The following are short story memories of EKCO Electronics at Southend from 1960 onwards.
If you have a story or wish to add your memories to those listed below, we shall be glad to receive them. All you have to do is click on my name (Chris Poole) also to be found at the bottom of each page.
The secret underground shelters
Chris Poole
Over time I came to learn of the secret underground shelters and stores hidden below the car park behind the Engineering Tower block and I once went down to these shelters with some of the maintenance men and I was amazed to find rooms still fully equipped with tables and benches. It was almost as if they had just been left as they were at the end of WW2. When I asked one of the maintenance men why there were tables etc, he told me that it was planned to be able to function and carry on limited production underground if needed during air raids?
When I re-visited the site in 2004, I discovered that this car park had not been built on in the intervening years, thus I can only surmise that the shelters and stores are still there?
The Magnetiser
Chris Poole
One of the must frightening duties I had was using the 'Magnetiser' which was a device designed by John Yarrow and used for imparting a high magnetic field into the soft iron blocks moulded into various components.
It was frightening insofar as this piece of equipment was in its own room adjacent to 'Gibbys lab' and I had strict instructions to remove any metallic objects, including my watch before entering the room and switching on.
I swear when the 'Magnetiser' was switched on the lights dimmed and it emitted an ominous hum akin to the sort of noise heard in the Frankenstein movies. I don't know what the power consumption was but by the size of the power leads it must have been considerable. Suffice to say that using the machine was not popular and I did sometimes wonder about the highly magnetic environment.
Tony Wadsworth
I supervised the re-commissioning of the magnetiser, which required the installation of a dedicated 440V, three phase, mains supply. The magnetiser was mounted on a low wooden table under which was a bank of large metal finned selenium rectifiers, arranged in a three phase bridge configuration, together with the necessary switching and control gear. The whole assembly weighed about three quarters of a ton.
The item to be magnetised was placed between the moveable pole pieces of the magnetiser, which were then carefully clamped in position. Failure to tighten the clamps would result in a violent coming together of the pole pieces with a loud metallic clang, and the squashing of the item to be magnetised.
There were some concerns about health and safety, which was not given much consideration back in the fifties and sixties, but nobody was injured during its use. I did have to fit safety shields over the electrics and cover the device in warning and safety labels.
However, a lab assistant narrowly avoided being crushed when the entire assembly fell off a pallet truck whilst being moved across the Lab during one of the many moves so beloved of modern industry.
Fortunately, there was no damage to personnel, the magnetiser, or the floor of the building.
The Helicopter radar indicator unit
Chris Poole
The manufacture of the Helicopter radar indicator unit was commonly referred to as either the 'coal Scuttle' or the 'fish fryer' by the mechanical lads although the senior engineers probably frowned upon this description.
What was unique about this unit was the fact that the whole assembly was fabricated using the 'German Toy' technique, which to the uninitiated is a method whereby one part is made with rectangular slots and the mating part has projecting tangs. These were big pieces of Aluminium and had to be checked very carefully due to the need for all the slots and tangs to line up. When the two parts are assembled, the tangs engaged through the slots and given a twist to lock them in place. A special paste was used, as a jointing compound, and the whole assembly 'dip brazed' in a salt solution at quite a high temperature, thus effectively welding the whole structure. A specialist company called 'Delaney Galley' did the 'Dip Brazing'
In the front of the unit, there was a 24-inch 'Fresnal Lens', which was held in place by being sandwiched between two castings. In the lover casting bolted to the casing, there was probably the first use in the UK of 'Screw Lock Thread Inserts', which caused many problems in the early days due to difficulties in having the right tooling, which caused the thread behind the locking element to jump a thread. The net result of this was that I spent many hours testing each thread in the housing and that meant checking a lot of threads.
Tony Wadsworth
One of the great innovations was the optical system that was housed in the "coal scuttle" and projected the radar image onto the back of the Fresnel lens.
This optical system was based upon the original Philips projection TV, although this was before Philips took over the Company.
The actual cathode ray tube was about 3 inches in diameter and had to be incredibly bright.
To achieve this degree of illumination, it was supplied with 30kV from an Araldite encapsulated assembly that employed a voltage multiplier developed from an idea thought up by V.J.Cox and known as a "Cox's Ladder".
As you can imagine, it was very easy to burn the phosphor on this tube and if the scanner was to stop, giving a stationary line, the phosphor would be almost instantly destroyed.
Indeed, if a fault condition resulted in a single spot being produced, the glass envelope of the CRT would be punctured, rendering the tube useless.
Consequently, very fast acting safety shut down circuits were required to protect the very expensive CRT, also, changing this tube was a very expensive and time consuming process.
As the face of the CRT was slightly curved, but the image was projected onto a flat Fresnel lens, optical correction was necessary to prevent distortion of the image, particularly at the edges of the display.
This was achieved by means of an accurately formed glass lens called a Schmidt Plate.
The entire optical system had to be rigid enough to withstand the harsh environmental (especially vibrational) conditions found in Sea King helicopters, whilst being light enough for airborne use.
The Fresnel lens itself was something of a marvel. It consisted of a flat sheet of transparent plastic about 18 inches across, upon which a series of concentric grooves was machined. These grooves were roughly triangular in cross section with the "peaks" forming little prismatic lenses.
The amazing part of the whole design was that each groove, and there were hundreds of them across the active area of the lens, had to have a slightly different form to its neighbours and be optically polished.
As I recall, this Fresnel lens was contracted out to a specialist optical manufacturer who refused to reveal his manufacturing techniques, although it was believed that the use of a specialised lathe and continuously variable profile cutting tool, using a Perspex solvent as the cutting lubricant, was involved.
The Environmental Test Laboratory
Chris Poole
This was a new building built behind the engineering block in the mid 60's.
What was fascinating about this lab was the fact that it was equipped with 2 large vibration tables (made by Ling I think?) upon which a scanner unit or a T/R unit could be mounted and vibrated over a wide vibration range going down I think to 20Hz.
The object of this testing was to simulate the vibration regime of the aircraft or helicopter.
I recall that one of the party tricks to demonstrate the equipment to important visitors was to take a TV from the main production line and watch it self-destruct in a very short time.
In the second part of the building was an environmental chamber where equipment could be subjected to 'tropical' conditions.
One of the big concerns about the building being where it was the fact that the vibrations would transmit through the foundations or the roof and affect the adjacent engineering tower block and cracks certainly did appear in this building with plaster and brick dust known to fall onto drawing boards in the D/O on the top floor.
Tony Wadsworth
Ron Lee ran the Environmental Test Laboratory at Southend and subsequently at Crawley.
The large vibrator that you mention was mounted on a block of concrete weighing several tons. This concrete block was located in a concrete lined pit in the floor and was mounted on shock absorbing mounts in order to prevent, or at least minimise, transmission of vibrations to adjacent buildings.
This vibrator and possibly the environmental chamber were transferred to Crawley where the Environmental Test Laboratory was a much larger and more comprehensive facility than that at Southend. There were, and presumably still are, several combined vibrators and environmental chambers, together with drop and bump tables, mechanical shock simulators, salt spray and fungal growth test chambers, driving rain simulators and a variety of other equipment used to environmentally prove military equipment.
When the vibrator was first installed at Southend, the local newspaper ran an article on it, which included photographs of the installation. Unfortunately, when the photographer arrived to take the pictures, a very large and prominent meter was missing from the front panel of the control console. So that the pictures could be taken, a dummy meter was constructed and fitted. In the photographs it was not possible to see that this meter was not real. Fortunately, the definition of the photographs was insufficient to see the calibration marks and units displayed on the meter scale, especially as some wag had marked the meter as measuring "elephants per micro-fortnight".
The Scrap Chit
Chris Poole
With security staff on the front and rear entrances (they never apparently twigged that you could leave through the gate from the sports field) to take anything off the site you had to have a chit.
Of course this was only used for objects, which would not fit into pockets (valves and small components such as resistors etc. were considered fair game and worth the risk of getting stopped for a random check.) but up the early/mid 60's the top of the range TV cases were still made of mahogany or if it was a Dynatron even teak.
The net result of this was many of the staff sought out scrap TV cases from the 'Willow Run', which were taken home and used to make coffee tables for example.
The procedure was that you should take the piece of wood you wanted to the 'Scrap Officer' who worked upstairs above Personnel and he would evaluate the piece and issue a scrap chit upon payment of a small sum such as sixpence (6d) or one Shilling in old money and it was not unknown for the teak pieces to be up to 5 shillings if it was from a large 24 or 26 inch cabinet.
Of course everybody soon wised up to this with the result that many departments had a suitably badly scratched piece of wooden cabinet, which was taken to the Scrap Officer whenever you found a good piece of wood.
We used to have bets on how much he would charge and never ceased to be amazed by the variation in price for the same piece of scrap wood.
Tony Wadsworth
The "scrap chit" was very useful to Radio Amateurs like myself as it meant we could obtain, more or less legally, components that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive, or just plain unobtainable to the general public.
As you say, scrap chits were also invaluable for obtaining wooden cabinets. I still have in my living room today, a cocktail cabinet that I made out of a prototype Dynatron TV cabinet, which was acquired just before I got married in 1963.
Scrap chits were also much used at Crawley but there was usually no charge, whereas a nominal sum was always charged at Southend.
Much of my home-built radio equipment, especially the VHF/UHF/Microwave items, would have been impossible to construct without the scrap chit and the loan chit that enabled employees to borrow very sophisticated and extremely expensive test equipment over night or over a week-end, provided the Manager of the department owning the gear agreed.
I remember having well over £100,000 worth of spectrum analyser, signal generator, frequency counter and power meter at home over several evenings and weekends during the construction of my 1296MHz transverter.
Fortunately, the loan chit also provided insurance cover for the equipment as obviously one's ordinary household insurance cover did not include such items. The transverter is still in use today.
George (Gibby) Gibson
Chris Poole
George (Gibby) Gibson. 'Gibby' as he was known to everybody was the Chief Mechanical Engineer and dare I say it a Brilliant Designer if somewhat eccentric, but was a person who I came to have a very high regard for.
Stories of Gibby are legend within the circle of engineers who worked with him over the years and he was just as famous for his 'unorthodox' dress style, which even today in the more relaxed working environment would still be considered 'bohemian'.
Many was the time when Gibby could be seen striding down the corridor where the directors resided wearing a baggy old pair of corduroy trousers, which looked and probably were the same pair he'd been gardening in judging by the mud on them wearing a 'Fred Perry' Tennis shirt and a tie with the shirt and the tie having soup stains on them and did he care – well NO seemingly.
One of the great joys was going to see him with a query and asking him if the component in question (with an out of tolerance dimension for example) could still be used or if it needed re-making?
As often as not, Gibby would say 'well let me think about this' and he would produce from his pocket a rather grubby handkerchief, which he would proceed to chew upon and almost look like he was going into a trance!
What he was actually doing was mentally working through all the mating parts, which could be affected and doing sums in his head of how this 'out of tolerance' part would affect the overall assembly.
This process sometimes seemed to go on for ages and only rarely did he have to give in and resort to using his giant cylindrical slide rule. Incidentally I can't remember him ever being wrong.
Gibby was a proud Scotsman and always insisted that the Scots have only loaned England to us, he was also immensely proud of AVIS, where he was apprenticed and waxed lyrical of his time there and the great cars they built.
Tony Wadsworth
Gibby was indeed a legend in his own lifetime, especially with respect to his clothes, some of which were ragged and torn to the point of being excessively revealing. Indeed, on one occasion, a lady employee actually made an official complaint about the state of Gibby's trousers. The soup stained ties became a hallmark of Gibby's sartorial elegance and people used to run books to take bets on how many days or weeks would elapse before he changed his shirts.
As you say, Gibby was an ardent Scot and I once heard him ranting on about the present Queen being called Elizabeth II. Whilst Gibby recognised the present monarch as Queen of both England and Scotland, he insisted she was Elizabeth II of England but Elizabeth I of Scotland. He did not recognise Elizabeth I of England as being a Queen of Scotland and adamantly asserted that she had murdered the rightful Queen of Scotland, Mary, Queen of Scots.
Mike Rose – Gibby at Malmesbury
I remember the car companies much regarded/worshipped by 'Gibby' were ALVIS and later on in his career FRAZER-NASH, he would regale any listener with details of mod's and increases in dimensions on all sorts of components used on these unique cars, be it 'big ends', crankshafts or half shafts.
As said, his knowledge of Scottish history and their Monarchs as well as the atrocities carried out by the 'Auld enemy' were legion.
Gibby' was a very talented if eccentric mechanical engineer given to very bright ideas. His sartorial intelligence stretched back to his Cambridge days, and continued whist at Malmesbury in quite strange ways. Some of the younger elements in the 'top story' Radar labs at Cowbridge kept a daily log of Gibby's shirts and ties together with the stains attained on each item and the periods at which the irregular changes were made to these items.
Some records were made on the walls near a telephone in the Lab. and I have it on good authority when VJC enquired about the information that was written on the wall (amongst the 'phone extension numbers for the Stores etc.) he was not amused!!! Instructions were issued for this graffiti to be removed.
