The 'Secret' World of Vickers Guided Weapons

John Forbat

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780752453163
• eBook ISBN: 9780752487922
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Transportation Industry
• Index: History

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.

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 gra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Foreword
• Prelude
• Prologue
• Chapter 1 The Start of GW at Vickers
• Chapter 2 Red Rapier Expendable Bomber
• Chapter 3 Blue Boar Guided Gliding Bomb
• Chapter 4 A Maturing GW Department
• Chapter 5.1 Red Dean Air-to-Air Missile Part 1
• Chapter 5.2 Red Dean Air-to-Air Missile Part 2
• Chapter 5.3 Red Dean Air-to-Air Missile Part 3
• Chapter 6.1 Vigilant Anti-Tank Missile Part 1
• Chapter 6.2 Vigilant Anti-Tank Missile Part 2
• Chapter 6.3 Vigilant Anti-Tank Missile Part 3
• Epilogue
• References
• Ministry Personalities
• Copyright