North Africa, 1941. British 25-pounder crews are dying in the open desert. Their guns are superb. The Ordnance QF 25-pounder can hurl an 11 and 1/2 kg high explosive shell over 13,400 yd. It fires five rounds per minute. It can kill a Panzer III at close range with a solid shot, but the gun has no armor, no engine, no tracks.
Every time Rommel’s Africa Corps punches through British lines, the gunners must hook their pieces to slow lorries and crawl to new positions under fire. The gun needs to move and shoot. Britain needs self-propelled artillery, and it needs it now. What it gets instead is a vehicle so poorly designed that its own crews will have to drive it onto a hill just to aim its gun.
This is the Bishop, the self-propelled gun that cut one of the war’s finest weapons in half. The problem was speed, not firepower, not accuracy, not reliability. The 25-pounder towed behind a Morris C8 quad tractor could keep up with infantry advances, but not with armored thrusts across open ground. When Rommel launched a counterattack, his tanks moved at 30 km/h across firm desert.
British artillery batteries needed 20 minutes to limber up, relocate, unlimber, and resume firing. In that time, German armor could cover 10 km. The towed gun was also completely exposed. A near miss from a mortar round could kill the entire crew. An air attack on the battery position could destroy guns, ammunition, and tractors in seconds.
What the Royal Artillery needed was a gun that could drive itself into position, fire immediately, absorb some shrapnel, and drive away before counterbattery fire arrived. The Germans already had this concept working. Their Wespe, mounting a 105 mm howitzer on a Panzer II chassis, could elevate to 42° and hit targets at 11,675 yd. It moved at 40 km/h.
The Americans were building the M7 Priest, a 105 mm howitzer on a Sherman chassis that could reach 11,400 yd, carry 69 rounds, and cruise at the same speed. Britain had nothing. In June 1941, the War Office issued an urgent requirement. The contract went to the Birmingham Railway Carriage and Wagon Company in Smethwick, a firm already producing Valentine infantry tanks on their factory floor.
The concept was straightforward. Remove the Valentine’s turret, replace it with an armored box, put the 25-pounder inside. The Valentine II chassis made practical sense. It was already rolling off three separate production lines across Britain, with Vickers Armstrong, Metropolitan Cammell, and Birmingham Railway Carriage all building them simultaneously.
The Valentine was mechanically dependable. Its AEC 190 in-line six-cylinder diesel engine was the only power plant in the Mediterranean theater rated as performing well in postwar assessments. Two Valentines could be manufactured in the time it took to build a single Matilda II, but the Valentine was a compact infantry tank designed to carry a three-man crew at walking pace behind advancing soldiers.
It was never intended to house a field gun. Birmingham Railway Carriage had a prototype ready by August 1941, two months from contract to working vehicle. That speed came at a cost. The team built a tall, flat-topped, slab-sided steel casemate directly on top of the hull. The gun port at the front accepted the 25-pounder barrel.
The armored box measured 2.83 m tall, making the Bishop nearly a full meter taller than the original Valentine tank. Soldiers compared the angular profile to a bishop’s miter, the ceremonial headpiece worn by senior clergymen. According to accounts from the 121st Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, the nickname stuck immediately and launched the British tradition of naming self-propelled guns after religious figures.
Bishop, Deacon, Priest, Sexton, Abbot, the whole ecclesiastical family started here. The casemate’s armor was substantial, 40 mm on all faces with 22 mm on the roof. The hull retained the Valentine’s own protection, up to 60 mm on the front. This made the Bishop the best protected self-propelled gun of the entire war.
Every competitor, the Wespe, the Hummel, the M7 Priest, the Sexton, used an open-topped fighting compartment, but that protection created the Bishop’s fatal flaw. The steel ceiling of the casemate physically prevented the gun breech from dropping low enough for high-angle fire. On its towed carriage, the 25-pounder elevated to 45° reaching 13,400 yd.
Inside the Bishop’s armored box, the maximum elevation was 15°. Maximum range dropped to approximately 6,400 yd. The gun could traverse only 8° total, four left and four right. The Bishop had cut the 25-pounder’s reach by more than half and reduced its firing arc to a narrow slit. The ammunition situation compounded the problem.
Only 32 rounds of 25-pounder ammunition fit inside the casemate alongside three crew members, the gun mechanism, and the breech assembly. In sustained fire missions where a standard battery might expend hundreds of rounds, the Bishop ran dry in minutes. The crew compartment was so cramped that the rear doors had to remain open during firing because there was physically no space for the loader to work with the doors shut.
Some crew members operated from the engine deck behind the casemate. The vehicle weighed 17.7 tons, but produced only 131 horsepower from its diesel engine, giving it a top road speed of just 24 km/h and an operational range of roughly 145 km. The workaround became the Bishop’s most infamous characteristic. To increase range, crews built earthen ramps and drove the entire vehicle backward onto them, tilting the machine to give the gun a few more degrees of effective elevation.
In the flat Libyan and Egyptian desert, where natural slopes were scarce, gunners sometimes spent hours digging and shaping ramps in blistering heat. This negated the entire purpose of self-propelled artillery. A gun that needs earthworks before it can reach its target is no more mobile than a towed piece in a prepared position.
The War Office found the design acceptable in November 1941 and ordered 100 units. Production began at the Vickers factory at Elswick in Newcastle upon Tyne in early 1942. 80 vehicles were delivered by July of that year with a follow-on batch bringing total production to approximately 149. An option for 200 additional units was canceled once the M7 Priest became available through American lend-lease.
Now, before we get into combat, if you are finding this useful, a like on this video genuinely helps the channel. The algorithm notices. Now, back to the desert. The Bishop entered combat at the Second Battle of El Alamein, which began on October 23, 1942. Three Royal Artillery Regiments fielded the vehicle.
The 121st West Riding Field Regiment received 16 Bishops in July 1942, attaching to the 23rd Armored Brigade to support Valentine tank operations. Their batteries named individual vehicles in the British tradition. One A troop machine was christened Lilly Elsie after the Edwardian actress. Imperial War Museum film footage shows crews climbing aboard, elevating the gun, ramming home shells, and rolling out across the sand.
The 107th Field Regiment also deployed 16 Bishops at El Alamein with the same brigade. By December 1942, the 121st had already traded their Bishops for towed 25-pounders. Four months in the desert was enough. The 142nd Royal Devon Yeomanry Field Regiment took Bishops into Sicily in July 1943 and then into mainland Italy.
Imperial War Museum photographs from October 1943 show their vehicles firing at night from a captured German airfield near Grazzanise in southern Italy. Parked among wrecked Gotha gliders, one vehicle bore the name Edmar II painted on its gun shield. The regiment later earned a Canadian maple leaf decoration for supporting a Canadian division during the fighting around Monte Cassino.
In combat, every design flaw proved itself. The 6,400-yd range forced Bishops within reach of German 88-mm guns, weapons that could destroy armored vehicles at distances the Bishop could never return fire. The tall silhouette made it an obvious target on flat terrain. The 32-round ammunition supply ran dry in sustained engagements.
In Italy, Bishops were sometimes loaded onto Diamond T tank transporters rather than driven between positions, suggesting that their slow speed and mechanical wear made road marches impractical. The vehicle was still in service in Tunisia through March 1943 and in southern Italy as late as February 1944. Against its competitors, the Bishop performed worst by every metric that mattered.
The German Wespe reached nearly double the range at 11,600 yd while weighing only 11 tons and moving at 40 km/h. The American M7 Priest carried 69 rounds, nearly double the range, and cruised at 40 km/h on a proven Sherman chassis. Britain first ordered 2,500 Priests in March 1942 before the Bishop even saw combat.
The first 90 arrived by September, and the Priest fought alongside the Bishop at El Alamein that October. Through late 1942 and 1943, Priests progressively replaced Bishops across the theater, but the Priest introduced its own problem. Its 105-mm American ammunition was incompatible with every other British gun. Maintaining a separate supply chain for one weapon strained logistics across the entire Eighth Army.
This drove the requirement for the Sexton, a Canadian-built self-propelled gun mounting the standard 25-pounder on a Ram tank chassis derived from the American M3 Lee. The Sexton restored the full 40° elevation and the complete 13,400 yd range. It carried 105 rounds, more than three times the Bishop’s capacity.
Its Continental R975 engine produced 400 horsepower, triple the Bishop’s output, pushing it to 39 km/h. The Sexton stood only 2.11 m tall, over 70 cm shorter than the Bishop. Around 2,150 were built. By D-Day, the Sexton was the standard British self-propelled gun. Turkey received 48 Bishops in 1943, accounting for roughly a third of total production.
The remainder were relegated to training duties in Britain, where they arguably performed their greatest service, teaching Royal Artillery Regiments the fundamentals of self-propelled gunnery before those units transitioned to priests and sextons. No Bishop survives today. Every single vehicle was scrapped after the war leaving only photographs, film reels, and regimental war diaries.
Military historians are nearly unanimous in their technical verdict. According to the World War database, as a design to meet an emergency, the Bishop served its purpose adequately at an important time of the war, but its most useful function was as an instructional vehicle for teaching regiments the basics of self-propelled gun tactics.
That assessment captures the truth of the Bishop. It was a failure as a weapon system and a success as a proof of concept. In June 1941, Britain had zero self-propelled artillery in North Africa. Two months later, Birmingham Railway Carriage had a working prototype. 14 months after that, Bishops were firing at El Alamein.
The 25-pounder inside the steel box worked exactly as designed. The vehicle around it was the compromise that urgency demanded. Every flaw the Bishop exhibited, the restricted elevation, the cramped crew space, the towering profile, the inadequate traverse, was deliberately avoided in the Sexton’s design.
The Bishop taught Britain how to fight with mobile artillery, why ammunition commonality mattered, and what never to build again. 149 vehicles dismissed as useless by the men who crewed them shaped every British self-propelled gun that followed. The gun was never the problem. The box around it was. British engineering learned that lesson once, built the Sexton, and never repeated the mistake.
QQ4 Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The friendship began on a live television program in November of 1986 in the 11 seconds after Bob Dylan called Keith Richards music derivative on camera. Keith Richard’s response to that assessment, one sentence said without anger, without performance, with the specific directness of a man who has nothing to prove and knows it made Bob Dylan laugh.
Then made Bob Dylan go quiet. then made Bob Dylan say two words that people who know Bob Dylan say he almost never said to anyone. This is the story of those 11 seconds and the 40 years that followed them. The program was a live music interview special broadcast on an American network on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The format was simple.
Two musicians, a host, an hour of conversation about music and the state of it. The producers had assembled the pairing of Bob Dylan and Keith Richards with the specific calculation of television producers who understand that two people with equally strong and potentially incompatible views about what music is and what it should do will produce better television than two people who agree about everything.
The calculation was correct, though not in the way the producers had anticipated. Bob Dylan was 45 years old in November of 1986. Bob Dylan had released Empire Burlesque the previous year and had been on the road for most of the intervening period as part of the True Confessions tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
Bob Dylan was in November of 1986 in one of the most prolific and restless phases of a career that had consisted almost entirely of prolific and restless phases. A career that had moved through folk, rock, country, gospel, and back again, that had been declared finished at least six times by the music press, and at each time continued with the serene indifference of a river to the opinions of people standing on its banks.
Bob Dylan had been redefining what music could be. Since 1962, Bob Dylan had invented and reinvented himself so many times that reinvention had become his defining characteristic, not in the superficial sense of a performer changing costumes, but in the deeper sense of a musician who had never allowed his work to settle into a form that could be anticipated or categorized from the outside.
Bob Dylan understood influence and originality and the relationship between them better than almost anyone alive in 1986. Bob Dylan had spent 24 years thinking carefully and specifically about where music came from and where music was going and what it meant that those two things were always in constant conversation with each other.
Keith Richards was 42 years old in November of 1986. Keith Richards had been playing guitar professionally since 1962. Keith Richards had built a career on a foundation of American blues and rhythm and blues. A foundation that Keith Richards had studied with the systematic devotion of someone who understood that the tradition he was building on was not incidental to the music he was making, but essential to it.
that you could not understand what Keith Richards did without understanding where Keith Richards had come from and what Keith Richards had been listening to since he was a teenager in Dartford with American Import Records and a secondhand guitar and no teacher except the recordings themselves. Keith Richards had never pretended otherwise. Keith Richards had in fact spent considerable energy across his career making the lineage explicit, naming the artists, citing the recordings, insisting on the acknowledgement of influence that the mainstream music
industry had a long history of suppressing or ignoring or crediting to the wrong people. If anything, Keith Richards was more transparent about his sources than most musicians of his generation. Keith Richards had always said openly that the Rolling Stones came directly from the blues, that Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and the specific tradition of the Mississippi Delta were not background influences, but foundational ones.
The music Keith Richards made was in direct and sustained conversation with that tradition, something Keith Richards considered not a limitation, but a responsibility and a form of respect. The interview had been running for 8 minutes when the host asked Bob Dylan about the current state of rock and roll.
Bob Dylan answered with the density and the indirection that characterized Bob Dylan’s responses to direct questions, turning the question over, approaching it from an unexpected angle, finding his way to what he actually thought through a series of observations that moved like a river rather than a road. Bob Dylan was not a straightforward interview subject.
Bob Dylan had been asked about rock and roll in hundreds of interviews across 24 years and had developed the habit of treating the question as an invitation to think out loud rather than a request for a prepared position. The producer Gerald Sherman said afterward that in the first 8 minutes of the interview, he had been slightly anxious, not because anything was going wrong, but because nothing was going anywhere in particular yet.
The interview had the feeling of two conversations happening simultaneously. Bob Dylan’s internal one and the external one visible to the cameras. And Gerald Sherman was not certain in those first eight minutes that the two conversations would converge into something. Bob Dylan talked about influence. Bob Dylan talked about originality.
Bob Dylan talked about the difference between music that absorbed a tradition and transformed it and music that absorbed a tradition and reproduced it. And then Bob Dylan made his assessment. And then Bob Dylan said with the precision of a man making a musical assessment rather than a personal judgment that the Rolling Stones work, and Bob Dylan was specific, naming Keith Richards as the guitarist whose approach he was discussing was derivative in a way that Bob Dylan found limiting.
Bob Dylan said it without hostility. Bob Dylan said it as a technical observation about the relationship between source material and the work that came from it. Bob Dylan said that Keith Richards played the blues the way the blues had already been played, rather than using the blues as a starting point for something that had not yet been played.
Keith Richards had been listening to this with the specific attention Keith Richards gave to things being said about music by people who knew music. Keith Richards did not interrupt. Keith Richards did not shift in his chair or display any of the visible signals of a person preparing a defensive response. Keith Richards listened to Bob Dylan’s complete observation all the way to its conclusion without interrupting and without displaying any visible signal of preparing a response.
Then Keith Richards said one sentence. The sentence was not a rebuttal. The sentence did not defend Keith Richards music or argue for its originality or challenge Bob Dylan’s characterization of what the blues meant in the context of rock and roll. The sentence was something else entirely, something that required a specific kind of confidence to say.
The confidence of a person who has spent long enough thinking about the same things as the person they are talking to that they can locate the exact point where their thinking diverges and say something useful about that point rather than simply defending their own position. The sentence acknowledged everything Bob Dylan had said, the assessment, the distinction Bob Dylan was drawing, the specific musical concern underlying the observation, and then turned it 90°.
Keith Richards took Bob Dylan’s own framework, the one Bob Dylan had used to analyze Keith Richards relationship to the blues tradition, and applied it back to Bob Dylan’s work with the same precision Bob Dylan had used to apply it to Keith Richards. Spare aimed. The sentence asked Bob Dylan something about Bob Dylan’s own music, about the relationship between Bob Dylan’s sources and Bob Dylan’s output that Bob Dylan had not been asked on television before.
The sentence did not attack. The sentence illuminated. Bob Dylan laughed. The laugh was not the polite laugh of someone responding to a joke. The laugh was the involuntary laugh of someone who has been genuinely surprised. The specific kind of surprise that a person of exceptional intelligence experiences when someone else’s intelligence exceeds their expectations.
Bob Dylan laughed for 4 seconds. Then Bob Dylan stopped laughing. Then Bob Dylan was quiet for 3 seconds in the way that Bob Dylan was quiet when Bob Dylan was thinking rather than performing thought. Then Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” The producer in the booth, a man named Gerald Sherman, who had been working in television for 14 years, said afterward that in 14 years of live television production, he had never heard Bob Dylan say those two words in a public forum.
Gerald Sherman said he had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions and had observed Bob Dylan in numerous other contexts and that you’re right was not a phrase that Bob Dylan deployed easily or often because Bob Dylan had spent 24 years being right about music in ways that other people eventually caught up with. And the experience of being right ahead of everyone else does not generally produce a man who says you’re right readily when someone else makes a point.
The host of the program, a journalist named Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said afterward that the 11 seconds between Bob Dylan’s assessment and Bob Dylan saying, “You’re right,” were the most extraordinary 11 seconds of television she had been present for. Patricia Wells said that what she witnessed in those 11 seconds was not a debate or a confrontation or a celebrity exchange of competing opinions.
Patricia Wells said what she witnessed was one musician recognizing another musician as an equal, which was in the specific context of Bob Dylan in 1986, not something that happened in public very often. The interview continued for another 42 minutes after those 11 seconds. The conversation between Bob Dylan and Keith Richards in the remaining 42 minutes was described by everyone who watched it as fundamentally different from the first 8 minutes.
The host, Patricia Wells, who had been conducting music interviews for 12 years and understood the difference between the performance of conversation and actual conversation, said that at approximately the 9-minute mark, something shifted in the studio. That the formal interview, architecture dissolved, and what replaced it was something less structured and more genuine.
Bob Dylan and Keith Richards talked about influence and originality and the blues and what it meant to build on a tradition without being consumed by it. They talked about specific recordings and specific musicians with the specificity of two people who had spent their entire adult lives thinking about these things and rarely found another person who had thought about them with equivalent care.
They talked about where music came from and where music was going and whether those two questions were actually one question or two. Patricia Wells said afterward that she had asked approximately four questions in the remaining 42 minutes because Bob Dylan and Keith Richards did not require questions. They required only a room and a camera and the shared understanding that what they were saying together was worth recording carefully.
She said it was the best interview she had ever conducted and that she had conducted the smallest part of it. After the program, Bob Dylan and Keith Richards were in the corridor outside the studio when the host Patricia Wells passed them. Patricia Wells said she did not stop because she did not want to interrupt.
She observed them for approximately 30 seconds from a distance. She said they were talking with the ease of people who had known each other for years rather than people who had met for the first time 2 hours earlier. She said that something had shifted between them during the broadcast that the broadcast had made permanent rather than temporary.
She continued down the corridor and did not look back. She said in her account of that evening that she had decided in that moment not to interrupt the conversation because some conversations are more valuable than any question a journalist might ask and that the conversation she had observed for 30 seconds in the corridor outside the studio was one of them.
She had been a music journalist for 12 years. She recognized the difference. Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have maintained their friendship across four decades. They have appeared together at various events, most significantly at the concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, where people who were present described them as inseparable for most of the evening, occupying the same corner of the backstage area and talking with the concentrated attention of people who only have a limited amount of time together and intend to use it
well. Bob Dylan has spoken about Keith Richards in interviews with the specific thoughtful care that Bob Dylan reserves for musicians whose work Bob Dylan considers genuinely important rather than merely culturally prominent. Keith Richards has spoken about Bob Dylan in similar terms with the specific respect of someone who recognizes in another person a commitment to music that goes deeper than career.
Neither Bob Dylan nor Keith Richards has made a public statement specifically about how the friendship began or about the November 1986 interview. Bob Dylan has not mentioned the 11 seconds. Keith Richards has not mentioned the sentence. The interview exists in the archive. The 11 seconds are there. The laugh is there. The two words are there.
What is also there for anyone who watches the interview from its beginning and pays attention to the shift that happens at the 9-minute mark is the specific moment when two people who thought they were appearing on a television program discovered they were actually talking to each other. What Keith Richards said in that one sentence has never been officially reported.
The people who were in the studio that evening, Gerald Sherman, Patricia Wells, the floor crew, the two camera operators, the makeup artist who was watching from the side of the set, have described the sentence in consistent terms. They have described its effect. They have described Bob Dylan’s laugh and Bob Dylan’s silence and Bob Dylan’s two words.
They have not repeated the sentence itself in the specific understanding that the sentence was said between two musicians on a television program and that its power resided in the specific context of that exchange and would not survive removal from it intact. What can be said is this. Keith Richards said something to Bob Dylan about Bob Dylan’s music that used Bob Dylan’s own observation about Keith Richards as its starting point and arrived somewhere that Bob Dylan had not anticipated.
Keith Richards turned Bob Dylan’s assessment 90° and showed Bob Dylan something about the music they had both spent their lives making that Bob Dylan recognized immediately as true. And Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” Two words said by Bob Dylan in public on live television in 1986 to Keith Richards in response to a single sentence Keith Richards had said about music.
Two words that Gerald Sherman, who had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions, said he had never heard Bob Dylan say in a public forum. Two words that Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said were the most significant two words she had heard in those 12 years. Not because of their content, but because of who said them and what it cost to say them and what it meant that Keith Richards had produced them in 11 seconds from a conversation that began with Bob Dylan calling Keith Richards’s music derivative. And Keith Richards and
Bob Dylan have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The sentence did its work in 11 seconds on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The work has been ongoing ever since. If this story moved you, subscribe and leave a comment below. Have you ever said something to someone that turned a potential disagreement into an unexpected and lasting connection? Tell us about it in the comments below.
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