The last station in the turret is the loader.
Again, very cramped.
I’m standing on the floor, and my head is outside the hatch.
He has no periscope in his hatch. In fact, he has no periscope at all.
The only way he can see out is he has a tiny little port in the rear of the turret,
so all he can do, if there’s a lull in the fighting, he’s got a little seat which folds up and down in the same way as the commander,
he can sit on that and look out the open hatch.
Which I should add was actually something of a narrow fit for me to get into.
Ammunition is stored pretty much all around, there’s.. oh.. one-two-three-four… seven ready rounds directly behind the gun,
there’s another eleven or twelve underneath the gun.
Because the ammunition is so small, it’s one-handed loading basically, just pick it up and slam it in.
You could also use your right hand, and put it in that way. I’ve seen both.
There is a canvas bag for catching the empty shell casings, he of course also has the job of the care and feeding of the co-axial Besa.
Not much else in here.
I’ll try to give you an impression of how small this is,
I strongly suspect that the internal volume of this turret is smaller than that of a Stuart, an M5 light,
but a Stuart is only a two-man turret, so that probably can put that into perspective.
Again, I’m glad I wasn’t around in the 40s, I probably would not have enjoyed being a tanker as much as I do today in the 21st century.
I do believe a fire extinguisher would have gone here,
and he has his own intercom set. A mount for the radio antenna. And that’s it.
Driver’s hole. I thought this place was cramped, let’s see what that one’s like.
So these two devices down here which look suspiciously like they were taken from a bicycle brake handle,
they are connected to the smoke projectors on the far side of the turret wall.
So squeeze inwards, and off goes your smoke grenade.
If you’re wondering how the driver’s hatch worked on Matilda, that was it.
It was a rolling system, that just levers forward.
There’s a handle on each side, and that’s it.
I –think- I’m in the ‘up’ position.
At least, I certainly hope I am, but I can’t figure out how to lower the seat
Go figure.
Anyway, for viewing, he has, again, a rotateable and adjustable in elevation periscope.
And in case it goes down, he does have, behind this armoured cover here, a direct vision slit
It’s actually a lot smaller than it looks like, it’s small grates as you can see, even behind the armoured cover.
And of course, his last option is to do what I’m doing now, to drive with his head out.
So ordinarily when I do one of these tours, I sit in the driver’s hole and I start pointing at things.
Unfortunately, this vehicle is so lacking in camera accessibility, I guess they weren’t thinking about that at the time,
there’s not much for this except I’m going to have to get out, lie on the front slope, and start pointing at things from the outside.
It’s the only way to get the camera and the items in at the same time.
Just while I’m here, you can see the driving position with the two steering laterals
Right in the middle is where the gear selector is, and I have two pedals, one accelerator and one gear-change.
Not a clutch, it’s a gear change
OK, as we’re climbing around on the outside of the tank, I should re-emphasis how many times we’ve nearly fallen off it.
It’s not a vehicle designed for staying on in dry weather, let alone wet.
Anyway, the cameraman is inside the driver’s hole, so we’re going to start him off looking at the lower left corner,
under his left shoulder, which is where the electrical junction box is.
At the very bottom of that is going to be the Master Power, and that is a simple handle right at the very bottom.
We have headlight switches.
Main headlight, and Headlight UV it says, which I presume is ultra-violet.
There are two little boxes on the outside I suspect that could be it.
There’s tail lights, and a couple of other switches I can’t actually read.
Batteries, incredibly corroded.
There’s two on each side, by the hull side.
You can see how the hull slants inward because of that V-shape that it has.
Up on the top is one of two handles to rotate the driver’s hood forward for protection
Just underneath that you have a nice round button called “Klaxon”
You have two guesses what that does.
What the handle to the left does, I have not yet figured out.
There is a clock, if you want to know what time it was.
And it seems to be the wind-up type.
To the front then you have the periscope which will elevate and rotate, like so.
And to the right is that direct vision I had mentioned.
Speedometer right here.
It’s an interesting way of the numbers circulating around.
Looks like it has 854 miles on the clock.
The gear change is right in the middle.
Five speeds, there’s an E-L and reverse.
Now, the thing about this is that it’s a pre-selector.
People who drove Routemaster busses for London Bus would be familiar with the concept, or if you drove a Ferret armoured car.
The idea behind this is that you select whichever gear you want to be in first,
and then when you need it, you depress the gear change pedal, the one on the left.
It is not a clutch, you don’t use it as a clutch.
What happens when you press that is it will change the gear to whatever setting your gear lever is currently in.
The big pedal on the right, that’s simple enough, it’s the accelerator.
Going further around to the right, we have another instrument panel.
A set for each engine, so going from the top you have engine temperature, pressure, and then finally the fuel tank gauges.
Yet more corroded batteries.
Obviously this tank has not driven in a very long time, needs a bit of work.
Further to the right and above the corroded batteries is the engine air pressure gauge.
And that is what is used to traverse the turret.
Once the pressure is at the correct setting, then the gunner is in a position to traverse the turret.
So this little red item under here is the escape hatch.
Now, I could not see the escape hatch when I was in the driver’s seat.
I could not see the escape hatch when I was lying on the front slope looking down looking for the escape hatch.
So I have no idea how it was that you were supposed to be able to escape through the escape hatch.
And not least you don’t have a whole hell of a lot of ground clearance either.
So that’s why egressing through the turret was usually the best option,
and why you had the whole spiel of the gunner leaving the traverse controller at a certain setting
so the driver could turn on the engine and spin the turret around so that he could get out through the turret and out the roof.
Yeah. Not the best design.
Matilda was a vehicle designed for a set specification.
It did that one thing, which was have lots of armour, well, at least 3 inches, and a 40mm gun
There was no room for upgradeability.
You couldn’t add a bigger gun, you couldn’t add more armour, you couldn’t make it go faster. At least, not much faster.
As a result, when the last production orders were placed in 1942 the tank was already pretty hopelessly obsolete,
and the last ones were built in 1943, you probably didn’t want to be the guy who received it.
That said, the vehicle did see service in East Asia, particularly with the Australians.
They rather liked the thing, I don’t know if it was the name or other features.
The Aussies did a bunch of modifications including rocket launchers, flamethrowers, and what have you.
So Matilda was actually one of three vehicles that were in production at the beginning of the war
and still in service at the end of it. The other two were T-34 and Panzer IV.
That was Matilda. I hope you found it interesting, and we’ll see you on the next one