Meek was ably assisted by Douglas A. Barnsley (DX/1a) and Charles Erwood, whom he had brought with him. Barnsley is remembered by some for the useful little Austin Seven car he ran while Erwood, a good photographer, lost a finger when a device exploded in his hand. Capt Charles Critchfield, RE had been a ship’s engineer officer before the war, visiting many European ports, and John Collins was in charge of the fuse-testing laboratories at Station IX but was handicapped because they were under-equipped. He subsequently went to the USA on a purchasing mission and did not return to The Frythe. This responsibility was taken over by John T. van Riemsdijk (DX/3), who designed and supervised the work of the Thermostat Hut.
The Explosives Sub-Section was reinforced in 1943 by the arrival of the 32-year-old Dr Gordon (later Sir Frank) Claringbull, a mineralogist and X-ray crystallographer who had been introduced to SOE by Cox. After graduating from Queen Mary College, London, he had been working on explosives for the Ministry of Supply on secondment from his post as Assistant Keeper at the Natural History Museum, where SOE had on the ground floor an extensive secret exhibition of their wares. Initially, Claringbull collaborated with Colin Meek’s group, but later in 1944 he moved to Baker Street to work on possible measures against the launching sites of V1 and later V2 missiles. This involved assessing intelligence reports (many of which had been collected by the Poles in Northern France) on the sites themselves and the routes by which they were supplied. Although the Poles had carried out some minor sabotage it is not clear whether SOE had any plans for largerscale attacks. Claringbull was promoted to the Directorship of the Museum in 1968 and retired in 1976, having been knighted in 1975. He died on 23 November 1990.
INCENDIARIES SUB-SECTION
The Incendiaries Sub-Section, which again was inherited from Section D, was led by Maj O.J. Walker (DX/2) who had been recruited from University College, London. He was joined later by Dr C.H. Bamford who had been working at Cambridge on alkyl boron compounds, some of which were spontaneously combustible when exposed to air. In fact, none of these candidate compounds proved to be useful as incendiary agents. This group was, as described later, concerned with the design of the incendiary for Operation Braddock. Bamford was also a near-professional standard violinist who spent many evenings practising in his office. After the war he joined the newly created Courtauld Research Laboratory at Maidenhead, as did several other ex-SOE people. Subsequently he was appointed Professor of Industrial Chemistry at the University of Liverpool and was elected to the Royal Society in 1964. He died in 1998. Among Walker’s younger colleagues was David H. Malan (an Oxford chemist – see how the network operated) who later joined Courtaulds, changed to medicine and became a consultant psychologist at the Tavistock Clinic. Another chemist, David Levi also joined this section working on novel incendiaries.
FUSES AND SMALL MECHANISMS SUB-SECTION
Small mechanisms were the province of John Cotterill who came from Courtaulds. He was a highly skilled small mechanisms designer whose previous experience had been in the design of spinning machinery. He was a perfectionist and his ability to foresee and avoid problems in transferring a design from a prototype to production made him a particularly valuable member of staff. John T. van Riemsdijk was an engineer who was knowledgeable about continental railways and developed the Imber Railway Switch described in Chapter 8. After leaving SOE in 1946 he enjoyed a period manufacturing clockwork devices before joining the staff of the Science Museum in London, eventually becoming Keeper of Civil and Mechanical Engineering. He was responsible for laying out the National Railway Museum at York and for writing several books on engineering history.
Also attached to this group were L.G. Wilson, B.H. Chibnall and P.T. Trent.
PHYSIOLOGICAL SUB-SECTION
The Physiological Section was headed by Dr Paul Haas (DX/3) who had an assistant, Mr Glascock. Dr Haas had been a Reader in Plant Chemistry at University College, London, and a lecturer in Physics and Chemistry at the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of plant and medical chemistry. Born in 1871, he was almost totally bald and wore steel-rimmed spectacles. To many he was the archetypal scientist, a forbidding character at first meeting but in fact a mild, soft-spoken and kind person. This hardly matched his role in SOE, where he was deeply concerned with, among other things, drugs and poisons. Younger people stood somewhat in awe of him, partly because of his age and experience but mainly because of his very high scientific and ethical standards. Haas was to become involved with both the chemical toilet and the system for the removal of CO2 from the Welfreighter.
In 1943 Dr A.G. (Sandy) Ogston was recruited by Everett and became a member of Newitt’s group. Ogston in turn brought in Callow. Ogston was a biophysical chemist and a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford where he also taught medical students. He was a tall, bearded Scot with a lively sense of fun, who had spent the early war years working with Professor R.A. Peters’s external Ministry of Supply team seeking treatments to minimise the effects of mustard gas. Several colleagues at the time were used as guinea pigs and many carried scars on their wrists where the proposed treatment had failed. In fact, no satisfactory solution to the problem was found. Ogston’s main activity in SOE, besides taking an active part in a number of field trials, was in devising compact ration packs and medical kits, partly for SOE agents but also for the Jedburgh teams – groups of three serving officers to be dropped after D-Day to cooperate with and coordinate the operations of the SOE Resistance groups. The ration packs had been designed to provide a balanced diet, making use of the evolving technology of the food manufacturers in the production of dehydrated concentrated foods. Alternative formulations were developed for use both in arctic and tropical areas. Ogston’s lively sense of humour extended to his daily life. He commuted between Oxford and Baker Street by train. In those days railway carriages were divided into compartments, each seating up to eight passengers. Sandy liked to have a compartment to himself and would therefore arrive in good time for his train, find an empty compartment, ensconce himself in it and take out his latest Fair Isle knitting project, the pattern for which he invented himself as he went along. Old ladies peering into the dimly lit compartment and seeing a bearded man knitting did not venture into such an eccentric situation. But Sandy’s sense of gallantry would certainly not have allowed such a person to stand in the corridor. Back in Oxford after the war, Sandy was offered and rejected several Chairs but was finally persuaded to accept the post of Professor of Biophysical Chemistry at the Australian National University in Canberra. He returned to Oxford in 1970 as President of Trinity College. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1955 and died in York in 1996.
In his work on dehydrated concentrated foods Ogston sought the collaboration of Lt Col Geoffrey Bourne, an Australian whom he had known in Oxford and who was now in charge of research and development of rations and physiological problems for the SOE forces in South East Asia. Later he had a distinguished academic career in medicine, having been the Nutritional Adviser to the British Military Administration in Malaya, and Vice Chancellor and Professor of Nutrition at St George’s University, Grenada, in the West Indies. Ogston, in collaboration with Dr Haas and Bourne, designed a compact medical kit which fitted into a flat cigarette tin. As well as containing basic items, it also had self-inject morphia tubes for use in relieving pain.
Later in 1943 Haas was joined by Dr Ken Callow, an RAF Squadron Leader who had seen service on the North-West Frontier of India but had been posted back to the UK on medical grounds. Callow had graduated from Christ Church College, Oxford, in 1923 with first class honours in Chemistry. He had a short period in industry and then studied for his DPhil on aporphine alkaloids. He joined the National Institute for Medical Research working on vitamin D, which he was one of the first to purify. On the outbreak of war, despite the fact that he was in a ‘reserved occupation’, he succeeded in persuading the MRC to allow him to join the RAF, where he was trained as an armaments officer. In India he was responsible, with th
e minimum of equipment, for defusing several 500-lb bombs which had failed to explode. He suffered several attacks of malaria and returned to the UK and to SOE, where he collaborated harmoniously with Haas. One incident in which he was involved must have become widespread knowledge for it was recounted independently by at least Cox and one of the secretaries, Miss Agnes Kinnersley. A small stone jar was found by the Army and suspected of being a booby trap. In view of Callow’s experience in defusing bombs it was sent to him. It contained a liquid which was looked upon with suspicion. Callow extracted the liquid and subjected samples to a variety of tests without finding anything noxious in it. He then suggested to a colleague that they should try the ‘organoleptic’ test. He produced two glasses and expected his colleague to follow him in tasting the suspicious liquid. It turned out to be excellent gin – but it might have been something lethal!
Callow also features in another novel technique derived from his experience in India. When he was serving on the North-West Frontier an isolated outpost telegraphed asking that a supply of eggs be dropped to them. Perhaps this was a joke request but Callow took it seriously. The solution was to put a chicken in a brown paper bag and drop it from a low-flying aircraft. The bag protected the struggling chicken from the effects of the aircraft’s slipstream just long enough for it to break out of the bag and flutter to the ground. In 1945 just the same technique was used to get pigeons to the Resistance groups in Belgium. It is not known whether Callow was responsible for this application. Callow later worked at Baker Street on problems of warfare in the tropics: this will be discussed later. After the war, Callow resumed his scientific work, in particular on the synthesis of cortisone. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1958 and died in 1983.
OPERATIONAL RESEARCH AND TRIALS SECTION
Further increase in the staff of Station IX followed in 1943 when Dr Richard Moggridge, another Balliol chemist, joined the Trials Section. As the User Trials commitment increased, he spent an increasing amount of time on this work. After the war he joined the Courtaulds research laboratory at Maidenhead but died suddenly in 1947. Capt George Brown, a chemist from Magdalen College, Oxford, joined the User Trials group in 1943 and played a major part in its activities. Brown had been called up on graduation but soon found the desk job allocated to him too boring and succeeded in getting transferred to ‘Special Duties’, which meant assignment to SOE. He, too, was trained at Arisaig, Beaulieu and Ringway and had much the same experiences as those described by Everett. In fact, Brown and Everett were the only members of Station IX who had been subjected to the SOE training course. It is unlikely that either of them was ever considered for despatch to the field – if only because neither of them had adequate language skills. He carried out many trials of the Sleeping Beauty submersible canoe and developed the fog signal method of initiating explosions on railway tracks. In 1944 he was seconded to the Services Reconnaissance Department in Melbourne – the Australian branch of SOE – to work on, among other things, methods of attacking wooden vessels such as Japanese-commandeered Chinese junks. Brown returned to the UK in 1946 to become chemistry master and later Housemaster at Eton College until his retirement in 1964. He wrote several highly successful chemistry text books. His latest book The Big Bang, a History of Explosives deals with many topics in which his service with SOE had given him an interest.
Among others who served at Station IX on the experimental side was the Canadian ex-Rhodes Scholar, Gordon Davoud who had run a small extramural group in Oxford working on fundamental problems associated with Time Pencils, of which more later. He spent the latter part of 1944 at Station IX. Another Canadian, Dr Roddy E. Smith joined Station IX in the summer of 1944 but died tragically in a swimming accident in North Cornwall. Two serving officers were added to the team responsible for user trials. The first was Maj Gerry Bryant, RE, MC, an Irishman who had lost a leg when fighting with the Commandos in Syria and had been awarded the Military Cross. As a result he had a deep antipathy toward the French. He was at Station IX as DSR/OPS for much of 1944 and played a valuable and efficient role in the organisation of trials. He retired at the end of 1944 to join the Colonial Service, where he rose to become Colonial Secretary of Barbados and the Administrator of the British Virgin Islands and of St Lucia. He was created CMG and CVO for his work. On his retirement he has played an active role in several public bodies. Maj Stuart Edmondson also spent much of 1944 and 1945 as a member of the Air Supply Research Section (ASRS) where he was responsible for the organisation of several major trials. Much of the administration of the ASRS and links with operational sections was channelled through Baker Street and was in the capable hands of Capt P.A.C. Howlett who also took part in the trials programme.
From the end of 1943 the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) had a liaison officer at the Frythe. The first was Lt E. Charlton Crocker, often seen resplendent in smartly pressed pink pants and dark green jacket. In April 1944 he was replaced by Lt Bob Daley who was an equally colourful character. During July and August he was joined by Lt S.W. Cutler. Although at the higher levels SOE and OSS did not always see eye to eye, the relationships at the research level were always cordial and the enthusiastic participation of OSS personnel in the trials programme was valuable.
No account of the Research and Development Section’s personalities would be complete without mention of a figure who comes and goes in the story. He is Dr F.A. Freeth who had been associated with Section D from the outbreak of War and on their move to Aston House in 1940 had become a full-time member. Freeth was a physical chemist with wide industrial experience. He had been with Brunner, Mond and Company (later to become Imperial Chemical Industries Limited) during the First World War, where he had been concerned with the production of ammonium nitrate, an essential ingredient of many explosives. He was a strong advocate of the close links between fundamental science and industrial processes. He was an ardent admirer of the Dutch school of physical chemistry and in particular their use of the Phase Rule, a somewhat neglected but very important scientific principle. By applying this rule he was able to predict the ideal conditions for the crystallisation of ammonium nitrate from a solution of ammonium sulphate and sodium nitrate and so improve greatly the production of this important chemical. Indeed, he would claim that his work had been a major factor in the maintenance of supplies of explosives in the First World War and hence to the Allied victory. He became Director of the Alkali Division of ICI but a breakdown led him to relinquish this post. It is clear that in the pre-war years he had been in contact with various secret agencies within the Government which led to his association with Section D. His name disappears from the formal SOE papers. However, he continued to have close links with SOE HQ and maintained a liaison rôle across the organisation’s technical sections. For some time he lived at The Frythe. He was nominally a supernumery adviser to Newitt but in practice a stimulating influence throughout the whole of Station IX. He will be remembered as an exuberant and compulsive talker with a host of stories. He claimed to have some credit for the discovery of polythene. It was on his initiative that the Dutch techniques of high-pressure chemistry were adopted and developed by ICI, research which provided the technical expertise which led to the discovery of polythene. An indication of his somewhat eccentric character was that he always wore a black skull cap. To those who assumed that he was Jewish he pointed out that its sole purpose was to keep his bald head warm! One of his party tricks was to challenge one to give the value of π. Most of the team could get as far as 3.141 . . . but Freeth would continue for another few dozen digits. It is not recorded whether anyone checked the correctness of his response. Always concerned with the dependence of industry on a supply of competent scientists, he was influential in persuading ICI to establish the ICI Fellowship Scheme to enable young scientists whose work had been interrupted by the war to return to academic life.
ENGINEERING SECTION
The Commanding Officer of Station IX and Head of the Engineering Section was John Robert
Vernon Dolphin who had been born in 1905 in Chester. After initial schooling at Rhyl, he attended Marlborough College and the United Services College before going on to Loughborough College of Engineering. He was apprenticed as a pupil from January 1928 with the Hydraulic Engineering Company in Chester. Later, as manager at the Austin Hoy Company from 1930-34, he invented the Hoy Double Box Coal Cutter Chain and reputedly demonstrated it personally in coal mines. He joined the Army and was made Lt Colonel when he took command of Station IX. He is best remembered for his development of the small submersibles and the parachutists’ mini-motorcycle, and for his attempts to interest the Australian Forces in the former. Between 1946 and 1950 Dolphin was Managing Director of the Corgi Motorcycle Company, where he exploited his experience with the Welbike; Dolphin Industrial Developments Ltd and Hydraulic Developments Ltd. He was then appointed Chief Engineer of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston, receiving a CBE in 1956 before spending two years as Engineer-in-Chief at UKAEA. There followed Joint Managing Directorships at Lansing Bagnall Ltd, the fork-lift truck manufacturers, and J.E. Shay Ltd before becoming a Director of TI (Group Services) Ltd from 1964–68. He was credited with a number of inventions including the Harrier Folding Jeep and the Lina-Loda Freight Handling Machine. Dolphin died on 2 May 1973 at the age of 68.
One of the leading engineers at Station IX was John Irving Meldrum, a Liverpudlian born in 1917. At Merchant Taylors School in Crosby he won a scholarship to Liverpool University, where he was awarded the Graduate Scholarship in 1939 and the William Rathbone Medal. In addition to gaining a first class honours BEng in 1939, he also gained a first class honours BSc from London in 1938.
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