The Connection Between The First Tanks And The Classic Routemaster Bus
At first glance, it would appear that there would be little connection between Little Willie, which was one of the prototypes leading to the first tanks of the Great War and the classic Routemaster bus of the 1950s.
But I’ve just read this article on the BBC’s web site about how the tanks were developed in Lincoln. The article talks about the two designers.
The work needed more than technical experience, it needed two very particular men – William Tritton and Lieutenant Walter Wilson.
“Tritton was a brilliant engineer,” says Mr Pullen. “And he was a brilliant leader. He got things done.
“He turned Foster’s around with new ideas and new markets.
“Couple him with Walter Wilson, who was also a good engineer but a genius with things like gearboxes, and they made a brilliant partnership.”
It goes on to describe how they locked themselves in a hotel room and scribbled designs on envelopes and fag packets.
And the rest as they say is history!
Walter Wilson went on to form a company called Self-Changing Gears, that developed pre-selector gearboxes. I never drove a vehicle with one of these gearboxes, but I’ve sat just behind the driver on many a London Transport RT-bus and watched the driver select the gear and then hit the gear change pedal to engage it. The use of this type of transmission, was to make the effort of the constant stopping and starting easier on the driver.
Routemasters , it would appear had a fully-automatic version of the transmission, linking them back to the original tanks.
Mick Gives A Lesson In Motivation
This report of an interview on BBC Suffolk of Mick McCarthy is a classic and shows how to motivate your remaining strikers, so that one steps into the big shoes of David McGoldrick. Here’s an extract.
“All the ones that think they should be playing every week – Paul Taylor, Sylvan Ebanks-Blake, Frank Nouble – opportunity knocks for one of them,” McCarthy told BBC Radio Suffolk.
I would assume that gentle tactics like this didn’t appeal to Roy Keane.
Will The Scottish Independence Referendum Settle Anything?
I’m from the Don’t Care Tendency on the Scottish Independence Referendum.
But after listening to the debate about who owns the oil in the North Sea, I worry about the result of the referendum!
I can’t believe that if the vote is No, that the Scottish Nationalists will accept it quietly for ever, judging by the passionate arguments they put forward this morning.
And if the answer is Yes, will those against prolong the argument as long as they can?
Either way, it doesn’t bode well for people like me, whose taxes go to finance all of the whims of politicians.
If there is a way, then there should be a gradual disintegration of the United Kingdom. Scotland, Wales and London have shown that it is not a bad idea to devolve powers to locally elected bodies.
But then it was suggested that the North East might like an Assembly and that was rejected.
Abraham Lincoln is supposed to have said.
You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.
Even with fool replaced by please, it’s probably pretty true and sums up why devolution is so difficult to get right.
Why Has This Art Not Been Sold?
My Internet trawl on the Royal Bank of UK Taxpayers has found this tasty morsel in the Scottish Daily Record web site. Here’s the first paragraph.
Fred the Shred’s stunning corporate art collection is still still under wraps at taxpayer-owned bank despite promises to make it more accessible to the public.
As selling this has no implications for the profitability of the rump of the bank or employment issues, it is a disgrace that it hasn’t been sold or at least displayed in public.
The Anonymous Widower 