The Macfie Landships
by Roger Todd

The History

Robert Francis Macfie is one of the unsung minor heroes of the story of the origins of the tank. A talented Scots-Canadian engineer and early aviator (he had built and flown
three aeroplanes between 1909 and 1911!), he had travelled widely before the
war and had seen Holt tractors in action on plantations in the West Indies. It was only natural, then, that when war broke out, he should be an ardent advocate of tracklayers.

At first, he used his connections with the Royal Flying Corps to contact War Office officials, who were staunchly unmoved by his ideas. Next, he turned to Lt Harry Delacombe, who was working with Commodore Murray Sueter in the RNAS, telling him that armoured cars should be replaced with fighting tracklayers. Sueter being away at the time, Delacombe discussed Macfie’s idea with other officers in the RNAS armoured car division, prompting Capt Tommy Hetherington’s famous proposal for a gigantic wheeled landship.

Macfie soon joined the RNAS armoured car division, serving as engineer to Capt Hetherington (with whom he had flown at Brooklands in 1911), and sent a meorandum to Sueter in November 1914 outlining how six Holt tractors would be able to haul 85-ton twelve-inch naval guns over broken roads with ease. Sueter rejected the idea, telling Macfie that they weren’t in the business of hauling naval guns around. Nevertheless, the idea had been broached.

By February 1915, momentum had been gathering into finding a way to break the trench deadlock, momentum that was channelled, steered, and sometimes misdirected, by the energetic First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. He had already looked into, with mixed results, Hetherington’s giant big wheeler, trench-crushing rollers and even a proposal by Commodore Sueter himself for an armoured vehicle driven by a pair of pedrail tracks in tandem.

Churchill formed the Landships Committee to coordinate this disparate activity, and Macfie attended its first meeting on 22 February 1915. Chaired by Eustace Tennyson d’Eyncourt, Churchill’s Director of Naval Construction, Hetherington, Macfie and the veteran engineer Col Rookes Evelyn Bell Crompton, were present among others. Up until this time, those present had been adherents of the big wheel. But Macfie’s forceful advocacy of tracklayers, supported by his extensive experience with them, was to prove crucial. Crompton, who was to play an important role in subsequent developments, became an instant convert to tracks.

This meeting was the only one Macfie attended, for reasons that will become apparent. Be that as it may, by April, Macfie had asked for Sueter’s support in developing an armed tracklayer. Not only did Sueter agree, giving him a free hand, but he also gave him £700 and instructed Messrs Nesfield & Mackenzie, a small West London engineering firm which had been making anti-aircraft gun mountings for Sueter, to render Macfie all necessary assistance.

Macfie took an old Allday lorry as a basis for experiments and had Albert Nesfield convert it to tracks. Little is known of this vehicle, but Nesfield maintained that Macfie’s design used two pairs of tracks, the front pair being pivoted for steering. Nesfield, meanwhile, had designed a landship that ran on one pair of full-length tracks, each independently powered and one or other of which could be slowed or braked for steering. He also built an electrically powered model that used bicycle chains for tracks. An interesting feature was the ‘angularized tracks’, as Sueter termed them, with the front of the track frame raised to facilitate better climbing. Foreshadowing Mother, they rather resembled the rear tracks of the Killen-Strait tractor, but enlarged and turned around. A photograph of the model appears below (the strange object on the left that resembles a ship’s ventilator probably represents a periscope).

Figure 1: The model built by Nesfield (by kind permission of David Fletcher, the Tank Museum, Bovington)

It is at this point that the story turns rather sour. Since early June, Nesfield had been complaining about Macfie’s ‘violent abusiveness’ toward both himself and his workers, and the two were to fall out bitterly over Nesfield’s model. Sueter had ordered it to be shown at a meeting of the Landships Committee on 29 June, but it is not known if this happened (there is no record in the minutes of that period). On 1 July, Nesfield was showing the model to Hetherington, Crompton and some other officers at the armoured car division’s Wormwood Scrubs HQ when Macfie seized the model and claimed it as his. By this stage, Sueter was describing relations between Macfie and Nesfield as a series of ‘regular dog fights’.

Sueter ordered Boothby, the commander of the armoured car division, to try to persuade Macfie and Nesfield to resolve their differences, but in vain. During all this, Macfie had produced a revised design in August 1915, but ultimately, and with great regret, Sueter ordered all work by Macfie and Nesfield to cease. Macfie’s reputation within the service was damaged by the spat over the model, never recovering, and in fact he resigned in November 1915, alleging that his designs were being pirated. The Landships Committee ignored him, Albert Stern, in particular, dismissing him as ‘a very troublesome fellow’ and ‘a most impossible man to work with’.

Figure 2: Revised design of 19 August 1915: ‘Experimental Armoured Caterpillar’ (you will need Acrobat Reader to open the complete file)

Stern had one more encounter with Macfie in December 1916, when the latter had approached him for help with building a pilot version of his machine, for which he had found commercial backers interested in mass producing it (this was after the first British tanks had seen action). Stern asked to see the drawings, assuring Macfie that they would receive a fair hearing, but Macfie refused, retorting, with what would appear by now to be characteristic ill grace, that Stern had not treated him fairly before. Stern, never one to suffer fools gladly, terminated the meeting immediately. Thus was Macfie’s last chance squandered by his recklessness. From this point, Macfie conducted a vicious campaign of vilification against Nesfield and other past colleagues, which ended in 1919.

In the final analysis, despite his undoubted engineering ability and drive, Macfies contribution to the development of the tank, apart from his important appearance at the first Landships Committee meeting, was far less than it might have been. The reason for this is that he had all the social skills of a rhinoceros at a garden party. Where tact was required, he provided insults; where patience was a virtue, to Macfie bullying was the order of the day; and where diplomacy in negotiation was vital, he could only summon up reckless sarcasm. While this may be a harsh judgement, it must be said that throughout any account of his activities, certainly with respect to his landships work, there runs a common thread of petulance, grudge-bearing and an intemperate tongue.

The Designs

But what of Macfie’s designs, and what of Nesfield’s influence? At the Royal Commission on Awards to Inventors in 1919, Macfie and Nesfield entered competing claims to the same materials, including the model (which was demonstrated at one of the hearings; an illustration of it climbing over a thick, presumably legal, textbook before interested onlookers appeared in ‘The Sphere’ magazine). Certainly, the model exhibited some advanced features, such as an ‘arrow head’ profile nose, similar to Little Willie later, and the upturned ‘angularized’ tracks, which foreshadowed Mother. But the Commission found no evidence that the model had a direct influence. Although Sueter and Crompton had seen it, neither Tritton nor Wilson had, and nor were they even aware of it.

In any case, although Macfie’s prescient advocacy of tracklayers cannot be disputed, his exact contribution to the design process can be. Macfie’s patents show machines with multiple track units, invariably including one for steering at the front, rather like Nesfield’s description of the Allday lorry conversion. The immediate impression, in fact, is of a degree of mechanical naivety.

Figure 3: Macfie’s amphibious tracklayer patent (by kind permission of the UK Patent Office)

Figure 4: Macfie’s tracked vehicle patent (by kind permission of the UK Patent Office)

But with Nesfield’s involvement, suddenly there appeared two sets of designs with single pairs of long tracks, upturned at the front. Although the revised design of 19 August 1915 was almost certainly Macfie’s alone, as by that time he had fallen out completely with Nesfield, the initial version was almost certainly mainly Nesfield’s doing. In fact, this is confirmed by John Glanfield’s comment in ‘The Devil’s Chariots’ to the effect that one source of the friction between the two men was Macfie’s, doubtless dogmatic, insistence that Nesfield’s method of steering, by stopping one track, would sheer the tracks off.

Superficially, the revised August design bears a striking resemblance to Little Willie, though more thickly armoured. It is doubtful if the trailing wheels would have worked very effectively, as they depend entirely on their own weight to gain purchase on the ground. Little Willie, and subsequently Mother and the Mark Is, used powerful springs to press their tail wheels into the ground. Intriguingly, there is what appears to be a three-bladed propeller protruding from the rear on a long shaft (which looks as though it would have suffered severe whiplash). Bearing in mind Macfie’s patent for an amphibious tracklayer that also features a three bladed propeller on a long shaft, it implies an amphibious capability. One doubts the effectiveness of this, however, as the machine would surely have lacked enough buoyancy. The tracks are unusual, in that they are roller-tracks similar to those fitted to German Orionwagen tractors before the war. The shoes are deep, with sets of rollers on bearings inside which engage with a smooth track-frame. No armament is specified, and there appears to be no provision in the drawing. There appears to be room enough at the front, however, but anything else is speculation.

The  Sources

David Fletcher, the Tank Museum, Bovington

·    David Fletcher & Dick Harley, ‘Tankette’, Volume 15, Issue 6 (my thanks to Tim Rigsby)

·    John Glanfield, ‘The Devil’s Chariots’ (2001)

·    Albert Stern Papers, Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College London

·    Murray Sueter, ‘The Evolution of the Tank’ (1937)

·    UK Patent Office