Talk:Ernest Swinton

"Post-war" Section
April 1918, the date of Swinton's meeting with Holt, was not "after the war." Swinton did not thank Holt for "helping to win World War I," since at the time the war had not been won; on the Western Front the Allies were retreating in the face of the Germans' spring offensives, and the war looked in danger of being lost. According to the transcript of his speech, reproduced in Caterpillar Times of May 1918, pages 5 to 8, Swinton thanked the Holt staff for their hard work, and acknowledged the value of Holt tractors in towing artillery and in providing the idea on which the tanks were based. Hengistmate (talk) 16:13, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

World War One
The chronology and the causal links are a bit confused here. Swinton was sent to France in 1914, but, as described in "Eyewitness", he did not see a Holt tractor until June 1915. By that time the Landship Committee had already been formed (Feb 1915). Churchill had read and been impressed by the memo drawn up by Hankey, and urged Asquith to act on it, but it was the approach from Hetherington and men of the RNAS Armoured Car Squadron that was Churchill's main stimulus for establishing the Committee.

The War Office was not involved in the development of tanks until mid 1915. It conducted the Aldershot trials, but chose Holt tractors only for towing artillery. The Foster-Daimler tractors were ordered by the Admiralty, not the War Office. Swinton suggested Holts as a possible base for tanks before he was put in contact with the Landship Committee, by which time work was well advanced. The Committee did not use Holts at any point during its development of tanks. It's all in Eyewitness and plenty of other references. Hengistmate (talk) 10:12, 4 April 2013 (UTC)

H.F. Marriott.
Marriott was a captain in the Rand Rifles (a militia raised to protect the goldfields) from 1900 to 1902. By the time he wrote to Swinton he was a civilian, just plain Mr. Marriott. Hengistmate (talk) 08:19, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

And he wasn't South African: born London, 1869.

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Swinton the academic?
I don't think I'd describe him as such. Author, certainly, and a number of other things. Between the wars he seems to have been mostly a schmoozer, if you're familiar with the term. The account here of his life between the Wars, apart from his delusion that he had invented the tank, is very sketchy. Swinton worked for Citroen, visited Nazi Germany, successfully sued the BBC and H.G. Wells for defamation, used the "n" word liberally in his writings, decided that the British public deserved not one but two autobiographies - an interesting, very talented, and rather flawed chap. I think "academic" gives rather the wrong emphasis. His main function as director of Citroen seems to have been to arrange introductions to the highly-placed people he met during his military career. In Military History in Britain, John Stone says, "The social and political consequences of war were never felt (in Britain) to the same extent as they were on the Continent. War was something that took place outside civil society, and the connections between the two were rarely a subject of interest for British military historians. . . . There were very few academic historians engaged in the study of military affairs during this period (the 19th century). The Chichele Chair of Military History was not established at the University of Oxford until 1909, and was not held by an academic historian before the 1950s. In the interim, it was filled by a succession of journalists, and retired soldiers, whose work was in many respects meritorious, but who nevertheless failed to transcend the existing paradigm." That seems to include Swinton. I would suggest that, taking into account his history of the Russo-Japanese War and other works, he qualifies as a historian rather than an academic. Certainly, "academic" wouldn't be one of his bullet-points (if you'll excuse the expression), in my view. I'd put it under "Later career", rather than in the lead. Over to you. Hengistmate (talk) 17:22, 24 August 2018 (UTC)

Duffer's Drift
Swinton's second autobiography, Over My Shoulder, makes it clear that the only person claiming that The Defence of Duffer's Drift is lastingly influential is Swinton himself. Hengistmate (talk) 13:45, 12 January 2019 (UTC)

The Swinton Problem.
Swinton's story is rather problematic. Many sources describe him as the inventor, designer, originator, or similar, of the Tank. It's there in black and white. Unfortunately, the problem we have is that this is entirely because Swinton spent 35 years declaring himself so, from just a few days after the tanks' existence became known to the public until his death while he was still working on his second autobiography. He had considerable success in creating an accepted wisdom that persists to this day, but the facts do not support his claims. It is fortunate that there are some reliable sources that dispute or refute Swinton's claims. I think it is Wikipedia's responsibility to convey the objective facts rather than Swinton's wishful thinking. Hengistmate (talk) 19:37, 12 January 2019 (UTC)

Defence of Duffer's Drift.
I've substituted an alternative source here. The new one simply contains the text of the book. The previous one included much biographical and historical misinformation about Swinton of the sort that, unfortunately, is to be found in all too many sources. Hengistmate (talk) 13:34, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

Edits to lead, 10/4/2019.
Most people will look for Swinton on the basis of his involvement with the tanks. Swinton spent many decades of self-publicity making sure that would be the case. It's important to lead on that, so that people will know they've got the right bloke. His other activities are very much secondary. To run them together as you have done seems to me to give the wrong priority. Hengistmate (talk) 16:29, 10 April 2019 (UTC)