s own 60-mm composite front armor was largely immune to the 2-pounder at distance. The Panzer IV F2 variant arriving in spring 1942 mounted a long 7.
5-cm gun capable of destroying the Covenanter at 1,500 m while being nearly invulnerable to return fire. The Covenanter’s British sibling, the Crusader, is the most telling comparison because both were ordered off the drawing board simultaneously in 1939. Both shared the same Nuffield-designed polygonal turret and similar teething problems.
But Nuffield, unlike LMS, had actual experience building vehicles. The Crusader used conventional rear-mounted radiators, solving the fatal cooling flaw. The Crusader also had five road wheels per side versus the Covenanter’s four, double the operational range at 200 miles versus 100, and its Mark III variant received the 6-pounder gun.
Over 5,400 Crusaders were built, and they fought across North Africa. The Covenanter’s suspension was already at maximum load when built with zero capacity for up-gunning or adding armor. A critical failing when the 2-pounder became obsolete by mid-1942. The Cromwell, which entered service in 1944, showed what a properly engineered British Cruiser tank looked like.
28 tons, up to 76 mm of frontal armor, a 75-mm dual-purpose gun, and the 600 horsepower Rolls-Royce engine. The Cromwell’s cooling system underwent 9 months of dedicated testing specifically because the Tank Board was haunted by the Covenanter’s failure. The Covenanter generated dark humor among its crews. The turret used a sliding roof section instead of conventional hatches.
The retaining catch was weak and liable to fail during hard braking or cross-country movement. When it failed, the sliding roof slammed shut with enough force to cause several fatalities. Despite repeated modifications, this hazard was never fully eliminated. The gear selector required both hands to change while double declutching, meaning the driver released the steering controls every time.
During trials, one driver struggled for 20 minutes to engage reverse. Legend has it, though this is unverified, that before D-Day, Canadian crews buried their Covenanters in deep holes at Denbies Vineyard near Dorking, Surrey. In the 1970s, guided by a retired estate worker who had been a Home Guard sergeant, excavators recovered one tank.
The Bovington Tank Museum restored it. A second Covenanter was recovered from the same vineyard in May 2017. Locals believe more tanks remain buried there. The closest a Covenanter came to being shot at was darkly ironic. A Mark one or two attached to an armored train near Canterbury was destroyed during a German night air raid on May 31, 1942.
The only known combat loss of a Covenanter gun tank, and it never fired back. The program’s one genuine success was the bridgelayer variant. 77 turretless hulls were fitted with a 30-ft scissors bridge capable of spanning a 30-ft gap under a 24-ton load. According to United States military intelligence, one vehicle completed 1,200 successful launchings and recoveries without undue maintenance.
The bridgelayer was the only Covenanter variant to see overseas combat. The 1st Czechoslovak armored brigade used them during the siege of Dunkirk from October 1944 to May 1945. The 4th armored brigade of the Australian army deployed them at Balikpapan in the Pacific in 1945. July 1942. Comparative trials at Bovington complicate the worst tank narrative.
Covenanter engines lasted over 1,000 mi before replacement, better than the Crusader’s 700-mi average. Covenanters recorded 50 to 60 defects over 2 weeks compared to the Churchill’s 150-plus. History of War flatly called it the worst British tank of the Second World War. Others have called it the worst tank ever built, but Peter Brown, the most detailed Covenanter researcher, offered a more measured assessment.
“With a little more development, perhaps it could have been what the Crusader was. Many faults were common to other British tanks of the period. The Covenanter’s specific weakness, cooling in warm climates, was the deal breaker, not necessarily overall reliability. In the moderate climate of the English countryside, the Covenanter functioned well enough to train thousands of crews who would later fight in Crusaders, Shermans, and Cromwells.
The tank was declared obsolete in February 1944. Of 1,771 built, only a handful survive. The Bovington Tank Museum holds a Mark three gun tank recovered from beneath Denby’s vineyard. At least two bridgelayers survive in Australia. Two partially buried wrecked hulls remain visible at Titchwell Marsh in Norfolk, where Covenanters were likely used as targets on a former gunnery range.
The remaining 1,760 were scrapped. Late 1940, Bovington. Seven sleek new tanks that nobody could start. They looked like the future of British armor. They were not, but the Covenanter’s failure taught the British tank industry lessons that no success ever could. Never order off the drawing board. Never mount radiators away from the engine.
Always design with margin for growth. Always test a prototype before committing to mass production. The Cromwell, the Comet, the Centurion, the entire post-war lineage of British armor carries the Covenanter’s ghost in its engineering DNA. When Rolls-Royce spent 9 months perfecting the Meteor engine’s cooling system for the Cromwell, they were thinking about the Covenanter.
When the tank board insisted on prototype testing before production orders, they were remembering the Covenanter. 1,771 tanks that never fired a shot in anger. Not a single round. But every British tank that came after them was better because the Covenanter proved exactly what happens when you let a railway company design a war machine and then build it before anyone checks whether it works.
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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