The lonely bungalow on moorland where a loner built a secret death ray
Surrounded by his cats, reclusive Harry Grindell Matthews toiled away on a device to kill Nazis, as Nathan Bevan reports
EVERYONE knew he was up there, but no one really knew what he was doing.
Situated high above Craigcefnparc, a village north of Swansea, his bungalow became the source of much gossip among those who wondered what went on behind its closed doors. There’d be talk of strangers regularly pulling up in big black cars and a secret laboratory situated within the remote moorland property.
To add to the mystery, the reclusive man that lived at the address also had a private landing strip nearby on which small planes could be seen arriving and taking off.
But not even the villagers’ wildest whispers could match what might be the unbelievable truth about Harry Grindell Matthews, who the London newspapers would come to dub ‘Death Ray Man’.
It is said that in the 1920s, Matthews believing he’d somehow foreseen the start of WWII - had begun work on developing a device which could stop an engine from afar, bring down enemy aircraft, ignite explosives and incapacitate infantry from miles away.
Moving to Craigcefnparc in 1934 to live a solitary existence amongst a clowder of Persian cats, Gloucester-born
Matthews had already laid claim to having pioneered various developments in radio telephony namely a way of transmitting messages from the ground to planes in flight. He also professed he’d been tinkering with rocket power, submarine detection and even pursuits as fanciful as space travel. But how true all this was proved hard to substantiate, Matthews rarely appearing in public long enough to be asked or regarded as anything more than a local eccentric, a crack-pot inventor. That he’d also been declared bankrupt by this point, having spent his various investors’ money on expensive hotel stays, probably didn’t help. Indeed one of the few times he did venture into the nearby village was to enlist the help of its children in finding one of his lost pet felines. “He offered a £5 reward. Everyone went mad because that was two weeks wages back then,” recalled one resident.
“Everybody in the village was out looking for the cat. Eileen Jones finally found it.”
Hardly the kind of behaviour you’d expect from a technological mastermind whose work might have single-handedly helped the Allied Forces defeat the Nazis.
Yet there are reports that strange things were known to happen to the engines of cars that passed close to the high perimeter fences surrounding the Matthews place. Perhaps in crossing some invisible beam emanating from within they’d been instantly incapacitated? Who knows.
The naysayers certainly didn’t buy a word of it, instead asserting that the so-called death ray was barely strong enough to kill a rat at 60 yards.
However, legend persists that Matthews had the ear of Winston Churchill, to whom he revealed all the details about his ray’s destructive capabilities.
That said, when the War Office subsequently demanded a demonstration of the machine’s supposed powers - which apparently took place on the island of Flat Holm they wound up denouncing them as a fraud.
But, if Matthews was a charlatan, why would a High Court injunction later be granted forbidding him from ever selling the rights to his creation?
Nevertheless, come the onslaught of WWII he was gone - vanished overnight - and his laboratory later cleared out. And the story of what became of him differs, depending on who you talk to. Some swear Matthews had been spirited away to continue his research at a hushhush Government outpost somewhere.
Others insist he’d been an undercover
German spy all along, and his eventual unmasking had seen him marched to the Tower of London and shot.
Then there are those who will tell you that Matthews simply died alone at home from a massive heart attack in the early 1940s, aged just 61.
His funeral, they’ll say, was attended by only a handful of people, one of which was a policeman from Craigcefnparc with whom he’d struck up an unlikely friendship.
For them the mysterious story of Harry Grindell Matthews ends with his ashes being scattered near the laboratory where he carried out his work, a building which today is used as riding stables.
The rest of us though are left to separate the truth from the fiction, or simply decide the version we’d most like to believe.