The 'Secret' World of Vickers Guided Weapons - John Forbat - E-Book

The 'Secret' World of Vickers Guided Weapons E-Book

John Forbat

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Beschreibung

Based on the author's own involvement as an engineer at the company through the 1950s and early 1960s and on more recent research of the archives at Brooklands Museum and the PRO, this book explains the successes and failures of leading-edge developments at Vickers, in the early days of guided weapons. John Forbat explains missile and avionics systems and trials, with diagrams and photographs, and tells the story of the company and its individuals. Projects covered in depth include Red Rapier, Blue Boar, Red Dean and Vigilant anti-tank missile, of which the author has first-hand experience as he started working for Vickers as a graduate apprentice assembling airplanes and soon graduated into Special Projects where he was responsible for many of the trials.

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Seitenzahl: 451

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

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Dedication:

To Mary, my ever-loving, patient and indulgent wife.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In the process of researching this book and filling out my own recollections, many ex-colleagues and others have made helpful comments and supplied photographs which have served well, to enhance the authenticity and completeness of the Vickers Guided Weapons story. Without being certain of mentioning everybody (and apologising for any I may omit), I would like to thank these helpful friends and colleagues.

Perhaps firstly I should thank Julian Temple, Curator of Aviation at The Brooklands Museum for suggesting I write this history in the first place. Also Museum Director Allan Winn, for his support and the loan of Fire Across the Desert, the official story of Woomera and the Anglo–Australian joint project, which provided some of the photographs. I would also like to thank aviation author Bill Gunston for his support and encouragement, including a loan of his own compendious publication of guided weapons worldwide, Mr W. Nicolson (ex-ICI Summerfield Research Station) the Public Records Office and The University of Cambridge library for facilities afforded to assist the research and the curators at RAF Cosford Museum, Bovington Tank Museum, The National Army Museum, The Imperial War Museum, The Science Museum, The Airborne Forces Museum, Doncaster AeroVenture, as well as members of BAE Systems, MBDA, Quinetiq, The Defence Manufacturers Association and several historians mentioned in the References.

Finally, among other colleagues from my time at Vickers, I wish to thank Brigadier John Clemow, who (well into his nineties) has given encouragement and help, also Jim Cole, John Duck, Chuck Fry, Paul DeWinton-Jones, Harry Fryer, John Goodwin, Henry Hunt, Ron Jupp, A.W. Kitchenside, John Lattey, whose assistance with editing so greatly improved the second edition, ‘Spud’ Murphy, Mick Padgeham, Peter Rice, John Stroud, John Whetmore, Richard Williams and any others I may have omitted.

If some of the more detailed diagrams are hard to read, this reflects the archival nature of the originals.

CONTENTS

Title

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Prelude

Prologue

1 The Start of GW at Vickers

2 Red Rapier Expendable Bomber

3 Blue Boar Guided Gliding Bomb

4 A Maturing GW Department

5.1 Red Dean Air-to-Air Missile Part 1

5.2 Red Dean Air-to-Air Missile Part 2

5.3 Red Dean Air-to-Air Missile, Part 3

6.1 Vigilant Anti-Tank Missile Part 1

6.2 Vigilant Anti-Tank Missile Part 2

6.3 Vigilant Anti-Tank Missile Part 3

Epilogue

References

Ministry Personalities

Copyright

FOREWORD

By Brig. John Clemow, MA (Cantab), FIMA, FIEE, FIMech E

(John Clemow is an acknowledged expert in Guided Weapons technology and development)

This book fulfils an important function in detailing the so far untold story of technological and aviation developments at Vickers, in the relative dawn of Guided Weapons technology – and the management problems involved.

The author, John Forbat, was a Hungarian by birth, and left Hungary in 1936. He went to school in London and lived there throughout most of the Blitz. After the war, he took his degree in Aeronautical engineering and became a graduate apprentice with Vickers Armstrongs. There, he became an enthusiastic early member of the Guided Weapons team, rising to senior designer. His book fills a necessary gap in the history of British aviation developments and in the achievements of Vickers at the site of the Brooklands Motor Racing Track, in Weybridge.

Before the advent of Guided Weapons, weaponry problems can be illustrated by the performance and limitations of the ‘6 Pounders’, which were well known and summarised in such sayings as, ‘get him with your shot or he will get you!’. The angry response from Normandy was, ‘you couldn’t hit the side of a barn at 1,000 yards’. The Armament Design Department was ordered with the highest priority to investigate the reasons why the proof firings of both gun and ammunition were so satisfactory and those obtained under field conditions were appalling, and secondly to recommend the changes that might be made to affect a solution and the timescale. In a matter of weeks rather than months, the problems were solved and the necessary changes made to gun and ammunition.

The designers of the gun had realised that the accuracy depended upon the shell being a very good fit in the gun barrel, and more important was to have a very good fit of shell and shell rifling, bearing in mind that with a high velocity gun the wear would be high. These requirements were easily overlooked in the pressures of war, especially as the gun and ammunition were also used for other less stringent purposes. In fact, it was one factory that had applied to the inspector for a concession to allow a batch of over-machined shells to be accepted. This was approved for this batch only, but in error applied to all factories making this type of shell; a temporary solution was provided by making a neoprene plastic collar to fit snugly over the driving band of the shell. Surprisingly, this worked well. The collars held the shell aligned accurately in the gun barrel, but fragmented and fell harmlessly as the shell left the gun.

The war in Europe ended a few months later and no more complaints were received, so we considered that the local difficulty had been solved. However, it was common knowledge among armaments officers that on average, it took the firing of some 20,000 anti-aircraft shells to bring down each enemy aircraft. Something had to be done to improve the accuracy and the lethality of all kinds of armaments. In the development of complex Guided Weapons, the principle of looking for simple solutions to apparently intractable problems applied as much as it did to the ‘6 Pounder’.

Brig. John Clemow

With the benefit of post-war tours in Germany investigating the V2 Rocket and the V1 Flying Bomb, then later in the USA, John Clemow’s attentions in the Army moved onto the new technologies to create high precision Guided Weapons, and this brought him into the developments of early guidance test vehicles originating from the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough. The period covered by this book commences during his tenure of various technical posts in the Ministry of Supply, as Guided Weapons were being developed across British aircraft companies. As director of Guided Weapons Projects in the MOS, Brig. Clemow found himself wading into problems encountered with a number of major GW projects, and he physically moved in with several aircraft companies to get the problems rectified and onto programme.

When Sir George Edwards invited him to join Vickers Armstrongs (Aircraft) Ltd as chief engineer, weapons, in 1957, he retired from the Army and joined Vickers. The company had already spent seven years developing ground-to-ground, air-to-ground and air-to-air Guided Weapons for the government, but suffered cancellation of three major GW projects. He took over as the company made the courageous decision to continue on a private venture basis and as an ever more capable technical design team was built under his leadership, embarking on the development of the Vigilant anti-tank missile. Besides completing the development of Vigilant into a successful Infantry and Armoured Corps weapon, the same team developed the Navigation and Attack System for the highly advanced TSR2 tactical strike and reconnaissance bomber for the RAF. The latter project required comprehensive system design and integration, and inventiveness, and the management of contractors engaged a number of technologies ranging from Radar and Inertial Navigation, to automatic Terrain Following and sophisticated weapon aiming, all co-ordinated by central computers. This work became the basis for developing later aircraft such as the currently operational Tornado.

John Forbat

PRELUDE

This fascinating personal account of the behind-the-scenes action at Vickers during the heyday of British aviation and weaponry invention in the 1950s and 1960s, is both authoritative and very, very readable. A researcher’s goldmine, this detailed book is crammed with facts, personal anecdotes, previously classified material and comprehensive explanations which, in a very real way, chart the evolution of today’s generation of breathtakingly advanced frontline aircraft and their associated weapon systems. All of the hallmarks of modern aviation: accuracy, reliability and technical sophistication, which we take so much for granted nowadays, were then largely unheard of, and today’s successful frontline jets are now the product of, what were at the time, seemingly improbable specifications, long hours of detailed analysis, complex trials and sheer inventive genius.

There is, however, a much more human side to the story and this book openly acknowledges the human failings, errors and financial battles – as well as the strong characters, leaders and men of vision – which together combined to dictate the course of events. It is this honest mix of success and failure, trial and error, genius and prevarication, boffins and budgets, which makes this book so appealing. As recently the officer commanding 617 ‘Dambusters’ Sqn and, having so far flown 3,500 hours in fast jets from Tornado GR4s with the RAF to F-117A Stealth Fighters with the USAF, this story of the dynamic linkages between industry and military rings very true to me.

January 2006

Air Cdre Al Monkman DFC MA BA RAF

Director of Air Operations, NATO ISAF HQ

Kabul, Afghanistan

Vickers had a team of engineers and technicians which grew to about eight hundred, working on up to three major projects simultaneously and supported by several major subcontractors. Besides this, the company established a base in Adelaide, South Australia, to support missile trials at the Woomera Rocket Range. The Australian team was led by Alan Milson (General Manager) and Jack Redpath, Head of Trials. From left to right: (back row) ??, Frank Williams, John Begbie, (middle row) ??, Syd Baker, Pat O’Connor, (front row) Maurice Watson, Jack Redpath.

PROLOGUE

This book is intended to provide, as accurately as possible after a fifty-year time interval, a historical account of the Guided Weapons developments by Vickers Armstrongs, (Aircraft) Ltd in Weybridge, Surrey, including some of the political aspects of government contracting. The difficulties in persuading a reluctant Ministry of Aviation and the Treasury to be ‘dragged kicking and screaming’ into buying the Vigilant anti-tank guided missile are recorded. Developed without government funds, this was, in their language, ‘unprecedented’. A British private venture development, Vigilant’s trials and tribulations before it was accepted by the Civil Service and the Government, are chronicled in some detail, relying on original government records in the Public Records Office of the National Archive. A list of References is provided, detailing the sources of my information.

Not intended to be a detailed technical treatise, it is written largely from my perspective of (initially) a young trials engineer, who was closely involved in most projects over a ten-year period. Thus, although there was a considerable depth of technical information and discussion needed to paint a representative picture of the developments conducted at Vickers, I have attempted to err on the side of making the story readable and interesting to a technically untrained audience. Though starting at the bottom of the organisation and maturing to senior designer level – short of Management status, I tried to keep myself abreast of the ‘big picture’, and in this account, factual though sometimes rather technical data is admixed with my own personal anecdotal experiences. I hope that these may help to add life to a tale of technical development at the forefront of engineering of the day, in a large and developing organisation.

The magic of aeroplanes and flying first inspired me as a small boy before the Second World War, when, rarely, a plane dropped advertising leaflets over Kensington Gardens. There we used to fish for ‘tiddlers’ and watch the old men (some aged at least thirty-five) sail their big model yachts. Sometimes the planes came so low that we could see the pilot’s head in the cockpit – and we wondered what it was like to fly. Being lifted up to look through the door of a corrugated skinned Handley Page airliner at Croydon Airport was the next best thing. Then came the war and evacuation.

Newsreels of the Blitz on London and shots of diving Stukas over Poland, then Heinkels and Messerschmitts being shot down by RAF fighters, imprinted themselves on our minds and imaginations. Having found an old wingless biplane in a farm shed outside Melksham in Wiltshire, where we were billeted away from London and family, was a major coup. Safe from prying eyes, a friend and I would climb into the tandem cockpits and waggle the joystick, making engine and machine gun noises till we were hoarse. By the middle of the war, in late 1942, at fourteen I was living back in London and soon got my Fire Guard’s armband and steel helmet, for fire watching duty – whenever we could arrange it, this was on the roof of our West Kensington block of flats. The sirens wailed, bombers roared, searchlights stabbed around in the night sky and Ack-Ack guns sent flak among the bombers evading the barrage balloons, and hot shrapnel tinkling down onto the pavements, for us kids to collect as trophies. Air-raid shelters were for grown-ups, who knew the dangers. For us, they were for ping-pong during the day when they were otherwise empty. We were trained to crawl through smoke filled rooms, to extinguish incendiary bombs by squirting water from a hose fed by another fire guard using a stirrup pump in a bucket of water. When bombs fell really close, it was ‘you young lad’ who was sent on his bike to ride the half mile over streets covered with broken glass, to fetch the fire brigade – which turned out to be on fire itself.

If only we could be old enough for the RAF and fly those beautiful, magnificent Spitfires and shoot Gerries down. I was green with envy, knowing that my older brother’s friends were Spitfire pilots and Mosquito train busters. The nearest thing for me was to join the Air Training Corps, where we wore a poor imitation of RAF uniform with high collars instead of shirt and tie, but where we practiced rapid aircraft recognition, learned about the theory of flight, navigation by dead reckoning, practiced Morse-code signalling and of course, lots of ‘square bashing’. The major annual event was the two week ‘camp’ at an RAF station, where we lived in Nissen Huts, slept on ‘biscuit’ mattresses and lined up with our tin plates for our victuals in the airmen’s mess, then washed them up in the trough outside, in steam boiling water, whence it was impossible to retrieve a dropped knife. Then after inspection, we would get runs in the bombing simulator, rifle and machine gun experience and, above all, flying. Never mind that the Short Stirling bomber finished its operational training bombing runs and target shooting over the sea on my first flight – with a mock attack by an American Thunderbolt fighter and took corkscrew evasive action – until I threw up. The 4-hour flight entitled us to a ‘flying meal’ of fried eggs and bacon, my favourite – almost totally unavailable due to food rationing in ‘Civvy Street’ – and I was so sick, I could not eat any of it.

But we flew as often as we could and the RAF let us feel we were part of the crew, with a trip to the flight deck wearing our parachute harnesses and helmets with earphones. There were also days out to an airfield, where we could fly in a Tiger Moth trainer and experience the wind and the bumps and even a loop-the-loop, or an Auster side-by-side seater, where we could actually hold the ‘stick’ and do a little ‘dual’. The epitome of this was for the luckier ones, who were able to go on a gliding course. On Hounslow Heath (now Heathrow Airport) barrage balloon winches would pull us across several hundred yards of bumpy grass in a single-seat Dagling glider. There were no two-seat gliders at the school, so we learned by flying solo from the first flight. At sixteen, this was not a bit frightening – just the excitement we craved. When we had become used to handling this almost Wright Flyer level craft up to only about 10ft over the heath, we transferred to the much higher performance Kirby Cadet. Now instead of sitting in the open on a ‘keel’ with wings and tail attached, we were in an open cockpit without instruments, just a stick and rudder bar, and the plug to release the cable. The instruction was somewhat primitive: ‘Just hold the stick about there, off you go’ was the gist of it, with perhaps a few shouted instructions from midfield while I flew over the instructor’s head. In the Cadet, we could climb to ten stories high, 100ft, and after pulling the plug to release the cable, glide down to a good landing. This was real flying and we were really in Seventh Heaven.

Soon we were also under the virtually 24-hour rain of Doodlebug flying bombs, pitching down as their fuel ran out, to crash and explode on London’s houses, causing much destruction and many casualties. I may have seen the first ones while cycling into Kent for camping one weekend. With its throaty pulse-jet roar, it flew quite low right overhead, with Ack-Ack bursting all around it. The usual rain of hot shrapnel had us dodge into a doorway, before picking up more souvenirs. Far from being guided, these V-1 flying bombs landed indiscriminately and we had all too real opportunities to practise the drill; when you hear one approaching, get off your bike, lie in the gutter with hands over the back of your head and wait. If you hear an explosion, some other poor bastard got his chips. The later V-2 missiles that shot up into space before coming down at supersonic speed were equally uncontrolled in where they hit. Unlike with the V-1s, no air-raid sirens announced their impending silent arrival. Once you heard the explosion – always followed by the scream of its falling trajectory – you knew that you were all right this time.

The depth of aviation’s penetration into my psyche naturally led to me taking an aeronautical engineering degree, and after passing ‘Inter BSc’ at school, it was virtually impossible for me to get onto a course in London. Eventually, in the face of floods of ex-servicemen returning from the war, I was offered a course for only two days a week as a temporary measure until a full-time course became available. The Aerodynamics lecturer was emphatic at our commencing lecture; if we had any hopes of passing an Aeronautical degree at the first attempt along with full-time students, ‘forget it’. When the year had passed, there was still no full-time place for me, so now having lost any opportunities for aircraft apprenticeships, I had to continue at two days per week and do private study at home on the other days. Out of a dozen or so in the Aeronautical class at Northampton Polytechnic, just two of us made it. In 1950 I was able to look to trying for that aircraft design career, to which I had nailed my flag. It took a few months before I was naturalised from my wartime ‘stateless’ designation as a pre-war Hungarian immigrant, and it was March 1951 before my ‘Secret’ clearance came through. That is when Vickers Armstrongs (Aircraft) Ltd accepted me as a Graduate Apprentice.

Arriving for an 8 a.m. start on my first day in my Dad’s Morris 8 borrowed for the day, the big car park outside the Design Office was quite empty. It was only when I backed into the first parking space near the main entrance that through the rear window, I saw the name plate growing as it came into view. The name was G.R. Edwards; fortunately I had done enough homework to realise this was our already famous chief designer’s parking spot. Quickly, I found another parking space. The first year at Weybridge was spent riveting, fitting, hammering and getting other factory experience with Valettas, Varsities and Viscounts in the factory, at the grand starting salary of £6 9s 8 1/4d for a 48-hour week, while I also got a first-hand view of the Valiant V-bomber prototype being tested. To my great surprise, the wing spars I was assembling closely resembled the design I had calculated and drawn for my recent college course work. Our lecturer must have known more about practical aircraft than we had given him credit for. I also witnessed the immediate aftermath of a test pilot’s arrival that would herald an important part of my future work. ‘Spud’ Murphy arrived for his job interview with chief test pilot Jock Bryce in his RAF Meteor fighter, which he flew like the aerobatic champion he was. Unfortunately, instead of landing at Wisley, he landed at Brooklands where we could all see it – and suffered a brake failure that led to his Meteor being wrapped round a tree at the bottom of somebody’s garden. Unhurt, afterwards he pleaded, ‘Jock, you have to hire me – I’ll be cashiered’, and got the job nevertheless, and later, as this book will document, we shared many flights.

My second apprenticeship year started with an interview with the assistant chief designer, H.H. Gardner. A large man with a hawk-like countenance, he looked over his desk and said, ‘I am picking people for our Special Projects Section. It is working on Guided Weapons. Would you like me to put you there?’ This was not exactly the aircraft design which I had so long craved. Yet, it was clearly something new, with supersonics and all that and still very much within the scope of my degree studies. ‘I want to put you into our Trials Section with Barry MacGowan, known as Mac.’ This sounded interesting enough and I quickly accepted. Very soon, I entered the Design Office as a very Junior trials engineer. I was into Guided Weapons.

Fifty years later, I am back at the site of those early developments as a volunteer at the Brooklands Museum. On the site of the famous Brooklands Motor Racing Track, which opened in 1907 and which is also the cradle of British Aviation exhibiting the many historic aircraft, engines, racing cars and associated equipment and memorabilia, I am gathering the missiles and related evidence of ‘GW’ for a third arm of Brooklands Museum.

Chapter 1

THE START OF GW AT VICKERS

The relatively new Special Projects Section I joined in March 1952 later became the Guided Weapons Department, and Henry Gardner then moved up to chief designer, GW. But thinking in Weybridge began immediately after the Second World War, when the company first considered setting up an elaborate organisation for designing and developing Guided Weapons. In a 1960 interview, Sqdn Ldr K.S. Lockie1 of Vickers reported that this was abandoned due to the insufficient likelihood of the very significant costs being recovered soon enough by sales of weapons to the armed services. Then, in 1949, the government offered Vickers the Sea Slug ship-to-air missile project, but this was declined. By this time, however, Barnes Wallis was following up his successful wartime bomb developments with the early creation of the idea that a TV guided gliding bomb should greatly improve on the accuracy obtainable by free falling bombs. This project became Blue Boar and was later the subject of a contract from the Ministry of Supply.

In the meantime, while the V-bombers were some time from becoming available to the RAF, in response to an invitation by the Government to produce expendable flying bombs for mass attacks, chief designer George Edwards initiated a private venture design – Red Rapier.2 These would emulate Hitler’s mass attacks with the V-1, but instead of relying on scatter shot methods, Red Rapier would cruise at a high subsonic speed at a 50,000ft altitude over a distance of up to 400 nautical miles, guided by a ‘TRAMP’ Radar beam system. Three jet engines mounted on symmetrically arranged tail fins would drive the large robot aircraft over this range and deliver a 5,000lb bomb load after a ‘bunt’ that brought the trajectory into the vertical over the target. With a specified accuracy of 100 yards, single 5,000lb bombs or clusters of five 1,000 bombs could have a devastating effect, particularly with waves of up to 100 Red Rapiers attacking together.

By the time this wet behind the ears engineer arrived at Special Projects, Blue Boar trials were well under way and Red Rapier development was advanced to the point of a firm specification under the designation Vickers SP2. Furthermore, a new (originally Folland Aircraft) project was just being acquired under Ministry contract, for an advanced active Radar homing air-to-air missile against bomber targets attacking at near-sonic speeds. This was capable of delivering a 100lb proximity fuzed warhead in all round attack directions, at a range of up to 10,000 yards and heights between 10,000ft and 50,000ft. Delightfully, this was named Red Dean at a time when Dr Hewlett Johnson, well known to be a card-carrying Communist, was the Dean of Canterbury. Since he was popularly referred to in the Press as the Red Dean of Canterbury, we could hardly wait for the missile’s name to come off the Secret List.

I reported to Barry MacGowan (‘Mac’), section leader of Trials. At the age of twenty-seven, this tall, serious, engineer with bright ginger hair was one of the top team under Henry Gardner and his deputy Eddie Smyth. Having bailed out of a tailless glider in which a well-known test pilot, Robert Kronfeld, was killed, Mac was a member of the Caterpillar Club – and well versed in flight testing. Against my newly increased wage of £8 15s a week – say a little over £400 per year – Mac was reputed to be earning the astronomical sum of £750 per year. He quickly impressed upon me his pride to be working with a company like Vickers, and showed himself to be a meticulous engineer, particularly in the quality of report writing he expected from his staff – nothing less than the standards of the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough. We had many RAE reports to study, particularly since the RAE tended to do the initial design of most Guided Weapons, up to the point of a contract being awarded to a company like Vickers.

However, the first thing I had to remember before handwriting even the most modest of rough notes or calculations, well before starting to assemble any formal report or memorandum, was to write ‘Secret’ at the top of the page. Long since unclassified, everything was Secret, except for those fewer matters that were merely ‘Confidential’, or at the lowest level, ‘Restricted’. This became an automatic process in everything we did, as did the locking of all this material into approved security filing cabinets, whose normal drawer locks were complemented by an approved padlock securing a stout steel bar passed down through its drawer handles. Work could not be taken home, all information was on a ‘need to know’ basis, and Management had to satisfy not only ‘the Ministry’, but the ubiquitous ‘Box 500’ Government security office somewhere in MI5. The aura of this environment under which the new area of technology called Guided Weapons was shrouded, added to its technical and professional attractions to make life exciting for a recently qualified engineer at the tender age of twenty three. Happily, all this work has now long been declassified.

However, one of the first stops on my introduction to this newly evolving real world was with J.E. Daboo, a squat, diminutive and brilliant Indian engineer with a Cambridge MA, who was also a graduate of the prestigious College of Aeronautics at Cranfield. In charge of aerodynamics and performance, ‘Dab’ had the design of Blue Boar well under his belt and was designing the shape and performance of Red Dean and its rocket motor. As I sat down to learn what he was doing, he could succinctly explain the mathematics of missile design parameters and how each interacted with the others, while he simultaneously continued to calculate missile trajectories with his ever hotter slide rule. This habit extended to the largest design and management meetings, during which his work rate on creating missile trajectories never slackened even though he never lost the thread, nor failed to make intelligent points. Thus, I was able to learn the basics of supersonic lift, drag and stability, which were sufficiently new to have had little attention in my BSc (Eng.) course. We would have a long friendship.

Mike Still was in charge of mechanical engineering work and supervised the sub-contractors who provided hydraulic actuators, valves, igniters and a host of related parts, assisted by Reg Barr, Bill Redstone, Peter Rice and others. Much of his time was also occupied by the design of missile recovery systems, with the aim of avoiding the expensive destruction of every air dropped or rocket boosted missile in the trials programme. Ingenious recovery systems were under development, involving everything from parachutes to dive brakes and their combinations, that could land a trials ‘round’ softly enough on a spike protruding from its nose, for re-use in subsequent trials.

Missile control by autopilots and guidance in the different forms required for each project involved a whole range of electronic designs, as did power supply systems and the radio telemetry required for trials. Electronic engineers abounded in many varieties, ranging from the small, softly spoken, bearded Dr Teddy Hall, in charge of Red Rapier’s control and guidance assisted by ‘Mac’ McDonnell and Ian Hansford among others, to bespectacled control engineer Johnny Johnstone. Away from the main design office, numerous engineers and technicians stared at oscilloscopes and wielded soldering irons at bird’s nests of wires on benches in the Brooklands Track’s remaining Pits. When not flooded out by excess rains, these were hives of activity by, mainly, ex-Post Office engineers like Colin New, Jack Mullins, Teddy Pierce, Alan Jones, Jack Few, Derek Dix, recent apprentice Don Wells and such, who may not have gone to university, but knew all about oscillators, servo motors and drives, as well as radio transmission with its specialised test equipment. Prolific numbers of Wireless World editions in The Pits were always on hand for tips on electronic circuits. Some of these people must have been over thirty, even approaching forty! In those days before the Transistor, all electronics utilised miniature and sub-miniature thermionic valves, which produced prodigious amounts of heat that had to be dissipated somehow, without baking the whole unit. What is more, they had to work equally well at an altitude of 50,000ft and -60°C as at sea level and +50°C, also withstanding the severe ‘g’ forces and vibration environments created by jet bombers or rocket motors or both.

Structural design involved yet another set of engineers, with Peter Mobsby and Albert Kitchenside creating the latest honeycomb wing structures, missile body designs to carry rocket motors and their efflux nozzles, fixed and flip-out wing designs, supported by experienced design draughtsmen like ‘Tubs’ Phil Ashby, Arthur Anderson, Frank Howard and colleagues bending over their boards wielding chisel-pointed soft pencils. ‘Mob’ had the additional distinction of applying his virile sense of humour through side-splitting cartoons, which regularly made rounds of the office. It was ‘Mob’ who quite believably drew Dr Hall as a ‘ferret peeping out of a bear’s arse’. A little more outrageously for our amusement, he related the company ‘dolly bird’, who regularly turned heads whenever she flounced by wafting her suitably provocative perfume. Mob depicted ‘Woking Lil’ – a possibly undeserved nick-name – passing outside the window of the management office, with a goggle-eyed manager’s erection bursting through the brick wall. Intertwined between the electronic and the mechanical engineers, Roy Baker and Eric Wightman were to the fore in development and the universal interaction with trials. Before computers or even cheap electronic calculators, slide rules still ‘ruled’. Yet Roy – who was the first person to acquaint me with the term ‘black box’ for any electronic system element, years before its time – forecast that the future of industry would be dependent on the ability to store and retrieve large quantities of data.

Where aircraft were to be used for flight testing missiles, otherwise ‘standard’ RAF planes such as Canberra jet bombers were equipped with complementary control, monitoring and missile launching equipment. This employed many engineers led by Sid Hook, Sid Horwood and more humble design draughtsmen, who stood astride the main aircraft design departments and ‘Special Projects’.

Peter Tanner oversaw prototype manufacturing in all its aspects initially in the W103 hangar, ranging from Forman Harry Beauchamp with Johnny Woods, machining, wiring under Sam Hastings, to assembly and with assistance in testing, by engineers from the laboratories in The Pits. That operation was supported by our own Commercial and Purchasing office led by the urbane Alan Moorshead and a more mischievously humorous Bill Murdoch, assisted by the gentle Ozzie Wood and others.

Trials were conducted at RAE-owned ranges on Salisbury Plain, mainly at Larkhill (where Mr Berens, the Range Warden, came to work riding a horse) and Imber, and at Aberporth on Cardigan Bay. Other trials were conducted by the Ministry direct, with aircraft operating from the Armaments & Experimental Establishment (A&EE), Boscombe Down. Vickers also had a permanent trials station in Australia, located at Edinburgh Field near Adelaide, for trials at the desert Woomera Missile Range. This team was set up and headed by Ozzie Wood’s brother-in-law, Jack Redpath, assisted by Brian Soan in charge of the trials operations, with general administration headed by Alan Millson. Members of Mac’s trials team were allocated to Australia for one-year periods. John Curry was already out there, and Maurice Watson was the next one due to go down under.

Each project’s trials programme was undertaken with a series of test vehicles, which in the absence of developed recovery systems were mostly destroyed in the process of the trial. Their performance was therefore only capable of analysis by means of Kinetheodolite film records of flight trajectories and on-board instrument data that were either recoverable after impact, or transmitted to ground stations using Radio Telemetry. One of my first tasks was to configure on-board instruments for measuring accelerations during flight, and to analyse trials results from various media. Recovered instruments and telemetry records would arrive from firings and air drops over Cardigan Bay on a regular basis, and mountains of data had to be extracted. Kinetheodolite film records required frame-by-frame viewing and assessment of missile flight behaviour in real time, telemetry records with typically sixteen channels of data, recorded continuously over 10 seconds of rocket-propelled flight, would enable readings of accelerations, pressures, temperatures, vibrations and gyroscope measured headings, leading to column after column of figures for further analysis. Accelerometer records were frequently made by ‘scratch recorders’ that had to be recovered from impacted test vehicles. These comprised a stylus moving in response to accelerometer deflections, which scratched a trace onto a clear piece of film previously calibrated with lines, scratched while the instrument was mounted on a centrifuge. We had to make sure that the calibrations were accurate enough to produce useful measurements and have the instrument packages installed in the test ‘rounds’ before they went to the range.

The volume of analysis that today would be fed directly into a (virtually unheard of) digital computer programmed to print out analysed data, then required manual calculation employing large and noisy calculators. To assist us with this work, there were about ten young girls of the ‘Hen Coop’. This apt name would undoubtedly be condemned as politically incorrect today, but these sweet girls, mostly around twenty years of age, who worked with us didn’t mind. Originally part of the Wind Tunnel Department when this was Eddie Smyth’s responsibility, The Hen Coop girls were led by Kathleen, an efficient and friendly lady more mature than the others – she could have been as old as thirty! Valerie, who had recently married Bob Gladwell in the Aerodynamics Dept., was as much a good looker as any, showing a Hollywood-level panache with a hearty slap across the face of a youthful test pilot who came a little too fresh for her liking. After a flaming red-headed princess of a girl went to Australia to be married, also in her very early twenties, Daphne Boughton, Daphne Morris and Edna were only outshone in attractiveness by the eighteen-year-old blonde Marlene Lees. With great application, industry and noise, they whirled the handles of their typewriter-sized Brunswiga mechanical calculators, and the lucky ones used the near desk-sized Marchant electric calculators. We then plotted graphs and tables of the results and wrote detailed reports for Mac’s approval before they were circulated to the appropriate design teams and to management.

Fig.1.1 Members of the Trials Team at a typical Christmas Eve party. From left to right: Alan Thurley, Edna, Peter Burry, Ron Jupp, Marlene Lees, Mike Martin, Bert Coleman, Clarice and above, Mike Ellis (with the Lea Francis cars in a large garage attached to a small house), Daphne Boughton, another Daphne, John Forbat, John Curry and Henry Hunt above, Kathleen, Valerie and Bob Gladwell. The names on the other faces and some surnames have retreated into the mists of my memory.103

For Blue Boar flight trials over Aberporth, Vickers already operated (initially two) Canberra aircraft – the world’s first jet bomber (later made under license by the Martin Corporation in America). With unswept wings bearing two Rolls Royce Avon engines, the sleek Canberra B2 carried its bomb load and trials equipment, with pilot, navigator and the missile trials engineer, up to a 48,000ft altitude at Mach 0.82 – some 600mph. They were only just entering RAF service, so our pre-production machines were not identical and still represented leading edge aviation – and risk. In the days before airline passenger jet travel was even on the travelling public’s horizon, to arrive over Land’s End from Wisley in 28 minutes was a big deal. Later, a RAF B29 Washington (American Second World War Superfortress) and two more Canberras were added for Red Dean and Red Rapier trials in England and in Australia.

The Trials Section already in place included Maurice Watson, a couple of years my senior, Reg Mason, recently returned from working at Oak Ridge in Tennessee, and Alan Thurley, whose asthma prevented him from flying. From time to time, Mac or Maurice would arrive in the office carrying flying kit and looking a little dark under the eyes. When after a few weeks he had licked my report writing into shape, one day Mac announced, ‘John, I want you to train up for flying with Blue Boar in the Canberra’. He wanted me to fly in the Canberra? With racing heart, I could think of nothing I wanted more. Besides being kitted out with flying suit, leather helmet with oxygen mask, pressure breathing waistcoat and goggles, I was soon despatched to the School of Aviation Medicine at Farnborough for a medical examination and to experience the ejector seat. The seat was waiting quietly at the foot of a steep ramp resembling the jib of a crane. Reg and I tossed a coin to decide would go first while the other watched – I won and opted not to watch him and risk turning ‘chicken’. When I pulled the handle of the face screen over my head, a loud bang gave me a kick up the backside and there I was with my feet dangling into space about 30ft up, feeling rather like a circus clown after a back somersault. Nothing to worry about, and Reg followed. In the event of a live ejection at Mach 0.82, that would be the easy part (assuming that the emergency oxygen supply attached to the seat worked and the cockpit canopy was successfully blown off first).

Firm instructions on making the descent to earth followed:

First of all, unlock the seat harness and get out of the seat as quickly as possible. In the seat, you will fall much too slowly and would certainly freeze to death before reaching the ground. Wait till you are at 10,000ft (estimate this by eye, we don’t have barometric releases yet) before you pull the parachute rip chord. Then steer as best you can away from houses and trees and raise your knees, to make a good landing without breaking your legs. Don’t forget to release the ‘chute as soon as you are down otherwise in any wind, it could drag you for miles.

A little more respectful of high-altitude jet flying in military aircraft, we drove back to Weybridge, ready for our fist trial.

By late twentieth-century standards, visits to other establishments were supported by quaintly cushioned facilities, available even to mere ‘Weekly Staff” levels. For those who did not drive (were there ever such people?) or for long journeys, a chauffeur could be made available. The Vickers Transport Department would supply Austin A40 or to ‘Monthly Staff’ A90 saloon cars for a trips, saving impecunious engineers from having to show up at the RAE trials ranges or at sub-contractors on their motor bikes, or (as when I became affluent enough) in my chugging 1930 model Austin Seven. Besides the numerous repairs I had to make to this ancient vehicle, my colleagues were much amused by the leaky radiator, which got me to work with the aid of porridge I put into the water, but required a saucepan to collect the drips during the day – poured back before leaving for home. The friendly Transport Manager, E.F.G. Hill, gave willing help, assisted by his wife and secretary Irene, whom he had married ‘because’ her maiden initials were I.J.K.L. Clearly, he had no other choice! We received rail vouchers for travel to London and beyond – in the case of senior designers and above, for the first-class carriages.

This substantial operation, major sub-contractors and relationships with the Ministry of Supply and the Air Ministry were co-ordinated by Eddie Smyth from his front office next to Henry Gardner’s larger sanctum in the big Aircraft Design Building that covered several acres of drawing boards and desks. While Special Projects was part of the one Aircraft Design Office, its serious yet easy going and enthusiastic entity already occupied a somewhat detached presence in its midst.

In a visit on 14 July 1952 to Vickers by assistant director/TD Plans, Mr F. Olaf Thornton, along with a Mr Baker, the RAE project officer F.G. Tarrant and W/C Simpson, GW(Air) of the Air Ministry, insufficient progress with the Blue Boar programme was noted. Internal correspondence retained in the Public Records Office in Kew shows how officials in the Ministry of Supply were at considerable unease concerning the work load Vickers had undertaken with three major projects. Following this visit, a reported interview3 with George Edwards and Henry Gardner, together with the Ministry’s resident technical officer (RTO) on 8 August 1952, with comments by Mr Thornton, is the subject of interesting opinions, quoted in the extracts below:

After a short general discussion the points made in Mr Baker’s notes were taken one by one.

Notes on Visit [Items of interest selected by Author]

(1) The progress on Blue Boar was unsatisfactory and this was attributed to lack of staff…

‘In the first place the figure of 44 did not include 20 men in the drawing Office, nor did it include such departments as Aerodynamics, Stress, Weight Control, Wind Tunnel, Mechanical Test etc. These are run as service departments, which provide specialised effort as and when required. Vickers maintained that it would be very uneconomical to create separate Aircraft and Guided Weapon departments for these services.

When comparing Vickers with firms who have a completely self-contained Guided Weapon organisation it should be remembered that the figure of 44 at Vickers is not in any way comparable with figures for self contained Guided Weapons organisations because it does not include any of these service departments nor of course does it include the Experimental Shop which at the time of the report employed 94 men on Blue Boar…

Note. There appears to me to be a fundamental difference between aircraft and electronic design, the former is very broadly designed, built and then flight tested, whereas the latter proceeds on a try and see basis and then tested to see if they work. These then go through innumerable modifications and tests, the modifications being made physically in the Lab by the technician, i.e. they do not go through the process of redesign in the Drawing Office followed by construction in the Experimental Shop, and when the right combination is found in the Lab then the design is formalised …

(3) Project Engineers. [This refers to Ministry Engineers… Author]

GWRD believe that there should be a PSO level man in technical charge of each project: Blue Boar, Red Rapier and Red Dean.

Vickers are unwilling to take on such a man on Red Rapier while it is a Private Venture and certainly while it remains a Private Venture on the part of Vickers it is not for the MOS to say who Vickers should or should not take on. Smyth deals with the other two projects and because they are in very different states of development (Blue Boar is well advanced while Red Dean is only just beginning) one project engineer is in the opinion of the firm adequate for the two projects …

(5) Distribution of Electronic Strength between the 3 projects.

It has been stated that the electronic section for Red Rapier is extremely well staffed with a good section head while the corresponding section of Blue Boar is bad and for Red Dean does not exist.

This is misunderstanding of the facts, as the real high quality electronic effort is required on the guidance system. The guidance system for Blue Boar is being undertaken by EMI and for Red Dean by GEC and only on Red Rapier is Vickers responsible for the guidance system. To put the Red Rapier guidance team on either of the other projects would, in the opinion of Vickers be a gross misemployment of these men and they would probably lose them as a result…

(10) General Suitability of Vickers.3

It was stated that Vickers were, as far as military aircraft were concerned, essentially a bomber firm and therefore showed greater interest in Blue Boar and Red Rapier than Red Dean, which is essentially a fighter weapon.

Quite apart from the fact that a bomber firm should be particularly suitable for developing methods of attacking bombers, I think that the history of these jobs should be remembered. Blue Boar was being developed by Vickers on contract and Red Rapier as a Private Venture though with MOS knowledge and support, while Red Dean was being developed by Follands. When Follands wished to drop Red Dean, Vickers were approached but said they did not wish to take on the work. The late Chief Executive Guided Weapons then went to the top of the Vickers organisation (Mr Weeks) and exerted very great pressure that they should take it on in the national interest because they were the only firm who were considered really capable of undertaking this very important project (Red Dean) and in whom the Ministry of Supply had every confidence. This was done with the full knowledge of the prior Blue Boar and Red Rapier commitments …

(11) Estimation.

To attempt to lay down what is little more than an arbitrary programme and then to blame others for failing to carry it out is a travesty of the functions of a Government Department …

(14) Conclusion.

There is no real clash between Blue Boar, Red Rapier and Red Dean, nor would there be any appreciable acceleration of the other two if Red Rapier were dropped …

In preparation for this visit I arranged a meeting with Mr Tarrant the RAE project officer on Blue Boar, and wing commander Simpson of GW (Air), to ascertain their criticisms of Vickers …

… … My conclusion is that there is no real clash between the Blue Boar, Red Rapier and Red Dean, nor would there be any appreciable acceleration of the other two if Red Rapier were dropped. My recommendations are:

(a) That a contract for Red Rapier be placed as soon as possible as while this job remains a Private Venture, the MOS are in the weakest possible position to influence the deployment of men on the job.

(b) That Vickers be asked to draw up their own programme for the next six months for all three weapons and that this be sent to the MOS and that it should form the basis for future action pending any CS(A)/CGWL agreed programme.

Signed off by F. Olaf Thornton AD/TD. Plans, this long note was sent up the line to the director general (DGTD/A) and to the controller, CS (A), who demurred from agreeing some of the points, but, nevertheless, concluded: ‘On the other hand I entirely agree with Thornton’s recommendations and suggest that you accept them’.

This went to the controller of Guided Weapons and Electronics (CGWL) with his own handwritten note, saying, ‘You will be interested to see this file. At present it appears as though we may rest assured’.

The Ministry of Supply was clearly torn between trying to micro-manage these programmes at Vickers, and the subsequent realisation that it was not a Government department’s place to tell a contractor how to run his business. The net result was that Vickers could continue all three projects with contract cover from the MOS – until much later, when other factors led to cancellations. Meanwhile, Vickers Guided Weapons Department was set up as a separate entity from the Aircraft division after all, and a new building next to the Vickers Apprentice School was built to house the whole operation. The Pits, the W103 hangar for Environmental Testing and other work, as well as other outlying buildings, remained in operation, but the main Experimental Shop under Peter Tanner, with Harry Beauchamp, Sam Hastings and technicians including John Duck, was relocated in the new GW building, along with Design, Project Management, Trials and the other departments. Eddie Smyth remained in day-to-day charge, reporting to Henry Gardner as director and chief designer. However, reliance of the Aircraft division was considerably reduced, being mainly for wind tunnel work and the nascent PEGASUS computer capability. Flight testing with pilots, navigators and aircraft maintenance also remained with the main Flight Test Department at Wisley airfield, employing GW personnel for its own equipment and engineering aircrew from the Trials Section.

Fig.1.2 Test pilot ‘Spud’ Murphy in the Canberra at 40,000ft, snapped by me.103

Fig.1.3 Navigator Don Bowen.103

By 1954, major expansion was taking place, with the recruitment of senior project managers and numerous supporting engineers to work on the three projects, considerably raising the level of technical and professional capabilities of the GW Department. While this heralded larger and more diverse operations, it was still much smaller than most other GW organisations and remained a closely knit and enthusiastic young team.

Other major UK projects were being pursued at Bristol Aircraft and English Electric, which were respectively engaged on Red Duster (eventually in as Bloodhound) and Red Shoes (eventually in service Thunderbird) ground-to-air missile developments, Fairey Aviation with Blue Sky (eventually in service as Fireflash) air-to-air missile, de Havilland with Blue Jay (eventually in service as Firestreak) air-to-air missile and Armstrong Whitworth with Sea Slug. Problems with some of these projects would later have repercussions in the management of Vickers Guided Weapons at Weybridge.

Fig.1.4 Our B-29 ‘Washington’ Superfortress and an aircrew, before a trial with the 5,000lb Blue Boar test vehicle. From left to right: navigator Don Bowen; trials engineer George Errington; second (test) pilot Eddie McNamara; Clive Roberts, Smiths Aircraft Instruments; trials engineers Frank Cox, John Whetmore and Pat White; flight engineer Pat Toll; test pilot and Captain ‘Spud’ Murphy.33

Following chapters include numerous extracts, diagrams and photographs from previously Secret reports and correspondence. The reader may rest assured that these documents have long been declassified and that any ‘Secret’ markings can be safely ignored.

Chapter 2

RED RAPIER EXPENDABLE BOMBER

Before a Guided Weapons Department was mooted at Weybridge, chief designer George Edwards initiated and oversaw the beginnings of a programme of development aimed at filling the RAF’s bombing capability gap, as the Cold War was making its early threats. In 1949, the RAF was still flying Lincolns and generally heavy bombers designed during the period of the Second World War. Although specifications for the new concept of unarmed, high subsonic speed V-Bombers flying at 50,000ft altitude had resulted in RAF Operational Requirements (ORs) being issued back in 1946, the resulting Vulcan and Victor bombers specified to carry a 20,000lb bomb load were even then not expected to be ready to enter service until the mid-1950s. To fill the gap, the nearest aircraft performance immediately available was by the USAF’s late WW2 B-29 Superfortress, of which the RAF ordered a quantity of eighty-eight.2 These aircraft could carry a somewhat lesser bomb load at well below sonic speed and up to only 35,000ft. Another shorter timescale OR had been issued in 1948 (the B9/48), with similar performance to the 1946 ORs, but with a lighter bomb load of 15,000lb. This became the Vickers Valiant, with swept back wings carrying four totally buried Rolls Royce Avon jet engines in an aerodynamically clean design overseen by George Edwards. Valiant first flew in 1951 amid much excitement at Weybridge and Wisley, where flight testing commenced as the Experimental Shop build at Foxwarren was quickly followed by manufacturing at Brooklands. This employed large stressed skinned wing sections built on jigs, with new technology hydraulically operated machinery. Nevertheless, the in-service date was clearly several years ahead.

Short Range Expendable Bomber (SREB)