The forgotten radar wars in the Malvern Hills
Joe Shute takes a trip to the remarkable facility that recruited Britain’s best minds
In February 1942 an elite team of British troops made a daring raid on a Nazi coastal radar installation at Bruneval in northern France. Code-named Operation Biting, the raid was a smash-and-grab mission to seize a piece of war-winning Nazi technology, the mysterious “paraboloid” Würzburg radar.
It proved a storming success and turning point in the war with key parts of the radar captured – alongside a German technician. But the relative ease of the operation also got Winston Churchill thinking: what if the enemy did the same to us?
An urgent order was issued to move the nascent Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE), the main British centre for radar innovation and development, from its base in Swanage to a secure location – and to do so by the next full moon.
Eventually the genteel Worcestershire town of Malvern was chosen: its towering surrounding hills deemed ideal for radar, while a new telephone exchange had been recently installed, as the town was a number of possible sites earmarked for an evacuation of the government from London, should circumstances require.
In May 1942, about 1,500 of the country’s best scientists were moved to start work at Malvern College within a fortnight. As well as repowering the captured Würzburg radar and discovering how to successfully blind it, the scientists would also devise radar inventions to protect British ships in the Atlantic, enable bombers to precisely target the German industrial heartland of the Ruhr and mastermind the deployment of the decoy “ghost fleets” that helped assure triumph in the D-day landings.
The site was also vitally important in the development of Cold War radar and defence systems, and in 1976 it was visited by the Queen, following in the footsteps of her father who had come here to pay tribute in 1944.
But after the Ministry of Defence pulled out of the area a decade ago there were fears that much of its archive – and the ingenious inventions contained within it – could have been lost for good.
However, earlier this year a charity was formed by scientists and engineers who had previously worked at the facility to preserve its remarkable history. The Malvern Radar and Technology History Society has since amassed a huge archive spanning tens of thousands of documents and images, much of which had been left languishing in abandoned buildings, as well as hundreds of artefacts. So extensive is the material collected that it is still being processed today.
“Commanders said winning the radar war was more important than the race to build the atom bomb,” says author and military historian Damien Lewis, who has written a new book, SAS Shadow Raiders, researching the archives. “Without the TRE none of that would have been possible.”
In researching his book, Lewis says he has been shocked by the extent to which scientists were forced to battle against the British establishment to persuade them of the superiority of the enemy’s radar and the need to properly invest in developing rival technology. “The truth is, the Germans invented radar long before us and at the start of the war it was incredibly more advanced than ours,” he says.
Among those seconded to Malvern to work at the Telecommunications Radar Establishment was Bernard Lovell (later knighted for his work in radio astronomy), who was in charge of a team developing “blind bombing” radar systems that enabled night fighters to locate enemy aircraft, improved the aim of bombers during night raids, and Coastal Command aircraft to detect submarines surfacing in darkness – which dramatically cut back
Atlantic shipping losses.
While it was predominantly a male workforce, Joan
Curran was one of a number of talented female scientists to be recruited. She pioneered a deceptively simple technology known as “window”, rectangular tinfoil strips that when scattered from aircraft could blind enemy radar. Curran’s invention proved vital on D-day in obscuring the intended targets of the Allied fleet. Hugh Williams, the 63-year-old archivist of the Malvern Radar and Technology History Society whose parents both worked at the TRE during the war, has been able to save a number of prototypes of other inventions. Among them is a black box called simply “control unit 572-A”, which ended up being fitted to the majority of the aircraft in Bomber Command to allow crews to drop their bombs with far better accuracy, by calculating ground speed, altitude and air speed and pinpointing positions using radar. Williams has also retrieved an early prototype of a device called the cavity magnetron which, through generating highpowered pulses, could dramatically reduce the size of radar equipment. Originally invented at Birmingham University in 1940 and later delivered to the TRE, it was widely used in British aircraft, giving a vital advantage over their Luftwaffe counterparts.
The archivists have also recorded the testimonies of those who worked at the facility during the war, including married couple John and Barbara Hooper, both 92, who still live nearby.
John joined the TRE as a 17-year-old fresh from grammar school and worked in the labs building models of prototypes. On one occasion he recalls being presented with an aquarium, a pot of glue and a box of iron filings, with which he was asked to create a land mass to bounce sonic waves off.
He later realised this was a prototype of H2S, the first airborne ground scanning radar system, developed for Bomber Command.
“All these scientists were seconded from the top-class firms in the country,” he says. “They always seemed to be there working. I would come in on Mondays and they all would have sprouted beards from staying in the laboratories over the weekend.”
Barbara worked as a tracer in the drawing office, copying designs drawn by draughtsmen on to Irish linen. Both she and her husband were required to sign the Official Secrets Act and she says they didn’t talk about what they were doing, even among themselves.
She is delighted that the radar facility will now be preserved. “I think it’s wonderful to remember the history,” she says. “The centre where I worked has all gone and is just houses now. It’s nice to be able to sometimes look back and remember it as it was.”
The Malvern Radar and Technology History Society, which houses its archive across several rooms belonging to Malvern-based defence technology firm Qinetiq, is already organising several public exhibitions and hopes to eventually establish a science museum in the town.
Mike Burstow, a 73-year-old retired MOD research director and chairman of the charity, admits that they will probably be sorting through the archive until long after his death, but it is a task he is willing to pursue. “The technologies developed here are the bedrock of modern electronics, and without our archive those origins would probably have been lost.”
‘The technologies developed here are the bedrock of modern electronics’
SAS Shadow Raiders by Damien Lewis (RRP £20). Buy for £16.99 at books. telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514