Fnurban #42 Defending England : from Radar masts to Martello Towers

Amid the continuing heatwave, last week we had a day and a bit enjoying the sea breezes on the Suffolk coast.  Normally we might well have headed for Dunwich,  but the huge wildfire burning there made us think again, and we went for the Bawdsey/Felixstowe area. It's a nice stretch of coast and a bit less busy than places  like Aldeburgh and Southwold further North,  and it has the bonus of some military history,  too!    

Firstly,  there is the Bawdsey Radar Museum :  commemorating the fact that on  24th September 1937, RAF Bawdsey became the first fully operational Radar station in the world.  The previous year, the inventor of radar Robert Watson-Watt and his research team had taken over nearby  Bawdsey Manor estate as their base, and built the first set of transmitting and receiving masts there - the former being no less than 360 feet high! The station was the first of the 'Chain Home' installations built around the British coastline, which played such a vital role in the defence of the UK in the 1939-45 war, most  famously in the Battle of Britain in 1940. 

At Bawdsey, the 'transmitter block' building remains and has been made into a small museum - we had visited before, but since 2018 it has been completely refurbished and updated, to tell the story of the invention of radar, how it works, and the history of the Bawdsey site, which continued to be part of the air defence system until the 1990s,  and still has a radio mast belonging to HM Coastguard - albeit a mere 100 feet tall.  We paid a visit to the museum, which was interesting if not large - worth an hour or so of your time, I'd say, if you're in the area. I took a few (not brilliant, sorry!) pictures: 

  Here  is the transmitter block - heavily protected by sloping earthworks/concrete, the entrance passageway is between the earthworks and the building and feels a bit like walking along a WW1 trench, and the steel  main doors were apparently gas-proof.  The HM coastguard radio mast is only 1/3 of the height of the original radar masts, but gives you an idea - the 1937 masts were pretty much in the same place, with the transmitter block housing generators to power the radar transmitters.

 

Not a very good (sorry!) picture of the main display room; it did do a good job of telling the story of Radar and the history of the site, and there was inevitably an 'interactive' feature which allowed you to test your potential as a 1940s radar operator,  turning dials to work out the range and bearing of a 'blip' on a screen (essentially an oscilloscope trace )  - it turns out that most operators were women, as they were more proficient.   

You may already know that Watson-Watt was originally asked to look into the possibility of 'death ray' weapons to actually shoot down enemy aircraft, but suggested that it would be more practical to use radio transmissions to detect targets by bouncing the waves off them.  What I learned was that he and his colleagues actually went as far as to calculate the energy that a 'death ray' would require, and concluded that this would be greater than the total electrical energy that could be generated in the whole of Britain at the time! 

 Rather a prescient quote from H,G. Wells as far back as 1902 featured in the displays - along with the inevitable 'The Bomber Will Always Get Through' of Italian General Giulio Douhet. 

And one most historic  piece of 'kit' - this is a Cavity Magnetron,  the device which allowed radar sets to shrink from filling a room to being able to be carried on ships and aircraft. It's been described as 'the most important invention to come out of the second world war' and was important enough to be offered to the US by Britain in the Tizard Mission in 1940.  

 

We also spent some time at neighbouring Felixstowe (see below)  which gave us a distant view of Bawdsey Hall, where Watson-Watt had set up his research facility.

 Finally a picture from the museum guide booklet : a postwar view of the radar station, with the transmitter masts in a line at the back, and receiving masts nearer.  

 As it says in the caption, multiple aerial cables were strung between the transmitter towers, and engineers had to swing out between them (at 300 feet!)  to do maintenance - it must have been terrifying! 

After an immersion in the defence of Britain from Hitler in 1940,  we took a walk along the coast path from Bawdsey to nearby Shingle Street,  which featured an important feature of the defence of Britain from Napoleon in 1805.  Within a stretch of a couple of miles, we passed a total of four Martello Towers.   I'm sure readers of this blog will know the story of these - inspired by a Genoese fortificd tower on Corsica, the Torra di Mortella  which put up a stout defence against British attack in 1794, a chain of 103 of them was built between Aldeburgh, Suffolk and Seaford, Sussex between 1804 and 1812, when Britain was threatened with a French invasion.  Wikipedia says that  of the 103 built, 

Fifteen towers were demolished to enable the re-use of their masonry. The sea washed thirty away and the military destroyed four in experiments to test the effectiveness of the new rifled artillery. During the Second World War, some Martello towers returned to military service as observation platforms and firing platforms for anti-aircraft artillery. 

They were given code numbers ( on the south coast ) and letters (on the east coast), and a list of them is available on-line, so we could identify the towers we saw.   Hence I can tell you that these were as follows: 

(above and below)  Tower 'W' at East Lane, Bawdsey - handy for a free car park by the sea wall from which we started walking. 

 then a few hundred yards North,  we have Tower 'Y'  ( it seems there was yet another one, 'X', in between but long-demolished )  which turns out to be rather special : 

 

This one has been extensively refurbished as a luxury home:  It underwent transformation by architect Stuart Piercy of Piercy & Company in collaboration with Duncan Jackson of Billings Jackson Design in 2010 into a three-bedroom home, winning the RIBA Award that year in the process.  And it has recently been  sold  ( advertised on The Modern House, naturally ), with the asking price listed at £1.25m,   Here's a  picture of the interior  'borrowed'  from the estate agent's pages: 

 I was fascinated by that brick column and vaulting, and it turns out that this is original and is of course there to support  the roof, which needed to bear the weight of artillery pieces installed on top. Given that  the walls are about 3m thick too, you can see what a feat of engineering these things were.  I wonder if the new owner is 'in to' military history? 

Moving right along, again only a few hundred yards to the North we have  Tower 'Z' which may be my favourite,  I'm calling it the Smiley Martello 🙂 

 Not sure if this is occupied, though there is a modern exterior staircase for access. The structure on top looked like a 1940s pill box, so I am assuming this one was one of those re-purposed during WW2.  

 We ended our walk at Shingle Street, a small village with a polyglot collection of homes ( I suspect mostly holiday/second homes) built right on the shingle, a very pleasant place lacking only a pub or teashop!  And here we found  Tower 'AA' ,  which is another conversion to residential use, albeit probably not quite as recent or as snazzy as Tower Y.  I suspect that what with the thick (and curved)  walls and the massive interior brick column, any rooms inside the brick structure are quite small (and hard to furnish!), which means that the roof area provides the main living area, with a sun terrace and  wonderful views, of course. 

 

So within about 40 minutes walk we had ticked four towers - sadly I forgot to take a photo (which would have been easily done) showing all four in a line along the coast.  Still, a pleasant seaside walk (we sat on the beach for a few minutes near Shingle Street, and a saw a seal swim by) , with a nice bit of military history included.

That however is not quite the end of the story - we also dropped in at Felixstowe, where there are two more Martello towers..  Here is Tower  U ,  at Felixstowe Ferry :

and here is Tower T,  guarding Felixstowe's golf course

 

Phew!  Now assuming there are about 50 surviving Martello towers,  the Bawdsey/Felixstowe area is richly endowed with them, having six within a handful of miles (actually seven, there's another one we missed!).  It's interesting that at the time they were built, Felixstowe itself was still quite a small settlement, not the important port that it has since become. But as Wikipedia says,   The Felixstowe area as a whole provided a linchpin in England's defence, as proved in 1667 when Dutch soldiers landed near the Fludyers area and tried (unsuccessfully) in the Battle of Landguard Fort to capture Landguard Fort due to its strategic location.
Which reminds me that a visit to Landguard Fort should be on the list.. 

 I should add that there was a link between the Radar and the Martello Towers - my partner's father was an electrical engineer who worked on  naval radio and radar during the war and continued servicing radar on ships for the rest of his career. The naval/maritime  connection probably means he wasn't at Bawdsey, since that was an RAF establishment, but it was nice to learn a bit about radar, which became his career (sadly like so many of the wartime generation, he never talked about his experiences, so we know very little).  And  the Martellos? Well, we have a picture of him, probably taken in the late 1940s or early 1950s, in front of - you guessed it, a Martello tower.    

 

I do like this picture - everyone has some of these, don't they, with family members dressed rather formally while 'relaxing' at the seaside!  The past is a foreign country, indeed - or maybe it was just  a chilly Spring or Autumn day?    He did quite a lot of work at Felixstowe later, as it was a big port, and we did rather hope it might be one of the Felixstowe towers -  but from what we saw none of them matched the photo. So, we have only forty-odd more Martello towers to go and see, in our quest to work out where this picture was taken!   It's a very long shot, but does anyone reading this have a suggestion as to where it might be?   Note the line of beach huts and the groynes on the beach - it must be at a seaside resort rather than a piece of 'unspoiled' coastline.   Any suggestions welcome! 

In other hobby news, I've been plugging away at re-basing vintage Minifigs 25mm 7YW figures.Currently working on Russians, and eventually I should have six units of infantry (Line, Grenadiers and Pandours), and four cavalry (Hussars and Cossack lancers). I am hoping there are some guns and gunners lurking in the box of artillery from this collection, which might complete a nice 'pocket army', inspired by Norm Smith's examples on his Battlefields and Warriors blog. 

 

 

 

If all goes well, for my next post I'll be able to show the whole Russian force and its constituent units. I'd better get cracking with the PVA glue, MDF bases, green paint and making some flags! With another heatwave coming, I will probably be mostly indoors, so no excuses..  Until then , keep well everyone.