[1][2] He made several approaches to the British authorities, in 1912, 1914, and 1916, with plans for a vehicle driven by a type of caterpillar track, believing that it could have a military application.

In 1919, three years after the first military tanks had been built and used in warfare during World War I, a Royal Commission acknowledged the potential of de Mole's innovative vehicle.

Inspired by the uncomfortable experience of travelling over rough terrain in the Western Australian countryside in 1911,[14] de Mole developed, and then submitted an idea of a tracked armoured fighting vehicle ("chain-rail vehicle which could be easily steered and carry heavy loads over rough ground and trenches") to the British War Office in 1912; in June 1913 he received a reply that his idea had been rejected.

[15] The British Royal Commission on Awards to Inventors, conducted by Mr Justice Sargant, investigated the claims of twelve persons (10 individuals, including de Mole, and one pair) relating to the invention of tanks, delivered its findings and recommendations on 27 November 1919.

[16] Mr. Albert Collinson Nesfield[17] and Lieutenant Robert Francis Macfie[18] were each awarded £500 for the separate and independent "conception, embodiment, and communication of the same set of ideas".

Crompton and his assistant Mr. Lucien Alphonse Legros,[20] on the basis that they had "worked loyally and very hard" at their allotted tasks, they had been well-paid as consulting engineers, and had neither invented nor discovered any of the special features that were ultimately incorporated in the tanks.

[21][22] He was made an honorary corporal in 1919; and, early in 1920, it was announced from London that he had been appointed a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE).

[23] At the formal investiture of the award, on 28 July 1921, in the ballroom of the New South Wales' State Government House, Lord Forster, the seventh Governor-General of Australia, was so nervous that he dropped the decoration before it could be pinned on de Mole's chest.

Inquiries from that government to the British one yielded little but polite responses that Mr. de Mole's ideas had unfortunately been too advanced for their time and thus were not recognized as they should have been.