British Army-Vehicle Subvention and Standardization.
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Several correspondents have asked us for information about the earliest steps that were taken to persuade the War Office to move in the matters of suusa dies and standardization. The Editor of this journal put the first scheme for a subsidy. before a special committee of the War Office in the year 1902, imniediately after the corfclusion of the South African war, but that report was pigeon-holed for some years before action was taken on It; the present Earl of Derby was chairman of the committee. The first proposals ior standardization were put forward in considerable detail in a leading article in this journal on the 22nd September, 1910, whilst early further treatment of the same subject was given in leading articles published by us on the 16th February, 1911, and the 20th July of that year.
Apropos the point of initial financial help from manufacturers, in order to encourage them to move with some degree of alacrity in the matter, it will suffice if we make two extracts from the above-mentioned issues of 1911. On the point of cash help we wrote: "We urge the makers jointly and severally to hold out for a cash sum down of not less than £2000 each. The proffered inducement for radical changes is wholly inadequate, and the War Office knows it. The maker deserves financial support at the outsct, the purchaser afterwards." Again, on the second of the 1911 dates: "The Director of Transport, with the sub-collateral branch of the Mechanical Transport Committee, might have brought greater pressure to bear upon, in the first instance, the financial secretary of their own Department, and through him upon the Treasury, to secure a lump-sum payment to particular manufacturers, in order to hasten their conversion to the scheme." It is lamentable, with the facts before us now as to the benefits which, say, 220,000 expended thus in 1911 must have secured, to know that much of chaos as to sizes and types has survived. The true compromise between commercial and military requirements has yet to be settled,