The Admiralty was to continue its work of designing, was to provide cash for experiments, and Mr. Churchill, its late First Lord, was to continue his invaluable work as a propellant. All seemed prosperous, for the representatives of the two Services appear to have worked pretty harmoniously, and the better informed and more progressive heads of Departments on both sides showed an interested benevolence. But unfortunately--especially at the War Office--there appear to have been a certain number of obstructionists. One senior Officer, fearing, one supposes, to be diverted from his ideal of the official attitude by the sight of these ungodly engines, refused so much as to attend the trials. The Adjutant-General (then no doubt, poor man, sufficiently harassed) rigidly refused a single man for the new arm. Fortunately, the Joint Committee was resourceful, and, after a preliminary appeal to Mrs. Pankhurst for militant suffragists,[4] they induced the Admiralty to turn over to them the 20th Squadron of the Armoured Car Reserve, and to increase the strength of this unit from 50 to 600 men. By July Colonel Swinton--another of the Tank’s best sources of power--had returned to France. G.H.Q. was later to be more propitious, but now the taste of those inconclusive experiments was still in its mouth, and their chief technical adviser had begun to have horrid doubts about the whole affair. “Caterpillars,” he remarked, that he had lately seen “could only go at the rate of 1½ miles an hour on roads, were very slow in turning, and nearly every bridge in the country would require strengthening to carry them.” “It was necessary to descend from the realms of imagination to solid fact.” Colonel Swinton explained and exhorted and expostulated. II Meanwhile the Joint War Office and Admiralty Committee system was too simple to last. From August 1915 to August 1917, when the “New” Tank Committee was formed, the control and administration of Tank manufacture and design were extraordinarily tentative and shifting. Necessarily so. The home organisation had to expand very rapidly, and constantly to adapt itself to changed conditions of Tank tactics abroad and Tank manufacture at home. Even the multiplicity of the authorities concerned seems to have been to a great extent inevitable. The Tank had, of course, initially complicated its early history by starting life in Infantry puttees and a south-wester. At the point we have reached, its story plunges into a whirling quicksand of departments, branches, committees, and conferences, which were reorganised and rearranged--changed hats and functions with bewildering frequency. This tangle of activity Colonel Swinton throughout made it his hobby to understand and his business to co-ordinate.