In 1926 the 4th Battalion, Royal Tank Corps, moved from Bovington Camp in Dorset to Catterick in Yorkshire. It must have been quite a traumatic experience. Until that time all five tank battalions had been concentrated in the south of England, which enabled them to train together, but now the Fourth was banished to the north, to a bleak camp which the majority of soldiers regarded as one of the worst in Britain. Things did not change much beyond that. Ever since the end of the First World War the Royal Tank Corps had been educating itself in the art of mobile, armoured warfare and in doing so had rather become divorced from the rest of the Army. This was not intentional. It resulted from a kind of persecution complex which led the tank soldiers to believe that they were outcasts, progressive outcasts perhaps, but misfits all the same. The more they preached the creed of armoured warfare the more they irritated the traditional arms, so they went their own way and encouraged one another with talk of mobile divisions in which tanks and armoured cars predominated.
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