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Black Prince, Formally the Tank Infantry A43, Black Prince.…

By A Mystery Man Writer

Formally the Tank Infantry A43, Black Prince. The prototype for a heavier Churchill tank, it never entered production. Black Prince was designed in 1943, the idea being to create a heavier version of the Churchill tank mounting the17-pounder anti-tank gun. Designed, like the Churchill, by Vauxhall Motors, Black Prince was wider in the hull to accommodate a larger turret to house the big gun, but in most other respects the two tanks had a lot in common. Armour thickness was the same, as was the suspension system, but the strangest similarity of all was that both tanks had the same engine, the horizontally-opposed, 12 cylinder Bedford. Later models of the Churchill tank, which weighed around 40 tons, were generally regarded as under-powered yet the designers elected to use the same engine in Black Prince which weighed 10 tons more. Many believed that it would have been wiser to fit the 600hp Rolls-Royce Meteor but there is no evidence that this was ever done. Indeed, the prototypes did not appear until 1945, by which time there was no further use for them and the project ended. The development of Black Prince closely paralleled that of Centurion and it was planned, at one stage, to fit the Centurion turret to the Vauxhall tank. Once again there is no reasonable explanation as to why this was never done. The Black Prince turret was not an impressive design, being vertical slabs of armour except at the front, and both turrets were designed to mount the same gun. Seen at the Tank Museum, Bovington, Dorset, England, the fourth prototype is the only complete survivor.