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Originally Posted by gmw
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I expect you are right about the Willis & Bates error, but while it seems unlikely it is conceivable that the company had a factory in Canada too. (Just saying that I wouldn't hang him for it without further evidence.)
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This is certainly not a book I'd ever re-read, nor recommend to others, and I do wish we'd done the Kitz book instead, but it obviously didn't rub me the wrong way as much as it did for you and Bookpossum. Funny the different things that will irritate us.
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As you have mentioned the Willis & Bates error, I thought this was worth revisiting. I can find no reference to their having a factory in Halifax Canada. But I did find a reference on whether or not they had anything to do with designing or making helmets:
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Alfred Bates, of Willis & Bates in Halifax, claimed to have come up with the basic design for a simple, inexpensively produced anti-shrapnel helmet using a process of metal stamping sheets of steel. By his own testimony he received a French 'Adrian' helmet from the War Office to assess how a British equivalent could be made. His firm made decorative metal lanterns and he was familiar with the stamping of metal sheets to produce lantern shapes. Indeed, one of his lanterns has a component which bears a remarkable likeness to the basic 'tin hat' shape. Bates coupled the simplicity of its manufacture with the use of specially strengthened steel manufactured nearby in Sheffield. No authoritative documentation can be found to back up Alfred Bates' claim outside of the newspaper reports, but the story that he was the 'inventor' of the 'tin hat' was current in many newspapers at the time of his death, including several from around the world. Today, John Leopold Brodie is credited with the invention 'mainly because of patents he took out on the helmet and the improvements he added to it'. Examination of these patents, however, reveals considerable emphasis on the design of the helmet lining. Scant attention is paid to the use of metal stamping in the manufacturing process, although at a later stage Brodie was probably responsible for replacing the original steel type with a stronger alloy of manganese steel.
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(Dr Peter Liddle:
Britain and a Widening War, 1915-1916: From Gallipoli to the Somme)
So not only was the company in Halifax in Yorkshire rather than in Halifax Nova Scotia, but its involvement with the manufacture of helmets is at least in question. I would have thought that Liddle would say that the firm made the helmets if this were the case, but the only point being raised is that of design.
While this is a minor aside in the whole book, such sloppy research has to call into serious question the entire work.