1940, a garage in Cairo owned by the Thomas Cook Travel Company. British engineers are doing something that would make any Rolls-Royce enthusiast physically ill. They are unbolting the armored body of a World War I Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, one of the finest fighting vehicles ever built, and lowering it onto the bare chassis of a Fordson farm truck fresh off a cargo ship from Dagenham.
The result looks wrong. The proportions are off. The rear wheels sit too far back. The bonnet is too long. It looks like two different vehicles welded together by someone working from memory, because that is exactly what it is. And within months, these Frankenstein machines will screen the destruction of an entire Italian army, race a thousand miles across open desert to lift a siege in Iraq, and fight their way into Syria.
24 were built. Not one survives. This is their story. To understand why British engineers committed this act of mechanical blasphemy, you need to understand the crisis they faced. By the summer of 1940, Britain’s armored car fleet in the Middle East was ancient. The Rolls-Royce armored cars, first designed in 1914 by the Royal Naval Air Service, had been the finest fighting vehicles of World War I. T. E.
Lawrence called them more valuable than rubies. The 1920 pattern, commissioned after the war with thicker radiator armor and solid wheels, served across the British Empire for two decades. Approximately 100 were built before Rolls-Royce ceased chassis production entirely, but by 1940, the youngest of these cars was over 15 years old.
Their Silver Ghost chassis had never been designed to carry over 4 tons of armor plate across hundreds of miles of scorching Egyptian desert. According to regimental accounts from the 11th Hussars, crews in summer heat often had to use their own drinking water to cool the overheating engine. The chassis were, in the blunt assessment of military historians, simply tired, mechanically exhausted after decades of hard colonial service.
Mobility in soft sand was poor, with the vehicles weighing 6 tons fully loaded. Breakdowns were constant. Spare parts did not exist. When Italy declared war on June the 10th, 1940, 76 Rolls-Royce armored cars remained in service worldwide. Modern replacements were desperately needed elsewhere. No new Rolls-Royce chassis could be manufactured.
The armored bodies and turrets, however, were still perfectly functional. 8 to 10 mm of riveted steel plate, a rotating turret mounting a Vickers water-cooled machine gun, 20 years old and still effective against infantry, soft-skinned vehicles, and aircraft on the ground. The solution was brutal pragmatism. Strip the armor from the dying Rolls-Royce chassis and mount it onto something that actually worked.
That something was the Ford 018T, a 1 and 1/2 ton truck manufactured in the United States and assembled at Ford’s Dagenham plant in England under the Fordson trade name. The name Fordson originally referred to Ford farm tractors, but in Britain it became the brand for Dagenham built commercial vehicles.
The chassis were shipped to England in completely knocked-down form, militarized and modified, then sent to Egypt. New radiator and engine compartment armor was designed and manufactured in England before the whole assembly crossed the Mediterranean to Cairo. According to David Fletcher, the former historian at the Bovington Tank Museum and the foremost authority on this vehicle, 20 Rolls-Royce armored cars had their bodies fitted to Fordson chassis in 1940.
Four additional vehicles were built as reserves, 24 total. The engine was a Ford flathead V8 displacing 3.6 L producing 85 horsepower at 3800 revolutions per minute, mated to a three-speed manual gearbox. This was comparable to the original Rolls-Royce 40/50 horsepower six-cylinder, which produced roughly 80 horsepower.
But the Fordson’s critical advantage was the chassis itself. A 6×4 configuration, meaning six wheels with four driven, gave it twin rear axles spreading the weight across soft ground. The wheelbase measured 158 in, 12 in longer than the original Rolls-Royce. One detail that still puzzles researchers is the steering.
The Ford 018T was left-hand drive. The original Rolls-Royce was right-hand drive. No wartime account mentions this change. Crews apparently just adapted without comment. Visually, the Fordson was immediately distinguishable. It sat longer at the rear with smaller wheels featuring five triangular holes instead of the Rolls-Royce’s disc wheels.
An armored box bolted to the back of the superstructure earned the universal nickname the coffin. It housed the radio equipment. Four different radiator door configurations were documented in photographs, ranging from completely open to an elaborate double plate arrangement with offset ventilation slots for ballistic protection.
The weapons fit reflected wartime improvisation at its most creative. Every vehicle carried the turret-mounted .303 Vickers water-cooled machine gun as its primary weapon. Most received a .55 Boys anti-tank rifle in a distinctive square armored box mounting beside the Vickers, a vital upgrade since the original Rolls-Royce had zero anti-armor capability.
At least one vehicle carried a .30 Browning salvaged from an aircraft instead. Anti-aircraft guns mounted on scarf rings scavenged from obsolete biplanes varied wildly between cars. Photographic analysis of a parade showing 11 vehicles revealed a roughly equal split between single Browning .303s and Lewis guns, with only one car mounting twin Brownings.
One experimental vehicle had its turret removed entirely and replaced with a one-pounder automatic cannon on an open mounting. These 24 hybrid machines entered combat in September 1940, when two sections of number two armored car company RAF were attached to the 11th Hussars as D Squadron. The 11th Hussars were the famous cherry pickers, the premier armored car regiment in the British Army, and part of the 7th Armored Division.
The RAF cars joined the regiment’s own 34 Rolls-Royce 1924 pattern cars and 30 Morris CS9 armored cars patrolling the Egyptian-Libyan frontier. Now, before we get into the combat record, if you are enjoying this deep dive into British desert engineering, hit subscribe. It takes a second, costs nothing, and helps the channel grow. Right.
Let us get into what happened when these Frankenstein machines met the enemy. When Marshal Graziani’s Italian 10th Army invaded Egypt on September the 13th, 1940, the 11th Hussars formed the covering force that harassed the advance. D Squadron’s Fordsons were part of the screen that helped inflict 3500 casualties on the Italians before they dug in at Sidi Barrani, 60 miles inside Egypt.
The armored cars then joined aggressive raiding formations called Jock Columns that kept the enemy off balance for 3 months. During Operation Compass in December 1940, the great British counterattack, the Fordsons joined the advance that shattered the Italian position, capturing over 38,000 prisoners.
The RAF cars then screened the famous dash across the desert bulge of Cyrenaica to cut off the retreating Italian army. This culminated in the Battle of Beda Fomm in February 1941, where the Italian 10th Army was trapped and forced to surrender en masse. D Squadron pushed as far west as El Agheila before being recalled after five continuous months of front-line operations.
The most dramatic chapter came 3 months later. In May 1941, pro-Axis Iraqi forces besieged RAF Habbaniya, a critical British airbase west of Baghdad. Number two armored car company received urgent orders to proceed to Iraq as part of Habforce. Eight Fordson armored cars covered approximately 1,000 miles in 4 days across open desert, racing ahead of the main column.
Half the company, under Squadron Leader Michael Cassano, pushed forward to assist the Arab Legion in capturing Rutbah Fort, held by approximately 100 Iraqi desert police. When RAF bombing failed to dislodge the garrison, Cassano’s armored cars fought a day-long engagement against Fawzi al-Qawuqji’s force of 40 armed trucks. The enemy withdrew under cover of darkness.
When the Iraqi garrison subsequently fled, two Fordson armored cars under Cassano were the first King Col’s forces to enter the fort. Cassano received the Military Cross. The company advanced to Baghdad itself, where a famous Imperial War Museum photograph shows a Fordson waiting outside the city during armistice negotiations with the rebel government.
The battle-hardened company immediately deployed again for the campaign in Syria against Vichy French forces that summer, fighting across a third theater in under a year. Against the Italian armored cars it faced in the desert, the Fordson occupied an interesting position. The Lancia 1ZM, Italy’s equivalent World War I era colonial armored car, was a 1917 design with three 6.
5 mm machine guns, weighing 4.2 tons, capable of 37 mph. The two types were effectively peers in obsolescence. But the Autoblinda AB41, which entered Italian service in 1941, was a different matter entirely. It carried 15 mm of armor, nearly double the Fordson’s 8 to 10 mm. Its 20 mm Breda autocannon could destroy the Fordson at ranges where the Vickers machine gun was useless.
The AB41 had four-wheel drive, dual driving positions, and a top speed exceeding 45 mph. It was considered one of the finest armored cars of the war. That British forces sent World War I vintage armor against such machines tells you everything about the desperation of 1940. Among British vehicles, the closest comparison was the Morris CS9, another improvised design serving alongside the Fordsons with the 11th Hussars. The Morris was lighter at 4.
5 tons with thinner 7 mm armor, but reportedly handled soft sand better. The South African-built Marmon-Herrington armored cars represented a similar philosophy of pressing Ford truck components into armored car service, but on a vastly larger industrial scale. 5,746 Marmon-Herringtons were built versus 24 Fordsons, and the South African vehicles had the critical advantage of four-wheel drive.
The Fordsons served until February 1943, when they were replaced by Autolite reconnaissance cars for the final Tunisian campaign. Photographic evidence from Cap Bon in 1943 confirms at least one vehicle still carried a Boys anti-tank rifle at that late date. Three years of continuous frontline duty for improvised machines built from components spanning three decades.
The Fordson armored car exist within a peculiar institutional story that most military historians overlook. These were not army vehicles. They belonged to the Royal Air Force. At the 1921 Cairo Conference, Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill and Chief of Air Staff Lord Trenchard agreed that the RAF would police Iraq and Palestine using a doctrine called air control, where aircraft supported by armored cars and locally recruited troops maintained order across vast territories at minimal cost. RAF armored car companies were
formed near Cairo from the winter of 1921, eventually numbering six companies spread across the Middle East. Number two company, formed on April the 7th, 1922, had been operating in the region for 18 years before the war even started. According to Dr. Nigel Warwick, the RAF Regiment’s official historian, these units accumulated unmatched experience in desert warfare that proved invaluable when the shooting started.
No Fordson armored cars survive today. Not one of the 24 vehicles exist in any museum anywhere in the world. A handful of Imperial War Museum photographs and a few pages in specialist books are virtually all that remains. One enthusiast, Bill Hodgson of the Yorkshire Military Vehicle Trust, built a loose road legal replica on a commercial truck chassis over approximately three years.
It may be the closest anyone will ever come to seeing a Fordson armored car in the metal. Think back to that Cairo garage in 1940. Engineers from a travel company’s workshop bolting World War I Rolls-Royce armor onto American farm truck chassis, building fighting vehicles for the Royal Air Force that would be crewed by airmen and fighters cavalry alongside one of the most famous regiments in the British Army.
It sounds like fiction. It was not. 24 vehicles, three theaters, three years, the destruction of an Italian army, the relief of a besieged airbase, and a fighting advance across North Africa into Tunisia. British engineering was not always elegant. Sometimes it was a Frankenstein monster bolted together in a borrowed garage with whatever was available.
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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Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
