This turned up the other day in some archive material a friend was checking for me for some other stuff and there were no details, names, dates, locations, or places etc to go with it.
I'm no expert on the matter so I'll just post the image and see what the experts make of it.
A very interesting photo that I haven't seen before. Obviously it's a Gun Carrier conversion. According to my information there was one Gun Carrier that was used for experimental purposes and I presume that this is it. I also have a note that the experimental GC was converted in Hull. That suggests the involvement of Priestman Bros. I am sure I have more here somewhere ...
It would seem that Priestman Bros were involved in the post war reconstruction of French villages destroyed by the war. The attached photo from a 1920 edition of Scientific American bears a great deal of similarity to the photo.
Thought I'd seen it before - the Priestman device is noted in David Fletcher's article on the Gun Carrier in the old "Wheels and Tracks" magazine.
According to the text the gun carrier only supplied the track frames and final drive gears. Steam was taken down through the turntable to a steam engine
which drove the vehicle. Apparently the final drive gears were operated by men walking alongside the vehicle - progress was quite slow.
The vehicle was built in France - it's thought to have been constructed by the Royal Engineers.
There were two other gun carriers with cranes - the final two from the order of 50 were completed by Kitsons with crane jibs on the front deck rather than
the gun handling gear and driving cabs. Both of these were used in France as recovery vehicles.
Nice. Double checked back through stuff and there were two other images of the crane in use. One is just a better quality image of that one Charlie and there is this one too labelled "Priestman Grab - Arras"
Interesting looking steam unit behind.
There's another shot of some crane/recovery conversion gun carrier too but its not this one
