BOER WAR ARMOUR
JOHNSON'S
Craig Moore lifts the lid on a London engineer’s obscure Armoured Motor Car, a vehicle envisaged to support British troops in the Boer Republics
Recently, Cold War historian Ed Webster told me that he had spotted an unusual application for the Manchester Patents Department on an online auction site. Ed knows I like what he terms ‘old tin’.
I scouted out the auction, and the document had been ripped from a larger patent application book. Two pages were missing and the uploaded photographs were of poor quality – but they did appear to show an 1898 design for a motorised armoured vehicle.
I contacted the Manchester Patent Library, Business and Intellectual Property Centre, which kindly sent over copies of the original patent application document from its archive.
A rush of blood and gold
The proposed armoured vehicle was envisaged for service in southern Africa, where, in 1877 – a year after goldfields had been discovered in the Transvaal Republic – the British annexed the recourse-rich Boer homeland.
Growing tensions led to revolt, and between December 1880 and March 1881, the British were humbled in a largely one-sided conflict that temporarily secured the Republic’s i…
