Sixteen tons of boilerplate on a slowly turning stand at Bovington is where the tank’s story starts. Little Willie, built by William Foster and Company of Lincoln in 1915, is the oldest surviving tank in the world, according to The Tank Museum at Bovington, which has kept it since 1919. It was a prototype, and only one was ever made.
It never fought. It never left Great Britain. What it did was prove that an armored, engine-driven, tracked machine could be built at all, and the tracks developed for it shaped the British tanks that followed.
The Tank Museum’s own history of Little Willie puts it plainly: “While it is undoubtedly the oldest surviving tank in the world Little Willie was only ever a prototype, it was the only one of its kind ever built.” The museum adds, for anyone standing in front of it, “So what you are seeing is it, the only one there ever was.”
From the Number One Lincoln Machine to Little Willie
The machine began life at the Wellington Foundry in Lincoln under a plainer name, the Number One Lincoln Machine. As first built, the museum says, it carried a dummy turret and ran on tracks made in the United States by the Bullock Creeping Grip Tractor Company of Chicago. Those tracks had been designed for an agricultural machine and did not work well on a fighting vehicle, even a prototype.
William Tritton, one of the designers, tested other ideas and then drew up a new track. The museum says that design “was so good that it not only worked perfectly on Little Willie but became the pattern used on virtually all British tanks built during the First World War.” New track frames had to be built along with the tracks, and the work took until November 1915. When the vehicle rolled out of the foundry again, the dummy turret was gone.
The museum’s collection entry credits Tritton and Walter Wilson with the working tracks and says the nickname came from the German Crown Prince. It calls Little Willie “the first working tank in the world,” adding that “It proved that a vehicle encompassing armoured protection, an internal combustion engine, and tracks was a possibility for the battlefield.” The same entry lists the specifications:
- Number produced: 1
- Crew: 5
- Weight: 16 tons
- Speed: 3.5 mph
- Armour: 10 mm
The museum’s history is candid about that protection: the hull is “not made of armour plate, only boilerplate after all.” A separate Tank Museum article, The First Tanks, says the prototype was powered by “a Daimler-Knight 105hp petrol engine.”
Burton Park, Mother and the road to Bovington
Little Willie was tested at Burton Park in Lincoln, “probably in December 1915,” according to the museum. It then carried a tail assembly, a pair of wheels at the back, worked by a hydraulic hoist that could lift the tail clear of the ground or help the machine over a trench. The wheels were removed before the end of the First World War; the remains of the hoist are still visible on the hull.
Little Willie was overtaken almost as soon as it was finished. Tritton and Wilson had already designed a better machine with tracks running around the whole hull, the rhomboid shape that became the British tank of the war. The Tank Museum’s First Tanks article says Mother, “the first Mark I Heavy Tank,” came from “a rapid redesign by Tritton with the assistance of Lt. Walter Gordon Wilson RN” and could “cross an 8ft trench with a 4ft 6in parapet.”
Mother was the machine put before military, naval and civilian officials. The museum’s account of the first tank trials at Hatfield Park records demonstrations on Jan. 29, Feb. 2 and Feb. 8, 1916, of the prototype “Popularly known as Mother or Big Willie, but officially His Majesty’s Land Ship Centipede,” listed at 31 feet 3 inches long and 28 tons 8 hundredweight. The museum says there are unproven claims that Little Willie also went to Hatfield in January 1916 and to the training ground at Elveden in Suffolk later that year: “We can’t prove or disprove either of these claims.”
Mother was scrapped after the First World War. Little Willie was kept. The Tank Museum says it was retired in 1919 and sent to Bovington as part of the original collection, though it did not come indoors until about 1946, when it was painted green like the other vehicles.
The machine on display is a shell of the original. The museum says the Daimler engine and most internal fittings were removed years ago, and damage at the front came from someone threading a tow line through one of its windows. It has since been repainted in what the museum believes is closer to its correct color.
Little Willie now sits in The Tank Story hall at Bovington, on a stand that slowly turns so visitors can see it from every side. It remains the only example ever built, completed in Lincoln in November 1915.
Top image: Little Willie at The Tank Museum, Bovington. Image Credit: Mightyhansa — CC BY-SA 4.0 / Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Combat Rated editors prior to publication.