I recently came across two original works albums of photographs from Vickers Armstrong Ltd whiich are held by Beamish Museum. The photographs cover the period from 1915 to 1915. The photos are vey high quality and seem to be mainly unknown. Beamish have given me digital images and permission to use them online.
I am therefore glad to announce the launch of the Interwar Tank Development blog here:
http://tankdevelopment.blogspot.co.uk/Although the albums and blog are titled "Tank Development" they also cover half tracked and wheeled vehicles. The coverage is pretty comprehensive, there are lots of prototypes, and both works photos and shots from exercises and tests including those at Wool in 1925 and 1927, the Dominion Premiers' demonstration at Camberlet in 1926, and trials at Okehampton. For example you can follow the contemporary interest in half tracked vehicles and exploring options for an MG carrier.
So far there are roughly 100 posts with the photographs and original captions from the first Vickers Armstrong Ltd Works album. I am intending to add text at a later date.
For the second album I need to go back to Beamish next Thursday to go through and record all the captions from it. There are a further 120 photos or so in the second album, this includes a number of WW2 ones including a fair number of Valentines.
If you look at the Pages tab on the home page you will see a page called media, which has a number of British Pathe and Movietone clips, and an interesting IWM archive audio interview.
I hope the blog will be of interest to some of you here - fantastic intersting photos, if you are interested in inter war or tank development. It should spark off a few ideas for the VBCW fans, too.