E.K.Cole Southend-on-Sea & Malmesbury 1939-71

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Malmesbury Radar Division Memories

1948 –1956

By Ray Reeves Oct. 2006

As soon as I got there I thought what a great place it was, and long after I left I reflected that it was the best work environment I ever had, I learned my trade there and gained a lot of skill in circuit design and technical publications.

For a start there was a wonderful bunch of people led by an avuncular Chief Engineer by the name of Hammet, I think, who preceded Phil Stride. He would let me remonstrate about anything, such as library facilities, without reproach. Unfortunately, he didn't stay very long. The place lived by it's own resources with it's plating shop, machine shop and drawing office and of course the various design laboratories. I wish I could remember more names such as the west-country store man who categorised everything as either manufactured or "bought'un out". The machine shop was full of wonderful characters too like the proud and sensitive George Goodrich. They could produce anything down there such as gearwheels and worm drives and of course all the instrument cases. There was a man who wound all the transformers and would make them for me even before I learned how to design them. I thought the draughtsmen were particularly brilliant. I remember designing a gearbox for klystron tuning (I was Mecano trained!) and they engineered it superbly without any help from computers. I also remember with delight the security officer and gatekeeper. "Father" Norris, a majestic figure who would detain us at the gate if we tried to leave minutes before the end of shift! There was an affable purchasing officer who I amused by unfairly referring to his assistant Paul Daly as dilatory Daly.

Then there was the laboratory, where I spent my days. Now I didn't have a higher education and indeed I think hardly anyone did, but there were brilliant people there such as John Yarrow, Hugh Green and above all V J Cox. and the great thing was there was no office politics, a condition I have never experienced since. Hugh designed the waveguides. He was one of nature's gentlemen, reserved and infallibly polite. He and his charming wife lived in one of the company's properties. John oozed competence and I was always consulting him. His house in Chippenham was like a social club for engineers and I spent a lot of time there, and so did others. I'm still in touch with him. Both these people did have degrees, I think, but there were never any barriers on that account. But Jim Cox was something else. He had no discernible education and certainly no math but he had such an insight into the detailed design of the product that you couldn't help but respect him, and everyone did. I suppose you could say he had a green finger. Years later I was with him again in Southend and he had taken up optics as a speciality. Who else would venture into that field without competence in maths? The company was competing with EMI on a large screen display for military helicopters and EMI were trying to produce a large flat electronic screen for it, but they were having difficulties because it was years ahead of it's time. Jim, however, produced a Schmidt lens to view a virtual image display. Not only that but he was working with the company chemist to design thick film printed circuits. This gives you some idea of his calibre.

One of the interesting features of the laboratory was there were a few young lads there straight out of school just to help out. Years ago they would have been called apprentices but that concept was out of favour. There were two of them I made good use of although I don't remember their names and I used one as a personal draughtsman to draw up an instrument called the Strobograph that I designed. He did a very nice job and I would be interested to know what became of him.

Ray Reeves with Strobograph
Me looking suitably modest with Strobograph machine

Once a year E K Cole would come down and throw us a Christmas part, and I used to look forward to that. I think that is where I got my first taste of wine! Another person I remember with affection was the company Patent Officer. He was a dedicated servant of the company and E K Cole personally.

The department liked to put on a display at the Physical Society every year, which I looked forward to. One year I took the Strobograph there to demonstrate how to record high-speed waveforms on paper with a ball pen. I thought it was really novel until someone came by and said, "that reminds me of the old … machine". I couldn't believe it so I did some research and found someone with the same name as Southend's chief engineer (Callender?) had made a machine for recording power supply waveforms in about 1910. So I called him up and said do you know anything about this? He told me that was his father, and as a child the machine had occupied a place of honour in their drawing room. What a coincidence! What's worse I found a reference to an earlier machine in Paris called the "Ondograph" and I got the Museum D'Arts et Metiers to send me a photo. At that time I read: "the origin of the method is lost in the mists of antiquity"!

Another time I had a wonderful adventure when I was asked by our Ministry liaison officer to conduct an airborne trial of the radar. That man was a wonderful character (I called him the gravel-throated comedian) and I was told there was an occasion when he thought he needed a radar corner reflector and tried to filch one from the airstrip, but the control tower saw their marker moving and sent security after him!

Anyway, he took me to this RAF base near Malvern where they prepped me for a flight in the back seat of a Meteor jet. I had never flown at all before. The pilot was a somewhat irascible man who didn't think much of chauffeuring scientists. We zoomed off and joined the target plane and started the trial. I didn't like the performance of my radar and asked him if we were bearing on. I couldn't see forward through his head and I knew he didn't like bearing straight on due to the buffeting. "Of course I am" he roared and slumped right down in his seat so I could see. "Oh well, let's make another run at it" I responded lamely, but instead of throttling back as I expected he dipped one wing down and did a tight 360 turn leaving me impaled on my visor. When we were done he relented and said we had plenty of fuel and where should we go? I opted to buzz Cowbridge House, and that is what we did.

I wish I could remember more names and describe them all to you. Of course there was the robust and reliable Ron Beaven and the flauntingly flatulent Cyril Drew. Another engineer was a tall and slim caricature of an Englishman who smoked a pipe all the time. I didn't mind that except that he would clean his pipe with the compressed air line and make a terrible stink. I posted a note saying: "You are not welcome to blow out your pipe on this airline", which he shortly annotated with a brown tobacco stain. I thought that was pretty funny. There was a delightful north countryman who unhappily came to an early demise, and there was the charmingly mannered public school type by the name of Stanley-Jones who I heard also found a sad end.

Well I made up a resume describing the patents, published papers and prizes I got at Ekco to offset my lack of education in degree-crazy America, and it got me into a few places where I would have been shut out. None were as memorable as Malmesbury.

Raymond Reeves 2006








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