Vickers medium tank in India, 1925 (c)

Photograph, India, 1925 (c).

Vickers Mark 2 medium tank standing with hatches open.

Colonel Norman Margrave Dillon (1896-1997), who compiled the album in which this photograph appears, fought with the Tank Corps in France during World War One (1914-1918). In 1925 he sailed to India to join 7 Armoured Car Company at Peshawar. In November 1926, he was posted to Delhi as Tank Technical Officer attached to Army Headquarters.

The British Army Vickers medium tank differed from its World War One predecessors by carrying its main armament in a rotatable turret.

With positive reactions to the Vickers Mark 1 medium tank in the United Kingdom, two transitional models numbered T59 and T60 were shipped to India for evaluation. They were similar to the new Mark 2 with skirting plates over the suspension but they were without a main gun and were fitted with two Vickers machine guns mounted in the turret. Under the command of Lieutenant (later General Sir) John Tredinnick Crocker (1896-1963) of the Royal Tank Corps, the tanks and their crews arrived in India in January 1925. They were put through four months of gruelling trials to see if they could cope with the testing terrain of the North West Frontier. They were eventually sent back to England and the Army chose to select lighter models to operate on the Frontier in the 1930s.

From album of photographs compiled by Colonel Norman Margrave Dillon, 1918-1926.