The Rolls-Royce Armoured Car is a British armoured car developed in 1914 and used during the First World War, Irish Civil War, the inter-war period in Imperial Air Control in Transjordan, Palestine and Mesopotamia, and in the early stages of the Second World War in the Middle East and North Africa. The Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) raised the first British armoured car squadron during the First World War.In September 1914 all available Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost chassis were requisitioned to form the basis for the new armoured car. The following month a special committee of the Admiralty Air Department, among whom was Flight Commander T. G. Hetherington, designed the superstructure which consisted of armoured bodywork and a single fully rotating turret mounting a regular water-cooled .303 in (7.7 mm) Mk I Vickers machine gun. The first three vehicles were delivered on 3 December 1914, although by then the mobile period on the Western Front, where the primitive predecessors of the Rolls-Royce cars had served, had already come to an end. Later in the war they served on several fronts of the Middle Eastern theatre. Chassis production was suspended in 1917 to enable Rolls-Royce to concentrate on aero engines. Lawrence of Arabia used a squadron in his operations against the Turkish forces. He called the unit of nine armoured Rolls-Royces "more valuable than rubies" in helping win his Revolt in the Desert. This impression would last with him the rest of his life; when asked by a journalist what he thought would be the thing he would most value he said "I should like my own Rolls-Royce car with enough tyres and petrol to last me all my life".