Royal Naval Air Service armoured cars provide a precedent

Flight Commander Thomas Gerard Hetherington, whose career spanned the Army, Navy, and Royal Air Force, brought experience from the RNAS armoured-car force into the landship team. RNAS crews operating in Belgium needed a way to reach pilots downed in no man's land, prompting armoured and armed vehicle experiments. Commander Charles Samson tested a Maxim gun on a vehicle and used Dunkirk shipbuilders to add boilerplate to a Rolls-Royce and a captured Mercedes. Rolls-Royce and Wolseley then supplied more formal vehicles as the improvised effort expanded. The Royal Naval Air Service ultimately fielded twenty armoured-car squadrons, giving it experience far beyond a single experiment. Colonel Wilfred Dumble connected that experience to the landship effort after service as a Royal Engineer, management of the London Omnibus Company, and responsibility for transport with the Royal Naval Division at Antwerp. He recommended the cross-country-vehicle specialist R. E. B. Crompton to the committee. These personnel, transport skills, and industrial links gave the landship project practical precedents for protected mobile firepower.