“ENTRY LEVEL RESTORATION”

My first restoration was my first military vehicle and is an incomplete, almost unknown, amphibious tank. I first saw it in 1968 and patiently waited for it to come on the market. The first sight of the vehicle was not impressive, at the back of a disused part of a working factory, covered in debris. There were so many parts missing that it was difficult to identify it. No part of the engine covers, driver’s roof or hatches was there and only one of the radiator doors remained. The track guards had been trimmed either side by about 8 inches and the rear part removed entirely. The part of the turret that remained was the gun mounting, mantlet and front right quarter only. The front left hand quarter of the turret was found, along with the traverse motor and parts of the turret roof. On the other hand, the basic hull was sound and contained all of its components, dirty but intact and apparently workable. There was also the more complete hull of a Mk III Valentine; subsequently this went to the

Budge Collection.
Following the owner’s death a sale was organised for July 1984 I was just successful in purchasing the Mk IXDD but had someone else bid another £50 they would have got it as I had completely used up all the money had and all of the credit I had arranged. I got a handbook from the auctioneers and this contained the original receipt when it had been sold in 1948 for £450.

I turned the engine over on the tank and discovered all the controls worked with the exception of the engine to gearbox clutch. I collected some batteries, connected them up and hopefully pressed the starter button but nothing happened. I realised however that it was fitted with a pre engaged starter motor, which means it does not turn until it is engaged. Close inspection showed it trying to engage but not moving far enough. Bit of oil and levering freed it up. Another push on the button and it turned over briefly. One more press and after about 3 seconds of turning it started and ran cleanly on all six cylinders on the original wartime diesel. Ran like a dream in fact!

I drove it by pulling both steering levers back, engaging the gear and then engaging both levers at the same time to move as the engine to gearbox clutch would still not free. It seemed probable that there was something wrong or broken inside the clutch itself as the linkage was intact but the pedal just hung lifelessly on the hull floor. I went up onto a lowloader without directions but this time with the added complication of not being able to stop and gently correct the steering. I had to get straight on the road and go up and on in one movement.

I secured some storage on a farm amongst preserved busses and then “restoration” started. I knew about engines but had never welded, angle ground or bent metal before in my life. In fact I never even did metalwork at school. The fact that the engine ran was if anything a hindrance as I was reluctant to do work that meant it could not be driven (storage was a somewhat insecure tenancy). I did however have plenty of ancillary work to do.

After I bought the tank but before I moved it from the factory, I was approached by a scrap man who had purchased the rights to all the scrap in the fields around the building, old tractors combine harvesters etc. He said he thought he had found a part of my tank and indeed he had. It was the rear right hand quarter of the turret. This was secured at a very reasonable sum and later he found the missing quarter and the centre section of the engine covers. Once he had finished he gave me permission to search and with a metal detector I found 3 of the missing 4 engine cover doors, the cut off rear of the platform and the turret basket. The latter two were in the very last stages of collapse due to corrosion but yielded very valuable construction and dimensional details. From inside the factory came the missing pieces of the turret roof and bustle but the latter had been used for cutting practice and consisted of several chunks of metal not much bigger than 2 fists together. The propeller power take off also appeared, the shaft where the propeller should have been was still shiny but the propeller itself never came to light.

I dismantled the engine covers and taught myself thread cutting, riveting and some fabrication. The missing fourth engine cover seemed an insurmountable problem, as was the missing radiator door.

All the time I was looking for information and discovered that there is almost nothing in the public domain about these tanks. I got into contact with some divers in Dorset who had recovered some parts from seven wrecked DD’s off the Dorset coast. Sometimes they has almost useable pieces made of bronze and sometimes fragmentary steel components but all the information was useful to make sense of the parts list and start the long process of doing technical drawings of the pieces I needed to fabricate. I spent a lot of time at Bovington Tank Museum in the archives and this contact eventually resulted in me joining a group of Museum friends doing Range Recovery. While on the artillery ranges I always had my eyes open for Valentines. Pirbright in Surrey gave me a drivers roof panel and doors, Sennybridge gave me a radiator door, Warcop gave me a 2 pdr turret in pieces to stop it looking like a bulldozer and Salisbury Plain yielded a number of small components. I was originally looking for a turret ring to use as the “former” to rebuild my own turret but found all of the bolts were in different places and anyway I had found enough Mk I components to make a whole turret. This temporary cosmetic expedient actually lasted from 1988 to 2000 or about 4 times as long as the original turret remained in place! By 1988 this “temporary” turret was in place and the trackguards extended back to their original size, albeit only tacked in place. The platform rear was similarly fabricated by tack welding and the tank had been road registered. My reluctance to take it off the road had been overcome by a friend from Wigan who arrived with a team and in one day almost removed the engine. In fact it took several months to complete this removal as the transmission had to be partly dismantled and the day after I had swung the engine/gearbox out I received a phone call from Tyne Tees Television wanting to book my tank for a film in 2 weeks time. There was now a frenzied period to fix the clutch and get the engine and gearbox back in. Finished work at 2 am on the day the lowloader was coming at 5am. The test run at about 12.30 am came as a considerable shock to 3 courting couples who had parked their cars in the lane leading to the barn.

My tank joined 2 Churchills, a Mk III from Budge and a Mk IX from Vickers, which had been recovered from a bog in Northern Ireland and restored, to running order. The Mk III looked magnificent having been restored to the very highest standard, money no object. That was to be the start of a long period of excuses and subject changing whenever I was questioned about progress “the Mk III is finished, why isn’t yours?” “Well I had less to start with/less money/had to earn my living/doing a degree in my spare time/4 children etc. In fact I knew I had bitten off far more than I could chew but would never have admitted it then.

For the filming in Newcastle, the tanks were props to give the illusion of a tank factory production lines and mine was painted in pretend red primer, in fact red poster paint. The weekend afterwards, the 2nd turret had arrived from Sennybridge, courtesy of the TA and was craned on. At last it looked like a tank not a piece of construction equipment.

In the autumn of 1989, the group of friends from Wigan came down to try out their handiwork. We took it in a quarry and had a drive about for a bit and then disaster! While going over a soft crest the tracks filled with sand and rocks and then on a steep decline the overtight and packed tracks tore the front right hand idler from the hull and severely strained the left one. Within an hour, we had short tracked the machine taking the track around the middle top roller and front road wheel instead of the missing idler and we drove it home towing the removed section of track. It proved possible to find a right-hand idler bracket on Sennybridge eventually and fit it. It is of an earlier and weaker pattern and no amount of searching produced a left-hand one so all driving had to be seriously curtailed. The turret proved more of a hindrance than a help as it has to be turned to gain access to the engine and because of the state of the ring this had to be done with a crane. There was a lack of money as I was on a University Course and I had realised the enormity of the restoration task I had taken on. I lost the storage due to a disagreement with the farmer necessitating outside storage under a sheet and imperceptibly work came to an almost complete stop. A few parts were made, each one being a minor triumph in itself due to the lack of information and my lack of skill and I took to spending more time on other vehicles I had acquired. I missed my original target of getting it to France exactly 50 years late (The Valentine DD never made it on D Day, being replaced y the Sherman DD just before the invasion.) When looking for photos of work on the tank for this article there is an almost complete lack from 1989 to 2000 and that is an accurate reflection of the activity. In the early 1990’s I booked myself on a casting course and a number of things including frame clamps and a propeller were cast but general progress was so slow I did not bother to fettle (clean) them up. By the end of the 1990’s I was in the dreadful situation of having “reverse” restored the vehicle in that although some work had been done, the overall condition of the tank was worse than it had been 15 years before.

In 1998 I had a contact from a man in New Zealand who was also restoring a Valentine Mk V. We exchanged letters and phone calls. General discussion led naturally on to me asking if any turret rings were available. Yes, he had several. Would he part with a ring? Eventually, after a couple of years of negotiations, Yes! He also included a replacement bustle because of the damage to mine and also a Mk V roof plate to act as a former when welding my turret back together which in the end was not used.

With the turret parts on the high seas (Jan 2001) it was time to take stock. Could I get it restored, to fully working order by the 60th anniversary of D-Day in June 2004? Even better than that, could its first public appearance be 3/4 April 2004 at the 60th anniversary of the exercise when the Valentines were lost off the Dorset coast? Decided to have a bloody good try!

Part 2