In fact, amid a seemingly haphazard development programme, and a faith that British industry would deliver in the end, the Air Ministry had made one solid organisational change several years back which was to prove very important. In 1936, the Royal Air Force had bifurcated into two main wings. Bomber Command would oversee all bombing groups, the planes that were to fly over and attack enemy territory. And Fighter Command, as well as overseeing the defensive fighter squadrons, would look after anti-aircraft defences and the work of the Observer Corps, the unsung men who were, in essence, to act as human radar. Fighter Command soon moved into its new premises amid the green north London hills. It was from his office in Bentley Priory that, in the immediate run-up to war, Air Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding would design an innovative – and misunderstood – system of defence that was to prove more than vital in the days that lay ahead.
This brilliant defensive wheeze had been initially inspired in some aspects by pulp fiction. There was quite a craze for the idea of death-rays in the early years of the twentieth century. They were the imaginative and innovative stuff of lurid popular fiction: in William Le Queux’s novel The Mystery of the Green Ray, ‘violet and orange rays passed through tourmaline and quartz’ turned green, blinding their targets on the spot. It recurred in popular culture, making appearances in ‘Sapper’s’ Bulldog Drummond stories and in the 1932 Hollywood adaptation of Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu series. At around that time, certain scientists, members of Parliamentary committees and senior military figures were hoping such a weapon might be developed by the British.
Suggestions poured into the Air Ministry. Could such a ray be aimed at a plane and cause it to burn and explode? Or could it somehow, magnetically, draw a plane off course and out of the sky? There were rumours that a group of German scientists were close to perfecting such a nightmare weapon. A group of scientists at the Radio Research Station in Slough, Buckinghamshire, were obliged by the Air Ministry to look into claims that a death-ray mixture of X-rays, ultraviolet and radio waves, when properly directed, had the power to make birds fall from the sky.
The Superintendent of the Radio Research Station, R.A. Watson Watt, set to work with his colleague Arnold Wilkins to try and work out how – and in what quantity – radio waves could be made to interfere with the workings of planes or to make their crews insensible. This naturally is a story of serendipity. For those dead-end researches led directly to a more fruitful line of work that would prove invaluable both in 1940 and in the years to come. Arnold Wilkins found that if radio waves were directed at an approaching plane, it was possible to pick up their reflection. In other words, it would be possible to mark where the plane was in the sky. So it was in 1935 that the first proper glimmerings of Britain’s radar defence system were seen.
There had been attempts before. Even now, on the wider, emptier stretches of Kent’s coastline, there are monuments to such efforts: grey, curved sculptures – ‘sound mirrors’ they were called as far back as the First World War – which were intended to detect the noise of incoming aircraft. These constructions look as though they form part of a prehistoric landscape; yet the future was an invisible world of pulses and waves.
The science of radio was, then, immensely attractive to scientists and amateurs alike; the very language of ionospheres, dipoles and cathode rays had its own poetry. Watson-Watt had, as a younger man, worked with the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, Hampshire; his job was to detect thunderstorms with a very primitive radio direction-finder. This wasn’t a matter of domestic weather forecasts; the early Royal Flying Corps craft were very fragile. Even flying through certain forms of cloud – let alone thunderstorms – was considered hazardous.
The Radio Research Station was staffed by a team of mainly young men, highly dedicated yet also comically slapdash about other areas of life. They were made piercingly aware of the seriousness of the work. When he joined as a Junior Scientific Officer in 1935, E.G. Bowen was made to sign the Official Secrets Act. He was also told that if he broke it in any way, he would be hanged by the neck ‘until life was extinct’.9
Bowen had gravitated towards this field thanks to a youthful obsession with radio; it was less a job and more a glorious chance to pursue an abiding love. In his memoirs, Bowen wrote of the affection inspired by Watson-Watt and the all-important patronage of Dowding. When it came to the theory of radar – which would require expensive research – Dowding himself needed more than what he termed Watson-Watt’s calculations. He needed some form of evidence that such a system could be made to work. With very primitive equipment, a transmitter in Daventry and a volunteer aircraft, Watson-Watt barely succeeded in demonstrating that he could register the ‘reflection’ of the aircraft.
The funding was granted, a larger team was assembled and more hush-hush headquarters were established on the Suffolk coast, on a spit of land near the remote village of Orford. The bleakness of the land had a poetry of its own; in this watery world of shale and seaweed, frets, haars, the murmur of waves and the lonely cries of wheeling marshland birds, the young boffins set up base at Orford Ness, shifting heavy machinery, great masses of Bakelite, metal and diodes into rudimentary buildings with concrete floors. On dark nights, as the sea whispered, the villagers in Orford could hear a pervasive unearthly hum: the music of silica valves, filament voltage, electricity and dull ruby heat.
Similar experiments in the principles of radar were being conducted in Europe, and in America too. But in Suffolk, they were coming at it with the intensity of men who knew that the very location where they were working – the Suffolk coast – would be intensely vulnerable if the Germans ever launched an invasion.
Early breakthroughs were the cause of intense excitement; the sky was full of echoes. Before they could start detecting planes, the scientists at Orford Ness found that the radio waves bouncing off the ionosphere, ninety-six kilometres (sixty miles) above the earth, were the sounds of mainland Europe; obviously too disparate to be pinpointed, but allowing a possibility of range, a radar that could go over the horizon. In June 1935, the boffins managed to capture their first proper echo, the trace of a flying boat which was travelling up and down the coast. This done, the advances were swift; their range soon expanded to radar coverage of sixty-four kilometres (forty miles), then 128 kilometres (eighty miles), then 160 kilometres (one hundred miles).
The dream was to establish stations around the Thames Estuary that would be able to detect incoming German bombers. It was very quickly understood that for such a system to work, there would need to be proper co-operation between the stations; the sharing of co-ordinates and positions that would allow for triangulation. The villagers in Orford – an absurdly quiet place, with little more than a pub, a greengrocer and a vicar – had to wonder as these dishevelled young men took themselves off through the shale and gorse for all-night work sessions, armed only with cake and bottles of beer.
But by 1936, with the vaulting leaps in know-how – an increasing number of test flights, detected with ever greater success – a move to more accessible premises was needed. The radar pioneers, driving around the coast of Suffolk, eventually came across a country house that would suit them perfectly. This was a redbrick late Victorian extravaganza – all towers and Tudor-style chimney pots – overlooking the mouth of the river Deben and the sea. The property, belonging to Sir Cuthbert Quilter, was for sale. And so it was that Bawdsey Manor, and its surrounding lands, was bought for £23,000.
The men of the radar team instantly loved their new home: the work might have been extraordinarily intense, but it was punctuated with cricket on the front lawn and sailing in the sea below. It was in this youthful atmosphere that the world’s first fully functioning radar station was established. Vast metal masts were erected on the hill behind the house. Workshops and laboratories were established in the house’s towers. So high up (relative to the surrounding landscape) was Watson-Watt’s office, overlooking the river, that larky fighter pilots would dare each other to fly past his window
as close as they possibly could. In this exhilarating environment, what became known as the Chain Home system evolved and grew. In those years before the war, atop high cliffs on the coast around Britain, small stations started to appear.
Robert Watson-Watt later wrote: ‘Radar is at once a science and an art … what it achieves depends only in part on physics. It depends very greatly on people.’ He reiterated what he had written in a 1935 memo to the Air Ministry: ‘You need not hope for any help from the enemy in your attempts to locate him by the light, heat, sound or ordinary radio which he sends out. You must put up a short-wave radio frontier which he must penetrate.’ And Watson-Watt’s tone was always one of indefatigable optimism. In 1954, looking back, he wrote that ‘we can extract all the information we require from a radar echo which contains only one hundredth of a billionth of a billionth of the energy which we send out to produce the echo.’10
To begin with, five stations were set up, dotted around the Thames Estuary. The information on aircraft positions they provided would be collated and filtered – the start of what would become known as the Filter Room. The Chain Home stations began to multiply; the Dover station was set up in 1937, and perhaps the most conspicuous and (as it was later to transpire) most vulnerable station, on the Isle of Wight, was soon to follow. The nature of the work being done at Ventnor was kept from the islanders, who could only marvel and speculate about the four huge masts, each 106 metres (350 feet) in height, that were built on top of St Boniface Down. In 1938, it was the ‘Chain Home Low’ stations – those not directly on the coast – that picked up the signal from Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s plane as he flew out to meet with Hitler at Munich. It then also tracked his return.
Air Chief Marshal Dowding was watching these developments with grave interest, absorbing the potential of what could be done and worrying about what yet could not. Young men such as E.G. Bowen were by now exploring the possibilities of installing radar equipment aboard fighter planes, the better to swoop and pursue the enemy. Dowding, fretful about the threat of night bombing, and at how little might be done to intercept planes in the dark, took part in a practical experiment, a test flight in a Battle K9208. It was all a little awkward: the pilot, young Mr Bowen and the Air Chief Marshal, all sitting snugly next to equipment glowing with cathode ray tubes. Yet the planned demonstrations, at 15,000 feet, were a success. The only smudge on the day, as Bowen recalled, was an exchange between Bowen and the pilot about the hair-raising landing: Bowen expressed in rather strangulated terms the opinion that the pilot was on course to overshoot the runway. The pilot, forgetting that their illustrious passenger could hear everything, replied: ‘Not bloody likely, with Stuffy in the back.’11 Dowding took the shocking landing – and the impertinence – remarkably well: as all three men left the (safely landed) aircraft, he turned to the pilot and said graciously: ‘I always say, the most important thing is to land the right way up.’
The First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, was fascinated and paid a visit to Bawdsey Manor in the early summer of 1939. Having been guided through the intricacies of the recently established Chain Home and coastal radar systems, he was invited to inspect the onboard technology at the back of a Battle K9208. Some manoeuvring was required to get him into the plane; he had to hand over his cigar to a man standing nearby and forsake his homburg. Once he was safely inside, the plane was piloted around the airfield, while Churchill gazed at the cathode-ray tube machinery. Later, in the officers’ mess, when offered tea, Churchill, looking horrified, instead requested brandy.
The pace of preparation was acquiring a level of hysteria. Nevertheless, in the space of just a few years, these young scientists had delivered to Dowding a system that a previous generation would have considered impossible. In the summer of 1939, it was still very rickety; the stations in the Thames Estuary, the preposterously prominent maze of masts towering above the Isle of Wight, had almost been extemporised, using bits of equipment that were sometimes brand new and sometimes cannibalised from elsewhere. Yet if there seemed to be an element of making it up on the hoof, this was not reflected at the nerve centre of Fighter Command’s operation. The secret core of Britain’s defence system was an establishment that very quickly developed a quirky and unique life of its own.
Chapter Five
The Secret Under the Hill
The journey from central London on the Bakerloo Line didn’t take long; Stanmore was at the end of the line, about half an hour from Piccadilly Circus. Then, from Stanmore station, you would take a fairly hefty hike (or bus ride) up a steep leafy hill to the summit of that London ridge. The estate of Bentley Priory was, and is, a terrific vantage point; from its Italianate tower could be seen in the far distance the jumbled church spires of the City in those days before skyscrapers dominated the view. There were stockbrokers working in the Square Mile who, as war drew closer, would find themselves being enlisted from their mahogany-filled offices and up to the great house on the hill. One of the quirks about the Dowding system – the means by which the intelligence from radar was harnessed – was that men versed in labyrinthine financial dealings would have an innate knack for this new, strange and complex work.
‘When the Filter Room was first formed,’ says former WAAF officer Eileen Younghusband, herself highly adept at the complexities of the field, ‘they had scientists doing it. But the scientists were too slow. Why? The scientific mind! They’d work it out but then they’d say “It can be that, but could it be that?” Whereas we had to think and make the decision come hell or high water.
‘After that, they brought men in from the stock market,’ she continues. ‘Because in those days on the stock market, the dealers were on the balcony looking down at what was happening below. Profit or loss. Life or death. The same sort of quick decision. They had a bit of maths too of course, dealing with figures all the time. These were older men. Quite a bit older than us, probably twice our age. Mid-thirties onwards!’
Fighter Command had moved into Bentley Priory on 14 July 1936. Those who worked there were beguiled by its history. The property had once been the home of the Austin Canons. The Reformation brought a succession of new deed holders, ending up with James Duberley, an ‘Army clothier’. But by 1788, a more aristocratic flavour came to the estate; it was acquired by John James Hamilton, the Marquess of Abercorn. And it was at this period that the house which we still see today was summoned into being. The Marquess engaged architect Sir John Soane to rebuild and reimagine the house. The elegance of the exterior was matched within: a graceful staircase of Portland stone, apartments with large windows, a great skylight to flood the house with sun on brighter days, plus a new gallery which the owner filled with valuable paintings and sculpture. The Marquess himself – ‘tall and erect and muscular, with an air of grace and dignity and with a dark complexion, more like a Spaniard than an Englishman’, as one admiring contemporary described him1 – was a product of nearby Harrow School, and a very active social and political animal. He has a form of immortality – the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan characterised him as the theatrically overblown romantic lead Don Whiskerandos in his comedy The Critic. The house began to attract the most eminent names of the day, from Pitt, Canning, Liverpool and Wellington to literary sensations William Wordsworth and Sir Walter Scott.
But like many other grand estates, Bentley Priory went into a gentle social decline. It was embraced by Victorian commerce: the house was bought by hotelier Frederick Gordon, with the aim of turning it into a fashionable establishment. But the hotel – possibly because it was both insufficiently close to and insufficiently far away from London – never attracted many guests. By 1908, it was sold again, and in its new incarnation became a girls’ boarding school. This, too, failed. By 1926, it had been acquired by the Air Ministry.
The steady drumbeat heralding the approach of war in the mid to late 1930s saw the main changes being carried out to customise the house for its coming role. Dugouts were constructed, and at the very begi
nning of 1939, work began on the secret subterranean Operations Room. ‘The average depth of excavation was 42 feet (13 metres), some 58,270 tons of earth were dug out and deposited on and around the building and there were 6,400 tons of un-reinforced and 17,100 tons of re-inforced concrete employed in the building.’2
Dowding had been brooding on what would become his ‘System’, a web of fast-paced communications relayed to all fighter stations and fighter pilots, the centre of which would lie at Bentley Priory. Dowding nominated the Priory’s ballroom as the nerve centre, at least at the beginning; it was here that a vast map would be laid out, depicting an area from the far north of Scotland to the French mainland. The map would be set at waist height, constructed in such a way that operatives could lean across it. There was to be a balcony level, reached simply by means of wooden stairs on the side of the room; from here, senior officers would be able to look down at the map and take in the wider picture of aircraft formations.
Special markers for the maps were made. As soon as information about aircraft positions came in, the markers would be deployed; and the intelligence was then to be disseminated to the fighter squadron bases. There was to be a bank of telephones and teleprinters. The General Post Office, then responsible for Britain’s telephone network, had made assiduous enquiries about Dowding’s needs. Its scientists, based just a few miles away from Bentley Priory in Dollis Hill, seemed more alert than many in government to the cold shadow creeping across Europe. In technical terms, Dowding’s system was impressively innovative.
There were later additions, such as the specially devised clocks, which were both inspired and aesthetically pleasing. As well as the normal features of a clock face, there were 24-hour numerals, plus colour-coded triangles at five-minute intervals: red, blue, yellow. These would be used for allocating colours to the markers on the mapping table, indicating the time that an incoming formation of aeroplanes had been detected. ‘Electric clocks of the “slave” type and a colour change apparatus receiving half-minute impulses on a telephone line from a master clock in the local GPO were also installed,’ reads one Bentley Priory memo from the time. ‘The colour change apparatus was fixed to the operations table as an aid to the Plotters who could thus observe when to change the colours of the counters without having to lift their eyes from the table.’ The precision was dizzying. ‘Experiments were carried out with counters of various colours,’ runs another memo, ‘to determine the colour that could be seen most clearly from the Control Room.’3 Orange had the edge over yellow.
The Secret Life of Fighter Command Page 7
