Marmon Herrington Mk III early vs Mk III late – Identification – Part 1 - Inside Track | Renault TSF Tank Kent

The exciting challenge posed by our two South African Marmon Herrington Mk IIIs is heightened by the fact that these are two different marques within the Mk III range. The problem is reference related. as we are not aware of any other surviving Mk III with characteristics that match our second ‘earlier’ example. We initially assumed this MK III was an earlier example as it had no door situated in the rear of the vehicle and only the two side mounted doors. The headlamps are very different from the box shrouded examples shown in images of those depicted as early MK III armoured cars. The headlamps are no different to other standard MK III. Publications on the various ranges of the iconic Marmon Herrington armoured cars are very limited. The one exception is the fine publication by William Marshall - Marmon Herrington. Despite this impressive book we will be forced to conduct our own primary research as we did for the Renault FT and TSF. With the Renault project we could only rely on two publications in a blizzard of Renault FT book offerings. The Marmon Herrington is different in one sense as it is not well known or followed. Marmon Herrington survivors are nearly exclusively MK IVs and apart from a handful of earlier marques in Southern Africa (SA and Zim), there are no MK III (or earlier) combat veterans in the Northern Hemisphere to stir up a fan base. The only sustenance for its strong but limited fan base can be attributed to a number of hazy black and white images from the Second World War or South East Asia and images of the 3 cars in Saxonwold and Tempe.This is quite sad as these armoured cars made a significant contribution to the success of British and Imperial forces in East Africa and the Western Desert campaigns. Our ambition is to address the lack of tangible knowledge of these plucky South African war horses over time through research for the Marmon Herrington MK III project. Our initial take was that we had two MK IIIs and that we would make one out of the two. This idea evaporated as it dawned upon us that we had two different examples within the MK III range. The challenge now is to identify both of them definitively. Once this has been done we have a very exiting project ahead of us.

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