Introduction

Ted Pegram died on the 7th June 2017; his funeral was on the 23rd June 2017. By way of an obituary, here is an autobiographical note written at the behest of his son, Gerard (Gez) Pegram. Its title reflects the humour and modesty of the man.

Not Much of an Engineer

By T.W.Pegram November 2016, at the request of my learned son Gerard.

(With apologies to Sir Stanley Hooker of Rolls- Royce, who wrote a book with same title).

I became an engineer because your grandfather worked for Marconi's.

Your grandfather, Herbert Bernard (" Bert" ) Pegram was one of many seeking work in the south of England during the depression years of the 30's. He originally came from the Liverpool area where he worked for the Westinghouse Brake and Signal Company. He was fortunate to find work in Chelmsford with the Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Company New Street.

Your other grandfather Walter Clifford (" Cliff') Jones did the same thing. He came from Wolverhampton to Braintree to work for Crittall's.

Bert Pegram was an electrical instrument maker, which involved assembling electronics apparatus from radio receivers to broadcast transmitters.
During the prewar period Marconi used to have experimental items for his boat Elettra, or various outstations, made at the New Street works, and your grandfather was fortunate to work with him on building some of these items.

During the War all electrical companies were overloaded with war work and your grandfather's job was classed as a Reserved Occupation. He joined the Home Guard and was put into the Bomb Disposal Group where he helped to deal with a number of unexploded German bombs in the Chelmsford area.
After the war I don't know if he felt like change but he left Marconi's and tried various other jobs. He was the Chief Engineer for Hawkes Sweet factory, Chelmsford, and whilst there changed the plant from boiling the sugar in open pans over coke fires to using high pressure steam.
He then worked for Britvic as part of the management team at their Chiswick bottling plant.
After that he worked a Marriages Flour Mill in Chelmsford looking after the large horizontal double expansion steam engine which drove the plant. This mill is still working, but under electrical power.
Subsequently, he returned to Marconi's in charge of a small workshop which made experimental equipment at the Writtle site. He completed his career by returning to the New Street works.

Your grandfather was always making things at home, be it model railways or radios and gramophones and your uncle Brian and I were early exposed to the used of materials and tools which has stood us in good stead for our lives.

At this time Chelmsford could almost be called an industrial town: in addition to Marconi's there was the Hoffmann Ball bearing works, Crompton-Parkinson heavy electrical engineers, Christy Brothers and Christy & Norris, Iron Founders and Electrical Engineers, and J.Brittain-Pash manufacturers of Agricultural Machinery. All were major employers in the Chelmsford area.

Now where do I come in? I came into the world during a heavy fall of snow on 11 February 1940 at 56 Ockleford Avenue, Chelmsford.
At this time the war was only a few months old and the Battle of Britain a few months away.
I do not remember much of the war. We had a brick-built air raid shelter in our front garden, which was shared with our neighbours and I can remember the sirens sounding for a raid or the "all clear".

I was sent to the Roman Catholic school in London Road, Chelmsford at the age of 5 and remained there until I was 15.
At 15 I left school having failed the 11 plus examination and having no qualifications.

Your grandfather secured an interview at Marconi's for me and, after a morning's tests along with other hopefuls, I was offered a craft apprenticeship. It never occurred to me to work anywhere else but Marconi's, particularly as your grandfather worked there.

As I was only 15, and could not start my apprenticeship until I was 16, I spent my first year doing odd jobs in the test rooms and delivering mail within the New Street works. My starting pay at 15 was 41 shillings and sixpence a week (old money).

All apprentices were granted day release which meant that we attended the Mid-Essex Technical College for one day and usually two nights a week. I did this for a total of seven years and was awarded an Ordinary National Certificate in Electrical Engineering, and a Higher National Certificate in Electrical Engineering, with endorsements.
In 1961 I became an Associate Member of the Institution of Electronic and Radio Engineers and when they merged with the Institution of Electrical Engineers I became a Member of the IEE.
I still have my IERE tie which must be quite rare and you could wear it if you wanted to create a talking point!

At the age of 16 apprentices started their training by spending 6 months in the Apprentice Training Centre. Here we were taught to use machine and hand tools and other skills necessary to work in the factory.
Each apprentice was required to make a tool box and I still have mine, underneath the bench in the garage, which I hope you will keep. We also made a set of four screwdrivers, but I only have one left, the wooden handled screwdriver in the rack over the bench.

After finishing my time in the Apprentice Training Centre I worked in various parts of the factory and then was sent to work in the workshop of the Marconi College. The College was set up to teach electronics to new graduates and also to instruct home and overseas students in the operation of equipment bought by their governments.
This involved making experimental equipment which was the rôle of the Workshop.

Also located in the Marconi College was the Drawing Office School. At the end of my spell in the Workshop I was accepted for draughtsman training and after nine months there was sent to the Drawing Office at the Marconi Research Centre.
In the last year of my apprenticeship I applied to be transferred to the Laboratories at the Research Centre, and this request was granted.
In 1961 at the age of 21 I finished my apprenticeship and went onto the Staff of the Company at a salary of £600 per annum.

At this time one of the large projects being worked on at the Research Laboratories was two control centres for the Royal Swedish Air Force. This job was important because it was one of the first applications of large scale digital technology in this field.
For the workforce assigned to the project, including me, it was our first introduction to digital techniques and the company organised a series of lectures in digital engineering and binary arithmetic for the staff. Despite our inexperience in this field we must have got it right because the system ran in Sweden for 40 years before being decommissioned! I was present at the ceremony when the Swedes presented a mounted track store unit from the system to the Company. My name appears on the mounting board as one of the few left who worked on the system (see the photo below - Ted is to the left of the easel-mounted device).

As a result of this project I became involved in the real-time display of alpha-numeric data electronically. The Company decided to make a commercial system and I did the engineering of the back-up equipment known by the company designation S3201.
This equipment could display independent data on up to 10 monitor displays and was used mainly for plant instrumentation. We did a number of projects, mainly with English Electric Computers supplying the data processing systems, in such diverse environments as Wylfa Head Nuclear Power Station, Anglesey, The Park Gate Iron and Steel Company Rolling Mill at Rotherham, and the Scottish Air Traffic Control Sector.

About this time the Radar Division of the Company won the order for the Fight Plan Processing System at the London Air Traffic Control Centre at West Drayton. This system used a modified version of my equipment to electronically display to the controllers Flight Progress Strips that had previously been done on cardboard strips.

I subsequently joined the Radar Division, which had then become Marconi Radar Systems, in the Systems Department as a Section Leader and worked on two major radar systems that comprised static and mobile long range radars and nodding height finders, together with mobile Control and Reporting Posts and Sector Operations Centres. These were the first mobile systems to make use of extensive computer software.
My rôle was to prepare the Customer Acceptance Specifications for the systems and get them accepted by the customers in England. We did two systems using similar hardware and software, one for the Yugoslav Army and one for the Sultanate of Oman. These systems were tested and accepted at the old Rivenhall Airfield which was close to Black Notley where we were living at the time.

In the early 1980's Marconi Radar won a contract to design and build an experimental High Frequency Over-the Horizon Radar (HF-OTHR).
I was appointed Project Engineer and we built the system on the mud flats at Bradwell-on-Sea.
The advantage of this class of radar was that it could detect and track aircraft operating close to the sea surface and beyond the optical and microwave radar horizons. During the system trials it was quite exciting to track Canberra trials aircraft operating 50 miles off shore and only 50 feet above the sea, particularly when he turned in land and crossed the radar site at low level! Quite often the pilot had to dodge ships laying on his track as they were taller than him!

In 1989 I was invited to take over the leadership of the Analogue Techniques Section of the Radar Research Laboratory at the Marconi Research Centre. This job I did for 10 years and proved to be my last posting.
I had about 10 very fine research engineers working for me and the position would have been very good except for the constant problem of finding funds to keep the section intact. Our main work was studies for the Ministry of Defence.
The last major equipment design and build that I was responsible for was another experimental HF-OTHR. This one was located on Foulness Island and was optimized for tracking ships and for measuring the state of the sea surface, current speed, wave height, etc. This radar was operated remotely from the Research Centre and was a very successful demonstrator.
Like you, my project work was done against a constant background of proposal preparation, tenders, report writing, trying to find funding and staff matters. This rather took the edge off the interesting technical work.

As you well know, in 1997, whilst working at the Research Centre I was diagnosed as having Waldenstrom's Lymphoma and, as the consultant told me that it would take at least two years to treat, the Company offered me retirement in 1998 on an enhanced
pension, which I took.

The last work I did for the Research Centre was a real curiosity. Before retirement I was off work for six months during my first course of chemotherapy (this was the time of your marriage). We had been awarded a contract to study some special aerials to be fitted to the AWACS airborne radar aircraft. To do this we required a one-fifteenth scale model of the aircraft to test in the special anechoic chamber at the Research Centre. I built this model in the garage of our home in Wickham Bishops with the help of Mel Willis, who was the superintendent of the workshop at The Centre and an expert woodworker who also did most of the work at home while he looked after his sick wife. This must have been the only project ever where a Project Review Meeting was held in our lounge!

I would have liked to have made retirement at 65 because I was one of the few people left who, starting work at 15, could have put in 50 years service, but I think that with the state of the Company finances I would have been asked to take redundancy at 60. I don't think that 43 years of continuous service was a bad record.
I received two awards from the Company. At 25 years service I received the gold watch that Philip now has. Also, I became a member of the Marconi Veteran's Association, which I still am and have the badge to prove it!
At 40 years service I was presented with the oil painting of the sheep which hangs over the book case in the lounge and which I hope you will keep.
On retirement I was presented with the Chelmer canal painting by Jim Hewitt which hangs in the hall.

I think that I had a good career. I had the privilege to work with and for some of the world's greatest radar sensor and systems engineers. I have called this note "Not much of an engineer". I was lucky, the people that I worked with were so far above me in intellect that they never noticed that I was not much of an engineer.

Editor's note - for some photographs of Bert Pegram's projects and Ted's Tabular Display rack, see this link.

Musical Instrument Making

Comments have been made about the lack of mention of Ted's crafting of string instruments. Here is a photograph provided by son Gerard  of some of Ted's beautifully-crafted work.