John Trew and an Elizabethan Tank? October 15, 2016
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
Beach recently enjoyed Robert Hutchinson’s The Spanish Armada, particularly this short passage about an Elizabethan inventor, John Trew:
Periods of national crisis often throw up the more eccentric among us. John Trew wrote to the queen in December offering his services for ‘her preservation and salvation… Though an old man, I desire to be employed in the wars.’ Like those unfortunates who, in later centuries, scurry between newspaper offices carrying tattered brown paper packages containing evidence of a world secretly governed by aliens, Trew’s fixation soon became apparent in his letter: ‘I have an invention which would do as much service as five thousand men in times of extremity and also an engine which can be driven before men to defend them from the shot of the enemy,’ he boasted. Like others of his ilk, his offer was politely declined and we shall never know whether John Trew, was the earliest inventor of the main battle tank (199-200).
Hutchinson has his fun at Trew’s expense here, but what had Trew invented and was it really a crackpot idea? Well, first, Trew seems to describe two different inventions. Invention one ‘would do as much service as five thousand men’; invention two ‘can be driven before men to defend them from the shot of the enemy’. The first sounds like something apocalyptic (gunpowder, a bomb?); the second must be come kind of wide shield to protect advancing infantry. Not sure about a tank.
Interestingly, the most famous Elizabethan of this name was a well known engineer, responsible for making Exeter Canal in 1564 and for works on the pier at Dover harbor prior to 1581. These dates mean that John Trew the engineer (‘an old man’ by 1588?) and John Trew the inventor could have been one and the same. If they were then these were something more than the ravings of a crank.
Trew’s paper apparently appeared in the Calendar of State Papers (Domestic Elizabeth, 1581-90), though Beach is unsure because the epub file of The Spanish Armada clips the page on his tablet… Sigh. Can anyone help get the originals: drbeachcombing At yahoo DOT com
Memories of Leonardo’s tanks…
