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Alan Hartley-Smith

Page history last edited by Alan Hartley-Smith 8 months ago

 

Bedell's End

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Marconi Sites In Essex - Bedell's End


When I finished my National Service as an instructor on the Console 64 fixed-coil system at RAF Locking in 1956 (Editors note - it recently came to light that John Brown was in my final training intake - GRF(C)34 - small world) I joined MWT Research Division as a graduate trainee and was immediately sent to Bedell's End to work with R.F. (Bob) O'Neill (an engineer who had joined MIMCO as a Radio Officer in 1920, and moved over to MWT Research Department in l928 where he was at first concerned with facsimile telegraphy, receiving pictures from across the Atlantic. Subsequently he worked on H.F. cable and receiver design in N.M. Rust’s section in which he remained until the war, apart from the period occupied by the Alexandra Palace equipment of which feeder design was his particular concern. In 1939 he moved with the Research Department to the new buildings at Baddow as one of the original staff at the new Laboratories. At the beginning of the war he transferred to the Air Ministry. This made little difference to life, for he still worked at Baddow, assisting R. J. Kemp, then Chief of Research at Baddow, with work on direction finders for the Air Ministry. Later. he designed a TV feeder system for the BBC's first post-war TV station at Sutton Coldfield. After the war he spent some years at Bedell’s End, engaged upon the design of aerials for ground radar (which is where I joined him). In April 1959, he was appointed Baddow Librarian).

 

 We worked on Type 7 modifications and a metric naval array (SNW12), just we two and a handyman at the site with two huts a fair way up a track into the field, one for a combined office and electronics lab, the other for a mechanical workshop, radar office equipment and turning gear control, for the Type 7 array in the compound together with room for the experimental mattress arrays. There were also some huts at the road entrance where Dennis Byatt worked on HFDF - Jack Jolliffe and some others were also in residence. I was there for two years.


Bob was a firm believer in do-it-yourself so I had to make all the test gear for the metric array work - 200 MHz oscillators, open-wire feeder test benches, standing wave detectors, hand-plotting the results of measuring null-point locations on the test bench on a Smith chart with a rotatable plastic overlay, which I still have (must give that to a museum sometime), cold-hardening the copper wire for the open feeders by stretching from a vice and making perspex spacers from rods by turning on an ancient lathe in our machine shop. And of course all the testing had to be done in the open air no matter what the weather - in the winter I used to have a coke brazier to warm my hands before inserting 10 BA screws. For the array we had a wooden frame which I populated with half-inch aluminum tubing for the reflector, adjustable flat sheet aluminum folded dipoles as radiators with quarter-wave stubbed copper feeders distributing the power - I learnt a lot of fundamental radar aerial theory and practice. The pic shows how the production version SNW12 would appear.

 

We had a complete Type 7 array with Ward Leonard turning gear, a Console 60 moving-coil display unit and a cobbled-together receiver equipment rack - eventually when somebody wanted a Type 15 cabin we rescued the T3705 Lecher-line transmitter which I refurbished so we had a fully working radar system. Doc Eastwood used to come out and do some of his angel work with us.

 

We designed and made a split-ring cap switch to enable the Type 7 to do automatic height-finding and I went to Sopley to install the prototype. I must have been one of the few people able to hang off a Type 7 array 30 feet up to tune the dipoles then go back in to fire up the turning gear, run up the transmitter, set up the receiver and timing unit and adjust the display console. We also did some early work on the new higher frequency Mk 10 IFF arrays.


After two years the metric work was scaling down and very opportunely a call came from this mysterious place called Baddow which I had yet to visit for staff to work on a new project requiring the sort of experience I had gained in the RAF and with Bob, so I applied and subsequently joined Roger Shipway's Datamation Group in Len Whittaker's Section B under Ron Ward where I met Frank Savill and many other now-MOGS, and the rest as they say is history. I did keep in touch with Bob, and I have never forgotten those early days at Bedell's End. A year or so ago on a visit to Chelmsford I drove out along the Roxwell Road - there was no trace of either site but I went up the track and got out into the field - the crop of wheat was coming up just as it did in those days - and I felt something stir in the air like a ghostly array but it must have been the wind.

 

[Editors note - I have subsequently learned that the growing corn and the particular landscape were the reasons for the move to

Bushy as they affected the measurement of L-band radar performance. Recently this picture has been found that shows the later use.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Addendum

The above text was first posted on MOGS in response to a posting of the locations spreadsheet. As a result of this and other postings this History has come about so I have now appended an extension covering the later period, which will grow as my memory allows.

 

In Ron's section I worked mainly on the valve version of the tabular display, then on a transistorised version (when I moved to systems marketing this was taken over by Stewart Fry - any knowledge of him anybody ?) coupled with the development of a character generator system to create labels for this and the synthetic radar PPI display for Fur Hat, building in a ferrite core store in the process - this was the period when analogue was giving way to digital and high-voltage valves to discrete low voltage transistors.  For test input an electric typewriter had to be modified to output alphanumeric characters - no keyboards around then.  Those were the days when you could still see what your circuitry did! See here for descriptive article. A recent conversation has reminded me that we were implementing a design philosophy, mandated by Roger Shipway, of toleranced design by which standard rather than chosen components were used to enable ease of manufacturing and reliability.

 

One particular name that sticks from then is Ray Throstle who designed the first solid-state EHT power supply - the first effort being a real birds-nest but it proved the principle and was engineered into a production version.

 

A few events also stick out. One is being part of Doc E's Faraday Lecture team touring the UK in 1963/4 - I still have a box containing the scripts, photographs, records of all the venues and the organisation of the tour (now with the Defence Electronics History Society being prepared for an article.)

 

A very interesting occasion was working with Broadcast Division to mount the first electronic display of election results. For this we used a studio camera mounted to view a tabular display - by producing pre-prepared paper tapes on which were recorded all the candidates names and locations we were then able to have a typist listening to the number of votes for each as they came in from on-site reporters and entering them into the system so we could present each result to the vision mixer for display in real time on the screen - a world first.  The complete exercise involved a 48-hour session in the studio for a simulated rehearsal day and the actual election day, during which we also attracted the attention of the principal presenter Cliff Mitchelmore and Ian Trethowen soon to become DG of the BBC.

 

Exhibitions also featured largely - Farnborough, Paris, Hanover, Munich and others - Robin Webb posted some pics of the gear on MOGS. I spent some time with Peter Way in the newly-formed Automation Division doing marketing, then along with others came back to Radar when that went away. As we all did I moved to Writtle Road and carried on systems marketing with Fred Kime, Gerry Taylor and others, and as I had already been working with the Marconi Central Publicity unit on sales literature for some time I eventually started the MRSL Publicity and proposal preparation section which was taken over by John Parr in 1978 when I left to go to Standard Telecommunications Laboratories at Harlow to head up their Public Relations department and also work with ITT Europe to coordinate their PR operations on behalf of all seven European Laboratories, later moving to Ferranti Electronics in a similar role and finally joining the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology as a lecturer in internet and web technologies from which I retired in 2002.

 

I have a claim to fame from the Marconi Publicity days in that I named the Locus 16 system, and a couple of years ago I received this message:

"Reading the entries to the MOGS channel I note there is some interest in the naming of Myriad. I am sure that if you dig into your memories you may remember that you and I had to find a name so that it could go into the catalogue. We worked on the principle that the name must start with M and worked through to find something suitable that was not registered and we were reaching the end of our tethers and when sampling My..... we were near the end of the alphabet for the second letter. At this point in time we found the word Myriad which appeared to offer some appropriate connotations hence the name was born.

Best Wishes   

Fred Kime"

 

So a double top!

 

A much later Marconi involvement

Just for completeness, in 2010 Ian Gillis had instituted the MOGS forum (see Ian's correction in comment below), which I joined. Following from the discussions on MOGS we decided that some sort of record should be kept of the life-and-times of the radar fraternity and its doings so after some research we settled on an online wiki format to enable remote content management and ease of access, the reason you are now reading this entry. This subsequently resulted in the creation of the Marconi Heritage Group with the aim of getting the company heritage in the now-City of Chelmsford properly recognised - the story of this effort is recorded on another wiki, The Marconi Family, which itself then gave rise to a series in the same vein as Radar to cover the other divisions and companies in the same way, which now number twelve. With increased interest in the history of the Company the content of all the wikis has now developed into an online extension to the printed Baker history up to the final GEC days. I have continued to add entries, together with additional input from other sources as and when new information comes to hand, and as of 2023 we could be on the verge of achieving the establishment of a permanent Heritage Centre in Chelmsford to house artefacts and other records and ensuring the wikis have a permanent home.   

 

Bedell's End

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Comments (2)

Ian Gillis said

at 3:56 pm on Feb 10, 2016

Page checked

Ian Gillis said

at 4:43 pm on Dec 14, 2018

AHS writes "in 2010 Ian Gillis had instituted the MOGS forum".
In fact the archives of the current "Groups IO" group include posts on the "Yahoo" group going back to February 2006. Before that the group was hosted on "Smartgroups" (subsequently bought by Freeserve) and "eGroups" (bought by Yahoo).
Archives before 2006 don't exist, but I'd guess I started the mail group service for the MOGS group just after the turn of the century - ten years earlier than you state. A MOGS "Walk in the Cotswolds" was cancelled because of the epidemic of Foot & Mouth disease in the year 2001.

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