Initially housed in a small office in the War Office in Whitehall, the department moved in 1940 to Portland Place, but after that building was damaged by bombing a few months later additional premises were found at The Firs, Whitchurch, near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire. This was a country house large enough to provide offices and accommodation, and had stabling that could be converted into workshops. A telephone network was installed at Portland Place which enabled direct communication from both stations with the War Cabinet and various War Office departments.
In his history of the war, Churchill wrote: ‘This was … no time to proceed by ordinary channels in devising expedients. In order to secure quick action, free from departmental processes, upon any bright idea or gadget, I decided to keep under my own hand as Minister of Defence the experimental establishment formed by Major Jefferis at Whitchurch.
‘While engaged upon the fluvial mines in 1939 I had had useful contacts with this brilliant officer, whose ingenious inventive mind proved, as will be seen, fruitful during the whole war. Lindemann was in close touch with him and me. I used their brains and my power.’
A demonstration range, explosive filling sheds, pools for underwater experiments, and production units for certain weapons were built in the grounds and women were bussed in from a hostel to work the machines. A range at Risborough was also used to demonstrate weapons to the Prime Minister and other VIPs.
Technological Support
Churchill, in addition to being Prime Minister, assumed the title of Minister of Defence – even though there was no Ministry of Defence as such. In addition to leading the Cabinet, he presided over the War Cabinet which comprised himself and four (later six) senior ministers. Among the bodies that reported to the Cabinet was its Scientific Advisory Committee.
As new weapons were produced, Macrae, using his journalistic experience and contacts, oversaw the writing of instruction manuals which included ‘exploded’ diagrams of the weapons. Found to be more understandable than the line diagrams used in conventional War Office manuals, such diagrams came eventually to be used in all manuals.
Although MD1 originated as a War Office department, its fame and reputation were such that both the Royal Navy (RN) and the Royal Air Force (RAF) consulted it on aspects of weapon design amongst other things. As with DMWD, many ideas from would-be inventors were passed to MD1 for appraisal and testing, activities that, in the early days when they were extremely short-staffed, diverted them from their main task.
See Appendix 3 for more details.
The ‘Wheezers and Dodgers’
A remarkable department was established in the summer of 1940 and led by a senior RN officer who reported directly to the Board of Admiralty. Originally established to design better anti-aircraft protection for RN and Merchant Navy ships, its first title was the Admiralty Anti-Aircraft Weapons and Devices Department, but its name was changed to the Department of Miscellaneous Weapons Development (DMWD) after it became involved with the development of devices to attack U-boats. Not having comparable organisations of their own, both the Army and RAF referred problems and ideas to DMWD.
Many recruits to the department were transferred from HMS King Alfred, the training establishment for potential RNVR officers based in Hove, Sussex. Virtually all DMWD staff were appointed RNVR Special Branch officers; as such, they were mostly ignorant of Admiralty procedures for procurement and disbursement and found it easier to circumvent red tape than RN officers would have done. Fortunately, both the Admiralty’s Directorates of Scientific Research and of Naval Accounts adopted a tolerant attitude to DMWD’s unorthodox activities.
Gerald Pawle wrote: ‘It was the complete freedom to experiment, the freedom to tackle unorthodox projects in an unorthodox way, which was the basis of DMWD’s success. And it was greatly to the credit of the Admiralty that they allowed such a free hand to an organisation whose approach to most problems must have seemed revolutionary in the extreme.’
These sentiments were echoed by the Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fraser of North Cape who said, ‘Their job could only have been done if they were unhampered by routine work.’
For the first two years of its existence its senior technical officer was Commander Goodeve FRS RNVR, whose principal deputies were Commander Richardson RNVR, a former scientific colleague of Goodeve’s at Imperial College, and Lieutenant-Commander N. S. Norway RNVR – better known as the author Nevil Shute – an engineer who had worked on airship design pre-war.
A Penny for your Thoughts
Following the precedent set after the First World War, at the end of the Second World War a Royal Commission on Awards to Inventors was established which considered applications from people who had made inventions that had been used during the war; 359 applications were considered.
Military personnel and civil servants who developed such equipment as part of their duties were excluded unless the inventions were ‘of such exceptional brilliance and utility that some award might nevertheless be justified’.
Among the cases which were deemed to be so exceptional were those of Sir Robert Watson-Watt who was awarded £50,000 for his invention of radar (a number of his colleagues were also recognised); Sir Donald Bailey, who was awarded £12,000 for his invention of the Bailey Bridge; and Air Commodore Sir Frank Whittle, who received £100,000 for his invention of the jet propulsion engine. To many this latter award seems a trifle odd as, brilliant and ultimately beneficial though the invention was, it came about too late to play a significant role before the end of hostilities. It was however explained by the Commission in a footnote: ‘Air Commodore Sir Frank Whittle was not in fact a claimant. The commission investigated the case at the special request of the Ministry of Supply in agreement with the Air Commodore and the Treasury.’
The fact that an applicant did not receive an award often meant that it did not comply with the guidelines, rather than it was not worthy of an award (a number of the engineers involved in designing the Mulberry harbours had their applications rejected).
In the first year of the war, when he was still attached to HMS Vernon and before DMWD had actually been established, Goodeve had conceived and developed the means of countering the magnetic mines that caused the loss of so many ships in the early months of the war (see Chapter 3).
The department was disbanded shortly after the end of the war, but a reunion dinner was held at Simpson’s in the Strand in May 1953. It was chaired by Goodeve, who by then had been knighted for his wartime services. The value and extent of their contribution to the war effort is reflected in the fact that Goodeve and four other members all received monetary awards from the Royal Commission on Awards to Inventors.
Details of some of the Department’s inventions are given in Appendix 4.
Some Other Strange Beasts
‘Winston Churchill’s Toyshop’ and the ‘Wheezers and Dodgers’ weren’t the only unorthodox departments to marshal the country’s brightest brains.
S-Branch was a small statistical organisation established at Marlow by Lindemann which reported directly to Churchill. It scrutinised the performance of the regular ministries and, having analysed data from a variety of sources, produced easily-understood reports and charts thereby enabling key aspects of the war’s progress and the nation’s resources to be readily evaluated.
The importance and significance of these presentations are highlighted by the charts now on display in the Cabinet War Rooms. Inter alia these show the tonnage of shipping lost each month compared with new construction and the weight of bombs dropped by Germany on the UK compared with that dropped on Germany.
Although