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Officially on any Marconi records I would be listed as Alfred Woollard but all my life I have been called Sam. I was a student apprentice joining with a bunch of others at Brooklands in the autumn of 1957. Did the METC thing for 4 years and finished with HNC, of course went through the Apprentice Training Centre and then into the shops, then Receiver Test in New Street, on to Writtle working on Tropospheric Scatter and ended up in Radar working in Dennis Byatt's Group with Norman Nairn, Humphrey Terry, Abe Ellis and Butch. Worked alongside "little" John Whittaker - still in touch with him. I worked mainly on the radar conversion side with Derrick Nudds (my late father in law) and Donald Plaistowe where we developed some Scan Conversion displays and then I was with Humphrey Terry working on a 5" Direct View Storage Tube that was eventually installed by me into the control tower at Heathrow.

At some stage Dennis's group was spun off into Datamation and Abe Ellis was the Section Leader and I worked with him on a couple of projects, the biggest was a Digital Signal Extraction system using Fairchild RTL and my last project was a digital scanning system for radar displays. I am still in touch with Abe and Dennis via email and with Mike Plant, John"Tub" Carpenter, John Whittaker and a few other colleagues from the Marconi organisation."

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