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Early Nucleonic activity at Malmesbury
By Chris Poole - September 2006
Based on the notes of Charles Exton
By 1947, the government had became aware that with the advent of Atomic weapons there was a pressing need to provide the Armed Forces, the Civil Defence and the Police with some means of detecting radiation so that in the event of an Atomic/Nuclear explosion, safe areas with low radiation levels could be marked out, similarly 'hot spots' of high radiation could be isolated.
When the United Kingdom's nuclear weapons programme was formally sanctioned in January 1947, this was carried out in parallel with the development of a civil nuclear programme under the Ministry of Supply at Harwell but at that time AERE Harwell was still in its embryonic stage to handle contracts and so TRE at Malvern became the first Nuclear Instrument design authority since they had the engineering staff and expertise to handle instrument contracts.
EKCO, because of their close ties with TRE and their known expertise set up a nucleonic laboratory staffed by a small group of engineers led by Harold Finch and including Don Smith and Laurie Taylor (to name a few) to work on nucleonic instrumentation research and design (this team later joined by a young Len Lumber).
Nucleonic lab at Malmesbury 1948 - Photograph courtesy of Southend Museum Service
They quickly received a Ministry of Supply contract to manufacture a large number (believed to be a thousand) of portable Dose Rate Meters.
These were compact units, a little larger than a brick with, sub-flush handles and controls and the purpose of these meters being that they could measure personal Dose Rates as well as dose rates of sites and equipment. These meters remained in production for some time and were still being manufactured as late as 1955.
Early Portable Dose Meter - Photograph courtesy Athelstan Museum Malmesbury
Other ministry contracts were received for small numbers of laboratory instruments such as Scalers, Counters, Rate Meters, and Amplifiers etc. all of which are remembered well by Charles Exton since he was the Chief Estimator responsible for negotiation of contract costs with the Technical Cost Branch of the Ministry of Supply at that time.
By the early 1950's EKCO decided to enter the commercial market with this type of instrumentation and the work of the development group expanded, particularly when Harwell made available commercially produced radioactive isotopes.
EKCO type 596D radiation meter - late 1950's - similar to original Eric Alden sketch
EKCO type 571 radiation meter
Photograph kindly supplied by D Cole
At that time there was much pioneering research done into possible uses of isotopes and applications resulting in EKCO designing and manufacturing a range of equipment ranging from detectors to measure material properties, continuous paper thickness measurement at the rolling mills, fluid flow measurement in pipelines, monitoring and controlling 'tape recording' plastic film to measuring the moisture content of tobacco as it was fed into Cigarette making machines.
In 1956 the decision was made to move all nucleonic activity from Malmesbury to Southend where the degree and scope of research, design and manufacture continued to expand.
Editors Note:
There is no evidence that EKCO Malmesbury held stocks of nucleonic material other than very small amounts of 'isotopes', which were used to calibrate the accuracy of the instrumentation being manufactured. These isotopes were held in a lead lined safe and only accessible by authorised staff all of whom had to wear radiation badges, which were routinely monitored.
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