Did you know that Lincoln was the birthplace of the tank? This small engineering city was instrumental in the invention of a machine that saved thousands of lives during the First World War.
By 1915, trench fighting was well established and the Great War had become a stalemate. If either side tried to cross No-Man’s Land the barbed wire would stop the soldiers in their tracks and the machine guns would have the final say. The army was in desperate need of a way to cross broken ground, crush the wire and silence the guns.
The British Prime Minister at the time, David Lloyd George, could already see how the outcome would be decided when he declared the ongoing battle as "an engineer's war”.
On the 29 September 1915, military dignitaries were invited to come and see something interesting at the William Foster and Co Ltd factory on Firth Road in Lincoln. When the War Office dignitaries arrived inside a large marquee, they saw a wooden mock up of a new weapon: The Tank.
To say that the military were impressed would be a huge understatement, and Fosters design team were told to have to complete machine ready for testing as soon as possible.
Little Willie
The workers at Fosters astounded everyone when in early January 1916, around three months later, they announced that their prototype machine 'Little Willie' was now ready for military testing. The initial trials were undertaken in the peaceful surroundings of Burton Park, near Lincoln. When these went without fault, the tank was sent to Hatfield Park in Hertfordshire for further testing.
Little Willie sailed through them all, taking trenches and boggy ground in her stride. The answer to the barbed wire had been found at a small, agricultural manufacturers in Lincoln and it was called the tank.
Mother
The next stage of production aimed to create a tank that could traverse wider trenches and so the world's first fighting tank - named Mother - was born.
After Mother had proved her worth, the orders started to come in and Lincoln became known as ‘Tank Town’. Machines made in Mother's image were soon leaving Lincoln for use in the world’s first tank battle on the 15 September 1916.
The Lincoln designed tanks were so successful that they began to be produced by factories across Great Britain in order to keep up with demand. The people of Lincoln were proud of Tritton's invention, and tanks were paraded through the streets of the city before they went out to war.
The birthplace of the tank
Without the tank, the stalemate of the Great War would have carried on, perhaps well into the 1920s, and thousands more lives would have been lost then and into the future. More than 100 years later, only a handful of Great War tanks survive today - one of which is a Mk IV female tank on show at the Museum of Lincolnshire Life.
The invention of the tank has been commemorated in Lincoln with the Tank Memorial on the Tritton Road roundabout, near the University of Lincoln.
Words by Richard Pullen, from the Friends of the Lincoln Tank.