I had seen it for sale some weeks previously and decided that I didn’t really need it, but clearly full of the festive spirit, I succumbed to its charms and brought it and now it has arrived, I’m somewhat over the moon about about it.
Constructed in wood, plywood and even cardboard, it really is detailed. It’s akin to those lovely models you would see in Army recruiting centres of a Centurion or a Challenger tank, but this is not professionally built.
Instead, it was most probably built by an old soldier for his son, and may depict his own tank. It has some age to it, dating I would think to the Second World War or just afterwards, perhaps being made by a wounded ‘Tankie’ whilst he was recuperating?
The original maker has gone to the trouble to include many smaller details which may not have been included by someone who wasn’t intimately associated with them. Features such as pistol ports in the pannier doors and the turret, along with the barrels of its twin BESA machine guns, which have been carefully turned, and the turret periscopes. They have even managed to get the longer length of barrel for the 6-pounder gun fitted to some later Mk. IIIs and the additional of a piece of armour plate on the front of the turret around the gun mantle (as seen on the ‘Kingforce’ Churchill’s used first at El Alamein in 1942).
The Mk. III was the first Churchill to feature a fabricated welded turret (all previous and post marks had cast turrets). The tracks on the model are all individually made, being individually glued onto a section of 1” webbing pack strap, so clearly the model maker was clearly using whatever materials he had about him at the time.
All the materials used are what you would find in regimental stores (packing crates, cardboard, wire and webbing) so it points very much towards it being made by a soldier. The colour scheme too is pretty accurate, copying original colour photographs of the mid-war period and the colours used makes me wonder if whoever made it just used paint from the QMs stores to finish it? (as it all looks spot on).
There is a bit of damage, but that adds to the character of it, but at just over 2ft. long, with my limited maths, the scale is roughly 1:12. Made in a time with no computers, where everything had to be scaled up from original drawings or photographs, it’s a pretty fantastic achievement by whoever made it, certainly not something I would be capable of completing.
All I need to do now, is to find a suitable home for it away from the destructive hands of my children!
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