The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

Water Closets for Russia

William Minor was released on the orders of the Home Secretary Winston Churchill. Churchill is remembered by lexicographers as a man of words. He wrote a novel called Savrola that appeared in 1899 to reviews that can be given the usual euphemism of ‘mixed’. He invented the phrases out-tray, Iron Curtain, social security and V-sign. He invented the words seaplane, commando and undefendable. He popularised crunch in the sense of the vital moment; and won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1953. With all these linguistic achievements, it’s easy to forget that in his spare time Churchill was also a politician.

As William Minor sailed, sans willy, back to America, Europe was getting ready for war. In 1911, Winston Churchill was moved from the position of Home Secretary and became First Lord of the Admiralty, where he was in charge of developing new and more lethal methods of killing the enemy.

One of the ideas that he oversaw was the landship. The oceans of the world were, at the time, dominated by the Royal Navy. Britannia ruled the waves. Huge steam-powered gunships chuffed around the globe making sure that the Sun never set on the British empire. These ships were covered in iron, so that they were immune to enemy fire, and they had huge guns mounted on them, so that they could destroy others. However, on land Britain was not so invincible. The British army still consisted of men and horses, which are made of flesh rather than iron and could be killed in their millions.

So, under Churchill’s supervision, a plan was hatched to take the principle of the iron-clad warship and apply it to land warfare. The British started to design the landship. It would be iron, like a warship, it would motorised, like a warship, and it would have guns mounted on it, like a warship. It would be a destroyer, but it would be used in the field and not in the sea.

The idea was pushed forward by an officer called Ernest Swinton. Plans were drawn up and manufacturers approached, but everything was done in deadly secrecy. No mention of landships was ever made in public, which is why they aren’t called landships today.

The landship was such a secret that not even the workers in the factory where they were built were to know what they were. By the outbreak of war in 1914, Russia was fighting on the Allied side, so Swinton decided that a good cover story for the new weapons would be to say on all documents that they were Water Carriers for Russia, but when Swinton told Churchill about his ruse Churchill burst out laughing.

Churchill pointed out that Water Carriers would be abbreviated to WCs and that people would think that they were manufacturing lavatories. So Swinton had a quick think and suggested changing the name to Water Tanks for Russia. Churchill could find no objection to this codename, and it stuck.

Well, it didn’t all stick. Water Tanks for Russia was a bit cumbersome, so water got dropped. Then it turned out that the tanks weren’t going to Russia at all. They were going to the trenches on the Western Front, so Russia got dropped too. And that’s why tanks are called tanks. If Winston Churchill hadn’t been so careful about lavatorial implications, they might have been called carriers. If Swinton hadn’t been so careful, they would definitely have been landships.

The tank was a very useful weapon of war, but unfortunately the Germans were even then building their own secret weapon, and theirs had a name that was quite ungentlemanly.