NATIONAL LIFE STORIES

AN ORAL HISTORY OF BRITISH SCIENCE

Sir John Charnley

Interviewed by Dr Thomas Lean

C1379/30

IMPORTANT

Every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of this transcript, however no transcript is an exact translation of the spoken word, and this document is intended to be a guide to the original recording, not replace it. Should you find any errors please inform the Oral History curators.

Oral History The British Library 96 Euston Road London NW1 2DB

020 7412 7404 [email protected]

British Library Sound Archive National Life Stories

Interview Summary Sheet Title Page

Ref no: C1379/30

Collection title: An Oral History of British Science Interviewee’s surname: Charnley Title: Sir

Interviewee’s John Sex: Male forename:

Occupation: Aeronautical engineer, Date and place of birth: Liverpool government scientist 4 September 1922

Mother’s occupation: Father’s occupation: Carpenter

Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): (Tracks 1+2) 2010.10.07, (Tracks) 3+4 2010.10.13, (Tracks 5 - 8) 2010.10.27, (Tracks 9- 11) 2010.11.19, (Tracks 12-15) 2010.11.24, (Track 16) 2010.12.02, (Tracks 17-20) 2010.12.03, (Tracks 21-23) 2010.12.16

Location of interview: Interviewee's home, Camberley.

Name of interviewer: Thomas Lean

Type of recorder: Marantz PMD661 on secure digital

Recording format : WAV 24 bit 48 kHz

Total no. of tracks 23 Mono or stereo Stereo

Total Duration: 26:11:43 (HH:MM:SS)

Additional material: Video interview, photographs.

Copyright/Clearance: © The British Library

Interviewer’s comments:

Sir John Charnley Page 1 C1379/30 Track 1

[Track 1]

This is interview with Sir John Charnley, seventh of October 2010. John, I’d like to start this interview just by asking you when you were born.

Fourth of September 1922. Zero four, zero nine, 22 is a thing that I quote to everyone. In Liverpool. It was a suburb of Liverpool, the south end of Liverpool, the south end of Liverpool docks, a little suburb called Garston and Springwood - we’ll probably come to that later - but essentially born in Garston. Shrewsbury Road I think it was. In Garston, on a hill and just a big Victorian house. I think it might have belonged to my grandmother, I don’t know. But that’s where I was born. And lived there until I must have been about… five or six, something of… maybe seven, don’t know, but that’ll slot in. And… my father was a Liverpool man: George Edward Charnley, and my mother was Catherine Wederburn Mathieson [ph], native name, from Workington in Cumberland. And her mother was still alive, she was my Nana, my grandmother, my Nana. Very important member of the family. And my father’s family, there weren’t any other generations and he was the only one still alive. So there was my father and my mother and a grandmother on my mother’s side. That was the way it all started.

Was that the grandmother who owned the house?

That’s right, yep. Whether she owned it or whether she was a tenant, whether she was renting it, I wouldn’t know because I just wasn’t old enough at that stage to understand that. But she was a, quite a powerful person that I loved very much. And my mother – well, both my parents – I did love them. My father, going on, my father was a joiner in the building trade, a carpenter, a joiner in the building trade and he was one of three brothers. He was the youngest. There was Bert who was the oldest and Tom the middle, and George my father, the youngest. And they’d all served in World War I. My father just about, the other two served in, during the war my father served in the war but I think only towards the end, 1916, 17, something like that, when he was in the Royal Engineers and worked on a searchlight battery in London at the time. But very clever woodworker, dad, and that’s where my interest in engineering came from. The family was an… the eldest brother worked for Cammell Laird’s in the dockyards. The youngest brother worked on Garston Docks railways and my father was a joiner in the building trade. So they were very much a working family of practical – none of them had been to university or anything like that, not a thing.

Sir John Charnley Page 2 C1379/30 Track 1

[04:26] Could you describe your father to me?

As I say, a very good practical man, very much in love with my mother. The two of them loved each other, no doubt about that. Very sensitive, my father. Let’s see, he lived until he was eighty-eight, strangely enough he lived until… I’m conscious that I’m going to outlive him, or maybe that any time now I might go because that’s when he went. We enjoyed great fun together and we had, in this house that I’m speaking of, there was a cellar and there was no garden, it was in the suburb of Garston around the docks and he just went to work every morning, came home at night. I can remember in 19… in the Depression when I was about seven or eight, whatever it might have been, he was out of work and I can remember when it was settled and there was a union strike or whatever, he came home on a Friday night and announced to my mother that yes, he’d had a rise of a halfpenny an hour, and that was a rise. And so he was a tradesman, he was a good tradesman. Nothing like a motorcar or anything like that. He went to work on the tram, the Liverpool tram, if that was convenient. If it wasn’t convenient he rode to work on a bike. All weathers; I can remember him coming home covered in snow on one occasion. But I’m moving on a bit here because we left that house when I was about six, must have been about six. I’d certainly started school. I went – they were both church people, Anglican – and I went to the local Church of England school. The headmaster was a man called Ashcroft, the deputy headmaster was a man called Billy Davies [ph]. Ashcroft left soon after I arrived, I was not very good news for him. Billy Davies [ph] took over and he it was that taught me to swim and I always enjoyed swimming, very much.

Why do you say you weren’t very good news for the original headmaster?

Just that he left soon after I arrived. Nothing… no, no. No, no, no. Just that he left soon after I arrived. He was tall and he was succeeded by a little round man, Billy Davies [ph].

Can you describe the school to me?

School was in, formally was Grassendale rather than Garston and it was on a crossroads essentially. One, two, three, in fact I think there’d be four roads and it was on that junction. It was, again, a Victorian school, which you might expect in that sort of background. Davies [ph]

Sir John Charnley Page 3 C1379/30 Track 1 was the headmaster really I think of. A Miss Charleston, a Miss Forrester. Teachers were mainly women. Two-storey and a playground that was not, was pretty gravel. It was, you didn’t fall over otherwise you were grazed, no doubt about that. You’d be rushing around doing, playing this, that or the other and if you fell over you were covered in blood in no time flat. It was co-ed, again, as a church school and I can remember that the girl I always used to look at and think gosh, she’s lovely, was a girl called Phyllis Roberts [laughs]. And that was as far as it got. But when I was about five or six, can’t remember precisely, there was a new estate being built some three miles away perhaps, something of that sort, at a place called Springwood and we moved, my father and mother took me. [09:33] I was an only child. I think, I’m pretty certain, that my mother had lost a child before I was born. I’m sure she did, yeah.

Why do you say that? Was it something that was discussed or something you discovered later?

I discovered it later, I didn’t know at the time at all. I just discovered it later and I think it was my cousin, Jean, that knew more about this than I did. My cousin – let’s get this… my mother’s sister didn’t live far away and she had a daughter the same age as me and she, Jean was born in the August that I was born in the September. And so these two mothers with their youngsters in prams were to be seen pushing around the district as a pair and as we grew up, Jean… gosh, certainly thought the world of my mother and knew a lot about my family circumstances, in many ways more than I did. She talked to my mother about it, where I just in a sense couldn’t care less. It wasn’t something that interested me particularly at that stage. And Jean now, she’s in Canada, still alive and she has an enormous plot of the family tree and adds to it as more information becomes available. But I can remember going to this house on this new estate as it was being built and it was, as I say, perhaps two miles, perhaps three miles is a bit much, two miles and after church on a Sunday morning my father would walk me – he’d made me a little toy motorcar, and he’d made it, and it was one of those cars in which – and here I’m showing my… - it was a pedal car and you pushed pedals and that got you along. But it was a couple of miles and so he had a walking stick always and would push me along to help me along, and particularly the last little bit was a slight climb up a hill, obviously, and he’d certainly have to push me up that and we would then be looking at the house that we were going to. Now, at this stage I had already joined this school because, why I remember that is that when we moved to the house eventually, I still stayed at the same school because my parents were pleased with the way in which things were going along, so I now had a couple of miles’ walk to get there and just continued at the school and continued doing that. At the bottom of the - the address was 17

Sir John Charnley Page 4 C1379/30 Track 1

Darwall Road, Springwood, Liverpool 19, and at the bottom of the hill, there was a slight hill, was the church which we were going to and again, when we first moved there the church service was being held in the church hall, which had already been built and finished, and the church services while the church itself was being built. And that was on the corner, big church, Springwood. All Souls Church, Springwood and that was the church which my father became a sidesman and I sang in the choir, became a head choirboy and [laughs]… but still continued at the school that I was at before, that’s the point. And I stayed at that school until I was ten, when I took the Junior City Scholarship. We sat scholarships from the school. And until then I’d developed; good at swimming, enjoyed cricket, football and there was a little sweetshop, Mrs Gregson ran a little sweetshop near the school, and was always a great thrill with a halfpenny to go and get some sweets. And that’s about it up to that stage. [14:35] Oh I know, I know, I know, I know. Across, where we lived in Shrewsbury Road, across the road was a pub, the Derby Arms, and the Derby Arms was kept by a family called Thwaites. Tharme, Tharme – T-H-A-R-M-E, and there was a daughter in that about my age and as I mentioned earlier, the base of the big house, the Victorian house we were in was the laundry. And there was a mangle down in that… a big mangle, big rollers and a big wheel that you turned at the end to get the thing going. And the little daughter from across the road would come across and we would play together in this washroom place. A dolly that went round and a big mangle. It was always good fun until that day when she got her fingers caught between the rollers and I was turning the han… [laughs] I was turning the handle with these screams from this little… we couldn’t have been more than five or six, but there it was. She had a squashed hand as a result. What was her name? Don’t know. Mabel. Mabel Tharme. Mabel Tharme. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, that’s right. Gosh.

What happened afterwards?

[laughs] I got a dressing down, obviously, but there it was. Their family, they understood, said there we go, bad luck, but she certainly had a squashed hand, fingers, Mabel. But we left soon after so… [laughs] and went to this other house in Springwood which was newly built and was the apple of my father’s eye. It was a council house. Liverpool didn’t have a council, it was a corporation, Liverpool Corporation, but it was a corporation house and I don’t know what the rent was, anything like that, don’t know.

Can you describe it to me?

Sir John Charnley Page 5 C1379/30 Track 1

Yeah. A semi-detached little council house at the top of a little hill and at the top of the hill was a crescent and this house was the second house on the left-hand side as you went round the crescent, it being the part, the second part of a semi-detached. Little garden, tiny little garden at the front and a garden at the back, certainly big enough for my father to build a greenhouse and started growing tomatoes and dahlias in particular – they were the two things that were his wish. But I can remember now, as I say, six, seven, whatever it might have been, holding panes of glass that he was putting in the windows of the greenhouse, and of course I dropped one. And that was more important to him than when I’d crushed these hands. [laughs] There we go. So we had a very nice greenhouse, certainly did, and what would I say next? That was a little semi- detached; three bedrooms, dining room at the front, bay window, dining room part of and the lounge, such as it was, at the back, stairs and three bedrooms and I had a small front room, mum and dad had… and then there was a spare room. And separate bathroom, lavatory, as they were at the time.

Indoors?

Indoors, oh yeah, oh yes. Yes, I was trying to think whether that remark applied back to the previous old Victorian… that was indoors as well, but no, this was right at the top of the stairs, was the loo. And then next to it the bathroom. So yeah, it was very good and oh, tremendous step forward. Tremendous step forward. But, it left me with this walk to school of a couple of miles. It was a good, it was a couple of miles, yeah.

What was the neighbourhood like?

Neighbourhood was not quite modern but certainly estates and the mainline from Liverpool to London, down to Euston, I had to, I went under a bridge because… and the trams, I went past the terminus of the number 8 tram from Liverpool, that came. And there were estates with ours, the new one, just newly built but there were old estates. It was obviously, looking back now, a development area out towards the docks. And at the end of the… the trams that went to the docks proper were numbers 1 and 1a, but ours was an 8 that came down Mather Avenue was the main, lovely avenue. [20:25] And, as you went into Liverpool on the number 8, you’d pass the university grounds, sports field, you’d pass the Plaza Cinema and you’d then come to Penny Lane, the same Penny Lane. Yeah? Yeah, yeah. So I do know Penny Lane and that sort of area.

Sir John Charnley Page 6 C1379/30 Track 1

What was actually on Penny Lane then?

Well it was, yes, yes, yes. We’re talking about the late twenties now, you see. And up till, until thirty-something, I was I suppose pushed ahead at school a little bit, at my school, because I certainly got the scholarship when I was ten and went up on the board at the school as the achievers or whatever and it was a bit outstanding to get it early.

[21:25] Were your parents keen on education?

They didn’t… if they were, they didn’t make it obvious to me that they were. They were keen that I did well, certainly. And they supported enormously, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

How did they support you?

Well, they were in the new house, shall I say now, and so were there from my age about five until I left Liverpool, so I was there through my teens as well. And the thing – I’m moving on now – but the thing I can remember, if I go back to oh, much later on at my grammar school, I’d done my junior… my GCSE as they are now, whatever that was.

Matriculation?

Say again.

Matriculation?

Matric. Yes, matric. It was, matric and I’d done my matriculation. At that stage we, as a family, to my knowledge, I thought I was going into the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board to do something there, I didn’t know what, something administrative, but just to go there. I can come back to that in a moment. But there was a parent teacher meeting where my parents came down and they were interviewed by the man that was going to be my form master. He happened to be the chemistry master, name of Tomlinson. Tomlinson. And he was going to be my sixth form master and he asked to see my parents and he asked for me to stay outside so he could talk to them and my father came – oh they both came out – but my father came across after a few

Sir John Charnley Page 7 C1379/30 Track 1 minutes and said, ‘Mr Tomlinson wants you to stay on at school. Would you like to?’ And it was the first time I had given it a thought of going into sixth form. ‘And he’s asked us whether we can afford for you to stay on at school. Because he’s taken the point that you’ll be earning to help things along. And we have said if that’s what he wants to do, yes we will do that.’ And that was it. And I said, ‘Well, if you can, I’d love to’. And that was a turning point, because until then I hadn’t thought of going anywhere beyond matric at school. So that was the support they gave.

[24:35]

As I said, I was keen on sport, my father played cricket and he essentially taught me how to play cricket. I was in the choir of the school – sorry – of the church. And we… I was never in the Boy Scouts but I was in the Boys’ Brigade associated with the church and each year the Boys’ Brigade went to camp in the summer like Scouts and I can remember going on one occasion to the Isle of Man and on another occasion up to the Lake District. Douglas in the Isle of Man, just outside Douglas, and I’ve forgotten where in the Lake District. And at this stage I had started at school to play chess and I can remember these two Boys’ Brigade camps, I was being put up as someone who could play chess and by strange coincidence, on each occasion, we were staying in somewhere associated with a church in either place because we were a church Boys’ Brigade and we were staying, we’d gone to camping grounds that were associated with churches, and I was set up to play chess with the local vicar on each occasion. I can’t believe they were very good because I won and, you know, that was a little feat that went down, again, on the record as having beaten the local vicar. My point about this is that on each of those occasions you had to pay to go to these camps and my parents had no difficulty, were very willing to see me going and to see me enjoying myself doing that sort of thing. And so yeah, they were a great support to me.

Was money ever an issue when you were growing up as a child?

Only this, as I say, this period when my father was out of work, the end of, in ’29, thirties or something of the sort when certainly he was out of work. I was never, when I went to the grammar school – we’ll come to the name of it in a moment, when I went to that – it needed a uniform. Prior to that in the little local village school there wasn’t a uniform there, but we went to the grammar school, yes there was a need for a uniform and I can remember that my mother

Sir John Charnley Page 8 C1379/30 Track 1 took me to the school outfitting where people had sent back their old clothes to be used again and got my blazer to start with from that. And then as I grew up I can remember being taken into town, into Liverpool to Blacklers where Blacklers did school uniforms that were not as expensive as George Henry Lee’s that were the upmarket school shop. So no, money was never easy, that was quite clear. But no, no, no, they were a tremendous couple; dad worked hard and I was beginning to do things with him.

Can we talk a bit more about each of your parents. [door bell ringing] I think at this point it would be…

[pause]

[28:46]

I was interested, you mentioned your father was a carpenter. Did he work for himself or for a bigger company?

No, no. A building, a firm of builders. And - in Liverpool – and they built churches, or they as a building company built churches, and in particular one that I remember was a Seamen’s Union on the Pool of Liverpool and the significance of that is that I used to go down and muck about in my holidays, summer holidays in particular, and make the tea for the men and when they were working down at the Pool they had to… they had to go down a long way to get decent foundations and that needed a firm from London to come up and dig, drill, drill dear God, drill and I can remember being fascinated by these huge screw thread drills until they reached bedrock and then concrete being poured in to produce the necessary foundations on to which you could then, you know, build the rest. And that fascinated me. At home he was making things in wood and I was doing that sort of thing, so I was always pretty good with my hands and I could see that there was an interest there in building, in engineering, but that was very much from my father. And…

What sort of things did he build?

Oh, bits of furniture; cabinets. You could, in some ways a cabinet maker, bits of furn… And crudely, a thing that I remember, a rabbit hutch, you know, at the back for me, a couple of

Sir John Charnley Page 9 C1379/30 Track 1 rabbits. Blimey. A fence for the garden was all his own work just from the wood itself. And he was from an engineering family. His father, the father of these three brothers had owned an engineering business in Liverpool.

And I don’t know that I’d want this public, the story was that he had drunk the success that had been the company. And so the next level down, these three brothers were all teetotal because their father, they had come from a better family apparently, not that I knew anything of it at all, but all of them didn’t have much money at all and all had to work hard as I’ve described, and they were all teetotal and very strictly so. And then there was the flashback, when I grew up, because I started spending it all again, you see. [laughs] And, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s my story.

So there was always, within that side of… there was always an engineering interest through that side of the family. Now my mother was from Workington in Cumbria and – as it is now, Cumberland then, Workington – and the family there, there was one aunt in particular that lived in a small house that was on the coast looking out over the water and we would go there for holidays. Trying to think of her name, doesn’t matter. Go there for holidays and I would have a tiny little room looking out over the water and way down over there at night, the room used to be lit up by an enormous flame that came from the steel works over there as the converter, the Bessemer converter I later learned, tipped out all its stuff, the residue, the stuff that wasn’t wanted at the tip and this thing went on to the tip and the whole place lit up and I can remember being wakened at night by my little room being suddenly like a fire. And yeah, that was Cumberland, that was my mother’s home.

[34:08] What was your mother like?

Big girl, big person, overweight perhaps these days, I don’t know. But certainly a big girl, very soft, very, very soft person, very sweet, very soft person. Her mother of course was around as well and she was a big lady, so… and my daughter Katrina, I’m sure, is of the same sort of build as my mother. My mother’s name, Catherine Kennedy Mathieson [ph] and very gentle. She died of cancer. Oh, when would that be? Gosh. I’d have to look that up I think. We were

Sir John Charnley Page 10 C1379/30 Track 1 married in 1945 and it was after that, but it was before Katrina was born in 1949 and she never saw Katrina. So it would be about ’48 when my mother died. My father was born in - don’t know when mum was born, she was a little younger than my father – my father was born in ’96, 1896 and as I say, he died when he was eighty-eight, so what would that be? Whatever. My mother died in the late forties, which would make her about fifty-ish when she died, yes early. And then my father married again, quite successfully, no problems there. And eventually as he and his new wife, I called her aunt Doris, she was never ‘mother’, they got elderly and started to fail and so we brought them down here and bought a little flat for them in Windsor, so they were nearby and that was a great success. My father used to take me to watch Everton play, which meant that I supported Liverpool of course, just to be difficult. There was a local soccer team, South Liverpool, that we used to go and watch, he and I together on a Saturday. But also at this stage – and I’ve moved on now to the grammar school really – I got this scholarship, which is quite something I suppose, looking back. And used to travel into Liverpool, which was five miles away, by tram, number 8 tram and… or cycle and I did a lot of cycling. Used to be very proud of my bikes that I had. I started with the handlebars up here, but then as I got older I qualified into the racing bicycle, an arse upwards bike, you know, that your arse was sticking up in the air, your head was down. And boy, I could get to school very quickly on that. There was something I was going to say about the little Victoria Church of England school. What was it I was going to think that was worth mentioning about that? Lady teachers, I can remember that. And Phyllis Roberts, she sticks in my… Mabel Tharme, stick in my mind. No there was… I started playing cricket and football there. When I went to my grammar school then we played rugby rather than soccer. Didn’t play any soccer again, it was rugby after that, and that’s important.

Why is it important?

Pardon me?

[38:25] Why is it important?

I can go right on to a period when we were evacuated from Liverpool down to South Wales where they played rugby. They too were a combined school, boys, girls, and this is late ’39 after the war had started and we were evacuated down to South Wales via Anglesey. Let me leave it

Sir John Charnley Page 11 C1379/30 Track 1 like that for the moment. And when we got down there, they obviously played rugby as we did and came the Christmas of ’39 and we were coming back to Liverpool for the holiday to go home for Christmas and two things were arranged between the two schools. One, there would be a formal rugby match between the local school and these horrors from Liverpool on the one hand and would also in the evening, the same Saturday, there would be a dance with the two schools all mixing one another. Now, these horrors from Liverpool committed the unforgivable sin of beating the local school. [laughs] And you don’t do that in Wales. [laughs] No. But the girls were absolutely hilarious, you know, all the local lads had been taken down and dusted and so the dance that evening was a tremendous success. All we young men from Liverpool were all having a whale of a time with the local girls. So that was why rugby was very important.

[both laughing]

[40:35] What other hobbies did you have?

Hobbies? Hobbies? Hobbies? I suppose, I’ll just expand on what I’ve said earlier about helping my father with woodworking. I was competent with saws and planes and that sort of thing, helped him build this garage, certainly. Helped him make a shed. Played cricket. We ran at the, I suppose… I enjoyed singing, I have to say that, singing as I think back and I became head boy in the choir and as such did a lot of solos. But also the choir used to go on choir outings once a year, but you had a choir practice on a Tuesday night for the boys only, then on a Thursday night the men would arrive and you’d join as a full choir for your service on the Sunday. So there were two nights in the week that were taken up with singing and I was I suppose doing a little bit of concerts here and there on my own, I have a decent voice. And… I don’t think I had any other… and sport was the other… it was always sports, it was either… .and certainly cricket in the summer. But nothing… I was never very intellectual, let me say that. The interests were more manipulative as woodwork or doing things with my hands, or gardening, quite keen on gardening and the garden was very small, there wasn’t much of it, particularly when the greenhouse was built and even more so when the war started because we dug a shelter, we put a shelter up.

[43:18]

Sir John Charnley Page 12 C1379/30 Track 1

So there was the greenhouse and a little shed and the shelter and in those days – but I’m up now to ’39 to wartime, you see, I’m way on now – but my father was a warden and used to go out doing his stuff and I would be in the shelter with my mother, and slept in the shelter, certainly. Not every night, but if there had been warning that there was a raid expected, then down to the shelter we’d go. Anderson shelter, yeah.

What did you have in it?

Two bunks. Do you mean? Is that the sort of thing? Yeah. Yeah, my father very seldom joined us. He stayed in the house or went out – fire-watching was the word wasn’t it? Put his tin helmet on and his rucksack round his back, whatever, and out fire-watching. Not every night, but mum and I, we’d all be up in the house but once there was warning of an air raid expected during the day or even with the thing going off, then down we’d go to the shelter. And there were two bunks down there, yeah. One either side that I can see now. And this was the Anderson shelter, this sort of thing, so there wasn’t room for two on one side. No. No, no, no. And stay down there until the warning, the all-clear went, which sometimes was all night, certainly.

Did you see much of the bombing in Liverpool?

Well, we’re on now to yeah, later on when… Let me stay with school, I think.

Shall we do school now?

Pardon me?

Just so I’ve got an idea in my head of how it all follows. You start off at the Church of England school…

Yeah, yeah.

…and then to the grammar school?

[45:25]

Sir John Charnley Page 13 C1379/30 Track 1

It was called Oulton High School and it was in, near enough the centre of Liverpool, it was downtown in Liverpool. So it’s five miles away, as I say, either a tram ride or a bicycle ride. And so I was starting there at ten and in 1933. That’s right. Arrived in ‘32/33. With my birthday being at the beginning of September, sometimes it was just after term started and other times it was just before term was due to start. And I think at the grammar school, Oulton High School, it was generally just before the year started, September fourth. And it was a mix, you could be paid to go to the school, you could pay to go to the school or you could win your way there. Well I got a scholarship and I remember that those people who were paying, it was three pounds a term. Three pounds a term was the cost of education, so it was ten pounds a year – three times three, plus a bit.

How did you win a scholarship?

I don’t know. I don’t know. Presumably the school put me in for an exam of some sort which I passed. Don’t know. Oh, great excitement, this Junior City Scholarship – JSC. J… Junior City… JCS. And that was 1932, thereabouts, because it was mixed up with this time when soon after I was there, and there was additional expense associated with that school after the little village school, and it was at that time that my father was out of work and that again was support from them to say no, you, you know, you’re going to school and don’t worry about us, you’re going to school. It was, I think it was just something that the school put you in for, is my memory. It certainly was not part of… there was nothing I was associated, nothing I was conscious of that was a deliberate intent of family, of parents. Didn’t think that way, didn’t think in those terms. My father essentially was just, thought about his job and family to the extent of his brother Tom, the middle brother who was just a little older than he, lived not very far away and we used to go and visit them a lot. We were a card playing family – when you asked about interests earlier – we played a lot of cards and solo, whist, bit of bridge. It was that sort of standard and we enjoyed that. And it was standard practice after church on a Sunday night to go to someone’s house to play cards. It had been a practice for me, big church - the one I mentioned, All Hallows in Springwood – big church, modern, it was being built when we moved up there, and chancel, choir of nine boys each side with the men behind and a big, big pulpit. And it was used by the choir as the forum for exchanging Wizards and Magnets and suchlike. It was eighteen boys getting together once a week and you’d take your magazine that you’d been reading, your Bullseye , your Wizard , your whatever, whatever and you swapped. I don’t know whether it still goes on, but that was the point. Now, you then in the course of the service for the

Sir John Charnley Page 14 C1379/30 Track 1 sermon you would move out of the chancel down to the front row of the main nave of the church where the vicar up there in his pulpit could keep an eye on you, because it was alleged that we made too much noise unless someone was watching us. So we’re down at the front row and there [laughs], to keep us quiet, we were allowed to read these magazines that we’ve [laughs]… in the middle of the service there was the choir in the front row reading Wizards and Bullseye . [laughs]

Was this with the magazines on show or underneath the…

[both laughing]

Doesn’t bear thinking about does it? Anyway, there it was, yeah.

[51:30] Were your parents very religious?

Yes. Very re… They were religious, ‘very’ is a bit too strong I think. They were good church people and certainly the ethical side, the moral side, that was very strong, very strong indeed from the pair of them. Yes, yes, yes. And as I say, my father was a church warden and my mother did, for all the usual church charity events, she was quite prominent in them. Yeah, we were pillars of the church as a family, let’s put it that way, which included me as the choirboy. And that led on to the youth club and that’s a point now, yeah, yeah, yeah. We’re into oh, the mid thirties now, between ’33 and ’39 when I went to that school, to the Oulton, yeah, yeah. Because at ’39 when war started, then I was evacuated out. Oh no, no, getting mixed. Certainly… what am I struggling with? It was another thing that my father did. He made a noticeboard to put up outside the church announcing the fact that it was All Hallows or whatever, All Souls, and the vicar’s name and the services. The sort of thing you see. He made that for the church. I can remember he and I putting it up and I was mixing a bit of concrete to concrete this blessed thing in, you know, all that. Other interests. Church. Later, it was after ’39 possibly, when I came back from being evacuated and before I went to university... [pause] I’m getting mixed, I’m sorry. I’m getting mixed. Let me sort myself out. Yes! Yes. Yep. War started ’39, evacuated until the following Easter – ’40 – and the big bombings had then started. It had been the phony war until then and the bombing started and Liverpool was bombed, but in the September of… I then, while we’d been evacuated – funny phrase isn’t it? It sounds medical –

Sir John Charnley Page 15 C1379/30 Track 1

I’d been put in by the school for an open scholarship to Oxford from Cardigan and travelled across, and I failed. I wasn’t interested really, I was more interested in helping run the school, because as I said, as the head prefect you’re this link between the staff and the boys.

We haven’t talked about this bit on tape yet.

Of course not, of course not, of course not. I’m sorry. Of course not. However. Yeah. Yeah. I’m moving ahead of myself in answering that question.

I wouldn’t worry about moving ahead of yourself, there are things that do span over, you know, multiple periods so it’s, you know.

Where have we got to? Why was I going through some history here?

We were talking about…

[55:36] I was trying to get to church because, following on from the choir and when my voice broke and suchlike, by then there was a youth club that met, related to the church and again, as part of the youth club we used to hold dances. And I was now beginning to get interested in the opposite sex, if you like, and enjoying dancing and I became a good dancer, there’s no doubt about that, I did enjoy dancing. But that went on into my university, that’s why I got the mix-up, and down to Cardigan, when we went down to Cardigan and had this rugby match/dance affair, again, my own dancing ability made me an attraction to the local girls and the head girl, the local head girl – the name’ll come in a moment – and I got on very well on the dance floor together and we were asked to start the dancing, the two of us. Huldah. Huldah Jenkins – H-U-L-D-A-H. Huldah Jenkins and I, she was the local head girl, I was the visiting head boy and the two of us could dance together very, very well and that had stemmed from the youth club back in Liverpool associated with the church. That’s the progression down that path. And certainly when we were married, we did a lot of dancing, Mary and I, and thoroughly enjoyed it.

How did you learn?

How did?

Sir John Charnley Page 16 C1379/30 Track 1

How did you, did you actually attend dance classes?

No, no.

Or did you just pick it up as…

No, no, no, no, picked it up, just picked it up. If I can go right on from now up to this year when I was making the speech at a seventieth wedding anniversary of some friends – he’s ninety-two, she’s ninety-one – and this lady of ninety-one and I, again, used to enjoy dancing together. Her name was Joy and his name was Jack – Jack and Joy – and I made a point of telling a little story that after one evening in Bedford when we’d been to a dance, the four of us; we two and Jack and Joy, got home, half past one in the morning, I don’t know, and Mary, my wife, said to me you seemed to enjoy the dance tonight with Joy. And I said, ‘She was wonderful tonight. She teaches piano, she’s got a wonderful sense of timing and she always knew where my feet were to avoid them’. And I then said, ‘It was great, absolutely terrific’ and said to Mary, ‘And how did you get on with Jack?’ There was a long pause and she said, ‘None of your business’. [laughs] ‘It was a good evening, but none of your business.’ So anyway, that’s dancing. One of my interests would have been dancing, certainly, now that we go back. And it was quite good and even, you know, modern, it was the old, the – none of the modern – we’re talking about waltzes and quicksteps, foxtrots, tangos, rumbas, that sort of thing, by dancing.

Is this with a live band or…

Oh yes, live band. Oh yeah, yeah. Yes, yes. Yes, live bands. They’d be a four or five-piece band probably, that sort of thing. Yeah, there’d be the pianist, the drummer, the sax. There wouldn’t be a fiddle generally. There’d be a sax, that’s three. Oh, and clarinet – four. That sort of thing. Yeah, that was the youth club, certainly. I can’t remember what it was in Wales on that occasion. But certainly youth club and Barbara Beswick [ph] was another good dancer in the youth club. She was a bit stiff, but she was very good. Dorothy Foyen [ph], Jean Johnson, all of these were girls I was dancing with before my wife really appeared on the scene. This was before the sixth form at school or the fifth form at the grammar school. That’s right, that’s right, before Mary appeared at the school.

Sir John Charnley Page 17 C1379/30 Track 1

Did you have many girlfriends?

No, I think. It was just these dancing, dancing with these girls was my thrill at that stage.

[1:01:00]

I had… I was into sport, into cricket and rugby were my interests at the grammar school.

[mic problems]

I’ve mentioned at the little village school, as I call it, that was a church school as well, as I think I said earlier. And when I went to grammar school that wasn’t a church school. No, no. That was Liverpool city centre, Anglican, Roman Catholic, Jews, you name it, Chinese, the whole lot were there. Welsh. And there was, every morning there was a service, a school service. The headmaster, by the name of Gibbs, was a musician himself, but every morning there was a church service, Anglican church service. Well, it was an Anglican, Roman Catholic, not… but all the other denominations: Jews, Muslims, whatever, just waited outside and then they came in for the notices and suchlike, but they didn’t take part in the service.

Were you religious yourself?

Obviously was at that time. Not now really, no, no, no. You can go down an avenue there that’s… I’ve got standards, but I don’t really feel the need for religion as part of those standards now. Now, there’s a subject, but not for this at the moment.

I was interested you mentioned in your moral upbringing from your parents and them being moral people. Is that something they passed on to you at all?

Well in that sense, yes, but it’s the point I’ve just made. I don’t feel the need for religion to be part of setting moral standards. I don’t feel the need. I don’t object to people interpreting it that way, but I’ve had my disappointments, let me… My daughter Katrina, married to this Paul who is an accountant, Oxford mathematician, accountant, and Roman Catholic, strongly Roman Catholic, from a Roman Catholic family in Preston. And when the two of them – there was this situation, they loved each other – Anglican, Roman Catholic, what do we do about it? And we

Sir John Charnley Page 18 C1379/30 Track 1 were down here then, they live not far away, and his priest and Trina’s vicar watch rugby together, and they’re buddies. So there was no problem locally about arranging a wedding, a marriage service to satisfy the requirements of the two faiths, but each of them, quite properly, said they would need to get agreement, if not permission, from their big chiefs. So they made contact up their line and I wrote to both the Roman Catholic Bishop of the Portsmouth Diocese and the Anglican Bishop of the Guildford Diocese, and got a reply back immediately from the Roman Catholic Bishop himself saying – and this was mid seventies now, yeah, they’ve got children of thirty-three so we’re talking of thirty-five years ago, something like that. What does that make it? ’75 doesn’t it? Yeah, that’s it. At least that adds up. The Catholic Bishop wrote back smartly saying, great idea, no problem at all, well done, I understand that this can be handled locally and all will be well. No reply from the Bishop of Guildford at all, the Anglican, my man if you like, no reply. After about a fortnight I chased and they said oh, we’re handling it, we’re handling it, you know, don’t worry. And eventually got a reply back, not from the Bishop himself but from one of his staff writing on his behalf, saying that there was no way he could agree, that since the Reformation there was no way that he would agree to a partly Roman Catholic Service taking part in an Anglican church. Now, that’s the sort of thing that gets up my nose, I’m afraid, and it was the mid seventies because at this stage I was Chief Scientist to the Royal Air Force and I was very friendly, very friendly with the head chaplain to the Royal Air Force, Anglican, the Anglican chaplain to the RAF. He and I used to meet and drink together. And when I told him this little story he said, well terribly sorry that this should happen, John, you know, terribly disappointing for you, but, he said, if you really have trouble, he said, I’ll do it for you, I’ll run the service for you and we’ll get round it one way or another. Don’t let it bother you, you go ahead and get these two, if they’re that much in love, make sure it is all a great success. If you’re having trouble, I’ll do it. We’ll do it here in the RAF church if need be, you see. But that that should happen – we didn’t, the two local vicar and priest sorted it out between them with a form of service that didn’t upset the Anglican problem at all, there was no problem. And that worried me, I thought I’d have trouble from the Roman Catholic side and not from the Anglican side. So, as I say, I think I’ve got my own standards and anyway, it’s for other people to judge. But I don’t go to church, other than when I have to. I go to – Paul, Trina as an Anglican supports her husband at the Roman Catholic church because she sings in his choir, doesn’t take communion, doesn’t do anything of that sort, but certainly they do things together based upon his Roman Catholic church. And I will go along there and I’ll sing, but again I don’t take communion at all. Now their children, the two boys and Leonie, the two boys they went to a Catholic school and so did Leonie, went to a girls’ Catholic school, a strong – the

Sir John Charnley Page 19 C1379/30 Track 1 boys – and neither of them show much interest now at all. Leonie, when she was at Hull, she did and still does and is married to James, a Roman Catholic, and they are very strongly following the Roman Catholic faith. And that’s fine, I can live with all of that. Their two girls, the youngest of them that was born oh, six months ago, five months ago, something like that, has been christened and this was held up in Stockport and I went up there for that, obviously, so that I can live with all of that, but my own, I don’t know… terrible thing to say isn’t is, I don’t feel the need for it. Are you religious yourself?

Probably put myself into the agnostic bracket.

Oh well, there you go. You’ll understand.

[1:10:45] When did this develop? Don’t worry about concentrating on childhood or any particular aspect or time, I’m just wondering when in your life did you start to feel this way?

Very definitely when Mary appeared on the scene at the grammar school, when we were both… she – there was a week between us. I was always a week older than she, she never caught me up. [laughs] I’m the fourth of September, she was the twelfth of September, the same year, ’22. She in Liverpool was from a Roman Catholic family, Irish, and she had a brother, Dick, who was a couple of years older than her and so she was brought up Roman Catholic. Her parents died when she was eleven. Her father died first and within a year her mother died, but her mother had just the twelve months on her own when she was ill. And over that period and perhaps before, I don’t know, but certainly over that period, she was attended by a doctor, lady doctor, a Dr Pugmire, in Liverpool and as she was – and she was very ill – and she didn’t want her daughter to go through the same experience that she had had in a convent in Ireland when her parents died. So she wanted to make provision for her daughter Mary not to go down that particular track, so she persuaded the doctor that was attending her to take Mary on board as a guardian. And the doctor agreed to this, but… name’s escaped… She was – what’s the… not a… yeah. The faith that she followed was… oh. Charnley, Charnley, Charnley. And it was with me when I started the story. Erm… the chocolate family were members of it.

Quaker.

Sir John Charnley Page 20 C1379/30 Track 1

Quakers. She was a Quaker. So you now have this girl who has been Roman Catholic and is now being, as a guardian has a Quaker from eleven and then this Quaker, who is a doctor, continues her education at eleven at this grammar… she doesn’t to start with, she goes to some other school, I don’t know which at the moment, but she appears at the same school that I’m at, Oulton High School, at age about sixteen – fifteen, sixteen. And there she meets me, Anglican. So now this poor little thing has been Roman Catholic, Quaker and now Anglican and that’s when we start talking about what each of us thinks about religion and it’s when I started having doubts, let me just say that sort of thing. But it’s… if I go on again, the doctor, Dr Pugmire, we’re into the war now and the doctor had family contacts up in Cumbria and because of my bases up there, we used to go up to the – from Liverpool – we’d go into the Lake District, we’d go into youth hostels in the Pennines and meet there. That needs explanation, that when I left this school to go to university, she left the school because the doctor was moving her in the direction of being a radiographer and the training school was at Leeds. So she was on one side of the Pennines at Leeds and I was on the other at Liverpool and we would meet in the mountains, in the hills, at a youth hostel in Settle or somewhere like that, Malham, the Tarn, or further north in the Lake District near the farms where her guardian had family contacts. Why did I go down that particular path? We’re talking religion and not really, but Mary always described herself as someone who’d seen so much of different religions that she really didn’t think much of any of them, which is back to your starting point. And I wouldn’t say sowed seeds of doubts in me, a practised Anglican, don’t know, don’t know, but certainly there was no pressure on me from my wife to be religious.

[1:17:15]

If I go on to the fact that when we were… we were courting together - I’m back to the wartime – the guardian married – her guardian was a woman doctor - and she married a male doctor who moved from Liverpool down, first of all to Cambridge, wartime, and then to London to St Thomas’s Hospital London who were evacuated to Godalming and they lived in Woking. So now you have Mary training in Leeds, but making visits to Cambridge and later to Guildford and I’m in Farnborough. And so when she qualifies, her first job was in Kent, at Tonbridge, and then she makes her way – we’re now getting to the end of the war – to Botleys Park War Hospital not far from Guildford, and starts living again in Guildford with her guardian. So she is now in Guildford but working in Weybridge and I’m at Farnborough. So I’m going across after rugby on a Saturday on my bike to go and see my future wife. And I am now twenty and so is she and

Sir John Charnley Page 21 C1379/30 Track 1 the end of the war is on the scene and she’s very, very busy or has been for twelve months since our landings in France, she has been on duty twenty-four hours on, twenty-four hours off and I have been going across there doing things in the lab and this, that and the other, helping, and going across to see her at weekends after playing rugby. And we decided to get married, but the end of the war is in sight so 1945 we decide to marry. And I approach her guardian and say this is, you know, could I have her approval to marry Mary. No. You’re too young and I don’t approve. So I’d also written to my parents in Liverpool, of course, and said that this was in my mind and were they happy. They’d met Mary, I’d taken her up there, and they thought she was wonderful, so they didn’t have any problem at all. So then there was this interesting situation of Mary’s guardian, Dr Pugmire, writing to my father saying that I’d approached her about this, my intention and she had told me, she told my father that she didn’t approve.

Why didn’t she approve?

Pardon?

Why didn’t she approve?

As I say, she thought we were too young essentially, at twenty. Didn’t think we, really that it was too young to be making up your minds. You know, we both had grown through, those years through a war, dear God, for four or five years and she was a doctor. Anyway. So my father was then writing the letters he was getting from her, sending them down to me for me to draft a reply for him to send back to her, all of us knowing that over the weekend I’d be going to see her. [laughs]

Not so much a love triangle as a love square really.

And this almost is where you get back to my own experience of helping to run a school, you’re now running a situation where you say, oh dear, goodness me, why did I get myself in this situation. However, we decided we’d go ahead, Mary and I, against her guardian. And so on the second of June 1945 we were married in an Anglican church in Liverpool, having sent out invitations to all the family, including her guardian and now the husband, and they didn’t attend. They wouldn’t have anything to do with it. No, didn’t approve and never did. And there came that moment within the service, you know, the church service where you get to the stage of

Sir John Charnley Page 22 C1379/30 Track 1 saying, the vicar, if anyone knows any due cause or concern why these two people should not be joined together in holy matrimony, I was scared stiff that someone was going to stand up. We’d spoken to the Liverpool vicar beforehand and he said don’t let that worry you, I can get myself around that, we’re going ahead. Everyone wanted this to happen other than Dr Pugmire, because she thought we were too young. Now, I don’t mind all of that going in the public domain, but there’s one thing I’ll say now that I don’t want, and if we have to switch off, then we’ll do it.

Well we can do one of two things. We can either record it and put it, well restrict it for thirty years is our typical…

Do we have a break while I have a cup of tea, because it’s half past four.

I was thinking a break was probably a good idea.

I’m getting a bit dry.

Do you want this to be in the…

I want something now for you to know, but I wouldn’t want it generally known.

Ever? Or just for the next thirty years?

Ever.

Okay, I can put it off, but yeah. Okay, shall we take that break?

[end of track 1]

Sir John Charnley Page 23 C1379/30 Track 2

[Track 2]

I got quite a good sense of some of the things that you got from your father, particularly this building, hands-on approach…

Absolutely, absolutely.

…I was wondering about your mother – what sort of influence was she on you do you think?

Taking care of me, taking care of the house, the family. One didn’t, there was no question of mothers going out to work, nothing of that whatsoever. She… her job was looking after dad, who as a manual building worker often came in drenched, soaked wet, might have ridden home on his bike from wherever and she saw her job as just taking care of the family. And I don’t… there was never any other thought of higher education for youngster, for me, I don’t think it entered minds. You know, we were of a level I think that just didn’t think that way in family terms because the engineering business that had been my grandfather, don’t know, don’t know. But certainly on mother’s side, she was from Cumberland, as I say, Workington, and her father, her name was Math… or his name was Mathieson, so my granny was Annie Mathieson, my Nana was Annie Mathieson and really they didn’t think any further than keeping house and cooking and cleaning and looking after the menfolk. That was it I think. Does that surprise you in a sense? We never… damn it all, I was still very, very young you see.

Does it surprise you at all?

No. No, no, no. No, it’s the way in which… it was as I expected and, no. You see, the only thought of that sort, (a) I suppose the first step was winning the scholarship, to start with, from the local school. Well it wasn’t local, I’d got two miles to walk to get to the blessed thing. And I used to cross the tram track, the number 8 tram, and used to cross that and walk down and on the way I passed the home of a chum whose name was Willy Hitchmough. Now there’s a good Liverpool name – Willy Hitchmough. And he lived about halfway to school and I used to pass – he was on another estate that I had to go through - and then under the railway bridge and down past the park on the right-hand side, the dentist that used to look after my teeth on the left-hand side and the school was at the road junction ahead. I can remember turning up at the Hitchmough house to call on my friend, my chum, and I was in tears and his mother asked me

Sir John Charnley Page 24 C1379/30 Track 2 what was I crying about, why was I crying so much, and I said well, I’ve forgotten my handkerchief, and I was going to school without my handkerchief which was something my mother would never let me do and I was in tears because… and she gave me one. And she said just don’t let it bother you, if you don’t use it, when you’re coming home tonight let me have it back, but don’t worry, your mother will wash and iron it and give it back to me, stop it, stop it, stop it, are you alright? So I went to school with a handkerchief, but it wasn’t mine.

Why was the handkerchief so important?

I don’t know. I don’t know at all. I don’t know. And it wasn’t the handkerchief as much as, the point you’re asking about, it’s something my mother insisted that I didn’t go to school without it. It was part of my dress, it was part of what she wanted me to have, so that I wasn’t reliant and dependent on anyone else to wipe my bloomin’ nose or whatever. Don’t know. Just me mum.

[05:00] Were you expected to behave in a particular way?

Oh well, from church, yeah there was a standard of behaviour that they expected from me. Now you’re going to ask, what was it? I was always expected to stand up if grown-ups, for the grown-ups entered the room, and certainly if ladies entered the room then you stood up without… even as a youngster you’d do that. Opening doors for other people, these sort of things which, no, nothing out… were just expected and corrected if you made a mistake. Not corrected violently at all, but I don’t know. I had my little, my bedroom of my own, as I say, that – what did I collect? Nothing really.

What was in your bedroom?

Bed down one wall. Sorry, go into it through a door, bed on the right-hand side going down one wall, window immediately ahead, dressing table at an angle on the other side and then a cupboard on what is back to the door on the left-hand side. That’s going round my little room. And above the door, a clock on the wall above the door where I could - the head of the bed was against the window, essentially, if you can see the little map - and I could see the clock above the door as I just lay in bed, whatever. It was a modern – I’m speaking now of the house in Springwood – so that was a modern house, so this had got electricity. The other one, yeah I

Sir John Charnley Page 25 C1379/30 Track 2 think so, I can’t remember really. You know, I was five or six when I left that place. I’d certainly started at school, the school they wanted me to… they were in some way, it was a church school, point number one, and they wanted me to continue there although it meant quite a walk to get there. But there we are, we’ve been over that, there’s no point in going over that again, other than I hadn’t mentioned Willy Hitchmough before, as this point of being, setting out to school without a handkerchief, which had me crying.

Was he one of your friends?

Yes. Yes, he was. Yeah. He was one, another one was a chap called Roy Jamieson who lived, again – he’s dead, Roy Jamieson, he became an accountant in Liverpool, didn’t move away – and he lived in a place called Long Lane, which I had to cross, again, to get to school. Near the end of the number 8 tram route, which again I’ve mentioned earlier.

How did you know them?

How did I?

How did you know…

Well or… do you mean?

How did you know Roy and Willy?

How well did I know them or…?

How did you know them, in what…

Just… school, obviously, and I used to meet with Hitchmough halfway to school and we came back together and I would stop at his house on the way home, maybe have a drink and then make the rest of the way on my own, but never stayed very long because there wasn’t a diversion there, that’s Hitchmough. Now Roy Jamieson lived in this road I had to cross by the side of the park that I mentioned, Garston Park, and he was bright. Willy Hitchmough wasn’t particularly bright, I didn’t think, from memory, but Roy Jamieson was and had a big sister that – oh, when I

Sir John Charnley Page 26 C1379/30 Track 2 say big, much bigger, much bigger sister, in age I mean – that always seemed to want to talk, not politics as much as just talk social affairs or gossip. Gossip is the best word for her, I suppose. Quite a lass. She’d left the school, you see, that school finished at fourteen and she had left and I’m talking about me, I left at ten when I got the scholarship. She was fourteen or plus fourteen, so there’s that age… she was a lot older, as a generation. Roy himself became an accountant. He was bright and again, his arithmetic, I don’t think of it as mathematics at that level, it was more just arithmetic, bit of geometry maybe, but that didn’t start until you got to your grammar school when you took mathematics. And that was arithmetic and geometry and algebra, but you didn’t, we weren’t doing that at the little junior school at all, it was principally arithmetic.

Did you play with Roy and Willy?

Not really, we were quite some way apart, we were at least a mile apart, and I’d got my own friends in the estate that I was playing with, that I was playing with, up to the point, yeah, yeah, where I went to the so-called grammar school, the high school, and then a new set of friends developed, obviously, and it happened that there were, you see, the boys of my age locally were going to more of a local school than I was going to. I was going on to the school I came from, whereas there was a Danehill Road School which the local boys and girls went to and I didn’t.

Did that ever cause you any difficulties, going to a different school to your local friends?

No, no, because we met largely through the church I guess. And the friendships were growing through the choir and the church and a little later on the dancing. [laughs] But no, no.

[12:45] Did you have any particularly important toys when you were growing up and playthings?

Toys. Football. [laughs] You’ll find a strong sport all the time, wherever, and… now I can’t think of, teddies or… I was always keen on jigsaws, I remember that. Ah, a Hornby set, a Meccano set and a Hornby. Back to engineering again, if you like. But the essence of doing things with my hands and creating and creating oh, my Meccano set and my Hornby, yes. Yes, yes, yes. Gosh. And the Meccano more than the train in a way, the engine, a Hornby train. But the Meccano certainly. And oh, what the Christmas when as a present I was given the little motor as part of a Meccano set that you could use to drive things. You could make a crane and

Sir John Charnley Page 27 C1379/30 Track 2 you could lift things with a little motor and so on. That was a wonderful moment. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Electric or clockwork?

Clockwork. A key that you wound. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

What sort of things did you build?

As I say, cranes for lifting things up and down. That was the… what else would there be? You could… daft. You could build, I remember that the smallest Meccano set was a number one, and you could then get a 1A, or a little bit of A that converted into a two, and so on. And I fetched up with an equivalent of a number three Meccano set – I think they went on to five or six, from memory – but I got on to a number three. I could build model, not very good replicas of boats, ships and I could use the motor for turning the propeller. Silly things. Silly – why, you might ask, why, why the hell? But there it was. You could fix this little motor within the hull and then put a long shaft and turn the propeller. There was another one, was a windmill that you could make and again, you could turn the… again, and that had a bevel drive from the motor down below, up a shaft and out, and that was exciting, to get that so that the bevel drive… In a way, you know, we were a practical family; my father and myself really, and we were looked after by mum. Anyway, go ahead, next question. Does that answer it? There was never any cuddly toys of that sort that I can remember, like bears or whatever. Can’t remember that.

Did you have any other building toys?

No, no, no, no.

What was the attraction about building things out of Meccano – and bear in mind I’m not an engineer, so I don’t get it. [laughs]

Just building something. And a little screwdriver and a little spanner on the other end, and sticking pieces together. Some pieces were coloured green, some were coloured red so that you could… you had a diagram that you followed to build the different things. And there were the different lengths, there were some straight, some bent, some curved and with a number three set

Sir John Charnley Page 28 C1379/30 Track 2 you could do quite complicated structures in different colours, principally were the greens. And there were wheels in it so you could build things that moved. Again, the little motor was great because you could build a little car and put this motor that I was given and see it off across the room, across the floor, all very exciting, as I say, and I liked jigsaws. That was putting, that was, oh the standard way of doing a jigsaw, getting the outline and then filling in and getting cross with so much sky. Those are the two things I can… And I’m interested now because my… oh… two year old great-granddaughter enjoys jigsaws and I find myself on the floor watching her manipulate a piece to get it right and thinking oh, will she find the right sort of position to put that, how long’s it going to take her and will she want some help. And no, it’s, takes me back a bit, certainly. And then, as I – oh Lord – as I mentioned, we were a card playing family and I don’t know whether it is done now, playing a game, standing cards up against a wall and flicking other cards to knock them down. Do you know of it at all? No. Well, you could just with ordinary playing cards, an old pack, and you’d stand some of them up against the wall and then you’d flick the others to knock them down and you’d play that competitively with someone to see, with a certain number of cards, how many you could get, how many he could get and so on.

[20:07] You mentioned chess as well.

That’s right, and I think I ought to go back a bit on that, because I think that happened at the grammar school more than the Garston Victoria School. And certainly at the grammar school I took to chess and again, became chess captain and I play chess now and I’m the chairman of the local chess club, as of now, and coach youngsters at it. Not very well. We’ve got a better coach than me in the club. But at the school, I should say, rather than chess, at that first school would have been draughts rather than chess and I used to play draughts with my father. Not with my mother, as I say, she didn’t enter into any of these things, she was more concerned with the cooking and doing the shopping and that sort of thing. I used to go out shopping, down to the local array of shops. There was a greengrocer, a chemist, a butcher, a sweetshop, newspaper shop of course, and there was a chandler’s shop. A chandler’s shop, yeah. The greengrocer was Waterworth’s, and that’s as far as that goes I think, I can’t remember any more. And that was down at the bottom of the road, there was the church on one side. Parade of shops, is the word I’m looking for. And nearby a parade of shops near the tram track again, that I’ve mentioned, the number 8 tram track.

Sir John Charnley Page 29 C1379/30 Track 2

You’ve mentioned a newspaper shop - did your family read newspapers?

No. No. Er, yes. Yes, yes, yes, but it was the evening newspaper, The Liverpool Echo . The daily newspaper would have been The Daily Post . Wouldn’t have gone to national news, it would have been The Liverpool Daily Post . But no, The Liverpool Echo was as far as they got. And of course, where were we with radios? Not quite a cat’s whisker, but there wasn’t much radio around.

[23:03] What sort of technologies did you have in the home? Let’s take your second home, the one on the estate perhaps.

The one on the estate? Well, as I say, there was electric and a gas cooker. Gas cooker, water was available; hot and cold, there was a boiler. The boiler was behind the fire. The fire was an open fire in the living room – it’s never a lounge – in the living room, and behind that was the water boiler. So when you didn’t have any fire on you didn’t have any hot water. There was no question of immersion heaters of that sort, that didn’t arise. So that’s water, that’s gas, electricity.

Did you have a radio?

Well that’s what I was trying… I was trying to think of the standard of radio that we had. We had a radio, certainly. Yeah, we had a radio, no television of course. But yeah, we had a radio. I can see the speaker, bloomin’ great thing like this, with the actual tuning in a strip at the bottom of the speaker. And electrically driven. So that was alright. Now what was the aerial for that, what was the antenna? Nothing on the chimney. Don’t know.

What sort of things did you listen to on it?

Music, for one thing. Sport, certainly sport. And variety programmes. Variety programmes associated with fun, jokes, quizzes maybe. Yeah. Yes, yes, yes, in the house in Springwood, yes, yes. We’d sit there and compete with each other as well as with whoever was on the radio, yes. That’s about as good as I can do in terms of facilities. When talking about interests, I mentioned the fact that we used to keep rabbits for my benefit, when dad had made a rabbit

Sir John Charnley Page 30 C1379/30 Track 2 hutch for me outside. And the, the only… on the understanding that it was my job to look after it, keep it clean, di-da-di-da-di-da. That was the understanding.

[26:08] Did you do much reading?

Wizard magazine, as I mentioned earlier, choirboys, but nothing serious in the way of serious books at all, no, no. The Wizard, The Hotspur . There was another one. I used to go to church [laughs] clutching these things under my arm for swapping. Bullseye . The Hotspur , The Wizard and The Bullseye . And The Bullseye was a different sort of thing. My favourite was The Wizard , that I can remember, and then The Hotspur , but The Bullseye was somewhat different, it had different paper, it was a different colour. It was a bluish colour in the background paper, whereas the other – and not a lot of colour in it – whereas the other, Wizard in particular, highly coloured. As part of the school, there was the school library of course, but also, not far away there was a lending library, a public lending library and I can remember going there to look for, because we didn’t have them at home, adventure stories, Biggles . Now there’s aeroplanes, Biggles . Don’t know, don’t know. Didn’t get anywhere with it, but certainly sort of detective stuff, but damn it all, I was still very, very small and hadn’t locked on to these things. And certainly when I was at school, at the grammar school sort of, and going on to university, well now it was all completely different because now I was reading… At some stage in all this I got a Children’s Encyclopaedia .

Were there any particular bits of it that you remember, articles?

[pause] Bit of birds, completely off my… as a result of walking and meeting, and going for – because the school had a walking club that we used to go out over the river and to Cheshire – and the masters, there were two masters in particular, the Latin master and the French master. The Latin master a chap called Dundas and the French master… forgotten. And I shouldn’t have done because he was also cricket. The Latin master wasn’t sporting but he did go for walks with us and he it was that would make a point of pointing out birds. So I followed that up in the encyclopaedia, that I do remember. And the other thing, and I suppose this is where it started, always been fascinated by maps. Always. As president of the Royal Institute of Navigation, maps were, and all that’s happened with satnav and the things that have happened since, maps still intrigue me. And just been down to France for a week around Annecy [? - 30:19] and Mont

Sir John Charnley Page 31 C1379/30 Track 2

Blanc, and the thing I needed to help me there was, again, a Michelin map of the local district I was able to get, because I do like to know where I am, what there is around me. So upstairs there’s a whole set of Ordnance Survey maps and a fair set of Michelin maps as well. So maps always interested me in knowing where I’m going and what there is about. And there was a part of the encyclopaedia, Children’s Encyclopaedia , where I could find maps. I can remember that, searching, hunting for them. I knew how to get there quickly, to the map section, that intrigued me. So.

Maps of anywhere in particular?

No. Lakes. Lake District. Lake District, and then, as I say, North Wales and Cheshire where we went, these walks with the school. So there was nothing abroad, it was all domestic, it was all UK and very close to Liverpool as well because, you know, that was my horizon in those days and I suppose I broadened out a little bit when I went to Wales, evacuation. Prior to that, been to North Wales; walking, cycling and the Isle of Man and the Lake District and Morecambe and Blackpool, all that area.

[32:11] These were family holidays or…?

Family holiday, include family holidays. Family holidays were very often the Isle of Man or Llandudno on the North Wales coast. So we were over there like that and when we did go, it was a funny sort of arrangement where my mother, you bought the food while you were there and you handed it in to the bed and breakfast place, would it be, and it was cooked for you by whoever, but we went shopping to get food while we were away. Strange isn’t it? And I can remember that, remember that. Went to the Isle of Man with my father to watch a TT Race, or the practising for it in particular. But there was a particular corner where they slowed down to go round this, almost a 180. Can I remember it? No. No, no, no. And that was a thrill because I remember there was the wide bit on the Highland part where they used to belt along. But that wasn’t as exciting or as interesting, to see them going through the gears and coming down from the corner and then hearing them roar away again.

Sir John Charnley Page 32 C1379/30 Track 2

You’ve mentioned a few sort of technologies in passing; Meccano boats, and aeroplanes a little bit but not much, TT Racing – were there any sort of, you know, technologies and sciences that interested you as a child?

No. No, I can’t say that there were. It’s only when I start trying to collect these thoughts together that it surprises me that there should be, like I can think of Meccano, I can think of TT Races, but that was my father rather than me, it would seem to me now. Maybe I’m wrong, but no, it wasn’t a family or a group of families with whom we mixed, for want of a better word, that were cultured. There wasn’t an artistic appreciation, there wasn’t an artistic interest in either art or… there’s a music interest, certainly, but the music would be church music and I was singing. And then there’d be the music associated with music halls that were on the radio, that sort of thing, for pleasure at home.

[35:25] Did you play a musical instrument yourself at all?

Indeed, at the Victoria School, no. At the grammar school I started to play the violin, a fiddle, and indeed I think the fiddle, I think it’s still in the family with my daughter, but the music master, as I say the headmaster was a keen musician. But the violin master also was the woodwork master and I much preferred him teaching woodwork than teaching me music. But in a sense he didn’t have much to teach me on woodwork, my father did all that for me. So there wasn’t very much… I could make a dovetail joint as good as the master himself. [laughs]

Can we talk a bit about school at this point? Seems a good place to move on to. So you started off in the smaller Church of England school and then transferred to Alston School?

Oulton.

Oulton.

O-U-L-T-O-N. O-U-L-T-O-N. Oulton High School. Two main schools – they’re called expensive schools in Liverpool – Liverpool Institute and Liverpool Collegiate and they were the two, again, in the city centre. And ours, this one was a smaller school, this was about 300 youngsters in strength, that sort of thing, 300, 350 and was the cheaper than these other two. No

Sir John Charnley Page 33 C1379/30 Track 2 doubt, as I say, it was three pounds a term. The others were something like five or six and accordingly everything that went with it; books and suchlike. Well that shouldn’t be, should it? Doesn’t matter. And...

What were your favourite subjects there?

Oh, maths. Oh yeah, oh without a doubt. Maths and physics. No doubt about, already, yes, yes, yes. Maths and physics, no doubt about that. Couldn’t stand history, although the history master was also my housemaster and I became head of the house, Prince’s, which was red, and the housemaster, Barnaby, was also my history master. And I found history utterly boring. Now whether it was the way he taught it, I wouldn’t really like to criticise in that sense. It might have been, I don’t know, but certainly I had no knowledge of history whatsoever and it’s only in my retirement that I really have started to enjoy history, because to me it was a dreadful bore. I don’t even now know the successions of kings and queens of England, couldn’t do that for you for one moment.

What about it didn’t you like?

Oh gosh. It was just boring. There was nothing about it that appealed to me. Don’t know. Just, couldn’t see the point. I wanted to be science, I wanted to be doing things in the lab and the idea of reading of where we all came from, what our history and background, no, no, didn’t interest me one little moment, not a moment.

And contrast that with what you said about loving maths and physics – what was the attraction there in comparison?

Oh… Oh dear. What’s the attraction? Well the attraction is again the practical things of maths – maths I still, obviously still enjoy maths, still do maths, of a different sort. Oh gosh. They’re chicken and cheese, or chalk and cheese – maths on the one hand and geometry and algebra, trigonometry and all that that explains in what we’re doing which I could never see any history explaining. And now you see, that was me probably. But never, never, never did I have any interest whatsoever in history.

[41:04]

Sir John Charnley Page 34 C1379/30 Track 2

Geography and maps again, yes, yes. The geography was a chap called Littlewood, was the master and he happened to be the housemaster of City, the yellow people, and I could enjoy geography with him. I enjoyed English with Mr Money, French with Mr White, Dundas who was the Latin master that we went walking with and I could manage him. Buckley was the physics man. I mentioned him, chemistry, earlier on when talking of my parents, Tomlinson. And the headmaster himself in music was… oh… begins with a ‘G’. Don’t know, forgotten. Don’t know. However, but Barnaby as the history master and despite the fact that he was my housemaster and I could get on good terms with him for things associated with running the house, this Prince’s house, and you know, I was captain of chess, captain of cricket, captain of rugby for the house. In fact I had the feeling he and I ran the house, very much, but I couldn’t stand him for cricket. For history – sorry, sorry, sorry. No, no. He took no interest in cricket anyway, so that wasn’t a problem for him. There were other masters that helped in that; Bibby. Bibby was biology and he was cricket. But Barnaby, no way could I get on terms of history with him. Now Mary was pretty good at history and I always said she was much more cultured than I was.

You mentioned quite a few teachers in passing there and I was wondering… You mentioned quite a few teachers in passing there and I was wondering if any of them were particularly good or bad towards you?

The maths master was very good to me. He and I got on very, very well.

What was his name?

Jimmy… Jimmy… Jimmy… begins with an ‘S’. Stephens or Stephenson, one or the other. And because of my attraction to maths he and I got on very well, very well indeed. And he was another, he was another assistant master in this Prince’s House and I could relate to him more than I could relate to Barnaby. Of course we had women teachers as well, there being girls in the school. But I didn’t… the French mistress – Evans… Evans… But I just… she was, I knew her largely through the house, because the house was both boys and girls. So you had masters, mistresses. But I never, she never taught me for French. The French was this chap White, Mr White, who was a big, florid man. Big, big man.

How did you do at languages?

Sir John Charnley Page 35 C1379/30 Track 2

Not bad. Not bad languages. Ah, ah, no, no. French; great, good, could see that. Dropped Latin as soon as I could. Soon as I could drop… I had to take it for the modern equivalent of O level, whatever that is. Matric. I got matric in Latin and then, bang, that was good enough. That just had no relevance to what I wanted to do at all, so that went out, history went out. [laughs]

Most engineers have told me this. [laughs]

Say again?

You’d be surprised the number of engineers who’ve told me they hate history. [laughs]

Is that right? Is that right? Now there, how very strange. I wasn’t aware of that, I wasn’t aware of that, but was certainly true.

[45:55] But I’m interested in this attraction towards maths and physics – and you have to remember that I never did that, I hated maths.

Oh I see. Oh really, really?

I got on okay with physics but I hated maths. I don’t see the attraction to maths. I was just wondering, what is it about maths that you liked? [laughs]

I like playing with numbers, playing with figures, playing with numbers. Even though my maths is much more than that now, but I in those days, certainly, just playing, I would play with numbers. Times tables and suchlike, understood square roots and squaring numbers, but numbers were a fascination, you see. And didn’t get to the stage at that level of what the square root of minus one is, now that really is tricky. [laughs] No, I don’t think that’s worth talking about. No, no, no.

Is it applied or theoretical maths appeal to you more? Was there applied or theoretical maths or…?

Sir John Charnley Page 36 C1379/30 Track 2

Oh, applied. Applied. Related to physics again, Newton’s Laws and all that sort of thing. All linked up together. The fascination in chemistry was more concerned with analytical chemistry again, of being, you know, quite apart from learning about the periodic table and where the various materials fitted in and the groups within a class, of the Mendeleev table, and again, I was never interested in the history of science and the history of how all that and when all that was introduced by Mendeleev and how clever he was, no, no, no, no. It was understanding the chemistry; oxygen, hydrogen, how that made water with H 2O and so on and so on. It was all of that side and in chemistry itself the thing that I was good at was being given a powder and analysing it to say what it was.

How do you do that?

[laughs]

My dad’s a chemistry teacher; I’m a grave disappointment to him, you may guess!

Well, you take samples of it and there’s a standard almost approach of a bit of acid, a bit of seeing what the result was, whether any gas come off and identify it, collect that. No, great, great, great, great. And you light a bit of it and it flares yellow and you say ah, there’s some sodium there. [doorbell ringing] Here’s that man back again.

[end of track 2]

Sir John Charnley Page 37 C1379/30 Track 3

[Track 3]

Now, you mentioned that you wanted to add some extra comment on your grandfather.

Yeah. My grandfather, certainly an engineer in Liverpool, I think was a successful engineer. I never met him, I never knew him and the remarks that I made on the last occasion related to his alcoholism, that was said to me by a third party, I have no direct knowledge of that myself whatsoever, and therefore I’m a little uneasy about it. Okay?

Okay. Happy with that and then we’ll put restrictions on both of them and they’ll both…

Yeah. That’s it, that’s it.

…correct each other at the same time, as it were.

The point at which we stopped last time was when we were talking about school chemistry lessons. You were partway through explaining that you enjoyed working with compounds and I was wondering what the attraction was with working out the chemical composition of a compound?

It was partly a logical process that was of interest in that it was chemical analysis of a compound and there it was as perhaps a white powder and then there was a formal process by which you started identifying, taking little parts of it and burning that and seeing what flame came out of it, putting that on acid and seeing what happened to that, whether there were fumes, a smell, or whatever, depending on whether it was hydraulic, hydrochloric acid or hydro… or sulphuric acid, and out of that you then identified the various components or the various element that were in that little sample of material from which you started. And I found that very exciting to be able to analyse something along those lines and that was a chemistry interest, without a doubt. Not that I followed chemistry afterwards to any great extent at all. The interest after that was maths and physics, dynamics more than chemistry.

Why do you think you drifted in those directions rather than the chemical one?

Sir John Charnley Page 38 C1379/30 Track 3

[pause] Oh… a wish to understand how things happen, what made things happen. I can relate it to my interest in woodwork and the things my father did, the things I did with him, they were things physical. The chemistry was more intellectually as an approach to a subject, whereas I was interested very much in the physical approach to a subject, doing things. And that was the thing that took me in the direction of engineering rather than science, in a way, if I can sort of think along those lines now. I’m not sure that I was conscious of any of that, this is thinking back on it now as you ask me the question. But my father was very practical, as I’ve tried to indicate before, and very skilful, and I wanted to be like him in many respects and that took me more in the direction of physics. So you can think of gravity, laws of motion, Newton, all of that, more of interest than, you know, we talked earlier about Meccano, that sort of thing all added up in my mind to something that was more practical than say chemistry, although there’s no doubt that interested me.

Did you prefer theoretical or applied mathematics? You mentioned that mathematics was your favourite subject – did you prefer the applied or the theoretical?

Oh, that was the applied mathematics without any doubt at all. Again, the same sort of area, the same sort of subject. The interest in mathematics was not mathematics for its own sake, but mathematics as a means of understanding and helping to understand other things, other subjects, other bits of dynamics and suchlike. Oh yes. Yes, yes. But not mathematics for its own sake.

[05:30] You mentioned your father a moment ago as well, as being a woodworker engineer. I think you mentioned that both his brothers were also engineers. I was wondering how much you saw of them when you were growing up?

The eldest brother, Bert, didn’t see him. The only time I saw him was when we went and spent, as a family, went and spent holidays with him. They were living in Newcastle, or at Whitley Bay on the coast just north of Newcastle, my Uncle Bert and my Auntie Edie. And he in a way was the, well not in a way, he was the most successful of the three brothers. He had been in the design team somewhere in Cammel Laird’s at Birkenhead and then moved up to Newcastle, still with Cammel Laird’s I think, yeah, on in some way, and I don’t know what ship design, in the drawing office, I would put it that way. And Uncle Bert was successful, no doubt about that. And you’d think, I would think of him in the sort of language of these days, a white collar

Sir John Charnley Page 39 C1379/30 Track 3 worker, where my Uncle Tom and my father were practical people working on the bench or on the railway. Whereas Uncle Bert was in an office, and that was a big deal.

Was it seen as a big deal at the time?

At the time, oh yes. I mean at the time was the big deal, oh yes, yes, yes. And Uncle Bert up in Newcastle was the man who had a car, that was a big deal. Neither Uncle Tom nor my father ever owned a car, neither of them. Uncle Bert did and then I came along and yes, in due course, I did, but the other brothers, no. No, no, no. And Uncle Tom lived in the Garston/Grassendale area and we used to visit him and he and his wife and one daughter, Ruth, still alive, living in Stafford, near Stafford now, my cousin Ruth. And we used to visit them as a family: father, mother, me, Uncle Tom, Auntie Jean and Ruth, and… the grown-ups would play cards and Ruth and I were just left to amuse ourselves really while they played cards. She’d play the piano a little bit. I don’t know what I did, because I wasn’t, at that stage I didn’t carry a violin around with me to play a violin. Certainly didn’t play piano. No, don’t know. Read a book or something, don’t know.

[09:01]

But I admired Uncle Tom; very practical and very like my father. The two of them were quite alike. Enjoyed both of them – enjoyed my father, enjoyed Uncle Tom. And Uncle Bert, didn’t see much of him. And we would go up to see him and Auntie Edith, his wife, who was the daughter of a man that owned a building company. I wouldn’t call him a developer, but he built houses in the Newcastle district, and as such, whenever we went up there I was under very strict instructions to behave myself always. Now behave, because now, Uncle Bert, Auntie Edie, yes, yes, yes. If you misbehave we may not be invited again.

Was that a serious threat, do you think?

No, no. I don’t think so, no. No.

Were there any other ways of…

Sir John Charnley Page 40 C1379/30 Track 3

I fouled things up once because the car they had was a big saloon and they lived in, as I say, they lived in – what did I say? - Whitley Bay, north of Newcastle on the coast, in a detached house, very nice detached house with a row, a house that had a row of trees on the edge of the road before the pavement. And I can remember coming back from having had a day out in their car and I opened the car door before Uncle Bert had stopped it and the car door was almost torn off by running into one of these trees, a half-open door, which didn’t do the door any good whatsoever. And it might have been after something like that that this remark was made, I don’t know, don’t remember. But it certainly, I always felt whenever we went that I was on trial to behave myself.

Did you get the same reaction with Uncle Tom when you visited?

No, no, completely different. No, no, no, no, nothing of that sort at all. Uncle Tom was working like my father, the same sort of level. Uncle Bert was the brother who’d been successful. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Left home, Birkenhead, Newcastle, and the other two had stayed in the south Liverpool area as skilled men, but not like Uncle Bert. No, he was different from the rest.

How would you define the difference?

[laughs] I was nearly going to say in World War I Uncle Bert had managed, I think he became a sergeant. Now the other two, Tom and dad, didn’t make any progress beyond privates and there’s almost that sort of a distinction. Uncle Bert, very set in his ways, very set in his ways. And he was a local dignitary of the bowling club up there, whereas Uncle Tom and my father were keen cricketers. I don’t know about Uncle Bert, don’t know. But I certainly went to watch him bowling when I was up there. And a holiday with Uncle Bert and Auntie Edie was a bit of a strain, it wasn’t relaxed, not just me but my mother and father also felt they had to behave properly. There was a bit of a strain, but there we are. Nothing more to say on that I don’t think. But we certainly had some very good runs into the countryside of Northumbria up to the Scottish border that I enjoyed, if only I hadn’t crashed the door car on [laughs] the return on one occasion. [laughs] Armstrong Siddeley was the car, an Armstrong Siddeley. Heavy, very heavy, big. Yeah, yeah.

[15:05] How do you think your father saw his slightly more successful elder brother?

Sir John Charnley Page 41 C1379/30 Track 3

You’ve just about said it, he recognised that his brother had been more successful, admired him for it, certainly. One of the differences I think, to try and… I think Uncle Bert was more ambitious than either of the other two brothers, Tom and George. And my father was never, never a very ambitious man in any sense at all. He became, towards the end of his career, before retirement, he became a foreman joiner in the company. In other words he ran the joinering element of the building company, the building firm and that was, he was very well pleased with that after a long hard life, in my mind. But it never, he never begrudged Uncle Bert the success he had in any sense whatsoever and to the best of my knowledge neither had Uncle Tom.

Did Uncle Bert ever come back to Liverpool to visit you?

Yes. [laughs] Again… they passed through Liverpool as they were going to board the ship on to which she was going cruising, and they would stay with us and they would stay with us on the way back. And I can remember one occasion when they came back having been cruising, and they’d been down through – I say down – been to New Zealand. Yeah, exactly. And this was the, you know, the first time I think that I had any reaction as to where New Zealand was, how it might relate to us, but they had been. They’d been to South Africa as well. So, oh there was that distinction in the company that they were wealthier, you’d have to say, than the other two brothers. But the other two brothers, it was never something that became an issue with them at all. And I was, certainly wasn’t with my father and I don’t believe it was with Uncle Tom either. Bert was the successful brother, yes.

[18:26] One thing I didn’t ask you about your father and your mother I guess last time, was did they have any sort of political outlook at all?

My father, not strongly, my father was a member of the woodworkers’ union, whatever it would have been. My mother, no interest whatsoever, none whatever. Father, a union, a good union member in the sense that believed there needed to be some sort of representation of a working body. Not active in the sense of doing things, but just paid his dues, whatever they were I wouldn’t know, and then there was something called the Rechabites – what were the Rechabite… don’t know. He also paid money to some of the Rechabites and I think they were something to do with a trade union movement. Don’t know. Don’t know. But certainly not

Sir John Charnley Page 42 C1379/30 Track 3 strong politically other than a feeling that he… ah, I wonder whether the Rechabites was some sort of insurance, like a health insurance scheme. He certainly paid into something of that sort, I don’t know. But I wasn’t familiar with those things in family life, they were just words to me in those days. Don’t know.

[20:09] The other member of your family I was going to ask you about as well was your Nana who you mentioned was important to you, but you didn’t… You mentioned that your Nana was important to you, but you didn’t mention why. I was just wondering what part she actually played in your upbringing?

She was always there, lived not very far away. However, when I was very, very tiny we lived with her, we lived in the same house in Shrewsbury Road, as it was. And… she lived longer than my mother. Oh… yes, yes, yes. And so she was about after my mother had gone. Yes, that’s right, because she’s on one of those pictures when my father married again, Nana was there. Yes, yes, yes, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

What sort of person was she?

Pardon?

What sort of person was she?

North country, Workington, Cumbria, big lady. She had these two daughters: my mother and my Auntie Annie; they were sisters, and the three of them – she lived, my Nana lived in Woolton and would visit one of her two daughters on a fairly regular process on a Friday afternoon and there would be this nattering of these three women that went on long after I got home from school. And Nana used to still, until very late in life, would catch a bus to her own place in Woolton, Woolton being five miles away maybe, where she had a little flat of her own, looked after herself. Looked after herself almost until she died. Yes. And very soft, loving, pleasant, attentive, caring person, as far as I was concerned. Someone that would talk with me with interest in what I was doing, whatever it might be, whether it was school or cricket or playing. ‘What have you been up to John, what have you been doing? Come on, tell me.’ Lot of love for

Sir John Charnley Page 43 C1379/30 Track 3 her, bless her. And some of that certainly was passed down to my mother because she was physically similar.

[24:10]

The other, my mother’s sister, other daughter, different person altogether. Different in build, different in outlook, different in manner. And her, Auntie Annie’s eldest daughter was my cousin Jean, same age as me, now living in Canada. And then there was, the next one down was Maureen and then Reg, and then Lorna and then Stella.

These are all your cousins?

These are all my cousins. Four girls and a boy.

Did you see much of your cousins when you were growing up?

See much of them? Saw quite a bit of Jean, my age. She won a scholarship to a girls’ school, as did Maureen, the next one. Reg, I don’t know that Reg didn’t... either of the other girls, don’t know, lost touch with them, I don’t know. But with Jean I used to [laughs] coach her in mathematics. Although we were the same age I was used as someone who knew a bit more about maths than Jean did and I would go and see her or she would come to me and we’d run through some maths together, whatever it was she was doing – geometry, algebra, arithmetic, trig. These were things that were very easy for me at the standard that she had a bit of difficulty with, so I would help in that sense. Some of the photographs that I’ve got, I’ve got when Maureen visited us. Maureen was a lively lass, a lively girl; into music, into dancing, into flinging herself around, always good for a laugh, always good for a laugh. Reg went to some sort of grammar school, I can’t remember which, in Liverpool, and he then went – sorry, let me go back because, important. My Auntie Annie, she was married to Uncle Reg and Uncle Reg was a cook going to sea. He was at sea, he was away a lot of the time and he was a chef on a ship and the ship, sorry, the line was the Blue Funnel Line out of Liverpool and they operated very much around China, Singapore, Hong Kong and down to Australia in those oceans. So he was away long periods of time. When he came home – he was a very quiet man – and when he came home there’d be oh, high jinks from the rest of us, Uncle Reg is home, you know, and daughter Maureen would be dancing around and just entertaining everyone, music. Uncle Reg

Sir John Charnley Page 44 C1379/30 Track 3 would be in the kitchen cooking the food for whatever it was we were going to have, and taking no part in the family affair, but just [laughs]… and my Auntie Annie would tease him no end because, ‘Don’t you do enough cooking at work? Why do you want to cook here?’ ‘Don’t you worry’ he said, ‘you get on, you get on’. You know, ‘Let me be, I’m happy cooking’. But she did have a hard life in the sense that he was away so much and it seemed as if every time he came home there was another baby, sort of. So there was a growing family with Uncle Reg not part of it. Different arrangement from my family altogether.

You mentioned that your auntie’s broad outlook differed from your mother’s as well.

It would be, it was. It was.

How?

Oh, the difference in just size of families, essentially. Auntie Annie’s bringing up a big family, mother and dad had me, and that would be about it. I can’t think of other reasons. They got on well together, my mum and Auntie Annie, and Nana was in the background of these two whilst all of this was going on. But quite different family life. These youngsters that I’m speaking of, the family, the younger ones, I think, I don’t know whether they went any further than the Victoria Road school that we spoke of on the last occasion, that we’d all been to up to age fourteen. I can remember Jean and Maureen going to a so-called grammar school, a good grammar school for girls in Liverpool, through scholarships. Lorna might have done. I don’t think Reg did and I don’t think Stella did, but I couldn’t be sure.

[31:03] How was your staying on at school seen in the family?

No thought at all I don’t think. No, no, just… oh I suppose you’d… yeah. I suppose you’d – and this is a terrible thing for me to say – John was the bright one, John was the bright one and therefore it wasn’t a surprise really that he should stay on at school longer than any of the others on either side. I think I can almost hear my Auntie Annie, saying our John, yeah, yeah, he’s clever. I don’t know. What was meant by that, I wouldn’t know, don’t ask me to explain. We were all, our Jean, our John, our Maureen, just a family phrase. But our John was clever. So in

Sir John Charnley Page 45 C1379/30 Track 3 that sense I don’t think it’s surprise that I stayed on. I was not aware of any feeling whatsoever, either by my cousins or my aunt or any of them that I was treated differently. No way, no way.

You mentioned that you were, was it head boy of your school or head boy of your house?

Both. Yeah.

How did…

That’s in a way, we’re talking now of, oh of… I went to the school in ’33, 1933, in September and I was just eleven, or was I ten, I don’t remember. This is where the actual dates mean things. It was in the early part of September and the school year beginning. Doesn’t matter. And so matric and school certificate, they were four years later. That’s right, they were ’37, 1937 and then I stayed on for two years till ’39 and then stayed on the extra year for scholarships, which took me into 1940 when I got the scholarship to the university. Now, I would have been head of the house I would think, certainly not before matric, so it would have been ’37, ’38, I would have been sixteen or seventeen. Yeah, damn it.

[34:23] What does the head of a house do?

It’s not a boarding house at all, it’s nothing of that sort, it wasn’t a boarding school. What did the head of the house do? Organises the entries into the inter-house competition within the school. The four houses: Prince’s, Stanley, Sefton and City, and competitive between the four houses in all the sports: rugby, cricket - we didn’t play football - rugby, cricket, chess, music, drama, that sort of thing. And they would be competitive through the school and head of house would be encouraging house members if they were, say they were, you know, good at – take rugby – if you saw someone who was bright and you could earmark them as someone that you should keep in mind as a member of the house team that was going to play in the inter-house competitions and encourage. And the smooth running of the house as well, because there was this competitive element through the running of the school, I would say, which something that I could react to and work with very easily.

Sir John Charnley Page 46 C1379/30 Track 3

Were you a competitive child when you were growing up? Were you a competitive child when you were growing up?

… It’s not the same point, almost the same, I like to win, if that’s being competitive, and if I could see a way to win through a bit harder work, of doing a bit more of one sort or another, practising or whatever, then I would do that. If I speak of, we had music but the headmaster was a keen musician so one of the house competitions was music and that divided into certainly piano, a choir, the piano and violin for instance. Those two I can… I don’t know that it went any further than that. And to improve the chances of the house getting more points for their music I worked very hard on the violin because it seemed as if we were weak as a house on the violin compared with what you could see in the other houses, and although I wasn’t very good on the violin, to me we could do better if I worked a bit harder. Don’t know, I’m wandering on a bit now, obviously, but that sort of thing. You were encouraging other people of the house who had an ability for something, you were encouraging them to promote that talent that they had, or put it the other way, make sure it wasn’t wasted. Head of school was very different.

[39:00] How so?

Oh, because of the war and evacuating and all that that brought with it.

When were you…

Until… I was head prefect in the year before Higher School Certificate, which was the final year before I stayed on. Had I left rather than staying on to take scholarships, I would have been head boy for that final year. As it was, I was head boy for that final year, so when war started in September ’39, I’d been head boy for twelve months so that I was in that position to help with the school leaving Liverpool and going to Anglesey. I’d already been doing the job of head boy for twelve months. And head boy ran the prefects, he was the head prefect – boys – there was a head girl that looked after the girls. But there were about eight or nine prefects I guess, that sort of number, and it was just running that sort of number of other people with duties of working with the staff at mealtimes, for instance, clearing out the school at the end of the afternoon and generally - the school was a basement and two storeys – so you had prefects earmarked for looking after each of the three areas, three levels and you, you rotated the prefects so that they

Sir John Charnley Page 47 C1379/30 Track 3 were moving between the three levels successively rather than getting stuck at one sort of level. So they all got a better understanding of what was going on in the school, I thought. And they were just there for maintaining discipline, would be as good as anything. If youngsters are making a hell of a row or shouting or running around like mad things, then it was the job of the prefects to take care of that, one way or another.

Were there any privileges with being a prefect?

Well, the way in which it then operated was that they, any misdemeanours they reported to me as the head prefect, and we then had regular, I don’t know how frequently – fortnightly, no more frequent than that – meetings where all the prefects gathered together after school one evening when there was a review of the misdemeanours and we took a judgement collectively on how serious it was, whether it was of a nature where a model should be made, whether it was the sort of thing which we would recommend to, or I would recommend to a master that there should be a detention given or whatever, a punishment of some sort. We did have the authority to smack over the backside with a gym shoe of sorts, which very, very, very seldom used. I think in, and I can’t remember now, I think I can only remember once, twice, maybe at the most, and I can’t remember for what. But generally it was a detention of staying in after school or – it couldn’t be a Saturday, we used to work Saturday mornings – Wednesday afternoon was sports and for that we worked on the Saturday mornings. Gosh, it’s a long time ago. Blimey.

How important do you think the prefects were to the running of the school?

Very. And as I said, I think last time, certainly when we were away from Liverpool, we weren’t in Anglesey very long to get ourselves really organised, but in Cardigan down in South Wales, then yes, they were this important link between the boys and the masters in, again, the behaviour of the youngsters around the town, where previously that didn’t concern us in Liverpool. It was the behaviour of the youngsters in the school itself. When we were away it was much more making sure that they were not being a nuisance to the local school and the local people who were being so kind to us. And the headmaster made it very clear that my job was to help the staff through the prefects in making sure that we didn’t create a nuisance, any more of a nuisance than we had to in Cardigan and the townspeople who were taking care of us.

[46:03]

Sir John Charnley Page 48 C1379/30 Track 3

When were you exactly evacuated?

When?

When.

September ’39, immediately.

How did it happen?

How did it happen? I can remember being told to… what negotiation went on between the school and my parents as to whether they agreed I should go, I don’t know. I imagine there was something of that sort, I don’t know. But I can remember... I don’t even remember either of my parents coming to see me off.

How did you travel?

I remember going to Lime Street Station, turning up at Lime Street Station having got there on a tram with a suitcase. Someone must have been with me, I guess. With a case, anyway, and being met by the school and having a gasmask planted around my neck, a cardboard box, no training on the use of it at all, it was just slung around your neck and you got on with helping organise the rest of the school into the coaches, so many to each coach, and then the fighting that took place as to who was going to travel with di-da-di-da-di-da, remember that well enough on the platform. And off we went to Anglesey. And what sort of agreement had been reached by my parents that I was going, because not everyone went, particularly amongst the girls. A lot of the girls, I imagine their parents felt that it wasn’t right for the girls to be going away in this way. And one of them was indeed Mary; she wasn’t evacuated at all. Her guardian decided that she should stay behind and those who were left behind, the boys went to one of the other Liverpool schools, the Collegiate, and the girls went out to a school in the suburbs. Forgotten its name, but it wasn’t an easy school for Mary to get to, but there we are, that was it. What was the name of it, don’t know, out… don’t know. Out in the suburbs. Not very far from where I lived or where my parents lived. But we hadn’t got to the stage yet where she has been home with me, we weren’t on those sort of terms. That didn’t happen really until I was at university. What was the name of the school? Doesn’t matter. The boys went to the Collegiate, those that didn’t come,

Sir John Charnley Page 49 C1379/30 Track 3 that weren’t evacuated, and the girls went to this other place and I’ve a feeling it begins with an ‘A’, but I don’t know. It’ll maybe come next time.

[50:33] Where were you evacuated to?

Where? Llangefni, which is in the middle of Anglesey. Again, a co-ed school there and being head boy I suppose I got very good digs. There were two of us; Bob Harrod – and I’ve got photographs of he and I at this place with the daughter of the house, little girl – and the owner of the house was the local town clerk. Spoke Welsh very well. What was his name?

[mic noise]

Do you mind not covering your mic up?

Sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

Can move it to the other side if you prefer.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. No, correct. His name will come to me as I start talking or thinking about it. Small town and as you entered the town in the high street, single street pretty well, was then, don’t know what it is… was then, and the school on the left-hand side at the bottom of a hill and you climbed up the hill and on the top of the hill, again on the left-hand side was this double-fronted, quite large, very nice house that was big enough to take two strapping seventeen year old, or thereabouts, youngsters – Harrod and myself. What was the name of the man? His sister, who happened to be there but didn’t live there, Myfanwy Howell by name, she was, and she was in Welsh broadcasting in some way or another. And his name nearly came to me then. [pause]

What sort of welcome did you actually get from your billet family?

Very friendly, very warm, very welcoming to Harrod and myself. This was not the case with some of the youngsters, I can say that. But to Myfanwy and her brother, certainly gave us a very warm welcome. Water was a problem in that town and certainly a problem on – we were on, as I

Sir John Charnley Page 50 C1379/30 Track 3 say, the top of a hill – and Harrod and I used to take turns in pumping up water for the house to use. Where it came from, whether there was an underground reservoir for the whole town, of which we were just… I don’t know, I don’t know. But we certainly used to pump water for use in the house. And that’s significant. Was his name Gregor? Doesn’t ring a bell probably. Anyway.

[54:56]

And we were settling down I suppose. We used the school on alternate… don’t know, don’t know. I’m trying to get to what happened on the Saturday, Saturday morning. Again, we played sports on Saturday afternoon and we went… there was certainly one Saturday morning when we had use of the school. And on that Saturday night the school burnt down. Now the actual burning down of the school took place in the night and Villtor knocked on my bedroom door and Bob Harrod’s too and she was shouting loudly, come on boys, you know, down to the school, get up, the school’s on fire. And the three of us tore into clothes, tore down the hill and yeah, it wasn’t… it didn’t look too serious, but one end of the school was certainly alight and going well. The local fire brigade had been called and it was unbelievable. Now after coming from Liverpool, this fire brigade turned up and it was a hand pump affair, a double action and it needed two people, one on either end to pump this water, which was recognised as a problem. And Harrod and I got on the… we had all the prefects certainly around, the village was there, and I can remember pumping hard, to the point where we ran out of water, nothing more to pump, so the school burnt. And what had been at just one end of the school then spread over the rest. Nothing more could be done about it. There was then, two things had to happen: one, we had to go somewhere else in the aftermath of it all, there was the enquiry as to how it had happened, and the end of the school that had been burning when we first appeared certainly was the end in which housed the chemi lab and the suggestion was that an experiment had been left in the lab going over the weekend and had been left by whoever was using the lab on the Saturday morning, and that was us, whichever one of us I don’t know. But it was certainly alleged that the Liverpool boys had left an experiment going which then led to the blazing of the school. And within a couple of days we were in the train again going down to South Wales, as a school. And there was no love lost between North Wales and South Wales and the locals in North Wales, in Llangefni, pretty well said, you know, it’ll serve you right for burning down our school, that you’re now going down there to those folk down in South Wales. It’ll serve you right.

Sir John Charnley Page 51 C1379/30 Track 3

How did the locals feel in North Wales about you burning down their school?

Not very happy at all. And I was later shown the report in the local newspaper about this evening, this weekend, which again, didn’t allocate, didn’t formally allocate, and I don’t know what happened about any sort of enquiry into the… I was never asked any more questions about it, we were now down, in south, in Cardigan in South Wales. I was never questioned about it. I didn’t think I had, I for one didn’t think I’d left any experiment going. I didn’t even remember doing an experiment in the chemi lab on that day, so I couldn’t, I certainly was not involved. But what sort of enquiry took place, I have no idea. And yet, it certainly hit the local newspaper headlines because some time later I saw a copy of what was said. But it does seem strange, doesn’t it? We were now getting on with our own business down in South Wales and whatever was going on in North Wales after our departure, I’ve no idea. No idea.

[1:01:41] Where were you actually sent to in South Wales?

The end of September. Oh where?

Where, sorry, yeah.

Cardigan. Cardigan. And that was at the end of September; we were only there three weeks or thereabouts, in North Wales, and down we went to Cardigan. Bigger town now altogether, same sort of thing; a local co-ed school; boys and girls, quite a big school, nice school in its own… This was, in both cases, but more so in Cardigan, we’d come from a school which was in the city centre of Liverpool, our sports field was way out in the suburbs, but now, in both of these places we’d gone to schools that had their sports field attached to them on site and it was so wonderful, you know, so wonderful for us city youngsters to have this facility on the spot. A rugby playing school, as you might imagine. And Harrod and I, Bob Harrod and I, again, very fortunate in being billeted on Mr Daniels, John Daniels, who ran a local garage in the town, Priory Street, Priory Street, and Mrs Daniels, Mrs Muriel Daniels was the daughter of a prominent local councillor, had been mayor at some stage, but a bit older now. But certainly she was very prominent in public life in Cardigan, whereas John Daniels was much more concerned with getting on with the job of running his garage, quite a big garage. And also ran the local bus

Sir John Charnley Page 52 C1379/30 Track 3 service; coaches buses, which operated over quite a wide area and included running a service of going round the villages and taking men to work at the top secret firing range at a place called Aberporth where guns were tested, firing out into Cardigan Bay. And Daniels ran essentially buses that went round the district. We used the school every other Saturday morning, we shared it with the locals, and on the Saturdays that I wasn’t at school I would go out on that bus to collect the fares as we went round the villages and dropped everyone at the entrance to this top secret firing range, Aberporth.

Did you know what was going on there?

Other than noise of bangs, guns, that was as far as… that was as far as I was concerned. No, didn’t know. It was just very, it was all very hush-hush. I don’t know whether I said this last time - later on I was responsible for it. No, strange. There we go, that’s the way it happens.

[1:06:03] How did you find the experience of being evacuated overall?

We came back the following Easter, Easter 1940, so we were away six months from the September through to the Easter, having been home for the Christmas holiday. And I think I mentioned last time about the rugby match and the dance at Christmastime. It… to me it was an extension of, I’d had twelve months as head prefect, head boy of the school beforehand and then this followed, and it was an extension of the whole process of being part of management and running, helping in the running of the school, in a major way now because you were in a different town altogether and you had a formal relationship with the masters to help the local people with this bunch of four or 500 youngsters who’d suddenly appeared from Liverpool. It was a period in national terms, it was the Phoney War period, that first six months when everyone thought it was going to be a disaster and nothing much happened, which is why we came back at the Easter. Which is when it all started, because you then got the Battle of Britain, summer 1940, through to this time of the year in 1940 and you got the bombing of Liverpool. We went back for that in that summer, we went back at the Easter. I can’t use the word enjoyed it. You’re away from home and that I missed, but I was very fortunate in having a very good landlord and landlady, very good indeed, and I learnt a lot from the movement. I learnt a lot from being away from home for a long time, no doubt about that.

Sir John Charnley Page 53 C1379/30 Track 3

What sort of things?

[pause] How to live with, how to mix with and how to live with people that you’d never met before. How to behave in that sort of society. You in your own house with the Daniels and they had a maid, Katie, that looked after, a nurse, a maid – she was a bit of both – that looked after Edward, the boy, youngster, young boy, four, five, something like that. And Katie was a big lass whose job it was to look after the house and to look after Edward. Now, I’d never met anyone that had a maid before. Never met a maid, never even thought about living in a house with a maid. Goodness me, no. So there was an eye-opener there in the relationship between Mrs Daniels and Katie and the way they organised things. But you then expand that into not just the local household but the town where we were flooding a town with a lot of youngsters, many of whom weren’t happy being away from home, many of whom wanted to go home, and yet the school was going on and there had to be arrangements to handle individual situations that came up. And we were mixed, we were boys and girls and there were boys and girls there already with their relationships, but there were things going on that made you a bit worried. I wouldn’t say on the sexual side maybe, but there were attractions developing, as you’d expect. You were conscious that things of that sort were developing and wondering what do you do and do you report this to a master, and so-and-so and so-and-so were seeing each other, a local girl and one of the boys from school. Is it healthy, where’s it going? It was growing up in a way in which I’d never expected to grow up at all. No way. At this stage conscription didn’t apply down to that sort of age, so that you, although some of your friends had volunteered back home who hadn’t been at your school or whatever, they were going, they were going away back in Liverpool. I was getting letters; so-and-so’s gone in the army, and suchlike, and you were conscious that this could happen when you got back home, whatever, whatever, whatever, that there was a war on somewhere, that you weren’t involved with and the expectation of it happening hadn’t happened, but could happen. So there was that sort of nervousness in the minds of a lot of people.

[1:13:41]

I was in my scholarship year and the school had decided that I should attempt a scholarship to Oxford. So in the December of 1939 when I was in Cardigan I made my way across to Oxford for a couple of days and took exams in – which college? On the river. My heart wasn’t in it, I have to say that, and I didn’t pass, I didn’t get it.

Sir John Charnley Page 54 C1379/30 Track 3

Why wasn’t your heart in it?

I was too involved in being away from home and helping run a school and I hadn’t worked hard enough for it because I didn’t think it was the right thing for me. I don’t know, again, what had happened between the school and my parents, I don’t know. I had a word with them. Don’t know how much I used the telephone. Certainly had a word with my father and said did he know that I was taking an exam for a scholarship to Oxford, and he said, ‘Yes, I do know John, I do know’. And that was about it. I’m sure he would have said, ‘Do you want to go?’ and I probably would have said, ‘I don’t know’. I certainly, I wasn’t looking forward to being evacuated, but I was certainly aware of my responsibilities I think in that sort of way. Now, I may be, it may have been that at the time I was attaching too much to them, but I felt I had quite a prominent part in helping run the school. And that was more on my mind than sitting a scholarship to Oxford. Because we’d got, you know, 400 youngsters away from home and a bunch of prefects, not all of whom had come with us, a bunch of prefects that you were then organising to help run the school in a new town.

Did the responsibility, you know, was that something that weighed heavily on you at all?

I think I have to say yes. Weighed heavily? It’s what I’m trying to say. I was conscious, I was very conscious of, in a strange sort of way, helping run the school, which I’d never expected to do. But there we are, that was it, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Do you think you gained anything from that experience?

Yes, I do, I do, I do, I do. I think, as I said earlier on, it’s part of my growing up, which led me to believe, rightly or wrongly, that it was one of the things I was quite good at, encouraging people to work with me and… nothing more to say. I could persuade people to work with me and I could persuade people to be organised by me, to be… there we are, I don’t know. It all sounds terrible doesn’t it? Sounds terrible.

No, not at all. It’s interesting.

[1:18:02]

Sir John Charnley Page 55 C1379/30 Track 3

How did you…

But certainly I… suddenly this happened and it was certainly part of a growing up that I never expected. Being away from home for over six months in that way, and then coming home in that Easter and now… [pause] We didn’t go back into our old school, Oulton. We went to a school, again on the outskirts, the Holt, and I don’t think our school ever opened again as a school. It became… like a sixth form college or an apprentice college for building work, I think, but I couldn’t be sure of that. But we never went back to the school. Mind you, I was only there for that term, that summer term in 1940. But I never went, I never went back to the school. I don’t think anyone did. I went to the Holt for a term. But now, again there was a settling down to be done, but we were back in Liverpool and I was now more conscious that I’d failed an exam I’d been put in for and there had been this discussion earlier on between the chemistry master and my parents as to whether they would be happy for me to stay on to go to university, and they’d made sacrifices so that could happen, and I now had the feeling I’d better get down and make sure it does happen. So then I concentrated then, from that Easter through to the month or so before the exams in making sure I would pass this time, and did. I’d already passed the exam the previous year, but I’d stayed on for this scholarship year which had been interrupted by the war in my funny little life. But now I was determined and got a Liverpool Senior City Scholarship. So in the September ’40 I then started at the university.

[1:21:30] What subject were you studying?

Engineering, civil engineering. Civil engineering. It was the nearest thing to the sort of… it was the nearest established course, if you like, the nearest thing to my father, my Uncle Tom in terms of the woodwork, the railways that he was on, and it was docks, it was the sort of thing that I could see had some sort of access to the sort of things that went on in Liverpool. That was as far as my thinking earlier on, my thinking hadn’t got any… two years previously, my thinking hadn’t got any further than leaving school and going to a normal job around the Port of Liverpool in some way or another. But now my thoughts had gone further, yeah, but not any further than still doing something associated with docks or harbours or railways or bridges. And that was it. So it was civil engineering that had courses in structures, hydraulics, materials, mathematics, mechanics, design. So we all had our boards. We were doing drawing,

Sir John Charnley Page 56 C1379/30 Track 3 engineering drawing. And that’s a fair sample. Labs where we did experiments. Big lab, big lab, beautiful.

Can you describe it?

A mass of different bits of working machinery, largely. Back to your thoughts about engines. We had several engines in there. And… I enjoyed the fieldwork associated with civil… surveying. And across the river… Better go back. Better go back.

[1:24:45]

In the years before that scholarship year at school, which essentially was the year of evacuation and taking the scholarship, but prior to that I’d done two years in the sixth form and got a Higher School Certificate, and up to that point I was doing a lot of cycling around the countryside; North Wales, the Lake District, Derbyshire, and as I might have mentioned before, that I was a keen, in the holidays certainly when I didn’t go on to a building site somewhere with my father, I’d go away on my own to a youth hostel somewhere and spend weekends away, weeks away. A ten hour trip took me a hundred miles and that got me into the Lakes and North Wales and Derbyshire, and then I would walk, dump the bike at a youth hostel and walk. And Mary, who would have the same holidays as I had, being at the same school, she would be on holiday, shall we say, summer, up to Cumberland where her guardian had family connections and we’d meet there. We’d now developed something of a relationship, nothing very permanent, but we were meeting each other, and we would walk together. She was a very good walker, we were walking fifteen miles, that sort of thing, without any problem at all. And that continued when I went to university in that year of ’40 and she, her guardian again, didn’t agree with her going to Anglesey to be evacuated and she’d now reached the point where her guardian decided that she wanted Mary to – and I don’t know how this happened – to follow some sort of profession within the medical world. And the choice was made, I don’t know how, that she’d take up radiography. And so now I’m at university and she’s across in Leeds, at Leeds General Infirmary on a two-year course to be a radiographer. And so now there is ample opportunity for me to be cycling into the Lakes where her guardian has now gone up there and is living on a farm. So Mary goes up to see her guardian, or she comes across to Derbyshire or into the Pennines and I meet her. So now this relationship is certainly flourishing between the two of us.

Sir John Charnley Page 57 C1379/30 Track 3

[1:28:29] How did you first meet?

At school. Yeah? We were in the same house. I was running the house and she was in Prince’s, as I say, as a prefect. I think I said last time we had this privilege of using the staircase that normally was reserved for the girls and the girl prefects had the privilege of using the scruffy set of stairs that was normally the boys’. And because we were in the same house, then we did house things together: music, singing, choirs, whatever, whatever. She played piano a little bit, I played violin a little bit, but you met on those occasions. Classes. Some classes were mixed and others weren’t. Now I don’t know why that was, don’t know, don’t know. Don’t know.

What did you like about her?

Her appearance. No doubt about that. She was an out-of-doors girl. As I say, we went walking together, enjoyed that. Her appearance. Her interests were similar to mine insofar as one went down that particular path in conversation or whatever, through the school. No. An obvious sexual attraction, that must be said, I guess. To me she was very attractive. And wanted to see more of her, wanted to know her out of school more and, yeah. I must ask the lass… that was her bridesmaid when we were married, Elsie, still in Liverpool, I must ask Elsie that question. What did Mary think of me, perhaps? Did she talk with her about it? I don’t know.

What do you think Mary did see in you?

Oh, Lord above. [pause] At age eleven she’d had this disaster of losing both her parents. She had then been adopted, sort of, by a guardian who was a Quaker and although she had great respect for Dr Pugmire for what she’d done for Mary - I don’t think we’ve ever… Mary Paden was her name – P-A-D-E-N – and although she had this great respect, I don’t think there was any real love either way, from Pugmire to Paden or Paden to Pugmire. And I think when I appeared on the scene this girl was looking for some stability from someone and some love, I guess. I’m using that in the broadest sense, and I don’t mean sexual love in that sense at all, she was looking for stability, comfort. And maybe in what she’d seen at school or heard at school or whatever, and that’s why Elsie might have a view on this, she thought I might be the sort of person to provide it. Can’t answer it any more, any differently from that. I don’t know what was… I don’t know. I could almost put the question to you from having two sessions of this sort from me,

Sir John Charnley Page 58 C1379/30 Track 3 what would you expect a sixteen, seventeen, eighteen year old girl to see in me. I don’t know. I don’t know what girls are looking for. Don’t know. She wasn’t, and never was, a highly sexed person, that’s for sure. So I don’t know. Other than we did get on very well together. And at Leeds, Leeds General Infirmary, her friend there was a girl called Joyce, Joyce Barnaby - God! - who’d already got a maths degree and was now studying radiography and so she was a bit older than Mary and I can remember meeting Joyce. I can’t remember the occasion, when I went across to Leeds for a dance or something and met Joyce and Joyce making remarks like, ‘Oh, you’re John Charnley are you?’ ‘You’re the reason why Mary always seems so much happier after she’s been to see you’. ‘You’ve had a weekend together in the Lakes or in the Pennines walking and she comes away from that always much brighter, much happier, and you’re the reason.’ Don’t know. Don’t know. But, from the word go, as far as I was concerned, there was never anyone else, other than the head girl down in Cardigan. [laughs] No, that’s naughty. No, no, no. And there had been another, a boyfriend with Mary before me, a chap called Harold Newton. He’d been at the school, he’d been the head prefect before I was. So she obviously had an eye on head prefects. But… and it was always a matter between us. I used to tease her about it. And he did get a scholarship and went… he started at - he was two years ahead of me and started at Oxford and then was called up and went into the Royal Engineers. He was the same sort of background as me. Anyway, that’s off the point really.

[1:37:14] How much did you see each other when you were both at uni in different places?

Not a lot. Not a lot. I very seldom, I can remember this one occasion when I went over there. We met in the Pennines. There’s a particular youth hostel that we liked, can’t remember its name. She was never a very great cyclist and I was. She would come across to functions at Liverpool from Leeds. And at this stage she’d now been home with me at some… I don’t know the why and wherefore of it.

Home with you to meet your parents do you mean?

Yeah, yeah. At some stage after I’d started at university and she was in Leeds, she’d come across for some function or another and was staying with her guardian in a place called Holt Road where her guardian had her practice, her doctor’s practice, surgery, and… I was taking her to the cinema, a place called the Abbey, the Abbey Cinema. Something like midway between

Sir John Charnley Page 59 C1379/30 Track 3 where she was living and where I was living in Springwood. And she was much closer to the city centre and indeed, when she’d been at the Oulton she used to walk to school. It was a mile, a mile and a half, something like that, but she was a walker, no doubt about that at all, and a very good walker. That’s why we met and went walking. But… [phone ringing]

[end of track 3]

Sir John Charnley Page 60 C1379/30 Track 4

[Track 4]

You were mentioning a trip to the Abbey Theatre in Liverpool. What happened?

Yes. Yes, yes, yes. It’s… it’s part, in my life it’s part of the bombing of Liverpool, which started in… I was evacuated to be away whilst Liverpool was bombed, when the whole country was going to be bombed in 1939, but I came back in the summer of 1940 and then started university in the September of 1940 and I think I’ve mentioned earlier that I helped my father dig a dug-out, a particular form of bomb-proof shelter for use at home.

Anderson shelter?

An Anderson shelter, that’s right, exactly. And spent evenings with my mother down there when my father was fire-watching, that sort of thing. Now as well as that, let’s think a little bit about that influence on my life at that time. And I suppose I could think of three things. One, a meeting with Mary and the cinema that we’ve just spoken about, the Abbey Cinema. Secondly, at university being recruited by the local bomb people to help dig people out of ruins. And thirdly, yeah, okay, okay. So, Abbey Cinema. On some occasion, I don’t exactly know why, I think Mary was at Leeds and had come across for some function at the university. I can’t be more specific than that. And she did come across, we went to dances together at the university. I mentioned earlier that how keen we were on dancing. She would come across and we’d go dancing. And I can remember on one occasion arranging to take her to the cinema which was something like halfway between where she lived with Dr Pugmire in Holt Road and where I lived with my parents in Springwood. And those two places would be four miles apart, perhaps, that sort of thing. And the Abbey would be a cinema roughly between the two. And I can’t remember what the film was, but we agreed, or she agreed that we would meet at the Abbey one evening and this we did and in the middle of the performance, the cinema, the siren went for an air raid. That closed everything down, all out of the cinema. Noises overhead and I was now going to see her home, a couple of miles, walking. No other transport now, everything stopped. Pitch black, everything stopped and we started walking, quickly to get her home. And some way… and along the route there was an air raid shelter for quite a number of people. I think it was associated with a school, and that was the sort of halfway house that we could think in terms. And lo and behold we were not very far away from it when there was the screeching of these whistling bombs that as they came down screamed and whistled to put the fear of God up

Sir John Charnley Page 61 C1379/30 Track 4 you, and they did. Because you thought, is that coming to me, is that ours, has that got our name on it. And rather than hang around we just darted into, it was either a bit of a bush, a bit of a shrubbery and doesn’t it sound silly, what protection did that give you, other than you did something. And there was a loud bang not very far away and it turned out the following day that that particular air raid shelter had been struck with everyone inside killed. So, how very, very lucky we were not to have made that particular shelter. That’s a very definite memory I have, in fact we both had for the rest of our… how lucky we were.

Does having a near miss like that affect you in any way?

I don’t think so. I don’t think so. Other than, so much is chance. You know, it’s not something over which you have any control whatsoever, it can happen. And I don’t think I have analysed it any sense, other than it was with us. I got her home and Dr Pugmire had nothing to say, other than oh good, she’s home, I can remember that, and that was it. And she was indoors and I then set about the four miles’ walk back home. It wasn’t very long before the air raid, the all clear went, so at least that was off my mind, but it was still quite a walk home. Fortunately I don’t remember it raining or anything of that sort. I don’t even remember what time of year it was, whether it was bitterly cold, don’t know. I don’t think it could have been otherwise I would have remembered it. There’s a negative in there somewhere. So no, don’t think it affected us in any other way than you can do your best with things but chance can ruin everything. There’s more chance of it doing that if there’s a bombing raid.

[06:28]

Number two is, follows that sort of thing. At university, there was obviously bombing going on after I’d started at uni… that 1940 summer, because I can remember cycling to university and being diverted by the police into different ways of getting there because there were unexploded bombs and suchlike that they’d got streets cordoned off, not down here, di-da-di-da. But, at the same time, I can remember occasions when you did get there, you found that instead of having lectures, you were being marshalled into groups to go into different areas that had been bombed to help dig and look for people who might still be alive. And certainly remember that sort of thing happening. Tearing away, literally with your bare hands, rubble where you, did I hear something, was it human, was it a dog, was that a sign? Not that I ever did find anyone, but certainly that experience is there, again with a lasting memory of Liverpool being bombed. And

Sir John Charnley Page 62 C1379/30 Track 4 thirdly, and this more of a joke in a way, that part of our job as engineers, we had been designated to fire-watch at the women’s hall of residence in Princes Park, nice hall of residence. And so we had a roster set up whereby we’d take it in turns to spend the night on the roof or near the roof of this building looking for things that might happen or whatever. Nothing did happen, we were very fortunate in that sense. It never was bombed, but you could always tell the following morning who had been on duty that night because they were still half asleep. They hadn’t got much sleep in the ladies’ hall of residence. I’ve no idea what they were up to. [laughs] There we go. So…

Was it seen as proper, having engineers in the ladies’ hall of residence?

Absolutely. I don’t know, the medicals were somewhere else and you see at this stage now, university life was completely different and lots of youth, men principally, were already being called up or were already away serving. Dominance of women around the place, no doubt about that. And I can remember we still played a bit of rugby, but the rugby team was made up principally of medicals and engineers. Even the science people didn’t seem to have the same reservation, being reserved as we did, because we were on, the engineers were on this deal that you’d agreed to that you could finish your course and then you’d go into REME, the Royal Electrical Mechanical Engineers, and you knew that that was going to happen. So you were reserved and then, why it was thought you’d make a better officer if you knew a bit about engineering, I can see a bit of logic there maybe, but certainly it meant that we were on the campus. The only other really people on the campus were the medicals and it was our joke with them that they just failed their exams each year, so they stayed on the campus, and so the university rugby team of the day consisted almost entirely of failed medicals and engineers who were designated to finish their course and go into the army. [laughs] Can laugh about it now, but certainly, the odd occasional… there were no English, no historical, no moderns at all, no Greats at all in the university at that stage. Different life altogether. They had no prospect of not being called up in the way that medicals and engineers had these particular circumstances. So there we are, that’s a little aside in the way in which university life at the time was completely different from anything that you might think now, and of course I was living at home. I never did leave home for… the first time I left home in that sense had been when I was evacuated for six months away from home and then more seriously in 1943, the beginning of ’43 when I was sent down to Farnborough.

Sir John Charnley Page 63 C1379/30 Track 4

You mentioned a couple of interesting things in passing I’d just like to pick up on and expand on a little bit. The dominance of women at university – in what respect?

Just about the place. As I say, that principally there were women still going to university and there weren’t men, it’s as simple as that.

What about on the engineering course?

No, no women at all. None whatever. There were women doctors, women in medicals, yeah, yeah, they were about. But we didn’t have any women in engineering.

Did that strike you as strange at all?

Didn’t give it a thought at the time, didn’t give it a thought. No, no. I don’t think one thought in those terms in the early forties. At least, other people might have done, I didn’t at all. Didn’t strike me as odd. No, no.

My other question was on… sorry?

We had… I don’t know whether it was the image that went with engineering or whether we had to do it to compete with these wretched medicals that just seemed to go on and on year after year, but we were a crude, hard drinking bunch when I look back, well even at the time when you weren’t at your lectures you were playing cards. Sometimes some people who had more money than me, for money. But I didn’t get mixed up with that, but there were card schools going on, yeah. Yeah.

[14:35] You mentioned a few little bits in passing there, like the rugby, like the card schools, what would social life consist of for you as an engineering student?

An extension of school. I was living at home, I was driving in, I was cycling in to work each day, just as I had done at school. The difference now, you maybe weren’t cycling the same way each day, for reasons I’ve explained. If there’d been some aerial activity overnight you could well find that no longer did you go the normal route. So the social life as such just didn’t exist.

Sir John Charnley Page 64 C1379/30 Track 4

There were occasions, very occasions, once a term – if terms existed, and they didn’t because you worked through the summer, you worked the vacations so that the three-year course was cut down for us as engineers to two terms, two years and one term, which meant that you knew you were going to finish at the Christmas of 1942 rather than the summer of 1943, because you worked the two terms in between. And so university life didn’t exist in the way in which one thinks of it these days. There were people, there was a men’s halls of residence, in fact there were two of them. Yeah, there were two of them. And so within the university, within the engineering school there were people from Cumberland – Dyson came from Cumberland – there was a chap from the Isle of Man, a chap from Ireland. No-one from the south at all. It was all very much more a north country atmosphere. I don’t know what it’s like now, mind you, but it certainly was with us. And so it was… and occasionally there would be these dances when you’d find a lot of women dancing together because there weren’t the men. I never thought anything of that either, of how significant that might be. No. Wouldn’t even have any suspicions of it. It was just a fact of the fact that the men weren’t about. And then we played rugby, as I say, and cricket. Yeah, yeah. And I was fortunate in that respect because the university cricket grounds were not far from where I lived in Springwood. So that was easy. But I didn’t play cricket representing the university. I had games of cricket up there, but not representing the university in the way in which I did for rugby.

[18:16] How much time was there for a social life at university? What was the workload like?

This depended on you, as perhaps it should at university, but certainly there were those of us who thought we were very fortunate in being reserved for a year or two until we qualified and then went to do our little bit for Queen and country, King or whatever it was. Be King and country at the time wouldn’t it? Yeah. And as such we worked. There were others who perhaps were a little more fortunate than we were, perhaps financially in social strata who regarded it as a means of avoiding the services for a couple of years and as such these were the sort of group that you’d find playing cards seriously. But in the main, it was a bunch of chaps who thought they were privileged to have been reserved to complete an education in that sense, albeit at the end of it you might find yourself just being knocked off and the whole thing of no value whatsoever. That was the thought that was in my mind anyway, certainly. Yeah, I’m privileged still to be here and not out there with some of my chums from school and from my district, because now I was at eighteen, nineteen, call up age.

Sir John Charnley Page 65 C1379/30 Track 4

Did you ever think about joining up?

No, I was in the cadet corps at the university. I was promoted to the rank of lance corporal – how about that? And so we were doing that sort of thing and although we were working the summer holidays, we did have weekends away in North Wales. I can remember going on two occasions to Harlech and crawling around on my tummy with a rifle on a range when at the end of which you were expected to pop off five rounds or something and see where they were on a target. So that was there as well as working those holidays, we were doing that. And what was it? Not the cadet corps, something like that. Don’t know. You see, you had the chance of the university air squadron that was running. It had no appeal for me at all, no, no appeal whatsoever. No, I was straight army. Even the navy had no attraction although there we were in Liverpool. No, the Army Cadet Corps. ACC, that’s it. That’s what we were. So as far as I was concerned – I can’t speak for other people – I was going into the army at the end of the course, meanwhile I was doing my bit in the ACC and again, to the point where I’d obviously satisfied someone and I was promoted to be a lance corporal. We had regular sergeants training us, we did all the usual things that you do in early training of running around with packs on your back and, as I say, crawling around at Harlech. We had army PT instructors putting us through it in the gym, so all of that was going on and to me it was not something I was dictated, someone else was saying that they wanted me to get a degree and go into engineering and meanwhile you were doing this. Now that made sense to me at the day.

[23:21] Had the choice of civil engineering been your choice?

Yes, yes, yes. Who else might you think it might have… my father, my mother or what?

No, no, I was wondering if, you know, was it something you were directed to based on your skills or was that…

No, if that’s the question, no, no, no. It was me. It was me. [pause] As the nearest university course to the sort of thing of my family background, sort of thing, which is a strange thing to say maybe, but yeah, that was it. There was something about it that… something appealed to me and at the end of… in the three-year course, as I say, the tuition, the lectures were still, although it

Sir John Charnley Page 66 C1379/30 Track 4 was two years and a term, in essence it was still done as three years because you worked two summer holidays which occupied a term. So at the end of the first year you’d now decided that you were… I think - oh gosh – I think the first year was a general engineering, you only made your selection at the end of the first year when the university itself had sorted out the men from the boys, if you like, where they’d come from different schools, different part of the country, different backgrounds and they had now got a stable… and they then, not decided which branch of engineering, that was for you, but they then decided end of year one or was it – don’t know – in their view you were going for an advanced, a higher degree or whether you were just going for an ordinary degree. And if you went for a higher degree then you joined the chaps in the maths department that were studying maths, because as far as the university was concerned, if you were going for a higher degree in engineering, it was essential that you knew your way around maths.

Which way did you go?

I went up and enjoyed maths with the maths boys, and there weren’t many of them. And there were girls, that’s where you met the girls when you were… yeah, yeah, that’s right, when you joined up with one or two, for some reason, why there were still maths people, I don’t know, but there were certainly girls reading maths and several of we engineers joined those people who were formally reading maths because we had been selected to go for a higher degree rather than an ordinary degree.

So the first part of your degree then, was this the basic background in engineering stuff?

Yeah, yeah.

You mentioned structures, hydraulics, material, all that stuff there.

All of that sort of stuff. Electrics, you did electrics, you did geology, you did… it was a general introduction to the sort of courses that you’d then become specific later on.

And then from the end of the first year you switched to maths, or was there still that engineering…?

Oh no, the engineering was still there. The maths was like a couple of courses a week.

Sir John Charnley Page 67 C1379/30 Track 4

So it’s just sort of extra maths with what you would have been doing on the… right.

I could call it advanced maths if you wish, just that extra maths. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which subject did you like best out of all this mix?

I think I have to say the surveying, which led me in the civil… I’d always been fascinated by maps, that’s something which maybe hasn’t come across, maps had always interested me and reading maps, looking at maps, understanding maps of any sort, whether I was cycling and therefore needed a knowledge, or whether I was walking. I’m able to, when Mary and I were walking in the Lake District on one occasion the weather was foul, absolutely foul, thick rain and terrible visibility, and we just made our way by walking from cairn to cairn and shouting to each other. She’d be at that cairn, I’d be here, we’d shout to each other, I’d catch her up and then we’d go on and look for the next cairn, it was as thick as that. And you were conscious that over there on the right somewhere was a scarp and that you had to watch very carefully, so the map said, and boy that scarp was a lot closer, or I was a lot closer to that edge than I should have been without any doubt, in those sort of conditions. I remember that very clearly. And I had a little compass, but didn’t seem to be doing me very… anyway. So surveying was a strong interest, and structures. Not electrical really and not any mechanical - engines, no. Maps, certainly. But as I think we will probably get to, that when I was interviewed at the end of the course as to joining REME, I was asked three questions: one – sorry. The interviewer, two men, had obviously spoken with the staff and the point made was we understand that you are good at structures, or interested in structures, and I said yes. That you’re interested… hydraulics. Yes. Then have you heard of a place called Farnborough? No. So you’ll be there after Christmas. That was it.

[31:07] Did you get any say in the matter?

No. Not one, not one. No, not at all.

Were you expecting to be diverted from a typical REME career at all?

Sir John Charnley Page 68 C1379/30 Track 4

I expected to go into REME and go into the services. REME was being formed that November. We all knew that, that’s why we’re all designated to be part of it. But instead of that, and lots of the, in particular the electricals went into REME, but one or two went in Admiralty Research Establishment and I went essentially into the Aircraft Research at Farnborough along with another chap, Tom Prescott, that came from – in fact I think there were three of us – Tom Prescott, Alan Hodgkinson, both of whom read civil, and myself went to Farnborough, were sent there. And neither of the other two… oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Hodgkinson didn’t last very long at Farnborough, as soon as the end of the war came he got out and went… I don’t know what he did. But Tom Prescott stayed and his career and mine overlapped again later on as we’ll no doubt see or hear in due course.

How did you greet the prospect of being sent down to Farnborough?

Initially, a concern that it looked as if I’d got a good chance of surviving the war where a lot of my chums and pals hadn’t, and did I like that or did I think that, could I persuade myself that someone knew better and that I was going to serve – damn it all, it sounds terrible doesn’t it – serve my country by doing that than by going into the REME. And it sounds, it does sound so dramatic now doesn’t it, but your thoughts were, damn it, we could be invaded at some stage, that we really do, there is a need seriously to pull your weight and do your little bit for your country. And this was, the thought immediately was, I’m lucky. Do I like that, do I want that to happen, but I am lucky in that I’ve got a good chance of surviving. It was now the end of ’42 when this interview took place, so there was still a lot of fighting to be done, but there was in my mind a feeling that we were going to win and that I would like to survive. Funny isn’t it? So that was the immediate thought. Now the second thought, well Farnborough, looked it up on the map, there it is, I wonder what goes on there, what makes it so special? Not a clue, don’t know, no idea. And as I might have said before, I don’t know, if you look up you’ll find that the second of January 1943 is a Saturday morning and that was the date I was given to report to the gates of RAE on Saturday the second of January 1943. And there another chapter starts.

[35:22] What sort of welcome greeted you on arrival?

The immediate thing was, I’d been given some sort of a pass to get me into the place, the welcome was of barred gates, essentially, gates shut with a little police hut on one side and just a

Sir John Charnley Page 69 C1379/30 Track 4 little lane to go through rather than the big gates for lorries and suchlike. Went through that entrance, policeman looked at this pass, or this permit and waited while someone from the personnel department, as it was, came and collected me and - a lady, middle-aged lady - and took me to some room where I signed various forms, signed the Secrets Act and this… the very formal process of entering into a classified establishment. Followed by being taken into another building on the main site there – and now you need to know a bit about Farnborough RAE really, but doesn’t matter – on the main site and taken to an office where there were two men and a woman and I was the third man. And this was called Aero F/J and it didn’t mean a thing to me. Didn’t mean a thing. Didn’t know what Aero meant, didn’t know what F/J meant, or anything. The characters were Frank Smith, Cambridge engineer, Miss Fougère – F-O-U-G-E-R-E – had been French, or from French family, Cambridge mathematician, and Dennis Higton, who was an RAE apprentice, he was the practical man. And their boss, a chap called Smelt, Ron Smelt, was in America and due back at the end of January. And this was the flight test… this was… the flight… sorry. This was the section where the Aero meant aerodynamics, the ‘F’ meant flight and the ‘J’ meant jets. So this was the flight test division of Aerodynamics department and the ‘J’ was this little section. That’s right, you go section, division, department, in terms of size, if you wish. So a section had been set up to handle the flight testing of the, our first jet-propelled aeroplane, the Gloster-Whittle E28/39, experimental 28/39, and that had arrived at RAE in November ’42 from Cranwell and been sent to RAE for flight testing the performance of the aircraft, establishing the performance of the aircraft with that particular engine in it. I’ve forgotten the… I can turn out the number of the engine. And three Cambridge people and Dennis Higton who knew his way around aeroplanes as an apprentice at RAE, very practical bloke, and he’s someone that I mentioned to you.

[40:40] How did you – so are you all in the same office?

Yep. All in the same office to start with. Smith… gosh. Essentially I shared a desk with Miss Fougère and I’ll speak of her here as Miss Fou, because that’s the way she was known to everyone. Very bright, lovely. Very bright and very good looking, very, very nice girl, as I say, Cambridge mathematician. And she took me under her wing really and I sat at a table which was the nearest thing to a desk, just a table, with her and Smith ran the outfit in Smelt’s absence. Higton organised the installations in the aircraft of recording instruments and suchlike to measure this, that and the other, and Miss Fou and I were then responsible for the analysis of the

Sir John Charnley Page 70 C1379/30 Track 4 results, even to the point of… with Higton I was, he’d taken me out to the aeroplane and we’d take out of the aeroplane the cameras, and they were just ordinary cameras, little robot cameras that had been taking pictures of various instruments, so I came away with a film, was then responsible for developing that film so that Miss Fou and I could read that film with spyglasses, magnifying glasses, spyglasses, and convert them on to a bit of paper in columns and then go ahead with the analysis. It sounds so crude these days doesn’t it, but my goodness to me it was an eye-opener. To… have been directed to somewhere that you knew as going to make history, because it was our first jet-propelled aeroplane and you’d got in right at the start of a new age, a new age of aerospace without anything to do with you whatsoever, you’d just been put there when you thought you were going into REME and you’d no idea of what you were going to do, but you got this feeling that you hadn’t heard of this jet propulsion until you arrived and here you were in the middle of it, our number one aeroplane with an engine that you didn’t know how it worked at that stage and you were there and actually working on it. Unbelievable. So you got stuck in.

How did you…

And Miss Fou looked after me in, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen, have you ever seen these large slide rules, thirty-inch slide rule? Well, you’ve seen a little slide rule?

What’s a slide rule?

Oh God. I’ll show you one after the interview. Cor blimey, what’s a slide rule? Take your little whatnot off. [pause]

[44:40]

Okay. Anyway, there we are, Miss Fou and she taught me how to, well taught me, I’d already been using a slide rule at university but this was a big one. A normal slide rule is about twelve inches long, like a twelve-inch rule, and it has a middle that slides up and down along its length and it allows you to do calculations of multiplication, division, those sort of things, accuracies and you use it to help you with calculations that you can’t do yourself very quickly, it’s a very useful tool. And it’s even more useful if you’ve got one that instead of being twelve inches long is thirty inches long, because you can do things more accurately. And that was the sort of thing

Sir John Charnley Page 71 C1379/30 Track 4 which was bothering us a little bit in F/J that I’ve just described, Aero F/J. So leave that on that side. The head of the department, the head of aerodynamics department was a chap called Dr Douglas and the head of the flight division was Professor Duncan and then you had the head of section which was Smelt, as I’ve said, and he was away. So I suppose I’ve missed Duncan out, but this lady from personnel department took me to introduce me to Dr Duncan. I didn’t see Douglas at that stage, the head of department, I saw head of the division, Dr Duncan, and then it was then he who took me into this little section of three people, of which I was now number four, and would become number five, hope to be number five when Smelt came back from America. And he was in America to… because as well as doing work on our first jet-propelled aeroplane, this little team was doing work on our high speed aircraft like Spitfires and Hurricanes and also work on American aircraft like the Thunderbolt and the Lightning and trying to understand how to account for the performance differences between these various aircraft. Why went so fast, others didn’t go fast, what was it that was an advantage in one and a disadvantage on the other. And because the Gloster E28/39, this experimental research aircraft jet was expected to go fast, it had been put into this same little group and used to flight testing on fast aeroplanes. And there we are. There was I, shall we say.

[48:22] What did you first think when they told you what a jet aeroplane was? Do you remember when it was first explained to you?

I went back to try to understand some thermodynamics, here was I new from university and within my university course I’d done some thermodynamics, so got a bit of an understanding of the theory of extracting heat and using that into a jet, but not from the point of view of putting it in an aeroplane at all, that was a novelty.

[49:14]

So… I can remember first seeing the aeroplane and this man Higton, who was the practical engineer in the section, taking me out, I don’t know whether it was on that Saturday or on the Sunday, but very early on – I don’t think it was a Saturday – there was nothing strange about… you worked all weekends, it was a seven-day a week. That can’t be right, because the following day, on the Sunday, and I’d been found… sorry. [pause] On the Sunday morning I’d been given by the personnel people the day before an address in Aldershot that was on their list of providing

Sir John Charnley Page 72 C1379/30 Track 4 accommodation and on the Sunday morning… must have been the same day, so it must have been the Saturday afternoon, I went to Aldershot and looked at these digs. That’s… it must have been the Saturday afternoon. That would make more sense wouldn’t it? And went to those digs and spent Saturday night in my new digs in Aldershot, Aldershot being some five miles away from Farnborough, four miles, five miles, not very far. The whole district being army, army related, wartime army related. Lots and lots… army everywhere, and Aldershot being a very prominent and strong army town. And a bus service between Farnborough and Aldershot. So I found myself the digs, went there that night and this might refer back to things we talked about on my previous interview. The following morning being Sunday, I went to church. Now I can’t remember now why I went to church as being almost the first thing to do in a strange town full of army where I was no longer going into REME and I was going into something I had no thoughts of ever doing and being presented with working on a new form of aviation. And I can remember this, thinking I’d better go to church. There was something here that, I don’t know. So I’m making my… I find a church, in Aldershot obviously, lots of army around at the service, come out afterwards making my way back to my digs and who should I run into but this chap Dennis Higton, who’d been to his church, which was not Roman Catholic but an offshoot of an Anglican church, Methodist shall we say. And there it was, ridiculous that we’d met the day before for the first time ever and here in Aldershot we met on that Sunday morning. And that’s formed something of a bond between us ever since. He remembers it as I do, very, very strange indeed that it should happen like that. So on the Monday, go to work on the Monday and he decides it’s time I knew a little bit about aeroplanes so he takes me out to show me some of the aircraft that are standing there on the hard standing at RAE. And this is January, very cold. And the first aeroplane he shows me is a Stirling and I was gob-stopped, he stood me under these enormous wheels of a Stirling aeroplane and the fuselage is way up in the sky and there’s this great long fuselage standing back and I think does this thing fly, say I to him. ‘Dennis, Dennis, does this thing fly?’ ‘Oh yeah, yeah, you’ll learn.’ So that was my immediate reaction, what an idea. So the next thing is we go into the hangar and there was this new form of aviation, this little aeroplane, the jet. And after that enormous great Stirling here’s this little aeroplane, single engine now instead of four, different engine altogether, neat, completely tucked in, tiny, and you feel ah, this makes much more sense than that bloomin’ great thing. And so he then starts telling me a little bit about aeroplanes and there we are, I’m now beginning to get quite excited about the idea of doing these things, all military. This again is my little war effort, I can believe myself that I can do something here. We then have a look at a Spitfire and when we get back to the office, this Smithy, the man in charge, is told by Higton that we’ve seen these three aeroplanes –

Sir John Charnley Page 73 C1379/30 Track 4 there might have been others, but certainly these three – and Smith said oh, that’s fine because we need to measure the pressures around the lip of the Spitfire radiator. The radiator isn’t cooling the engine in the way it should, we think that there’s something wrong with the flow going into the radiator and we need to measure the pressures to see if we can understand why the radiator isn’t cooling the engine as it should. And Smith looks at Higton and says, ‘Do you think that’s a job Charnley can do?’ and Higton says, ‘Yeah, I’m sure he can’. And there’s my first job, of measuring the pressures around the lip of a Spitfire radiator. Oh, dear God. [laughs] That was absolutely unbelievable. Oh. You know. So I go away, outside with Higton, Dennis, and say ‘What do I do now?’ He says, ‘Come on’, so down we go and have a look. It was this Spitfire again, I think it’s the M409, it doesn’t matter, and describes to me the way in which we’ll measure. We’ll put little pressure recording orifices around this radiator lip and we will connect them up with tubes to some instruments in the fuselage of the aeroplane, we’ll photograph those instruments and that’ll tell us the pressures as we… and so on. So that was the first job I ever did, nothing to do with jet engines at all, it was just a job that I was given. And that was my start in high speed aerodynamics. That went on for January, please if I have not made that clear, it doesn’t matter, the detail, but I was measuring the pressures around a Spitfire radiator lip to see why it was that the Spitfire engine wasn’t being cooled in the way in which it should be.

[58:36] What does one do with that sort of data once you’ve collected it from the instruments?

You collect that, you analyse that and you found that the shape of the lip, the Spitfire radiator is beneath the wing of the aeroplane and obviously the air is being, is entering that radiator and finding its way through pipes to cool the engine, but in entering the radiator the airflow around that lip is stalling and instead of going in as a straight full of pressure, it stalled and isn’t delivering the pressure on to the engine to do the cooling. So the results, it became clear from the result that this is what was happening. I mean, you know, this is happening to me in the course of January. And what I am doing is feeding these results into Smithy who knows how to understand them. I don’t. I think Miss Fou does and she and Smithy pore over them. I’m just pushing a thing to be part of the analysis, no idea really what will happen. Miss Fou and Smithy and after that however it’s processed within the department, I don’t know, however it gets to the Spitfire designer, I don’t know, but that’s where it fetches up, with Supermarines. I was saying that these tests have been done and there’s a redesign of this radiator needed. And there we are.

Sir John Charnley Page 74 C1379/30 Track 4

That was it. So that occupies me more than the jet engine aeroplane for January although, with Higton, with Dennis Higton, I do start getting absorbed in this experimental jet engine, jet- engined aircraft and beginning to wonder at it, obviously how much simpler the whole process is than this Spitfire standing next to it which has got a bloomin’ great nose on it with exhausts coming out of the side, something like eight from each side, from about sixteen cylinders, you know, bloomin’ great propeller on the front. And sitting next to it there’s this sleek, slim, little aeroplane with a hole at the front into which the air goes and a nozzle at the back producing thrust. And without knowing too much of what’s happening between the two, here’s this aeroplane, that fellow over there, which can go faster than that bloomin’ great Spitfire sitting next to it. John, aren’t you doing the right thing?

What did you…

[1:02:23] Smelt come… let me, just pause for a moment. Smelt comes back from America and Smelt is a double first at Cambridge: maths and a bit of engineering I guess, anyway he’s a double first. And he comes back, sees me in the office as number five in the place, it’s the third boy who gets Miss Fou, number four, says ‘Who’s this?’ He’s a north countryman from the Durham area, Smelt. ‘Who’s this?’ And Smelt [Smith] says this is a new lad that’s been given to us, Charnley, and Smelt, you know, ‘Well, what about it?’ you know, ‘What does he know? What’s his contribution going to be?’ And Smith says, ‘Well, he’s a civil engineer from Liverpool’. [laughs] Smelt says, ‘Get him out of here’. [laughs] ‘How much aerodynamics does he know?’ And Smith says, ‘None. He’s a civil engineer from Liverpool’. And someone says, ‘Get him out of here’. So I’m turfed out and they have a debate as to what should be done with me and I’m sitting quietly in the corner and Smithy comes out and says, ‘Smelt says no, you’re not staying and he’s had a word with Bradfield in the wind tunnel department and you’re going to work with her. You’re going across to small wind tunnels to learn something about aerodynamics and what makes an aeroplane fly. Don’t let it worry you, across in the wind tunnels they put an aeroplane upside-down, but it doesn’t fly like that, so that’s no help. Anyway, Smelt won’t have you.’

[1:04:35] Oh. How did you feel at being turfed out?

Sir John Charnley Page 75 C1379/30 Track 4

Well, exactly. Exactly. I felt, who is this guy Smelt that can treat me like this, that, you know, hasn’t got an understanding that it might be worth having a word with me rather than just saying, get him out of here, can’t be bothered with someone who doesn’t know anything about aerodynamics. My job isn’t to teach people, my job is to get people – this was Smelt, I’m told by Smith – that, no. So off I go, the following day or two, into small wind tunnels. And I’m there, just to finish this little bit in a way and wait for your questions. I’m there until the end of the summer, September-ish, October-ish of ’43. I spent nearly, way over six months there, certainly, learning aerodynamics, learning about flying. I go to night school at the local technical college, again, to learn about aerodynamics, the theory of it and the basics of it and get involved in tests on new shapes, new aeroplanes in the tunnels. And obviously Miss Bradfield, who ran and is a well known classical aerodynamics expert and has been running wind tunnels for a long, long time, quite elderly, and a household name in the aerodynamic world, she decides that I might be worth nursing a little bit and encouraging, assisting and this I can respond to, I can get back to my own efforts at school in helping people, encouraging them. And she’s doing to me what I was able to do with some people at school, and she got a response from me, quite clearly, because in the September-ish, or thereabouts, I don’t know exactly when, she came to see me in… I was again in a small office with one other bloke, and she came in to see me, didn’t ask me to go to see her. [1:07:34] She came to see me and said I’ve persuaded Smelt that you’d be better occupied in flight testing than you are here in wind tunnels and I’ve persuaded him to take you back. So way back towards the end of 1943, exactly when I don’t know, it doesn’t matter, I find myself back in aerodynamics department, which I was in, only in the flight division and back again with Smelt on jet propelled aeroplanes and Spitfires and fast trans… well at this stage still high sub-sonic speeds, trying to understand what it is that is making it difficult to get aircraft through the speed of sound, or to get anything through the speed of sound. And that is what I spent now quite some time doing. But, there we go.

There are innumerable questions that…

I’m sure there are.

…have popped into my mind over the course of that.

I’m sure there are. That’s why I’m stopping there. But that was my entry into RAE, essentially. No knowledge of aerodynamics. Being introduced by Higton to a great big aeroplane, an old

Sir John Charnley Page 76 C1379/30 Track 4 style four-engined big bomber, and alongside it this little, little experimental jet and alongside that, a high speed fighting aeroplane. And, you know, those three things made such an impact, such an impression on this bloke who didn’t know one end of, the front end of an aeroplane from another.

[1:09:33] Had aircraft not interested you at all until that point?

No, no, not at all. Not at all. Does that surprise you? No, not at all. I suppose when this bloke said you’re going to be there after Christmas, did I then start thinking a bit about aeroplanes, and if I did, it didn’t make a great impact. Only being the sort of person that I was, I don’t think I’d have let that lie, I think I’d have done something, read something or gone to the library, although it doesn’t react with me at all. Christmas was coming up, I was going away from home. I’d been away from home before, two or three years earlier, certainly, but this was now more positive. It didn’t include a greater threat or a less… the war was still going on, end of ’42, ’43, as it had been in 1940, ’39, ’40 earlier. I was not clever enough to know the relative chances of Liverpool being bombed as against an air experimental establishment being bombed at all. You didn’t think that way, you just… life came and went. I didn’t analyse along those lines at all, didn’t think of it. However, there we were. That was certainly my introduction to aeroplanes and aerospace through aerodynamics and measuring the pressures around a Spitfire radiator lip. [laughs]

I’ve got, I think for today I’d like to do a bunch of follow-up questions and I think I’d like to move the story on next time, but there are a lot of things I want to fill in.

Yeah, go on. It’s up to you now to…

Yeah, yeah.

We’ve got twenty-five minutes.

[1:12:00] I think one of the first things I’d like to ask you about is secrecy and the jet – was this something you talked about with other people?

Sir John Charnley Page 77 C1379/30 Track 4

No. No, not at all.

Is that including people in the establishment?

No, including people in the establishment. No, we didn’t, that little group didn’t… it was there, it was obviously there in the hangar and there were other aircraft that were being, experiments done on them, so that there were other people in the division, of which F/J was just a part. There were other people in the division in the hangar doing their own experiments on this, that or the other, and so the aeroplane was there, but no, you were, all recognised the need to know and if you didn’t need to know, you didn’t, and you didn’t talk about it. No. No, no, no. And as for, you didn’t talk about it outside under any circumstances. And that was something that, I don’t know, I’d signed all the various forms, the Official Secrets Act and what else? Oh, I don’t know. Don’t know. There was a bit of a contract. It was… I joined as Junior Scientific Officer, a JSO, and the salary was 293, I think it was 293 pounds a year, 293 or 295. It was certainly less than 300 and not that one can relate that to anything these days, but that’s the figure that’s in my mind. I think somewhere I’ve got a bit of paper that says that, this was my salary.

How good a deal did that seem at the time?

Pardon me?

Did you consider yourself well off on that?

Oh yes.

Or not?

It was good enough not to concern me and think, you know, this is a bad do. No, no. Was it 295? 275? I’ve got doubts now, but it doesn’t matter, it was that sort of thing. And I don’t… I don’t even think now how I related that to what my father might have been earning. I mean that’s five pounds a week isn’t it, roughly? I’ve no idea what he was on, don’t know. But I can remember him, as I might have said earlier, in the 1930s, and we’re now talking ten, twelve years on from that, coming home and announcing very proudly that he’d got this halfpenny an

Sir John Charnley Page 78 C1379/30 Track 4 hour increase, which we all thought, or my mother and father thought was tremendous, in his halfpenny an hour increase in his salary, in his wage. It wasn’t a salary, it was a wage. Don’t know.

[1:15:34] How had your parents actually reacted to you going to university?

Oh. [pause] Wonderfully. I can’t think of a better word than wonderfully, that’s why I hesitated. The little box room of the house, there was their main bedroom, there was my bedroom, and there was a third, small room which had been the spare bedroom for anyone that came and this was now converted into a workroom for me, where I had a drawing board that I’d borrowed, loaned – sorry, borrowed – the university had loaned me. I carried this home on my bike and there it was. It was an image of the thing I had in the university itself. And so at home I had a big drawing board with a T-square on it, if you know what that is, and various drawing instruments for designing at home in addition to doing that sort of thing in the uni. And they, dad in particular sorted this out for me. We arranged a lighting, a better lighting so that it was over the board, the board could be angled up and you normally worked on it when it was, tipped it up at about fifty or sixty degrees and you were doing things, drawing on it, doing this, that and the other. And this’ll make you laugh. I can remember drawing something I’d just made in Meccano. [laughs] There now. There now.

What…

A crane. A crane where you could, the jib of the crane, there’s the base of the crane and the jib of the crane came up here and you could elevate the crane backwards and forwards and there was a spindle, a shaft across here and the rope, or piece of string in this case, went over the top and you could hang a weight on this end. And again, with a motor you could now lift and lower this weight.

So you were still using the Meccano when you were at university?

[pause] I’m hesitating about using, as much as it was lying around, it was there, it was in its box and it was something that I had made, this crane, and I think I was now, it was more an exercise in design in drawing and the use of the different instruments, the set squares, the T-squares, gosh

Sir John Charnley Page 79 C1379/30 Track 4 the box of tools – they’re still upstairs – the drawing instruments, the dividers, the protractor for angles. They’re all upstairs still. I think it was more that I was wanting something to draw, what shall I draw or design or whatever, as part of learning to draw in engineering terms and I just took the thing that I had made in Meccano which was lying around, still, as a crane. Yeah, more that. I don’t know that I was still playing with Meccano, I don’t know. Don’t recall. But I recall having a lot of fun on this drawing board with one thing and another.

Trying to think about the drawing board. Would that have been a part of the university course in itself then?

Oh yes, oh yes.

Technical drawing?

Oh yes. Yes, yes. Oh certainly, yeah. Yeah. Technical drawing, yeah absolutely and most afternoons were spent either in the lab on one of the machines or in drawing, the afternoons. And you had, in the lab you had chaps who were working with you on the staff, assistants, technical assistants, and equally you then had others who were working and helping you to draw and use the instruments and scaling from real size maybe down to drawing size and getting angles right, and the whole technique of, as you say, technical drawing. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Something you came to easily?

Yes, yes, not a problem. No, no.

[1:22:04] You mentioned laboratory classes. How were you actually taught at university?

Lectures, of varying standards. There was one chap who lectured on materials and materials in those days was ferrous, principally. I’d left the chemical materials behind and these were ferrous materials, as I say, with new forms in steels, I can remember. Nothing like composites, nothing like carbon fibre, nothing of that sort, all very conventional. No silicones, nothing of that sort. And this particular man was a research man and in the lab when he was going through some research with you that he was doing, he was a different man altogether from when he stood there

Sir John Charnley Page 80 C1379/30 Track 4 trying to lecture to you, because he couldn’t get stuff across whatsoever. It was a bore. But in the lab when he was working on his research and was talking to you just about that, different man altogether, different. So, Daymond was the structures man, the dean of the engineering faculty was the civil man. Sorry, yeah, was the surveying man I mean. Daymond was the structures, this bloke that I’m speaking about was hydraulics. There was someone else on, oh I don’t know, materials. And they lectured and they were the mornings, and the afternoons then you were drawing or down in the – and I say down, because you were mainly, the building itself was on two flights over a ground floor, two flights, and the lecture theatre took up a couple of the flights I guess at one particular area, big lecture theatre towering up, steeply up from the demonstration area. And big, big, vast room in which there were heat engines, there were experiments in thermodynamics – that’s heat engines again – experiments in strengthened materials, testing machines where you tested a specimen to breaking point and measured extensions before it broke, and so on. And therefore looked at the characteristics of different materials, different steels or whatever. Another set of tests where you essentially, you released a hammer sort of, an Izod machine – I-Z-O-D – and that released a hammer that again broke a specimen or didn’t, as the case may be, might have made an impact on it. Another means of materials testing. And so on. And then the writing up of those experiments where you were again being trained in the art, if that’s the right word, of writing up an experiment. A method of what the object was, what the equipment was and then the results and then the analysis of the results and the recommendations. So out of that, if you like, came the structure of how to write up an experimental result. But that was certainly the object. The object and then the equipment, in other words the technique you were going to use, and then the results. And then the analysis of the results and the recommendations as a result of the experiment. Good discipline.

[1:27:30] I’m going to have to make this my last question of the day, but I was wondering, how well did those two years at university prepare you for what came next?

When you say what came next, in the sense of moving into a discipline that had not been touched at all at university? Do you mean that or…

I mean your immediate career afterwards.

Was that.

Sir John Charnley Page 81 C1379/30 Track 4

Yeah.

I could almost touch on the point on which I’ve just made, that in terms of how to conduct research, there was a model set up in that lab. How to conduct research, how to present the results of your analysis, was all there. So in a format of that sort, how to go about being an engineer, to me it was ideal. The fact that the profession wasn’t the one I’d chosen to work in, sorry, it wasn’t the one that I’d chosen to go to university, you just accepted that and it sounds corny doesn’t it? The thing at the back of your mind was, there was a war on and you’d been asked to go to a place where it was thought that your skills could help a war effort and, you know, silly though that might sound, dear God, that was uppermost in your mind. And alright, you hadn’t chosen this aeronautics, you’d now seen enough to excite you as something that you were in at the ground floor on a new thing that was opening up, you didn’t know much about it, you yourself had – Smelt had said, get him out of here and get him somewhere they’ll teach him some aerodynamics, you are going to night school to learn some aerodynamics, you yourself are reacting and saying well, if this is what people think I could be good at, I’d better work at it. And what I’ve got out of Liverpool University is just an understanding of how much I think I’m going to like being an engineer, and now I’ve come here, I think I’m going to like being an aeronautical engineer from what I’ve learned in a little bit here. It’s difficult and it’s new to me and I’ve got to learn, I’ve got to work at it, but boy, it’s so exciting that I think I know I’m going to enjoy it. Now, the end of the war comes in 1945 and I now have to ask myself that question, do I want to go back to civil engineering, and the answer is a positive no. There’s a bug there associated with aerospace, aerodynamics and aeroplanes now and I’m caught, I’m excited, I can’t get enough of it, I’m drugged.

Could you characterise, what is that drug? What’s the thing about it that interests you so?

It’s new, it’s… the way in which information is provided by a research team to enable improvements to be made in a product, this product happens to be an aeroplane, shall we say, and you’re doing research to decide how you can improve that product. In this case try and get things through the speed of sound. Now, normally the technique for doing that would be a wind tunnel and you put a model of whatever it is in the wind tunnel, you blow some air over it, you take some measurements and they will help you understand how to improve that model – the wing design, maybe, whatever. Let’s talk the wing design. Now, if you’re thinking of doing

Sir John Charnley Page 82 C1379/30 Track 4 things near the speed of sound with that model you can no longer use the wind tunnel because the airflow is now being distorted by the fact that you’ve got a model in a closed space and not free air. And to get anything – and it chokes and it blocks, the tunnel blocks – and you can no longer use that particular tunnel – and I’m talking now about the early forties and the 1940s into the fifties – you can no longer use the wind tunnel as a means of getting reliable information to help you design an improvement to an aeroplane or a new aeroplane, a new one. And the only way now in which you can get that information is by doing it in flight, in free air and establishing technology of getting measurements that enable you to improve and design. And that was so exciting in terms of there isn’t another way of doing this, other than what you’re doing. And you’re assisting in the evolution of this whole business of aerospace and how it’s going to evolve and you’re part of it. Now, it’s not something that’s been around for centuries like civil engineering and bridge building, although that has an appeal, this is so dynamic and in that sense moving so fast. And when we started this at some time this afternoon I said that my boss to be, Smelt, had been in America. Now he had just been in America, telling them in the States all about this thing called jet propulsion, they’d never heard of it. And that we’d got an aeroplane that had been built to develop this new technology and we were flying it, and he, Smelt, had been charged with running the flight tests on this particular aeroplane to learn how to go about, because the actual engines were stalling in some places up above. And he was now, he’d gone across to the States to tell them what we’d got that they hadn’t got. Now, what a, you know, what a situation to be in, in terms of excitement there were so many elements of it; being there first, a new subject to me with a woman, Miss Bradfield, that was prepared to help me along, teach me. A bunch of characters that were all very clever, all with backgrounds in Cambridge or wherever. A place that played rugby and cricket, so that was fun. And chess, you know, you’re on a high. No? Have you never felt like this?

I think that seems to be a very, very good point to stop for the day.

Yeah, I think we’d better, it’s six o’clock.

[end of track 4]]

Sir John Charnley Page 83 C1379/30 Track 5

[Track 5]

I think the point at which we’d left off last time in terms of chronology was when you’d joined Aero F/J. I was going to ask you about the other people you shared an office with and if you wouldn’t mind, just describing them in turn to me in a few words apiece?

The boss man, to me Ron Smelt, but he later became Roy Smelt, was a double first at Cambridge, very bright. And north country, Durham area, originally, which is important later in my story, if you wish, and with a strong North Country accent and determined to keep it, determined to demonstrate that he was from the north and as clever as anyone from the south. Played a good piano as well. So, talented man without any doubt at all. But at the time that I joined he was in America, he was in the States, I think talking to them a little bit about what he was planning to do in the evaluation of this new idea of jet propulsion. Second in command who was running the place when I arrived, running the unit when I arrived, a chap called Frank Smith, another Cambridge aeronautical engineer, and again bright, round man, not very tall and fairly broad and round. Married to a German, Marta, lived in Farnborough, two children, and quite a heavy smoker and with his heavy smoking just lived on Polo mints. [laughs] Smithy just lived on Polo mints. They were the two academics, if you like, Smelt and Smith. Then the other highly intelligent person, in fact they’re all intelligent, no doubt about that, was Miss Fougère. She was a Cambridge mathematician and really was the person who first saw the results of the flight tests and she was the person who took them and analysed them, read the films from the aircraft installations - very crude in those days - read the films, started to analyse them and get the information to give to the Smith and the Smelts of the world. Originally French and very attractive and known to everyone as Miss Fou. The fourth member of the team was a practical engineer, Dennis Higton, and he had been apprenticed in the RAE scheme, a very, very good apprentice scheme, and he’d done well at it and again, as such, I think had been privileged to be put into this little high-powered group that was being set up. And he was a practical engineer, very talented practical engineer. Knew his way about aeroplanes and it was he who had the job really of introducing me to what an aeroplane looked like, what it did and what was the front end and what was the back end, and so on. And it’s worth recording now I guess that he and I stayed very, very close friends and still are and he and I meet every few months still for a pub lunch with two other people generally, but Higton and I have stayed generally – although our paths have departed they’ve come together again and certainly in retirement… he lost his wife soon after I lost mine, so we have that common element as well. Going back to this particular period,

Sir John Charnley Page 84 C1379/30 Track 5 that period in early 1943, my start date at RAE was a Saturday and I found digs in Aldershot and on the following day, the Sunday, I was looking around Aldershot for the first time amongst all the Canadians and so on and who should I meet but Higton that I’d just met the previous day, very strange. And he was coming out of church and I had been a church person and that was another link between us in that day. He at the church had met an ATS girl, a girl from Wroughton who was a driver in the army, Joy. And the first time I met Joy through Higton was when she was driving a bloomin’ great army truck, huge thing, and out of this army truck, or car, this attractive, slim, Joy Piggott – Piggott her name then, and I was introduced to her and she was a lovely girl. So Higton and Joy and Mary and me, we got together as a foursome a lot of the time and thoroughly enjoyed times together, which stood us in stead later on, later on.

How did you spend time together?

Bicycles, walking. We rode bicycles a lot in the Surrey downs and the Surrey… Crooksbury, which is a hill the other side of Farnham and it’s on, I was going to say the Pilgrims’ Way, but it isn’t, no, no. But it’s nice walking country. We’d cycle and then walk.

[07:26]

If I move on a little bit, because we were – and the cycling, walking reminds me of it – I don’t quite know when it happened, but other countries within our own Commonwealth were keen to send engineers to us to be educated into this thing called jet propulsion and so before – and it could have been about twelve months later, ’44 maybe when I went back to the flight testing having done my stint in the tunnels and learnt a little bit about aerodynamics and night school and back to Aero Flight, F/J – a character called Bridgland, a Flight Lieutenant Bridgland came from the Royal Canadian Air Force, Eddie Bridgland, and he became a great friend of Higton and myself. Again, as someone who’d been sent across, he was an engine man more than aerodynamics, but Eddie got on very well with us and he became a fifth member of our people who went out cycling and walking and we introduced him to bicycles. But, as I say, it had to be about 1944 because in June 1945 when Mary and I were married he was my best man and he rose to be the senior engineer in the Canadian Air Force. And again, we kept in touch throughout his career and my career, and indeed there were times when he tried to persuade me to make my way across to Canada, to move and join the Canadian R&D, defence R&D area, but no, I resisted. Now he was one chap that came. When he went back to Canada he was then

Sir John Charnley Page 85 C1379/30 Track 5 followed by an Australian, Ian Fleming, just like the author of the book, the Bond books, and he too became a good friend career-wise and later when I moved into the guided weapon field he and I did quite a bit together because he was a chief designer of an Australian firm that built targets for guided weapons and suchlike, manoeuvrable targets. Ian and I became, when I was going, eventually in my guided weapon days went to Australia a lot and Ian was always there and we did things, again, did things together there too. And Mary and his mother became very good friends – Mabs [ph] – and I’ve got pictures of her outside. But getting back I suppose, that happened where this little group concerned with the flight testing of our first jet was breaking new ground completely, so Canadians, Australians within the Commonwealth all wanted to hear about it and they sent people to us.

[11:19] How did they get on once they were there?

In this country or when they went back do you mean?

In this country when they first arrived?

Oh, well as I’ve said, Eddie Bridgland settled very quickly and Ian Fleming had been educated at Cambridge, he was a Cambridge engineer, so he was familiar with this country without any doubt at all. Ed was new and as I said, he joined the Higtons and the Charnleys and became one of our little group, socially. Professionally bright and not only was he concerned with jet aircraft, but he also pulled his weight in the flight testing of our conventional, our Spitfires, our Mustangs, the things that we were doing as well as the jets. Anything that went fast, we had a hand in it in one way or another and Eddie got involved. I remember that he did some tests on the effectiveness of air brakes on Vampires, for instance. So he became a member of the team, without a doubt. Ian Fleming, again, a bit more distant maybe. He was older, Ian. He and I got on very, very well because [laughs] we both enjoyed rugby and cricket and that became a bond between he and I. With us the cricket in particular, with the Australians, dear God. So that was a source of amusement between the two of us for years, and we went to Lords together, we watched cricket together. There was another character that came across from Australia to join Aero Department rather than specifically the flight group, a chap called Tom Lawrence. Tom didn’t fit as well at all. Tom was very Australian in the sense of being almost aggressively proud to be Australian and determined to show these Pommies that he knew a lot about aerodynamics

Sir John Charnley Page 86 C1379/30 Track 5 and this, that and the other. Tom and I got on well, yeah, we became friends. He joined Mary and me for Christmas and he spent a Christmas holiday with us at home in Farnborough, stayed a few nights with us. Tom Lawrence, TFK Lawrence, which we all said ‘Tom For King Lawrence’, that was the… [laughs]

How did he take to that nickname?

Oh, he was big enough, he was big enough for that, certainly. Oh yes, yes. And he went back, when he went back to Australia he rose to be the head of the Australian defence R&D world. So, and again, when I was going out there I saw a lot of him. So I established very good links in Australia and in Canada and that’s enough of that. Links with France certainly, links with America, lots of links with… links with America or, it happened later when I, yeah, used to go to the place in the Mojave Desert. A place that’s still used for a lot of their space activity as well as their conventional aircraft activity. Wright Field, Wright Field. Yeah, Wright Field. But that comes later, I guess.

[15:53] Were there any Americans at Farnborough when you were there in the early days?

No. Not that strike me, no. One did come, now, cor blimey. Bertha Parker was the wife. He was American Air Force, something like Major, it was Major, but he didn’t appear until later because when that happened then Mary and I were married, so that was after ’45. We were married on the second of June 1945, the war had just finished and so we decided it was a good time to settle down now and start adjusting ourselves to civilian life as a married couple. And – Danny Parker and Bertha Parker, they were on the scene after that, but not in that ’43, ’44 period. But they threw some very good parties, I must say. Yeah, yeah.

What was so good about them?

[laughs] Oh, as you might expect, with the American, I don’t know where they got, the P… their food, and the stuff that came. In those days we were so restricted in choice and what was available in the shops and the stores, rationed is the best word to describe it I guess, we were rationed. But there was no ration in the places where the Parkers shopped and I don’t know where it was because there was no obvious American activity broadly in the district, but

Sir John Charnley Page 87 C1379/30 Track 5 certainly they could deliver in terms of food and drink, tremendously interesting and exciting [laughs] parties. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they also would, on their living arrangements, as American Air Force, they were able to rent a very attractive house on the way to Guildford where, as I say, they threw excellent parties. No, very good. And that was, I’m talking now those early, essentially post-war years when living was changing, slowly, not quickly. That was American. And I developed relationships with France because France wanted to set up its testing establishment for testing aircraft at Bretigny and I don’t know when that was in terms of the forties, but it’s probably way after ’45, it’s bound to be way after ’45 isn’t it? The – who was our Minister, who was… Minister of Supply of the day? I’m getting on to this because some when, ’46, ’47, he was inspired, not when I was living down at Farnborough, but there was this… The point I’m making is that he was inspired, he decided aviation had come to stay after the war and that we had a place in it; we’d done a lot, we’d done well and he was determined that he was going to find the right sort of, going to launch the right sort of aerospace, aviation industry and for that he needed an industry which had done so well during the war, convert that into commercial aeroplanes, but as well he wanted a college of aeronautics and that was the foundation of Cranfield, and that was about ’47. And you’ll have known that from other people, no doubt. Oh his name… And I was then involved in drafting some of the terms of reference associated with flight testing at Cranfield from our own experience here at Farnborough, particularly a chapter on almost the high speed testing. High speed in their terms being, oh fairly high, but still subsonic. But very much giving a steer to Cranfield on the way to, safely, to conduct flight tests on fast aeroplanes.

How did you feel at the time about being involved in setting up an aeronautical college?

Oh, no wish to go there myself or be part of it because I was enjoying Farnborough so much, and my goodness I was so enjoying Farnborough. Oh, his name’s nearly there. It’s on the tip of my… I want to say Shawcross, Sir Hartley Shawcross, but that’s the comet issue. Anyway, it’ll come, I’m sure it’ll come. Responsible for setting up Cranfield as a college of aeronautics. Some of the people that were in Aero Department certainly went there. Bethwaite went, Cyril Bethwaite for one, and I didn’t, I think… another name, never mind. But certainly people from Aero Department saw an opportunity and went, yeah. Not me. I was too excited about this transonic activity and trying to understand what was happening near the speed of sound.

[23:02]

Sir John Charnley Page 88 C1379/30 Track 5

When you arrived at the RAE as a trained civil engineer as opposed to an aeronautical engineer, were there any colleagues who were useful in helping you educate yourself about aeronautics?

Higton was the obvious name, and I’ve got to say Miss Fou. And she was terrific; she was patient, she almost took me under her wing, bless her. Got a photograph of her. She died recently and I had to say a few words, a eulogy at her service. She left RAE and went back to teaching mathematics at the girls’ school, the girls’ advanced school here. Chrystelle, her name. And the Minister’s name nearly came to me then. Ah! Anyway, she did, certainly. But that, no, I went to night school and Smelt and Smith were the people who one tended to… outside F/J – the ‘J’ being jet, the rest of the flight had a low speed section run by a chap called Hufton and these are the sort of level of Smelt. You’ve got Smelt running F/J, Hufton, Phillip Hufton ran a low speed naval group; helicopters, naval aeroplanes and take-off and landing problems. There was a controls, a big controls group run by Morien Morgan who later became Director of the RAE. Morien ran this very powerful controls, stability and controls group, which had within it Lyons – Joe Lyons – Dai Morris, Bethwaite, Nivison. Pretty powerful bunch.

Powerful in what sense?

Pardon me?

Powerful in what sense?

Powerful in intellectual ability. Lyons, Joe Lyons had also been an air force instructor and he’d been included in the team for those sort of practical reasons. But Hufton and Morgan, same level as Smelt, the three of them were always attacking each other because they were the… the man who ran Aero Flight as a whole, Professor Duncan, and then you’d got the little family tree of Smelt, Hufton and Morgan. And those three, in those days we used to meet for tea in the afternoon together, all Aero Flight, and the arguments were, I wouldn’t say acrimonious, but getting on that way with these three in particular, each with their supporters all had a go at each other. Healthy, I suppose you’d say, good fun, no doubt about that. Going back to your point, I learnt a lot from just mixing with a group of that sort. There was also the chap who ran a little drawing office, Sammy Childs [ph], because a lot of what we did needed installations in aircraft and Sammy Child [ph] was an aircraft designer in that sense and had a little team of draughtsmen

Sir John Charnley Page 89 C1379/30 Track 5 knocking up experimental installations. So he was there with a little drawing office. Good days. Thoroughly… great days.

[28:01] The three who you were talking about who got argumentative – were those the three section heads?

Yes, yes.

What sort of things did they disagree about?

Well, to some extent I mentioned earlier, Smelt made sure that the position of a North Country youngster… I can’t speak positively and say his father had been a miner, but it was that sort of, he was from that sort of background. Hufton also, Morien was strongly Welsh. Dai Morris, one of his team, also strongly Welsh, so there was that sort of debate as well about Wales, England, North Country. There was a geographical issue of that sort. And there was an issue, Smelt was… he certainly was the bloke responsible for the high speed end of flight testing. Hufton had got the low speed end, Smelt had got the high speed end and Morien with his control divided the… differently in that way, there was high speed or low speed, controls and aircraft control was something that was his – and there have been books written on the stability and control of aeroplanes as I’m sure you’ve heard from other people, Barry Gates theoretically. And if we go on to the ’45 area, post when we went to Germany, trying to extract from Germany in competition with the Russians and the Americans whatever skills we thought we would like to have - and there’s a separate subject there - then it was Morien that went across to Germany picking up German stability and control experts… in particular Doetsch, Karl Doetsch, who came back and became eventually a member of their team. And that didn’t, that didn’t please a lot of other people in Aero Flight or in RAE.

Why?

Doetsch was a difficult man, if you like. In moving from a propeller driven aeroplane to a jet- propelled aeroplane you lost a slipstream of the propeller and that meant that the Meteor, for instance, as our first frontline operational aircraft had difficulty in gun firing on to a particular target, because the directional stability wasn’t as good on a jet aircraft as it was on a propeller,

Sir John Charnley Page 90 C1379/30 Track 5 because the propeller aeroplane gave a slipstream on the fin which was missing with a jet, wasn’t there. The Germans had their jet-propelled aeroplane and they’d solved this problem and Doetsch had done it. So we were, Morien Morgan was keen to get Doetsch across to solve our problems on the Meteor, and he did. I have to say that, and he put an auto-stabiliser in to stop them. The Meteor snaked, and so trying to hold guns on the target was not possible and Doetsch solved that problem, much to the disgust of a lot of our controls people. And Doetsch was a difficult man, not an easy man to work with or to be associated with and lots of people found that. He was very confident, he knew the answers, he brought with him an experience which was new to us, and there we are, there we are. So, but if we go on, just talking these personalities, Hufton stayed and became Deputy Director of RAE later. Smelt, elsewhere in those late forties, soon after ’45, ’46, ’47, a new department was being formed in RAE called Gas Dynamics Department, which later became the Guided Weapon Department, and Smelt was picked out of Aero Department to form this new Gas Dynamic Department. Another name to come forward, Handel Davies, came down from London and filled in after Smelt. So whereas Smelt had been my boss, Handel Davies became my boss. Stories there, another Welshman. Smelt went to Gas Dynamics, Duncan went back to the academic world, Glasgow I think, and now there was a vacancy for the Head of Aero Flight. Smelt, ambitious, didn’t want it, he’d gone to Gas Dynamics, so it was left as far as the sitting tenants, with Hufton and Morgan and Morgan got the job. So my chain of command then had changed to Handel Davies and Morien Morgan and then the head of the department still, G P Douglas. But Morien was the man I’m concentrating on, Morgan, because he eventually became Director of RAE and he became Controller of Guided Weapons up in London – CGWL was he? Yeah, he was, yes he was. Whereas Hufton… Smelt went to Gas Dynamics and then to be Guided Weapons Department, and then with his ambitions England was too small for him, his sights were set on something bigger and better and off he went to the States.

When abouts?

Tullahoma, on the engine R&D side. Again, the jet background, but only that was a stepping stone, he then went to Lockheed and became responsible for Lockheed space activity and became the President of the American equivalent of our Aeronautical Society. He became a big man in the Lockheed space world.

[36:09]

Sir John Charnley Page 91 C1379/30 Track 5

What was he like as a boss when you first got there?

Don’t know. [laughs]

Oh, of course he wasn’t there was he? What was he like when he got back as a boss? [laughs] After you’d back from the wind tunnels actually as well.

He tolerated me, I guess. Oh no, he was a very ambitious man. Very, very clever, very ambitious but he looked after Higton. Higton worshipped him. Higton as an apprentice trained, practical engineer thought the world of Smelt, and still did, he kept in touch with Smelt long, long after… Higton was appointed in his later career to be our man in Washington and when he was in the States he used to go regularly to see Smelt. Smelt lived on the West Coast. Oregon, had a farm there. And used to come back to this country because he, with his money, his American wealth, he’d bought a farm in the north of England over here and he used to come back once a year to see that the farm was being run properly. And in the course of that visit we – Smith, Higton, Smelt, Charnley – used to link up for a lunch. Ah, there’s another name that’s got to come out of this, Bob Rose, and he joined us for these occasions when we met with Smelt when he came over here. And it was quite strange in that I always felt that he, he didn’t regret going to the States at all, because that was a bigger world and he was a big fish in it at Lockheed, obviously very successful, made a name for himself out there, great respect, and tended to still think of the UK as a bit small and…

What sort of things did you talk about over lunch on those occasions when he came back?

With his strong Durham North Country… he started, ‘Aw John’, ‘Aw Smithy’, ‘Aw Higgy’ and… what did we talk about, for goodness’ sake? Things that were going on at that time in the aeronautical world, I can’t be specific. Because he was now into space with Lockheed. If one goes on to men landing on the moon, he was very much in that direction. He… he… was so intelligent, so bright, so clever. At his own farm in Oregon he’d got his own radar and so he used to do his own little experiments as well as for Lockheed, looking into the sky and space and would develop the electronics associated with – it couldn’t have been digits in those days – but certainly used to improve his own radars that were staring up above. He was that sort of a bloke. And was always keen to tell us how clever he was being. And then would, oh dear, and then would be highly critical of whoever it was that was running his farm in this country, didn’t think

Sir John Charnley Page 92 C1379/30 Track 5 much of that at all compared with the estate he had in the States, so on. He’d married in America, wasn’t married here, no, married in America. And I lost touch with him oh, ten years ago maybe. He must have died by now, he was that much older than me. And whenever I see Higton, I asked him, has he… we’ve all lost touch. And the last time Higton heard he wasn’t very well, so I’m sure he will have gone by now. And I regret really that he went without more of us recognising that he had and that someone ought to have said something or done something or whatever, but there it is and that probably would have been me, or should have been me. Smith went some time ago. Smithy went to East Anglia to live and he died quite some time ago. Marta, his wife, his German wife, she died before he did. So there it is. Higton is still around, but Smelt has gone, Smith has gone, Chrystelle Fougère has gone.

[41:58]

Now the one I, the chap I didn’t mention earlier, and I need to put this right, when I got back to F/J after being in the wind tunnels there was a new member of the team and he was a young boy, Rose, Bob Rose, but he was never known as Bob, he was Reggie Rose for some reason, I don’t know why, and he was straight from school, he was about eighteen, straight from, as I say, straight from school. Quite bright. I don’t know why he didn’t go on to university, but he came in as a lab assistant just to be a dogsbody to the group, to the team. As such, you know, he and I had a bit of a bond because he was new and didn’t know a lot, I was new and didn’t know a lot, in amongst all these Cambridge aerodynamic experts and Higton was the practical man. Higton, Rose, we three got a little group together. I mention his name because he’s still alive and lives in Fleet and he and I, he became very interested in publications, little books on various subjects. He did a book on walks in our area of Surrey and Hampshire. He did a book on parachutes and when I say parachutes, parachute descents, people who’d escaped by parachute. He collected a lot of that together, put it into a little book. And… I suppose it would be twelve months ago, maybe a bit longer, when I got a letter from him saying that he was writing a little book on a French test pilot that had been at RAE, name of Claisse, in Aero Flight and would I have a look at what he thought he’d done and could I suggest the right way to go for publishing this book. And so he and I linked up again and we still correspond. And the last time Smelt came across, which must be twenty years ago, that sort of, fifteen maybe, Bob was in the little group that met for a pub lunch. And he’s still living in Fleet. Went, did a day release university course, got a degree and became quite a successful man in his own right and still does this business of collecting ideas, collecting things and then writes them up and has them published.

Sir John Charnley Page 93 C1379/30 Track 5

What did he actually do for a career, was that…

Stayed in Aero Department. Went to Bedford when Aero Department went to Bedford, when Aero Flight went to Bedford, the whole department didn’t. And yeah, yes, yes, yes. Then in retirement, as I say, he went into publishing really; writing and publishing. Strange, but there we are. But now thinks highly of those days in Aero Flight, as we all do, as Higton does, as I do.

[46:23] This group of, I guess six of you, in Aero F/J, all from different backgrounds. I’m noticing three Cambridge educated mathematicians, two from, you know, without that university background and yourself from, a Liverpool trained civil engineer.

Yes. That’s right. What a bunch.

How did you all get on together?

Very well, I have to say to that. Smelt was a thrusting person. Smithy, as I say, was… he and Smelt were the two that set the policy of the way we would do things, (a) what it was we should do and then the way in which we would do them, generally. Higton would be responsible for the practical side, which I collected with Higton as well, and the analytical work were Miss Fou and Bob Rose in that sense, with Bob doing the dog work, the – ooh, the name of the Minister almost came to me then… it doesn’t matter – and yeah, we were a very effective team, no doubt about that. And if I think back now I can well believe that the other people in Aero Flight were very, not suspicious, but very envious, very… no, no, that’s all wrong. They certainly recognised us as a force to be reckoned with. In all of this, Aero Flight had its pilots who were a strong bunch in themselves, were always coming up to… ah, geography now, in the sense of all of this to start with in those late war days and early post-war were in an office in the main part of RAE. Then, and I can’t remember why, Pyestock was the jet establishment and here again you get Smelt, had pretty well, obviously there must have been some arguments that I was not aware of associated with who should be responsible for the flight testing of our first jet aeroplane. Was it the jet people or was it the aeroplane people, and Smelt won the day and it came to the aeroplane people, F/J, but the jet engine people were across at Pyestock – near here, you know it? Know of it probably, yeah.

Sir John Charnley Page 94 C1379/30 Track 5

[49:46]

And they were still active and the chap there that was of the same level as Smelt, and he had his little team of jet people and there came the moment when again, in some way or another, it was decided that this team from Pyestock and Smelt’s team should be merged. That meant they needed more space, so we were then moved out of the main parent establishment out to the other side of the airfield into what’s called, it was called Turbine Flight. And then that was a stepping stone to the whole of Aero Flight, went to the other side of the airfield. But the jet people joined us and Smelt and…

Constant, Griffiths?

No, no. No, no, no. Never did get on very well together. The engine people that came from Pyestock were… this man’s name and then Smith, another big tall Smith and Kell. And Kell had been an apprentice like Higton so they got on, they did get on well together. I fitted in a bunch like that. [pause] Oh, doesn’t it annoy me. Smelt and… No, no, no. We never did really merge into an effective unit and I suppose it wasn’t too long after that that Smelt decided to go and not stay. And the other bloke never did really settle down and it all got – Handel Davies came back from London. Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter. But we physically moved to the other side of the airfield and we moved into a new-built single-storey building. I don’t know which year this was, it must have been ’48, ’49, something like that. We were very close to our aircraft, that was the advantage of it, our pilots were nearby so we were a unit out in the sticks across the airfield where building generally was taking place because we were just almost the start of a general move of people from the centre going out, and it was towards Pyestock, as it happens, in the general direction.

You mentioned…

And what do I want to get at in this? Oh yes. Yes, yes, yes. One weekend Higton and I came into our new office block and so that we could start work on the Monday when everyone else came in, we scrubbed the floor of the office that we were going to occupy. Got all the builders’ stuff out of it. We did that, he and I. People came in on Monday and admired the work and said, ‘Cor, that’s good, who did this?’ And when it… you fools, you madmen, you know. But that

Sir John Charnley Page 95 C1379/30 Track 5 was the way we were working. We were all desperately keen to get on and try to solve this problem of making it possible for aircraft to fly through the speed of sound. It wasn’t jets and conventional aeroplanes, it was just aeroplanes and the problems associated with transonic flight, and we were determined to crack it.

[54:40] I’d like to follow up, talk about that particular aspect of the work in detail in a section in its own right, but before we go any further can I ask you a couple of follow-up questions before I miss them completely. A minute ago you said that, I was thinking about these different sort of teams, you know, Aero F/J and the Pyestock engine people and you mentioned that Aero F/J made a good team and I was wondering what made them a good team do you think? Made you a good team, since you were part of it as well?

I think it’s the point I’ve really just made about cleaning the wretched floor. We were determined, it was the work, it was the interest, it was the determination, the interest, the excitement and the fact that we could see our each particular contribution that we could make: Smelt, Smith, same sort of – completely different background. Smith had come from the West Country, Gloucester area and Smelt from Durham. Higton was a local boy, been an apprentice, I was from Liverpool, Miss Fou originally a French family, Bob Rose a local boy. And we could all relate to each other in the contribution we could make to trying to solve this problem. We knew, we all… the design aid had been the wind tunnel and the high speed – when I say high speed now I’m speaking of high subsonic speed wind tunnel that had been used was at the National Physical Laboratory and the NPL results in terms of aircraft drag showed this steep wall which meant that you couldn’t get through the speed of sound, because the drag was going to… it just went along at a low level then suddenly shot up. And that wasn’t… RAE had built its own wind tunnels and they too were showing the same sort of thing but the RAE bunch – and this wasn’t Miss Bradfield that I’d been with, she was the small tunnel, the low speed – this was a chap, Dr Thom, that ran the high speed tunnel and it, in the very nature of flow near the speed of sound, it gets to a point where the tunnel choked and the shockwave that was formed was bouncing about off the walls of the tunnel and made it so that the results that you got from it were completely unreliable, which is why this drag went up and produced the sound barrier. That’s what it was called, allegedly a barrier. And so it was that the only way to explore that area near the speed of sound was in flight because you couldn’t rely on anything from the wind tunnel, either Teddington or in RAE. And so our little group now had the job, or developed this

Sir John Charnley Page 96 C1379/30 Track 5 job, of doing in flight the sort of tests to improve the way in which you designed aeroplanes to go through the speed of sound, because there was no information, no reliable information coming out of tunnels. Now, in the States they were building what were called slotted wall tunnels to try to offset the idea that the shockwaves are rattling around like nobody’s business. And that was moving and that was one of the reasons why Smelt was going backwards and forwards to a certain extent. Because we were – the focus wasn’t on the jet engine, the focus was on getting, understanding how to use whatever, and it would be a jet engine for the very same reason that shockwaves were making a mess of the wind tunnel tests, shockwaves were making a mess of the aircraft in flight, but also they were making a mess of the efficiency of the propeller so there was no longer a lot of chance of getting a propeller driven aircraft through the speed of sound. So now you were going through the jet. So all of that came together in this little bunch that were now very involved in assisting our own aircraft industry that was growing up with basic information that previously had been supplied by wind tunnels and now was going to be supplied by flight testing.

[1:00:36]

And I’m talking now of the period ’45 or ’45 through to ’50 and a little bit on from the… ’52. And it was enthusiasm, eagerness that, you know, you put your finger on it, that our little group, F/J had these debates, arguments, we were proud of what we could do and we could see a clear definition of our job to understand how to improve the performance of an aeroplane in speed terms. Morien was doing control terms and Hufton was doing the low speed end and that was F/J as a whole, Aero Flight as a whole. We had our pilots nearby, this pilot that Bob Rose, the Frenchman was there, Claisse, he was one and we can talk pilots and suchlike because we certainly were part… they were a wonderful part of Aero Flight’s activity and integration into an effective unit. The pilots were a terrific bunch. Another subject altogether there. Anyway. No, I can’t think of any issues in F/J until the jet people arrived from Pyestock and then there were problems.

How did it change?

[pause] How did it change? They, some of the… some of the work that we had been doing, and I think of Miss Fou now, in analysing why at altitude, at high altitude, the jet engine stopped. What’s the word? Gosh. And then couldn’t be restarted. Not seized.

Sir John Charnley Page 97 C1379/30 Track 5

Surged?

Surged would do, yes. Yes, that’s right. Yeah, yeah. It would surge and that was certainly a serious limit and the Pyestock people were also working and when the merger took place they collected that particular issue, particular topic, being more appropriate for them to pursue than for us. There was no need for two sets to be doing it, and I guess within whatever had taken place that I knew nothing about, that sort of thing had been sorted at a higher level that I was not aware of. Let me go back, because when I joined RAE I started as a JSO, a Junior Scientific Officer, then at some stage got a promotion to an SSO and Smelt was a PSO, Principal, and the Head of Aero Flight as a whole was a Senior Principal, an SPSO, the sort of level now. Me at these days, what was I, an SSO? Hadn’t reached PSO yet. SSO. So policy issues I knew nothing about whatsoever. I was a working chap enjoying doing flight tests on aeroplanes, working with pilots, in the summer playing cricket with pilots in the team, in the winter playing rugby with pilots in the team, and so on. An integrated bunch without any doubt at all. But the general policy, how did the work change… I’ve got difficulty with it because as far as I was concerned it didn’t, but I was conscious that Smelt – oh, what’s his name – he and his opposite number didn’t get on. That sort of, Smith and… Cliff Kell was alright, Smithy was a funny sort of bloke who didn’t mix very well, who… I’ll get his name soon. Two names now. One the Minister and this…

Hawthorne?

Anyway, don’t know. Don’t know. I can turn some things out upstairs that’ll tell me I think. Certainly turn out the man who launched the College of Aeronautics. I wonder if it had ‘S’s in it? Don’t know. So go on, I’ve failed that question as to why, how it, what the merger… because somehow it almost faded into the background as a problem. There were certain tests on the engines as engines and they collected those and Smelt did the aeroplane performance. Speeds, heights, thin wings. That was our main…

[1:07:09]

And we were in those late forties, out of Germany had come this idea of swept wings, swept back wings, and so we were now, we’d now recognised that that delayed the development of the

Sir John Charnley Page 98 C1379/30 Track 5 shockwave and therefore made it possible to get closer to the speed of sound if you swept the wings back. And so now we would all just sweep the wings back, do you put a curved wing on it, do you make it a flat, a delta wing, a solid? Do you put, do you have a tail on the aeroplane or not? We were now into the area of design where we were having experimental aeroplanes built for us to, I was going to say play with, but that’s… to experiment with. And aeroplanes that had been designed with zero sweep by Hawker Siddeley on the one hand and Supermarine on the other now were modified to have swept wings put on them. So out of that came the Swift, from Supermarines and the Hunter from…

Hawkers?

Hawkers, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Can we talk about all this? I’m going to have to change the card in a moment so I’d really like to talk about the actual work aspect of this in one big chunk on its own, as it were. But as I’ve only got a couple of minutes left before I have to change this I don’t think we’re going to get through it all before I have to change the card. So I’ve just got a couple of other quick follow-up questions as well.

Yeah, yeah, go on, go on.

[1:09:02] We’re talking about all these other different groups within the aeronautics department; the flight controls, the low speed group. How much do you actually have to do with them? Are you all working on your own little separate group problems or are you communicating with them along the way as well?

There are two levels of this aren’t there, in what you’ve just said. There’s, we’re talking, within these groups, we’re talking within Aerial Flight. Now Aerial Flight was a particular part of Aero Department and there’s Aero Flight, there’s Aero Low Speed Tunnels, there’s Aero High Speed Tunnels, there’s Aero Performance does the seaplane tank. So within Aero Department there are a whole set of divisions of which Aero Flight was one. Within Aero Flight then, you’ve got the Hufton and the Morgan and the Smelt, shall we say. Now, within the divisions I would not be aware of communication broadly through… what Douglas was doing as a head of the department

Sir John Charnley Page 99 C1379/30 Track 5 and running his various divisions, I wouldn’t know. What I did know is that we in Aero F/J had a close link with the High Speed Wind Tunnel because we were both trying to do the same sort of thing and we were involved because the High Speed Tunnel couldn’t do it. But, when you get to the work point, one of my main jobs was to measure the pressures around a wing in flight to compare with that same wing pressures in the wind tunnel, to understand better how the shockwave in flight was different from the shockwave in the tunnel. One of the things, which I’m sure we’ll get to, was that I became closely associated with a photographer in the RAE, Lamplough, very good, good photographer who with me arranged a means of photographing shockwaves in flight to compare with the shockwaves that you got in… and so on. And that was a major part of our activity, so we had a very close link with the High Speed Wind Tunnel as F/J. I would expect Morgan, on the stability and control side, to have had a link with the theoretical stability and control people in Aero Department, Gates and Lyon who did a lot of the stability theory. And HHBM Thomas is another name. And so I think the links would have been established related to what it was that you were trying to do at the working level. Now what Douglas who’s running the department set up to bring together the divisions, I don’t know, I wouldn’t know. But certainly I had from my end very close links with the people in the high speed tunnel; Dr Alan Thom, Harper, Thompson who had a very, very bad stammer, who I suppose is another, when I mention Aero Flight and the High Speed Tunnel, the Low Speed Tunnel, another division was Aero Airborne that was doing a lot of work on parachutes and getting people, units, whatever into… designing gliders and suchlike, designing, working on gliders using our pilots. Gosh, I’m stumbling. Does that answer your question? I’ve forgotten the question now.

I was wondering how the different groups worked together, but yeah, that’s more than answered it.

Very independently I’d say, really, unless there was a specific that said get together, or you decided you would. But there was no – let’s go back to the sort of… you were too keen to get on with your own little job, as far as I was concerned. You were very junior, your activities were working with the pilots, what are you going to do today, weekly, that sort of thing. And what was going on, you know, I wasn’t conscious of any… until the jet people from Pyestock arrived, and that was certainly something that, oh, concerned us in F/J, but no, with the rest of the…

[1:14:50]

Sir John Charnley Page 100 C1379/30 Track 5

As I say, we used to meet teatime and argue with each other at our different levels, whatever, or have fun together or talk about football, rugby, whatever, whatever, whatever. Flying. A lot of us were doing, particularly the control people in a way and Duddy more than us. You see the control people were concerned with bomber aircraft, which we never were because there were no bombers thinking of going through the speed of sound. So we had no, big aircraft were not part of our activity until a little later on and then it was, then yeah, then we got involved with putting a new nose on the Lancaster for better bomb aiming.

[1:15:40] You mentioned a moment ago you used to argue with people at your own level over tea and biscuits. What did you mean by at your own level?

In the sense that I was part of Smelt’s group, I’d be talking with, debating, arguing with perhaps, people within the other groups that were doing the same sort of activity. They’d be doing the flight testing for their group on stability and control and for Duddy’s group or Hufton’s group, on take-off and landing. You’d get the same sort of people that were flying and analysing results and you’d be checking with them as to whether their instrumentation, the way in which they were putting instruments into the… the sort of instruments they were using because you were developing the instrumentation for getting flight test results at the same time, whether you were using altimeters, airspeed indictors or continuous trace recorders, these were… you were developing the technology of flight testing. And their approach to it would be different from my approach. My problem, crudely, what I’d be asking a pilot to do, say a Spitfire pilot, if we were looking at the drag rise on the Spitfire with Mach number, climb to 40,000 feet, stuff the nose down - don’t wing over because that puts asymmetry into it - stuff the nose down and you lose control as you go down a hill, but believe me when you get down to 15,000 feet control will come back again because the Mach number has now gone down and you’ll be able to recover and that’s the test I want, from the period from about 30,000 down to fifteen when I’ve got a recorder going on all the time. Now, I want that continuously but, because you’re going downhill, because you’re going downhill very fast, your recording is not appropriate to that particular time. The pressure lags in the pipes are such that the reading you’re getting is really related to a different speed, a different Mach number, so when you’re attempting to compare with the wind tunnel your results of drag against Mach number, your results from flight tests have got some corrections that you’ve got to sort out and put on and the instrumentation to do

Sir John Charnley Page 101 C1379/30 Track 5 that is being developed and you’re now talking with the other groups to see whether they’ve got any ideas that you can use. The answer generally was no, not, because the rate at which your pressure was changing as you go down in height, increasing as you go, bit thin up there, but when you… So you had to develop… and this in a way is where some of my civil engineering, my hydraulics, my original hydraulics and the laws that relate to the way in which pressures in pipes vary and I think in my CV you’ll see I’ve got an MSc, an MEng at one stage, in 1945 was it, or something, and the thing that I got that for in a way in particular was a paper I wrote on this pressure variation in pipes as you were coming downhill in an aeroplane, and so on. Now where that is now I don’t know, but I haven’t got a copy of it, I don’t think.

[1:20:30]

Doesn’t seem to make sense when you sit here now in 2010 and talk about it, to try to get the atmosphere of the way in which things were being done, very crudely, very – crudely’s unfair. One of the things I look, has bothered me – not bothered me – in later life has been the way in which our pilots, in particular the pilots I worked with, were willing to put their trust in idiots like me. These were blokes who had come back from operations a few years ago, been through test pilot school and now were there to do the flight tests for you. You worked with them in the mess, you played with them in the mess, you drank with them in the mess and that helped build this relationship where they were willing to stick their own necks out to do the sort of thing that you were asking them to do, which was very dangerous. And my Spitfires – I did a lot of work on Spitfires – and two of them blew up. Two of them on two occasions came back without propellers, that in this dive they’d over-speeded. Another whole story there, another story. Martindale was the pilot, Squadron Leader Martindale, a great pilot, and he was doing particularly dangerous high speed dive. When they were doing these things I would go up into the control tower so that I was listening out to what he was up to, we’d talk over air traffic. And then there was a silence and he’d gone and that was the atmosphere, oh God he’s gone. And then the phone rang in air traffic and it was Marty saying, you know, John, I’m in the woods near Guildford, I’ve wrecked your bloody aeroplane but I’ve got your cameras, I’ve got your results for you, come and get them. And he had landed the Spit, put it down in a wood, without a propeller, a dead stick landing, no engine, not on an airfield but in some woods near Guildford. Broke, not broke his back, damaged his back in the process certainly, damaged his back, and then as he said, he’d run away from the aeroplane, didn’t catch fire fortunately, lucky, but he’d collected the camera that had my instrument records in it. Upstairs I’ve got, sorry, one of the

Sir John Charnley Page 102 C1379/30 Track 5 other aeroplanes that I did a lot of work on was the Mustang, Mustang I and then a Mustang III and it was an interesting aeroplane because it was supposed to have a low drag wing on it to enable it to go a bit faster than other aeroplanes, but you can now get into the aerodynamics of wing shape and wing thickness and wing contours and so on. And one of our pilots was a Canadian pilot, Eddie Gale, and he flew this Mustang and he did kill himself, he never recovered, just went straight on from 35, 40,000 feet and just great big hole in the ground. And I felt very upset about this, very, very upset and I dropped a note to his mother back in Canada saying how upset I was that he was doing this test for me and things had gone wrong and he’d been killed. And I got the sweetest little letter back from her which is upstairs, saying that how he’d enjoyed the work he was doing, how he’d mentioned me to her and that I was not to worry about it, he was doing what he loved doing and if that had happened then it was no fault of mine, it was no fault of his, something had gone wrong. Those two examples are just… the atmosphere in which you worked was like that. And you had such a tremendous respect for the pilots who were willing to stick their necks out to do things for you. And you moved forward very, very slowly in terms of Mach number. You’re familiar with Mach number, I’m sure, from what people have said. And you’d move from point nine, nine one, nine two, and if things were… particularly with tailless aeroplanes when they started to oscillate because they hadn’t got a tail. We certainly lost a pilot in the de Havilland aeroplane that was tailless. Why am I wandering on like this. What question am I trying to answer?

One second.

[end of track 5]

Sir John Charnley Page 103 C1379/30 Track 6

[Track 6]

You were talking about the atmosphere at the RAE in the 1940s and test pilots.

The atmosphere was such that it was a place of very bright people and in a way we saw ourselves in RAE generally, if you like, as a link between the fundamental physics and suchlike done in universities and the service, in our case the air force, and we were the bunch in the middle that knew enough about the physics and the basic thing going on in the universities that could match that with some experiments, with some tests, with some analysis as to how to satisfy what it was that the service needed for the next ten, fifteen, twenty years. We were the bunch in the middle that could look both ways, informed both ways, with sufficient capacity within us to look both ways and make sense and bring things together. It’s a thing which I don’t know where it comes from now. I don’t know where it’s coming from. But that was, in my mind, it was part of the function of the defence R&D area and I don’t know where it’s done now, what Qinetiq do and what anyone else does, I have no – I try to find out, no-one really ever gives me a straight answer - I don’t know. You probably know more about that than I do because you’ll have devilled specifically in that area, where I haven’t. All I know is new people joining Qinetiq quite like it, old people regret, almost as you could put your finger on it, regret the passing of an age. There we go. But we regarded ourselves as very clever, both during the war when I was only there ’43 to ’45 and after, those early days afterwards, certainly. And I myself became something of a recognised expert in the question of high subsonic speeds and the transition to supersonic and the problems associated with that transition. Transition’s the wrong word really because it was just an evolution from… but the laws, the subsonic and supersonic laws changed, in flow. But the atmosphere was very privileged, you felt you were in a, or I felt I was in amongst, with my peers in a very enlightened bunch. I enjoyed – I never did learn to fly but I did a lot of flying with others to the point where – does the name Bill Bedford ring a bell to you? He was one of the first pilots, he was one of the early pilots on the Harrier, with Hawker’s. But prior to that he was with us in Aero Flight and again, his wife, my wife got on well together. That was always a help of the family relationships. And I would go flying with him, either test flying or going from A to B, up to Bedford for instance, and in oh, a little Bulldog. And he’d say, he’d take off – I’d never do the take-off – and he said, ‘Alright John, it’s all yours’. And that was me then. And so on. And it happened in a Hunter – exciting. I can’t remember who the pilot of that was, but that was when I was, in 1962, ’63, there-ish – ’63 it would have to be, doesn’t matter – and I was doing the head-up display work on Hunters, different thing altogether, and we were on the low flying

Sir John Charnley Page 104 C1379/30 Track 6 route around the country and I was flying a Hunter, and so on. But not with the responsibility of… but with a knowledge of what to do and how to do it and enjoyed doing it, but never went on a flying course. Higton did, Dennis. Time we’re talking of, early post-war, he went to Panshanger near Hatfield and learnt to fly and he went on and actually did a lot of flying himself, yeah, as a pilot. Again, later on maybe, once we get beyond the forties, dear God. Anyway, that was the environment in which we were working.

[05:50] You described yourself a little while ago as ‘I was just a little JSO’ at that point, did you feel very junior?

Oh yes. Oh yeah. Very junior and very inexperienced. I can remember, not on the first day, on that Saturday in ’43 when I really just was meeting people, and I then met Higton on the Sunday in Aldershot, went to work on the Monday and it was Higton then took me down – and the office at that stage was still in the centre of the RAE – and Higton took me down on to the outside, what was A shed and was where all the aircraft were parked outside and I found myself between the wheels of a Stirling. And the Stirling was way up there and I couldn’t believe it flew, it was just so enormous and so unreal and I, you know, my remark to Higton was, ‘This thing flies?’ Didn’t make… so that was my inexperience and yeah, as a JSO I was, I wasn’t the lowest of the low because there was another technical stream, the scientific stream and the technical stream that weren’t so well qualified, I would say, but no doubt about it. And they… that’s about it. And Higton was one of those and it annoyed Dennis, not annoyed him, that he was more than me, he was in with a bunch of four other characters, until Reggie Rose arrived, all of whom in his view were highly qualified. The fact I came from Liverpool and not Cambridge, I’d got a university degree and it was a first class degree, although it wasn’t in the right subject, it was something which he regretted throughout his career and, you know, there were things later on where that is relevant.

[08:30] What sort of things, if you don’t mind me asking?

Oh yeah, okay. Well he retired as Director General Aircraft Production – DGAP – where his practical experience was so much more useful than an academic background. And I was helpful in steering him in that direction. There came a point in his career when he’d been to the States

Sir John Charnley Page 105 C1379/30 Track 6 and done three years in the Mission in Washington, late sixties to ’70, came back. In ’52, 1952 he’d moved on from Aero Flight to Boscombe Down to continue the same sort of testing, where having got a promotion out of it, down at Boscombe Down. And so he stayed at Boscombe, worked at Boscombe, concentrating on naval aircraft, until he was posted to America in the Mission in Washington. And while he was there I moved around to a position where when he came out and came home from Washington, I was now in a stage, at a post associated with his posting as to where he should go when he came out. And he was sure that the right move for him was to go back to Boscombe from where he went before America. And I was equally sure that he was not the right sort of, he didn’t have the right sort of qualifications, if you like, to compete with the science stream because he was in the technical stream and Dennis was up against people that when it came to an interview and a board would always beat him at that sort of level. So it was the wrong thing to do, for him to think of going back into that area, and I persuaded him to go into the aircraft production side, in which he was a great success in London, a great success, and as I say, became Director General, or DGAP when he retired. He had the practical experience of going round to industry and he concentrated for a while on helicopters with France, with the French helicopter teams, and with our own – and knew enough about practical engineering to spot where our own commercial companies were making mistakes. They had a great respect for him. When he left, when he retired – he’s a year older than I am – and when he retired in 1981 or thereabouts, he was snapped up by Lockheed as well as by two or three companies, a company doing bearings in this country, forgotten its name. But certainly he was a Lockheed man over in this country for years, with his practical experience. And there’s no doubt it was the right thing to do, he wouldn’t have done as well if he’d gone back to being associated with flight testing and at Boscombe, no, no. And he has no regrets and thanks me very much for what I did. There we are.

[12:58] Thinking back to those early days in the forties and these two scientific and technical streams, how did the two of them actually get on together?

Depended on the characters themselves, the individuals. You’ve got he and I, couldn’t have worked closer together. He was in the technical stream, I was in the scientific stream, so-called. You’d get to places like the tunnels, if I’m talking of Aero Department – I don’t know what went on in the other departments - but in Aero Department there wouldn’t be many technical people working in say the Project Office, they’d all be scientists. Aero Flight would be the area where

Sir John Charnley Page 106 C1379/30 Track 6 there was the closest working together between the two streams. And to my knowledge there was yet another stream in which Reggie Rose joined and they were the lab assistants, essentially. So you’d got the superior people were the science stream, then there was the technical stream, and then there were the lab assistants or the technical stream and experimental officers weren’t they – S & E – and then the lab assistants who were dogsbodies really, for want of a better word. Don’t like the word, but they were very junior. They did a lot of, in Bob Rose’s case, Reggie Rose, he’d go down to an aeroplane to take the camera out and bring it back and it would then go to Miss Fou or to me for developing and analysis and he would then help pushing a slide rule around and that sort of thing. So low level stuff, but important, for all of that. But Higton and I, and I’m not aware of anywhere else that there was a problem. In the Duddy area, the low speed group, there was a woman in there, well qualified but qualified experimentally. Again, I think couldn’t have been an apprentice, don’t think they were, don’t know that they did women apprentices in those days, engineering, I don’t know, don’t know. But certainly, she got on well with all of us and she wasn’t science group, I wouldn’t know what she was, but she wasn't the science group. No, not a problem that I was conscious of at all. No.

[16:03] You mentioned the sort of duties that the lab assistant grade would be doing. Could you compare that then with what a technical grade and a scientific grade person would be doing?

Thought I’d pretty well answered that. The scientific grade and the technical, experimental technical, in qualifications the science group, the science grade would be expected to be more capable of original thinking, of moving forward, of extracting from results the real message of those results. The experimental technical would be concerned with the actual producing that information and the lab assistant, very much even below, as I say, the chap that you’d put a camera in the aircraft, go and get the camera out, take that to the lab to do this, that and the other. Might do things in the lab, but nothing of any great responsibility. The experimental would certainly have responsibility for the producing of the information, if you like. And then you get the scientists who would also have that, but they would have the overall ability to think through what the purpose of the tests were and were the tests actually producing the answers to the questions they were meant to explore. That’s the best I can do for you I think.

Oh, I think that sums it up quite nicely.

Sir John Charnley Page 107 C1379/30 Track 6

Within the science group, I’ll just add one other thing, that there were then those people who were just not, almost management qualified at all. There was a special set, a special group, a sub-group if you like, that were there because they were intellectually capable of, and completely incapable of running other people. They were specialists in themselves, they were ideas people. And it was one of my delights that within the Civil Service we had room for that sort of person, whereas out in industry they were few and far between because they weren’t in industry terms, contributing to the wealth. Now we can argue that as well, but certainly it meant that the RAE had curious people in it and they were of this type. Willie Grey was one who rushed around the airfield, you’d think where’s he going now? And not only was he a low drag fanatic, in aerodynamic terms, he was an expert on the big flowers and he would go round – he grew flowers on the airfield behind the pilots’ hut – and he would go down with a feather and tickle these plants to pollinate them, one to another. And he’d do this with a flying helmet on and go there on his bicycle, tearing away like this, and just accepted, he’s a curious chap. But he was bright and we had room for that sort of person in the organisation. There was another bloke that it was found out after a long time, I gathered, in Radio Department, which was an area of RAE I knew nothing about, that he slept in the place, he lived in the place at nights, and no-one knew. He just had, in a little part of Radio Department – is this going on the tape, I’m getting worried now.

You haven’t named any names. Well, not for this chap anyway.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Willie Grey I don’t mind, but this I… don’t know, don’t know. But it’s all a long, long time ago.

[21:00] I had a couple of questions about, well actually Miss Fou and Dennis Higton specifically. Along the way you’ve sort of mentioned that both of them in their own way were sort of important in educating you about what you were doing there. Could you sort of give me an idea of the sorts of things you got from each of them?

Oh, completely different. Miss Fou, not really practical. A mathematician, very clever. Able to analyse, to look at results and pick out the important things from those results and as a result of what she’d learned from one particular set of tests, describe what she’d like done next. The person that would then do that would be Higton and he’d be the man who would then set up

Sir John Charnley Page 108 C1379/30 Track 6 within the aeroplane the equipment to do what it was she wanted done. Dennis was the practical bloke and he could take an aeroplane to pieces, as he’d done as an apprentice with a Spitfire, he was involved in the flight tests of the first Spitfire, for instance. K504 or whatever it was. And he was in practical terms, he knew how far to go before things could be dangerous, in practical terms. Miss Fou would, she’d analyse a situation completely differently. She wouldn’t need to worry about the practical mechanisms for doing things. As I think I might have said to you before, my first memory of her was in working a thirty-inch slide rule and we sat with her at a sort of a table, wasn’t a desk, it was a table, she was, we both sat on the same side sharing the length of it and working the same slide rule, at times together, at times separately. And from her I then extracted the way to go about the particular analysis that was required from this set of instruments that we’d got, that Reggie Rose might have brought back from the aeroplane, that I then, sometimes with Dennis would develop – we were doing our own developing of these results, like a mass of instruments such as we saw upstairs – and then I would still stay with them, but with Miss Fou, help with the analysis or get on with it myself. Completely different functions, completely different. But worked together well.

[24:25] The other part of the education thing I was going to ask you about as well was your time spent at the wind tunnels where you mentioned there, was it Miss Bradfield?

Miss Bradfield ran Small Wind Tunnels, yeah, and she’d been there, she was elderly. Oh, elderly, careful John. She’d certainly been at RAE for some time and grown up in the department with Dr Douglas who ran the department. So she and he were closely associated in the history of the department. And she ran Small Wind Tunnels. I think there were two tunnels: an eleven foot and a three foot, there were. Eleven foot and three foot. And it had, John Seddon was in it, Squire. Seddon was a man who was knowledgeable on the cooling of engines, the aerodynamic cooling of engines, the flow through engines to cool them and how to make sure that the cooling did its job. Squire was a theoretical man on basic flow, aerodynamic flow, developing theories on flow patterns and then checking them in the tunnel. Hills was just a good tunneler. So Miss Bradfield ran a bunch like that and when I was sent there there was another man called Anscombe, Tony Anscombe and Chew Warren, and I was put to work with them because they were doing model tests, again, on jet aircraft and new designs for jet aircraft. Were thinking of Vampires and Meteors and tests on those forms were going through the tunnel to help with the design process. And none of them at that stage were associated with the high Mach

Sir John Charnley Page 109 C1379/30 Track 6 number, that was going to be the high speed tunnel and that was another division. But Miss Bradfield had a lot of these, three or four people who worked the, or evaluated what the wind tunnel should be doing. And then you’d got the minions who actually did it, worked in the tunnels, again, got the results and analysed the results before handing on to these three or four people who knew what it was all about. But within the minions, you’d got people straight from university who’d been to Cambridge or Bristol or wherever and had got a degree in aeronautics, and that was the sort of bunch that I joined. It was an area where there were a bigger proportion of women than there were elsewhere in the department, and as such it was Miss B, Miss Bradfield, used to run little parties where it was alleged she tried to put people together. It was alleged. She tried that with me, I have to say, but it didn’t work. No, no, no. I’d known Mary since we were at school so I wasn’t really interested in any plan of that sort at all. But it certainly was the place where a lot of graduates started their aeronautical career with Miss B, because it was a fairly traditional line of activity to work in a wind tunnel and get lift, drag and pitch and a few movements of control, hinge movements and so on, and you did that on one model or you looked at a wing and got its lift, drag and pitch and you’d think right, that’s that, now the next one. So there was a bit of an automatic process that didn’t need a lot of thought, other than from those people who were running it. But you’d come straight from, as indeed I did, not knowing anything about it and I could hang a model in the tunnel and you could then arrange for the equipment already there to measure the lift and the drag and the movements and turn the handle on that for this model, the next model and whatever.

[30:08] Forgive my naivety; I have quite a fuzzy idea of what a wind tunnel is actually used for. Would you mind explaining it to me?

Just done that!

Possibly describing it as well, because I have this, you know, three foot, eleven foot, in my mind, is that diameter, is that length or…

Yeah, cross-section, working cross-section.

Could you actually describe, you know, what maybe one of these wind tunnels is like and the set- up there and…

Sir John Charnley Page 110 C1379/30 Track 6

I was trying to think, have I got a picture of one somewhere? I’m sure, somewhere around I’ve got a picture. But… big building, a working section. [pause] In plan. Big building and [pause] closed circuit, a fan shall we say here, which is sucking air around this section. This is the working section, here.

Could you describe where that is in relation to the other bits, just for the tape as well?

And that’s the fan which is sucking, generally sucking air and it’s going round the system and the working section is where the… it’s where a model will have been made, generally in a carpenter’s shop which is associated with it, and it’ll be a scale model of, ten scale, whatever, whatever, whatever. And depending on size, when I talk about a three foot and eleven foot, that’s the size of the working section and it’s generally, it can be circular, generally circular, because these will be all circular sections as you go round. And the model is then moved in one way or another, depending on the size – carried in, moved in on a trolley if it’s a big model, for an eleven foot, because that eleven foot means that working section is eleven foot diameter. And that’s a big model and you certainly wouldn’t have anything that size in a very high speed tunnel because the forces would be too big. But in the small wind tunnels, then the biggest, there is an eleven foot, certainly. And that was a very good tunnel and that’s a big working section. And now you, around the working section you have a balance which is where, a balance on which the model is hung and the model is hung upside down so that when the air, when the stream flows past the model – you can now imagine a narrow section and a model, and I know this - a model that is now hanging upside down so that when the model develops lift on the wings, instead of it going up it’s now loading the balance. You have a balance up above the model and because the model is hanging upside down it’s pulling and that makes, that’s the easier way to make measurements. Now, you get some tunnels where the model is put on a sting. Well let’s stay with the, the normal in the RAE in that day they were hung upside down and you measured the lift and you measured the drag, that’s pretty obvious, and then you arranged again a measurement of the way in which the model was trying to topple, measuring a moment. And those are the three main measurements that you made and you blew wind past the model and increased the speed or whatever as you wished. But standard stuff, some of the companies would have their own pretty limited affairs and it was places like the NPL – National Physical Laboratory – and Farnborough, and then when it was set up, College of Aeronautics, they had… I think Bristol had, Bristol University. Cambridge certainly had the odd wind tunnel for doing

Sir John Charnley Page 111 C1379/30 Track 6 this sort of thing. Those were for academic purposes and for instruction of the universities of just what aerodynamics was. We at Farnborough – I say we – were more concerned with producing information to help design rather than an understanding. Anyway, that was it and this big building was run by Miss Bradfield.

[36:15] What was she like?

[laughs] An elderly spinster. Sorry, elderly’s too… that’s unfair to her. A spinster, no doubt about that. Thought her wind tunnels were the most important part of the department, which was good news for her, and she fought her corner very, very well, Miss B, no doubt about it. And so many people had been through her hands; Smelt had been through her, Smithy had, Higton had. I don’t know about Miss Fou, but they’d all been through Miss Bradfield. She was part of the education of the department as well as people for whom the industry had an enormous respect. I remember going to see Sydney Camm when I was working on Hunters and we’d got some flight results on a Hunter that explained why the Hunter was having certain problems at high Mach number, and our solution in Aero Flight, in F/J, was to put some spoilers… The reason the Hunter was having some difficulty was that in a particular span-wise position of the wing the flow was breaking down around the aerofoil and causing an earlier transition to separated flow, the flow was separating and as such the drag was going up and it was affecting the aileron, the performance of the control. And we put some little things we called little fences on the wing, which improved the flow over the rear end of the aerofoil. Tiny little things, just like this, a row of them.

A couple of inches tall.

That sort of thing, yeah, yeah. And you can imagine almost helping to straighten out the flow on this swept back wing, getting back into design now. And that improved the aircraft performance and I had to go to Hawkers and persuade Sydney Camm, the aircraft designer, that his aeroplane would be improved by doing this. And there was no way that he was going to listen to me – I can see it now in his office – but he did then say, ‘Charnley’ he said, ‘You come back to me when Miss Bradfield in her tunnels have had a look at this and that she supports what you’re saying, and then I might do something’. That was the respect that a baron of our industry would have for Miss Bradfield.

Sir John Charnley Page 112 C1379/30 Track 6

[40:02] As an aside, what was your impression of Camm when you met him?

[laughs] Oh, terrific. Oh yes. We’d… the fact that I was almost sent to go and persuade him to do this was a reflection of the fact we’d worked together and I’d worked with his team and as such been taken to appear before him, and we got on well, we got on well together. Tough, undoubtedly. A good designer. Was sure he was right, which is when I went along with little things, about this sort of size, to put on his wing, he, you know, didn’t like that one little bit. And ran the design team I think very well, the various elements; the structure, the stressing, the aerodynamics. All the ancillary bits and pieces, the equipment that goes in, putting it together, managing, very good. I had a high opinion of him and oh, enjoyed arguing with him. It was stimulating to do so. Oh, no doubt. I was just, again, fairly cog in the wheel where he was running the wheel. No, no, no. I’m trying to think of other names. The Supermarine man, Spitfire man.

Smith?

Oh….

Mitchell?

Yeah, Mitchell, another one. Although I never met Mitchell.

I think he died in about ’38 didn’t he?

Never met Mitchell, but his product, the people that he trained I did know and I was trying to think of that name. But certainly, Handley Page, again a name there, but certainly… And again, here was I, in the forties, you know, when I turned up in 1943 at RAE I was twenty or twenty-one maybe, with a first class degree, from Liverpool admittedly. [laughs] But very junior and the next thing you found yourself in the course of the next two or three, four years, you developed for yourself a reputation of, knowledgeable about the problems with aircraft near the speed of sound. And so you were led into the offices of these big men to tell them a bit about it and why you knew a bit about it. And you were lecturing on the other hand the Empire Test

Sir John Charnley Page 113 C1379/30 Track 6

Pilots’ School and telling them why their aircraft were being a bit strange as far as they were concerned, because you were in a position of being one of the few people at that stage who knew anything about it. So you did meet these designers, big designers. Avro’s. Ah, names. Avro’s… He and I often had words. Gloster, I had no difficulty down at Gloster because I’d built a reputation on the A28/39 as far as they were concerned. Chadwick up at… Avro was Manchester.

Roy Chadwick?

That’s right. You’ve no doubt heard of these names from other people?

More literature than from other people. What was, why did you have words with Chadwick, if you don’t mind me asking?

I lost. The question was whether the Avro Delta should have a tail or not. A tail plane. We’re getting to the stage of aircraft design from what we were doing at Farnborough and as I mentioned earlier, tailless aircraft were a very fashionable sort of thing to do because it reduced the drag if you didn’t have a tail, but equally it left you with a very debateable longitudinal stability, where without a tail the aeroplane could get unstable and oscillate, de Havilland 108 is a good example. The Gloster Delta had a tail all the way through. The Avro Delta we flew, and we at RAE flew a version with a tail and a version without a tail and I had to go off to Manchester and try to persuade him to put a tail on his aeroplane, but he wouldn’t, so… and so the little model, we did some more work on the model, the – I can’t remember what scale it was, doesn’t matter – again, it couldn’t be done in a tunnel so we were fiddling with it in flight and making little changes here and there. All very difficult, all very risky. We had an aeroplane built for us, Boulton Paul Delta, and we had one of those built without a tail and another one built with a tail, again, looking at the changes. But Chadwick said no, no, no, no, he was going ahead without a tail, and that became the Vulcan. And he was right. I don’t know, it was a bad mistake of mine, I don’t know – mistake is probably the wrong word – it was the wrong thing. He had a good design and got away with it. Yeah, yeah. I was wrong. And the Vulcan was a tailless Delta and it was a clever design in the relationship between the longitudinal pitching control where the lever… anyway, there we go. Yeah, yeah. But certainly, I was a very junior boy who was a bit of an expert in a narrow area and was talking with men who had enormous wealth, a wealth of experience over a big area and I was a specialist, an experimental specialist.

Sir John Charnley Page 114 C1379/30 Track 6

And so they listened to me, but whether they took any notice of me, in Sydney Camm’s case he wanted Miss B, not me. [laughs]

[48:12] One final question, but it is my last question for this morning. What do you think you gained out of your experience working with Miss Bradfield and working in the wind tunnels?

Oh, yeah. An understanding of some of the basics of aerodynamics, no doubt about that. What lift, drag and pitch were all about, and how the fundamentals of aircraft design, the elements in an aircraft that affected the drag, the lift and the moments, both the longitudinal moments; stability fore and aft and the lateral moments as well. Which I was going to night school in that first twelve months and the two things complemented each other. On the one hand I was learning the theory at night school and what contributions like, oh the famous aerodynamic names…

Glauerts?

The Glauerts, certainly, well done. The one I was trying to think of, the flow in pipes, when you get… the transition from laminar flow to turbulent flow. But all the… and Lanchester’s theories on that sort of thing, the general rules affecting flow, the influence of density, influence of Reynolds number, one of the important numbers in aerodynamics which relates to the size of something. And along with that went the fact that depending on the size of the model in the tunnel, that would fix a Reynolds number and that meant that there could be some doubts about the way in which you used the results of the tests of that particular Reynolds number to the full scale in flight where the Reynolds number, which really was a scaling feature, meant that the results when you got in the tunnel in some cases couldn’t be directly applied. And all of that appreciation of almost pretty fundamental aerodynamics came from the wind tunnel work associated with the technical school in the evenings. When you then went, and that touched upon the shockwave problems associated with flow near the speed of sound, or at the speed of sound, which is what I was then going to do in the F/J area. Yeah, that’s good enough I think because the F/J, the jet engine which I’d been associated right at the start was now part of the broader scene of using the jet as the main means now of going up to and through the speed of sound, and for that we wanted to reduce the drag and in reducing the drag, produced all sorts of other problems; instability in control, in structure, because reducing the drag meant thinning the

Sir John Charnley Page 115 C1379/30 Track 6 wing down, essentially, sweeping it back and thinning it down. And after that, was it a Delta? Was it a swept wing? Was a… and so on, and so on. We were doing all that in flight, which was great fun. Something to eat and drink. Is that it for the moment?

I think that’s a good place to stop.

[end of track 6]

Sir John Charnley Page 116 C1379/30 Track 7

[Track 7]

I was wondering if you could tell me about some of the actual, the nature of the actual work you were involved in. We’ve touched on it in little places, but I’m interested in what were the real problems with aerodynamics when you got there, to the RAE?

Ah, okay. Wartime, January ’43, completely unknown area to me. My knowledge of World War Two to that point had been bombing of Liverpool, evacuation into Wales and university activity as soldiers, the something something corps in university, where as I think I might have… I was promoted to be a lance corporal, but never had any thoughts of aviation. So RAE was a complete surprise and really until almost nine months later when I’d learned a bit about aviation, aerodynamics, was still a surprise, although now I could understand wind tunnels, I can understand from what I’d heard flight testing, and the problems were those associated with getting our aircraft to go faster in the terms of Spitfires and Hurricanes, in terms of Tempests and Tornados for strike, for ground strike, in terms of producing of an aeroplane for night fighting to counter to some extent the bombing threat. Those were all beginning to be subjects that were crossing the paths of RAE in one form or another, so that I was becoming more aware of them. We had intelligence related to some sort of new threat to the southern counties and we, certainly in RAE there were teams working away as to what they might be. And then - I must be in 1944 or something like that now – the doodlebugs, attacks on London and the south took place and RAE was immediately involved with understanding the mechanics of that oscillating engine. And there was a hangar where we did things, there was a hangar set up for all the bits and pieces of bits of doodlebug that were recovered, finding their way into the hangar, being examined, and then the analysts deciding what the thrust was and therefore where it was that the range and where they’d come from, and so on. And I found myself over that period, at one particular period, along with two or three other people, I was certainly on the cliffs at Dover following the track of doodlebugs that were coming to attack London and photographing the track and allowed… then, we then went back and were extending backwards the line of where they might be coming from and two or three other people at different other places on the south coast were doing the same sort of thing and giving some idea of the launch pad of where these things were coming from and moving this to the air force as to places to be attacked as likely launching pads for these wretched doodlebugs. So that was something that RAE was involved in. It’s still wartime. And the other thing of course was – I say of course – of using Meteors, which were a new aeroplane to us, just newly instructed, of intercepting doodlebugs and tipping them over

Sir John Charnley Page 117 C1379/30 Track 7 with their wings. So that too was an activity in which we were involved. So we were, certainly I was conscious of being involved in World War Two at that stage and so was… and RAE, you know, within other areas of RAE the bombing and nav division, as I learnt later, of the instruments and photographic department, they were sending people out on the operational aircraft looking at the performance of bombing systems. I know that from a chap, personal friend that was going on those night ops with the aircrew.

[06:42]

So within the Aerodynamics Department then in broad terms, one improving the performance of existing service aircraft, on the control side, improving the controls of the big bombers. And I was involved with Higton, that I’ve mentioned earlier, in putting a new nose on a Lancaster because the bomb aimers were complaining that the distortion through the plastics of the nose was upsetting their bomb aiming and please could they have the nose of the Lancaster replaced with a series of flat panels rather than curved panels. And Higton and I knocked up did a few sums with Structures Department on the sort of strengths required of panels in a new Lancaster nose, with a designed diving speed of 330, 350 miles an hour, I don’t know, it doesn’t matter. And the next thing, we were screwing this new nose on a frame of the Lancaster nose and lying on our gut in this new nose, like a bomb aimer, flight testing it to see whether it fell to pieces or whatever, and it was all knocked up in wood so you were a bit concerned, particularly about the bolts that were attaching this temporary structure to this frame and the need was to see whether it would… we didn’t ever get to 330 or 350 miles an hour, whatever it was, but certainly I was in there when this blessed thing was creaking, and you think we’ve gone far enough, this is… And the view was still alright, we flew through rain and fog. I think, to my great delight, I think the war finished before it ever got into service. [laughs] But it was a different sort of job for the things I was doing for fighter aircraft and then the things I was doing for evaluating the proposals that were being put forward by industry as the response to the night fighter specification and de Havilland, they’d been… the proposal had been reduced to two; one from de Havilland’s for an aeroplane called the DH110; twin-engined, twin-boom, tailed aeroplane, and by Glosters for the Javelin. And RAE was asked to, by headquarters, asked to produce an evaluation of the two aircraft and a little group was set up of which I was to make the comparison of the aerodynamics between the two proposals. Someone else was doing navigation and armaments and so on. But certainly, from the discussions we had in this little group, I’m pretty certain, I wouldn’t be sure of this because it left me, that the eventual RAE answer, recommendation to London, was the

Sir John Charnley Page 118 C1379/30 Track 7

DH110. No sorry, wrong. The group captain that was running the flight side of Farnborough was a member on the RAE board, was a Group Captain Hughes who had been a night fighter operator himself previously before coming to RAE as a group captain and a board member and he was firmly of the view that the right aeroplane was the Javelin, the Gloster Javelin. Now I’m not sure just what decision eventually went from RAE, but certainly, from my bit of the aerodynamics that was for the DH110. But in the end the air force went for the Javelin. And I can’t tell you why that would be so in terms of what went on later, don’t know. What I do know is that the air force having lost interest in the DH110, the navy picked it up and it became a very successful – what was the name of it for the navy? Vixen. Sea Vixen. And it became the Sea Vixen for the navy. So you now had the air force with the Javelin and - which didn’t do very well - and the navy with the successful converted DH110 into a Sea Vixen.

[13:17]

So that was another thing going on at RAE, that sort of thing was happening all the time of RAE sensibly being asked for recommendations on choices of this sort. I don’t know what was going on in the big bomber side between the V bombers and why we went ahead with all three. Don’t know. Don’t know the politics or the policies there, but we did finish up with the three; Vulcan, Victor, Valiant, didn’t we? The Valiant first to appear really, and then Victor, Vulcan. And of those three in the end I guess you’d say that the Vulcan was the most successful – or would you? I don’t know. I don’t know how you’d measure that. The Valiant, a swept wing, the Victor with the crescent wing and the Vulcan as a delta. So we just, again, ringing the choices. We were at the period where we just didn’t know which was going to be the most successful design variant and we in Aero Flight were having scale models built – and I say flying models with pilots in them. Like we had a little 707 delta, we had a straight wing version of the model size, scale model of a Valiant and did we have a… yes, a Handley Page. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Crescent wing. Didn’t get very far with that. Didn’t think it had the advan… I don’t know, don’t know. There were things that I saw on the flight line but I was never involved with them, so I don’t know. And there’s an example of a question you were asking earlier, the extent to which there was a cross linking between the different groups. You were so involved with your own activities that you didn’t really spend time looking at what other people were doing. You heard more of that through the pilots because one moment they’d be flying for you and then later in the day they’d be flying for one of the other groups on their activities. And of course there were questions about that, as to whether it was better to have the same pilot, having a continuity on a

Sir John Charnley Page 119 C1379/30 Track 7 particular programme or whether you had different pilots adding their versions of how to fly that particular thing, depending on the nature of what it was, whether you were relying on a pilot opinion, and that was important for controls, or whether you were relying on just the results of instruments and measurements of that sort. Generally a bit of both, but there we are. But I couldn’t say I knew an awful lot of what was going… particularly in the Hufton area of deck landings, naval operations, unless it was that some naval aeroplane was running into trouble at a high Mach number and then one would be involved. But not the… the programme of landing aircraft on naval decks, no, no, didn’t know the first thing about it, which of course I complained about when I was moved to the other end of the speed range for blind landing. When I complained, when the director said it was time I moved from transonic aerodynamics into other areas and he was sending me up to Blind Landing in East Anglia and when I protested and said I didn’t want to go because I knew nothing about the landing of Vulcan aeroplanes in particular, didn’t know anything about, and he just said, well you’re a quick learner I’m told. And there, as I think I’ve mentioned already, I don’t know, as I was leaving his office he said two things: one, I want you to move BLEU from where it is now up to Bedford in two years’ time, and I’m talking about 1955 now, in two years’ time, and then also, you know, as I was leaving his office, it’s a promotion for you. So who resists then? So all my aerodynamics stopped. No, that’s wrong. My high speed aerodynamics and involvement stopped in ’55 so I can’t claim to know what was going on after that.

[18:48] Can we talk about those ten years or so in high speed aerodynamics?

It was twelve – ’43 to ’55, exactly that. Yeah, that’s it, that’s it. That’s what it was.

When you first got back from learning about aerodynamics at the wind tunnels and at night school, what did you actually have to do in your section?

Pressure plotting around the lip of a Spitfire radiator. [laughs] Now there’s a good answer for you. Spitfire apparently, well, Spitfire radiators, the engines were getting bigger in Spitfires and the cooling wasn’t good enough so they were warming up and overheating. So there was a need to look at the flow in the radiator of the Spitfire and in particular the theory was that the flow was breaking down because of the design of the entry. And the way in which to, again it was happening at high speeds, the tunnel couldn’t be believed so it was having to be done in flight

Sir John Charnley Page 120 C1379/30 Track 7 and so it needed… Dennis Higton had produced a design of a little pressure transducer of the sort that you dug a hole, bit of skin for a wing or whatever, just a bit of skin, light alloy skin, dig a hole in it and he had produced a transducer which you sunk in through the hole and then you extended clips underneath which kept it in position so now you had a means of recording the pressure at that point. You could now put a row of them and you could get a shape of the pressure distribution like that. You could see where the flow broke down from being laminar to being turbulent. And if you did this around the lip of the radiator, the Spitfire radiator, and you had very thin tubes then that you stuck, you attached, literally, to the radiator and you could see if, and if so where, the flow was breaking down and therefore not cooling. You could then rearrange the shape from your own knowledge of aerodynamics to try to improve that. And fly again and do some new measurements. And we improved, we got… certainly. And that was the thing I was put on with Dennis, with Higgy, because he was the chap that could put that little bit of equipment in, whereas I didn’t have the experience. That was the first thing, then the other thing associated with the jets themselves and this was also… that was in a way, that was not what I… that was clever aerodynamics of designing a shape so that you didn’t get a flow breakaway. But I wanted to get involved more with this new idea of jet propulsion and suchlike and that was measuring the performance and how the performance varied with height and as we’ve said earlier I think, the question of the engine surging and then trying to start it again, making measurements at different combinations of speed and altitude when the surge occurred to get some idea of why it was happening. And then we get in – I couldn’t say got into conflict with – but certainly came into association with the Pyestock people. And the man of now is, what did I say, Baxter, AD Baxter, between he and Smelt. Not bosom friends at all. And there, I did that on Spitfires, on Mustangs, on Lightnings from America, on Thunderbolts from America, for first line operational aircraft meant to be fast fighters and out of that got drag curves of the sort that showed how the drag was varying with Mach number and how well the Spitfire came out of that from its clever wing design, essentially, an elliptic, a classical aerodynamic shape of an elliptic wing, nice and thin, whereas – I can’t remember what the… I’ve got papers somewhere of the thicknesses of the wings, relative thickness/chord ratios.

[24:16]

One other thing that I wasn’t directly associated with, but which does touch on some of the other things we’ve spoken about, and I’ve just found a note on it in that box file upstairs, the early experiments done on vertical lift and we now had jet engines which were – and I’m talking of the

Sir John Charnley Page 121 C1379/30 Track 7 late forties, I think – they had jet engines which were now capable of producing more thrust than their weight. So they were now capable of lifting themselves vertically. So the question now was, how did you take advantage of this operationally and could you design, could you think of an aircraft design, could you think of how to control the ability to lift something under its own weight and then control it either to move forward or vary the amount of thrust you were getting from it, and therefore make practical use of it. And we set out, Higton and I, and principally Dennis, principally Higton, just a cross on the ground in planks. And this is classical RAE stuff; crude but effective. A cross on the ground with a seat at the intersection of the cross and with little squirts of pressure air coming from the ends of the crosses; longitudinally and horizontally, and tubes connecting these pressure jets to a stick on this chair. And you sat a pilot in this chair and got some idea from him as to whether the amount of control he could have in controlling that beam, couple of beams with a stick in between his legs like a joystick and how did you put this together as a control system to enable him to have any sort of reasonable control of something that might be built around it.

Where’s the high pressure air coming from?

There was a supply of, as you say, pressure air mounted on this structure and you were feeding it to, I think I can turn… this is a report I think I can turn out, I think I’ve seen it up there today, and this went to the, as an RAE report addressing the feasibility of something like this, it went to the Aeronautics Research Committee, the ARC, in London who recommended that money should be spent on pursuing this idea in industry. And out of that came the Harrier. Sorry, went to Rolls-Royce to develop the engine technology associated with the sort of controls that we had decided ourselves could be used to do it, to maintain sufficient control. And Rolls-Royce then produced the Bedstead. And one of the things that Higton, more than me, more than I, is upset is that the display of vertical lift in the British Museum starts with the Bedstead rather than this work that was done in RAE beforehand.

What was it called? If it had a name at all?

It didn’t have a name. It didn’t have a name. It was just an RAE tech memo or a tech note and again, I can certainly turn that out. I think I could find that today or we can have a look next time, but certainly it was just… and I don’t know. We needed to – and Higton took it over, I was now busy with something else, I don’t know. But Dennis certainly did some very useful,

Sir John Charnley Page 122 C1379/30 Track 7 typically the sort of thing RAE was good at, lashing something up in a crude form to demonstrate principles and then handing on to people who were concerned with exploiting those principles, the feasibility having been demonstrated. And we were not clever enough, or Dennis wasn’t and I wasn’t, because we needed the help of the automatic control people that could link phase advance and feedback to get the right sort of control laws for doing this job. We were not clever enough and that’s where folk like Doetsch came in from Germany. And so on and so on and so on.

[30:15] How did you get involved in the control system work? Was that part of your normal job or…?

No, no, no. No, no. It, the same Aeronautical Research Committee, ARC, it was they who, as I say, decided that the jet engine could now lift more than its own weight, therefore ask RAE to do some work to decide whether, if this was to be used for vertical lift it could be controlled in some way or another and for them to get going on it. And that came to us and came to F/J, jets.

Did it leave the ground or was it just a case of measuring…

No.

… the pressure on each point?

To start with it didn’t leave the ground, it was just a platform where you measured responses. And I think I left it then. Dennis feels very strongly about this, I know, that for some reason the British Museum exhibit didn’t start with the work he did at Farnborough. You’ve got me going on this. Can I spend a minute or two, to take this off…

Just pop this on pause.

[end of track 7]

Sir John Charnley Page 123 C1379/30 Track 8

[Track 8]

We were talking about control experiments for vertical flight and how you ended up…

Oh yeah, and I will find a paper for you. Next time we talk you can see the evidence that led the Aeronautical Research Council, who were presented with the results of this original bit of RAE work, that led them to say it demonstrates the feasibility, you’ve had a pilot sitting in there and he says he can control it, so let’s go to the private sector and build it into a flying machine. And in fact, in fact – did we not go to two? We went to Shorts and we went to Rolls-Royce. And Rolls-Royce did just a vertical lift engine. Shorts did…

The SC1?

The SC1, with an arrangement whereby the same engines could be used for lift and then forward propulsion. And did the Rolls? I don’t remember.

I think there were Rolls-Royce jet lift engines, I forget the name. Before the Pegasus.

And it’s in, that part of it is in the British Museum. Or was.

The Science Museum?

The Science Museum. Science Museum. Yeah, yeah.

You mentioned that the main, well a lot of the work you were doing around this time was connected with the problems of supersonic and transonic flight.

[pause]

What was the problem of supersonic flight?

Well, getting there. We’d already, we had by now, our work, the flight work had shown that this sonic barrier was an illusion associated with wind tunnels and was not the case in flight, therefore with the improvements you could get from a jet engine we could see that we could get

Sir John Charnley Page 124 C1379/30 Track 8 through the speed of sound. And for the first time now it opened up this change in flow pattern from a subsonic flow to a supersonic flow. And essentially to explore that area, you just needed at that stage a lot more power than we had available. So we were diving aircraft and that was not a healthy business to be doing. And we moved then to, I was going to say dropped bodies, but something similar to the sort of thing that the States were doing, only they were doing it with a manned aircraft beneath a big commercial, big military bomber. We went along the path of just a model down a firing range, whereby oh, you explored the drag profile of something like that. You fired this thing, you then with various wing shapes, wing thicknesses and so on, and you produced out of the model a set of results that you ejected by, and parachuted down on the range. It would never have got very far but the… we were looking towards the build, the design of the English Electric Lightning, the P1 as it was then, F23 something something. And we had in fact a system. The air force if you like had been persuaded, convinced that supersonic flight and supersonic operations were now a practical proposition. Enough had been done by us down here to convince them that… and what was it? F23/49? So we’re saying by 1949, I think, I think it was the F23/49 that became the OR for the Lightning. And they were now persuaded that they could write a requirement for a supersonic fighter. That was the basis then for a formalised attack of understanding more about flight at supersonic speeds. But we didn’t have – I was going to the States on this – because the Americans were going for very, very thin wings, very thin. Our typical Spitfire, Mustang thing were eight or ten per cent thick, that’s the thickness in terms of the chord length, T over C. America, in the F-104, was playing with four per cent thickness/chord ratio.

[06:14] What’s the benefit of a thicker or thinner wing?

Oh, reducing drag. Simple as that. It’s the main drag component. And you thin down… it’s, in crude terms it’s a smaller frontal area to present to the wind and the airflow doesn’t find it as difficult to get round just a thin sheet and so the thinner you make it, you’ve then got problems of where do you store the fuel, that becomes a different design problem now. And I was getting to… we’d set Bristol off, I think, on a very thin research aircraft; straight, thin-winged research aircraft. And Bill Strang, Bristol Chief Aerodynamicist and I went to the States together to look at what we could glean, what we could gather, extract, steal from the States to improve our own knowledge of thin, straight wings for supersonic speeds because they had got tunnels that are working effectively at supersonic speeds where we hadn’t.

Sir John Charnley Page 125 C1379/30 Track 8

When did you visit the States?

Ah…

When abouts?

Well, obviously before ’55 because that’s when I left this world, this particular area. And we’re talking again about ’53, something like that, no doubt. ’53, ’54,’52? Had Higton left? Higton went to Boscombe in ’52. Had he left when I did this particular trip? I’d already done the Scott Crossfield jaunts on the Skybolt D55, 155? Don’t know, don’t know, don’t know. Ooh, don’t know.

[08:42] What were the earlier trips you just mentioned, sorry?

The thing when Scott Crossfield flew the rocket propelled thing, launched from underneath a big military airplane. And when he and I went on a dude ranch.

You mentioned this over lunch, you haven’t mentioned it on tape.

Oh God, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Okay.

Who was Scott Crossfield, would be a good place to start I guess.

[pause] We were now thinking seriously about supersonic flight. We had demonstrated to everyone’s satisfaction now that the so-called sonic barrier wasn’t a barrier, it was only there. It wasn’t so steep as had been previously indicated by tunnel tests, that was the fault of the tunnel, and would not be experienced in free flight. So that it was now a matter of a sufficiently powerful engine and that would obtain supersonic speeds. So the States, the United States, they had decided to attack this problem and Bell for NACA, the American Research National whatever, became NASA, but it was NACA in those days, they had contracted Bell to build a research aeroplane with very thin wings and rocket propelled. And they were going to and did take this experimental aeroplane, little, up high underneath the belly of a big military transport,

Sir John Charnley Page 126 C1379/30 Track 8 release it like the rocket motor, for a very short flight time go through the speed of sound – and I mean a very short flight time, like a minute or two, that’s about it, five minutes at most I think – the engine would then finish, stop, and the pilot would then have the job of landing this vehicle on the desert in California, Muroc desert - Mojave desert. Mojave was the desert, Muroc was the base. And he became so clever at it, at this particular type of testing that he could without any help from any engine whatsoever, land this vehicle and taxi it into the hangar, I suppose he had a brake at that stage, and could present himself there inside the hangar without an engine working at all. Terrific. And he and I became very good friends because, I don’t know why. We were offering them something in exchange for information of this sort and I was the go-between as far as we were concerned so I spent quite a lot of time out there and I was there for a weekend on one occasion and Scott said we’ve done enough for this week John, come on. And he and I went out to a dude ranch for the weekend. He was a good horse rider, I wouldn’t say that I ever mastered the skill of driving a horse, but I must say I learnt the technique of falling off without hurting myself too much. But from that and from that series of tests we gained some experience of the – we knew already really – the importance of wing thickness as, you know, you either put a bigger engine in or you thinned your wing down, it was as simple as that, in essence. And the Americans went for very thin wings and I’m sure the F-104, very thin straight wings, no sweep I think, and the Germans bought it and it killed a lot of people. It was a killer in Europe. We didn’t go down that track. We sent a team over to look at it I think, I do, I think, but we never went down that path. But, Bill Strang and I on another occasion went together once we had started, Bristol Aircraft Corporation as they were, on the job of looking at a thin-winged research aeroplane. And did we build one? You see, I’m getting near the stage where I left this world and went into the other end of the speed range and into equipment rather than vehicles; radars, autopilots, cockpit displays. I don’t know. I have a feeling that Bristol built an aeroplane and it went to Bedford, to RAE Bedford when Aero Flight moved up there, because we’re now getting to the stage where it was beginning to be felt that the sort of aeroplanes that we were now doing experiments with were getting too dangerous, too risky for operating out of Farnborough, Farnborough being in the middle of a civilian community, in essence, and the main runway, the approach to the main runway came right over the town. And it had all… the thought had always been there that there could well be a time when RAE would move, or at least the aerodynamic work associated with new sorts of vehicles, aeroplanes, would move from Farnborough and Bedford had been chosen as the site. And it happened early fifties, again, same sort of period – ’52, ’53, I think – certainly by ’55 people were moving up to Bedford and I was, as I say, summoned to see the director to move to Martlesham Heath with the task of moving BLEU to

Sir John Charnley Page 127 C1379/30 Track 8

Bedford in ’57. And I had left the aero… in ’55 I left the aerodynamic world, other than being concerned with the low speed characteristics of something like the Vulcan. That was a big, big, big triangular bomber.

I think that whole Blind Landing Unit probably deserves a day on its own.

It’s completely different from anything we’ve said so far. Completely different.

[17:29] I’ve got some follow-up questions, as always, about…

Yeah, go on.

Before we get beyond ’55. I was wondering what else happened on your trip to the States?

Well, one now says which trip, because I was backwards and forwards.

What happened on your trips to the States then, in comparison? Can you talk me through the sorts of routine you would go through? Why were you sent in the first place?

Well, in the first place we were… more information was coming from the States than we were able to get in this country on design, on wing design and so on, because they’d got tunnels, they’d solved the problem of getting tunnels which would operate through the speed of sound. And they did that with hollow walls and very clever technology which we were not with at that stage. We got it and we took it, but there was that delay and that was when I was going over there with wind tunnel people talking to them about it. They were generally quite long trips in time, starting in Washington and visiting not just the government research establishments, but also those areas of industry that were involved. So we went to Wright Field, to Tullahoma, which was an engine place, but didn’t spend much time there, to… what was the place down… Louisiana… don’t know. Forgotten. And then across to Muroc, Mojave where I spent quite a lot of time. Oh, then the people who built the… my mind’s getting dull, getting dimmed. The very successful American swept wing aeroplane of this day.

Sabre?

Sir John Charnley Page 128 C1379/30 Track 8

Yeah. What was it… the Sabre.

86.

86, F-86, yes. Who built F-86? Anyway, spent time with them, certainly. Spent time with Bell in Buffalo because they had been involved in the design of thin straight wings. And spent time at just south of – I was going to say Singapore, I don’t mean Singapore – oh, up from Los Angeles, well known.

San Diego?

No, that’s down south.

San Francisco.

San Francisco, yeah. Just south of San Francisco is another research establishment with a lot of wind tunnels, and spent time there. I can remember I took Mary with me on one occasion and she linked up with the wife of a professor who was involved in this sort of thing, forgotten names. Forgotten names, doesn’t matter. But interestingly enough, you made your way into the States via the Embassy, our Embassy, BJSM – British Joint Services Mission – which was an annexe which was part of the Embassy and was the, as it said, a joint services mission and part of that joint mission was concerned with the technical and scientific links in the US. So you clocked in with them first, they’d been arranging your programme anyway, before you went. So they were expecting you, they’d set it out. And you were taking advice from them as to the sort of places that were worth going to in terms of what it was you were after: thin wing, sweep back, deltas, whatever. You then clocked in through them, you clocked in with the defence people, the R&D people in the Pentagon, so I got to know myself my way around the Pentagon. And you were taken, you were led by your own man in Washington to go and meet the chappie who ran the defence R&D and he was a political appointment rather than with us, we didn’t go down to political appointments to that sort of level, they did. And this particular chap – names again… always started by saying, ‘Welcome John’ or whatever it was at the time, you’re most welcome, I see what your programme is, do enjoy it but please, before you leave, after you’ve been round for three weeks or whatever, come and see me again because I want to know what your reactions

Sir John Charnley Page 129 C1379/30 Track 8 are. Because you in the UK don’t have the money that we throw at things, you have to think more carefully as to how you spend your R&D money, and, you know, I find – he said – that your view is of value in the areas where you think we’re spending our money that isn’t going to be of value. And that happened. Before I left I would go and give some reactions to the way in which they were doing their… in the area with which I was concerned.

[25:28]

Later on, when I was Chief Scientist to the Royal Air Force over here, and we’re talking then about the mid seventies – ’73 to ’76 or something like that – again, I used to go to see the forward thinking outfit of their air force, forgotten its name, and again, he – and he was now a technical man; engineer, scientist, I don’t know – but he ran, can’t remember the name of the place. But as far as he was concerned, he was looking so far ahead for the air force, into space and all sorts of places, that he didn’t, he would regard it as a failure on his part if more than something like one per cent of his activity paid off. One per cent, ten per cent? Ten per cent is better isn’t it? But, you know, if more than that paid off he wasn’t looking far enough ahead, he wasn’t doing the sort of thinking that his outfit should be doing if a bigger percentage of his work led to something that was of benefit to the air force. He expected so much of it to be a non- event, having dismissed it. And again, he recognised that was a way we couldn’t perform, we couldn’t operate like that. So he was always keen to talk with me around that sort of subject. This is when I was… what… ARPA – the Advanced Research Project Agency, ARPA, A-R-P- A, and it was advanced research, it was the sort of thing that we might do in our universities here and they were doing it specifically for the air force in a unit of their own. Different arrangement altogether. The only point I’m making, why am I making it? When you say what did I do when I went to the States, what did I go for? I went to see ARPA in that case and see what they were doing that we couldn’t afford to do anyway, if they were willing to talk about it. Whether they talked about all of it to me, I don’t know.

What sort of reception did you get from…

Well, just that. There was such a lot there that really I don’t know how he could get away with it at the time, just they were great fun. Lovely, great fun. Money not a problem in those, seventies. You thought, what a life, what a luxury to have that sort of freedom to let chaps

Sir John Charnley Page 130 C1379/30 Track 8 follow their own ideas, resources, and come up with ideas that can be followed up to a certain point and then just thrown away if need be.

How did the situation compare in Britain?

[laughs] What it’s like now, I don’t know. What it was like then, you just couldn’t work that way. No. No, no, no.

[29:11] How about the earlier part of your career, when you first went over there in the fifties, what were your impressions of how the Americans were doing their research compared to what you were used to at the RAE?

That was different. They were using wind tunnels and they’d got a huge array of wind tunnels up to the speed of sound and then they had another set which were supersonic wind tunnels operating on a different principle, a lot smaller, but going very fast, twice or three times the speed of sound, which – and it was recognised that there was an area between somewhere round just one and one point one, one point two, where you didn’t devil at all. That was an area where the flow was a bit of a nuisance and there was no point in that. But they, in the other areas, certainly at the transonic and high subsonic region, they were turning out masses and masses of routine wind tunnel information on basic features such as the span-wise shape, the aspect ratio that is, the thickness/chord ratio, the shape of the surface of the aerofoil shape. And that’s where low drag, they were doing a lot of work on a specific design for low drag, where the maximum thickness of the aerofoil was moved a long way back. Again, the Spitfire, typically of that generation, thirties, late thirties I suppose, had its maximum thickness quite a long way forward, and by that I mean the maximum thickness of the aerofoil shape would be around thirty per cent of the chord. And when you were approaching the speed of sound you’d get a separated flow from laminar to turbulent flow towards the end of the aerofoil and that put the drag up.

[31:35] What’s the difference between laminar and turbulent flow?

Exactly as its names… laminar is smooth and streamlined, turbulent flow is where it’s now a disturbed flow. The laminar flow has broken down because the shape over which the airflow is

Sir John Charnley Page 131 C1379/30 Track 8 running, is flowing has now, in crude terms, no longer attaches itself to the surface; it breaks away from the surface and as such it creates turbulence, as its name implies, and that’s where the drag comes from. So if you can retain laminar flow a long way back on an aerofoil, then you have a lower drag and therefore the thing’s capable of being pushed along faster. For turbulent, it’s exactly what I mean, it’s the flow has separated from the surface. When it’s laminar it’s hugging the surface and then it gets to a point where the shape of the surface means that no longer will it continue to attach, so it breaks away, it goes turbulent, it goes rough, and you now get a different wake altogether, completely different wake which puts up the drag. Now, the Americans had done a lot of work on what are called low drag aerofoil shapes where you arrange for the maximum thickness of the aerofoil to be further back along its length and as such you encourage the air stream to stay attached to that aerofoil for a longer period. And then when it did separate there wasn’t the same length for the drag to build up, so you got a lower drag of particular shapes. And they had done a lot of work on this which is basic, fundamental aerodynamics in tunnels that we didn’t have. So they were a source of design, a very important source of design information. And as a result of that they built low drag aerofoils into the King Cobra, into several of their experimental aircraft, and they had sent a King Cobra aircraft, an aeroplane, King Cobra to us for us, as I say, in these experiments we were doing for comparing the drag of Spitfire, Mustang, Thunderbolt, Lightning and also the King Cobra. And somewhere I’ve got a report, I think somewhere, that compares the drag against Mach number of these different aerofoil shapes that we established from flight tests.

Drag against Mach number being drag increasing as you’re getting faster then or…

That’s right. That’s right. The so-called barrier, as you say. But the drag is quite small, the flow is staying very nicely laminar following the shape of the aerofoil and then, when the flow breaks away from the aerofoil and goes turbulent and creates a wake, that’s when the drag starts rising.

[35:38] Keeping in this same sort of vein, I was wondering what were the problems associated with the aerodynamics of the early jets you were working on? Let’s take, I guess the Gloster jet as a starting point.

Control. It could, generally, longitudinal control associated, if I follow what I’ve just been talking about, once the flow has broken down behind, at the tail end of an aerofoil – imagine an

Sir John Charnley Page 132 C1379/30 Track 8 aerofoil section – and you’ve got a nice flow up to a certain point towards the rear end, it then breaks away. Now if you’ve got a control working where that breakaway has taken place, then it’s no longer effective, and that gets worse once you get nearer the speed of sound because the turbulence and the breakaway becomes more pronounced and your elevator on your tailplane will no longer work. And so you lose control of the aeroplane. Now, that’s one. The other thing is that the separation of the flow and the fact that it’s irregular can lead to buffeting and a shaking of the aeroplane, and so as you get close to the speed of sound with your vehicle you can find that (a) you can either, in some cases, lose control and you can waggle the stick, let’s say fore and aft in particular and nothing happening or with others you can try to waggle the stick and it’s become so heavy that you can’t move the blessed thing and you’re committed to whatever flight path you’re on. Or, number three, the thing can be oscillating and as such, it can be undamped and just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and breaks up the aeroplane. And all of those three things can, are possibilities and these are things, as I used to lecture to the Empire Test Pilots’ School, on these, what might happen as you get close to the speed of sound when you’re flying your aeroplane. You can either lose control or you can find your control goes solid and you can’t do anything about, you’re going downhill and there’s no way of stopping going downhill, because the only way in those days that you could get near the speed of sound was by diving. Or you could get to a stage where you had a longitudinal oscillation which was undamped and just increased until it broke up the aeroplane. And that was more likely to happen if you didn’t have a tail. If you were in a tailless aeroplane then you lost the effect of the tail being out of… you could put the tail, that’s why tailplanes are up in the air at the top of the fin, to be out of the wake of the main wing, so they were still in clean air in other words, and still able to do their job. Gosh, this is a lecture in aerodynamics now.

It’s fairly historical aerodynamics, you have to admit.

[both laughing]

Talking about, the other thing - sorry…

No, go on. No, no, no. It’s just because it was the sort of thing that I learnt in my first six months, you know, away from flight in the wind tunnel.

[39:58]

Sir John Charnley Page 133 C1379/30 Track 8

You talked a little bit about wing shapes in passing as well – deltas, straight, swept. What sort of wing shapes were you thinking in terms of as being the way forward in the late forties?

Well you see we were building experimental aircraft just to explore that very point. We’d had teams across in Germany – Germany was more advanced than we were, wartime, and they certainly, as I say, I don’t know why our theoretical people had been so slow, I think one has to say, we hadn’t somehow locked on to the value of sweeping back the wing and we had ’45, 1945 came and we sent teams across to Germany to do two things. One – well three things I suppose – to find results of any work they had done in whatever sphere, and I’m speaking now… but let’s stay with aerodynamics if you like. Results of work they’d already done, talk with their experts on where they thought things were going for the future, collect some of their experts and bring them back to this country, and collect some of their tunnels and equipment, tunnels and bring it back to this country. And when we opened up the place at Bedford, then we opened it up with supersonic tunnels that we’d brought back from Germany. As I mentioned, at some stage, I don’t know when it was, so were the Americans and so were the Russians and they were very interested in the German space activities and intercontinental ballistic missiles and that’s why old whatnot went to the States. We really didn’t show a lot of interest in attempting to extract that sort of information from Germany. Why I don’t… I’m still a little lad in 1945 and you’re asking me to explain things of which I was not really part. I was part of a briefing from our own experience in ’45 of briefing of the sort of thing that we wanted to know from Germany, the teams that went across there. I was never in a team myself, Smelt was. Morien Morgan was on the control side. And I can’t speak of others, but certainly Smelt was. And I was part of the group that briefed the blokes who were going across there as to the questions to be asked and what it was they were looking for, what it was that we wanted to know and… but I know from when they came back that we were, that the main issues were between the Americans and the Russians and we, I don’t think we did as well as we would have liked to have done. But we got one or two decent scientists back and we certainly got some equipment back.

[44:28]

And that led us for the need to see for ourselves the merits, advantages, disadvantages of different planforms in particular, planforms now. We could think about the aerofoil shape and we could do things with that anyway, but the different planforms needed… experimental delta. We built the Boulton Paul Delta without a tail and with a tail and that was built specially for us.

Sir John Charnley Page 134 C1379/30 Track 8

It first flew in 1950, the BP without its tail and then a couple of years later we built with a tail. We lost one of them, two of them. Don’t know. Don’t think it killed anyone, but it certainly, we lost the aeroplane. I think Ben Gunn who was the Boulton Paul test pilot, I think he ejected. What was I going to say? We understood thickness. This was all to do with planform and extending the chord length. If you’ve got a certain thickness, if you extended the chord length, then obviously the thickness/chord ratio, which is the important variable, went down, so that was a good thing. That’s why you thought in terms of deltas. And similarly, what your sweepback was doing in broad terms was increasing the length of the chord line. If… I have to explain this without drawing a diagram. As you swept something back out of… if that’s the length… sorry. As you sweep something back, if you sweep a wing back, then the chord length increases by the amount of sweep you put on the wing and if you go absurd, let me go absurd, if you take a wing which is against the flow so the sweepback angle is zero, if you now make that sweepback angle ninety degrees, you’ve now turned it so that the whole length of the aeroplane, of the wing, is now its chord. And in between, you’ve now got a variation from zero when the wing is unswept, to the full length of the wing, so in between you get cosines and sines of whatever the angle is in effective length of the chord, and so on. Gosh. Why all this?

I was asking you about different wing shapes originally.

Different planforms. Different planforms. And, oh yes, the point I was going to make was that, yeah, that… and I don’t know, I started by saying I was just a junior technical man working on these aeroplanes, but my thought is that so soon after the war, the main contractors, and I mentioned earlier the main contractors: Hawker’s, Supermarines, Vickers were all still very tied up in building operational aircraft and our requirements for specially built experimental aircraft, to look at whatever, were going to the smaller companies, the Faireys, the Boulton Pauls, the Miles, rather than to the teams that already had experience of operational fighting aircraft. As such we ran into a lot of troubles with them. And you’re going to ask what sort of troubles in a moment now, that’s why I don’t like throwing out remarks like that.

They’re called follow-on questions [laughing], I’m supposed to ask them.

Of course, of course, of course. And the simple answer, is because they lacked experience. And I don’t… I don’t want to go down this path and so… but Miles made a bid for building a supersonic aeroplane.

Sir John Charnley Page 135 C1379/30 Track 8

In ’52.

[50:13] In ’52, that’s right. Very thin wing. Thin straight wing with a single engine and a big fuselage with the pilot sitting with his legs wrapped around the engine and his escape from the aeroplane, should anything go wrong, was the ejection of the whole cabin and then an escape from the cabin later on. And, as you say, there are still debates about the reasons for that aircraft being cancelled and there are those that would say that one of the reasons why it happened was that Miles had never built an aeroplane like that before, certainly had no experience of fast aeroplanes near the speed of sound and certainly not through the speed of sound. And there are those who didn’t have the confidence in Miles being tasked with making a success of that sort of aeroplane. Boulton Paul, we had experience with BP, Fairey’s. Again, Fairey was a vertical take-off delta. The FD2, there was an FD1, a Fairey Delta 1, a Fairey Delta 2. I don’t know, I’m struggling now.

Did you do any work on the Miles 52 yourself on the RAE side of it?

Yes I did.

What sort of things?

…I contributed to, as I did for the Javelin, again the comparison of the Javelin and the DH110, I contributed to a little RAE group that looked at the design and build of the M52 and I’m pretty certain that the advice they gave to headquarters was not to go ahead with it, don’t support. Headquarters took that advice in that particular case. That was Ben Lockspeiser I think. What was he, DGSR at the time, Director General Scientific Research. Don’t know, can’t remember. But he I think was later accused of almost selling out to the US in the sense of research being done in manned aircraft and that led to a lot of experiments being conducted with rocket propelled models, rocket propelled vehicles, RPVs. RPVs, yes. RPV 1, 2 and so on. And I know that Miles are still sore, still argue, I understand from some of my links at Cranfield, that Miles still argue that they would have made a success of that aeroplane. I don’t think they would. RAE didn’t think they would, collectively. Have you interviewed anyone from Miles on this subject? It’s half past four.

Sir John Charnley Page 136 C1379/30 Track 8

I’d noticed. We’ve got time for probably one or two more questions.

Go on, go ahead.

[54:47] You mentioned – keeping with the aerodynamics link here again – I was thinking about, you mentioned that you knew Karl Doetsch or you’d met him, you also mentioned Dietrich Küchemann in passing.

Oh, Dietrich was the chappie who designed the Concorde wing. Two completely different people.

When did you come across Küchemann?

How?

Mm.

Oh, he was a very prominent member of the German R&D wing… he was a very prominent aerodynamicist in Germany and Doetsch was a controls man. Dietrich was much more of a very clever aerodynamic expert, wing design and understanding the flow around wings. The sort of thing we’ve been talking about in the way in which the flow separates from wings; shapes, thicknesses, theoretical aerodynamics but practical with it. Very mild, very mild, very gentle, musician. Karl Doetsch was much more aggressive in his – aggressive’s too strong, oh no, it doesn’t matter – different people. You could get two people… this is not the fact that they were German, it’s the fact they were just different people. You could get this in our country. But completely different people. Dietrich came across, went into I think Supersonics Department. I mentioned some time earlier today that we’d formed a Gas Dynamics Department, that became Guided Missiles, but also we launched into a Supersonic Department. And Dietrich came across and I think, did he run… he certainly went into Supersonic Department, if not ran it, certainly at some stage later he did run it and later again he became Head of Aero Department and in all of that, when we were talking about this little Supersonic Transport Research Committee, when we were thinking around the 1950 stage, that we now think we ought to be, yes, we ought to be thinking about a transport that’s going to fly at supersonic speeds. Certainly Dietrich was part of

Sir John Charnley Page 137 C1379/30 Track 8 that very actively and designed the wing, that lovely Concorde, beautiful aerodynamic mix of planform, thickness/chord ratio, twist across the span, you know - you’re going to ask me all sorts of questions about this now - but to get characteristics that are satisfactory at twice the speed of sound on the one hand and at 150 miles an hour for landing on the other. And to combine those in one set of features now, the Russian supersonic transport which looks very similar to Concorde’s wing in fact isn’t as clever at all and they abandoned it. It came unstuck. No, Dietrich, very very clever indeed, very clever man and a very person… very lovely man with it.

Did you work with him in your own time at Aero?

Our paths crossed a lot and we knew each other well and yeah, got on well together. We were working in the same sort of area only he was theoretically much better and – I was going to say much better informed – much cleverer, much better understanding of what was happening within the flow patterns than I was. I was a hoary handed experimental chap. Dietrich was a bloke who knew what was going to happen. [laughs] I didn’t know until we got there.

Would you say that was the RAE way or…

The RAE way was to use both and make sure you had both. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, are we through for today?

I think so.

[end of track 8]

Sir John Charnley Page 138 C1379/30 Track 9

[Track 9]

Well let’s make a start on my posting into Blind Landing activities on the east coast at Martlesham Heath, Woodbridge, Felixstowe, that area of the countryside. And I’d had twelve years in transonic flight testing, flight testing of transonic aircraft, ’43 to ’55 and I had a request to go to the director’s office. The director was Sir Arnold Hall – was he Sir then, I can’t remember, doesn’t matter, yeah he was – and I was a lowly scientist down in the depths of RAE and here being asked asked to go and see the director. And from past events, I thought what have I done wrong this time, because my appearances before the director previously had been associated with misbehaving in the service mess on a wild and woolly evening with the test pilots that got a little bit out of hand and the result was that the PMC had reported me to the RAE establishment, amongst others, and I was summoned to see the director. So I was now going again and he started by saying that he’d thought I’d spent long enough doing what I was doing and although he knew that I was happy doing it and really couldn’t think of doing anything else, as far as I was concerned that was me for a career, it was wonderful; exciting, stimulating, you were making progress, you were doing things, you were recognised as a bit of an expert in that particular field of aerodynamics and flight testing as such. You were known in America, you were known in France, generally what the hell was the need for a move. And Arnold Hall set out his stall by saying that he thought there was potential for doing something different and when he said, and I think the difference is to go to the other end of the speed range and get out of little aeroplanes and get into big aeroplanes like Vulcans and the problem of landing the Vulcan aircraft in bad weather for a military purpose, this was Cold War period and we had to be seen to be able to operate our V bomber force in all weathers as part of the deterrent philosophy. Therefore we had our bomb, our aircraft in one airfield maybe and our weapon at somewhere else and the aircraft had to be capable of going from A to B before setting off for Moscow or wherever, to pick up the weapon and then off they went. And we needed that sort of flexibility for our operation. And although in the unit already there were people knew things about guidance, radar, radio and the different frequency bands and also people who knew about autopilots and maybe a little bit about the history of the unit is useful at this stage. They already had those people as a matter of setting up the unit, and that was a clever thing to do, but there really wasn’t anyone that knew much about the aerodynamics of something like a flying triangle, like a Vulcan and it would be a good idea to have someone there who knew a bit about aerodynamics, to which I replied that I knew nothing about low speed aerodynamics with a Vulcan. I could demonstrate how it behaved near the speed of sound, but I didn’t know anything

Sir John Charnley Page 139 C1379/30 Track 9 about landing of it. And that’s where he produced this remark, well I’ve been told that, but I’ve also been told that you’re a quick learner. So really, don’t argue with me Charnley, get on your bike and do it. And two other things he said as I was discharged from his office. One, I want you to leave - we’ve sold Martlesham Heath - I want you to leave the airfield, leave that area in two years’ time and move to Bedford. There’s the new establishment, the new airfield at Bedford, so you’re to move the unit that you’re there in two years’ time up to Bedford. So that’s number one, that’s an additional task for you, and secondly, as I was leaving his office, oh and he said, and you get a promotion and you will be an SPSO, Senior Principal Scientific Officer, and the equivalent in military terms, and he said, and this is important, because you’ll be in charge of a little fleet of aeroplanes which will be run by a wing commander and he will look after all of the operation of the pilots and suchlike, but you will have, as an SPSO, you will have the equivalent rank of a group captain, so it’s your place. Now that made things clearer to me because from my aerodynamic background I was conscious of at a place like Boscombe Down where the chief technical man and the chief uniform man were the same level, they often had problems sorting out how to run the place. But at least it was being made clear to me that I (a) the unit was an RAE unit, an out-station of RAE, I answered therefore through the RAE chain of command, and that within the unit itself then it was mine.

[06:35]

Now, what I should say here, that I was being sent there to do two things, because it wasn’t BLEU, it was A&IEU, the Aircraft and Instrument Experimental Unit, because it had two functions, A&IEU, the – sorry, the Armament and Instrument – and the armament function was it provided the flight testing facilities for a bombing range further up the coast, the east coast at… gone. Gone, gone. It’ll come to me. Anyway, the aircraft that we used at the bombing range, which again had some nuclear activity, the aircraft were based on the airfield at Martlesham along with the aircraft that were being used for blind landing. So there was an armament function, and that was a particular squadron run by a squadron leader under a wing commander, and then there was the blind landing unit where the pilots again were run by a squadron leader under the same wing commander. So on the operational service side there were essentially two squadrons, one of which was providing flight facilities for armament work and the other was flight facilities for blind landing work. And although I had programme responsibility for all the blind landing activity, I just had a management function for providing the facilities for the aircraft that were going to use the bombing range. So it was a dual function

Sir John Charnley Page 140 C1379/30 Track 9 in that sense, one was a direct responsibility and the other was a management responsibility and I had seen that there could be problems with the wing commander in that sort of area, which he made, which the director made clear to me, don’t let it bother you. And it didn’t, I’m happy to say, because Johnny, Wing Commander Johnson was good value, I enjoyed working with him, we enjoyed working together. Our wives got on well, that helped, and it produced little problems now and again on the social side in Ipswich. As far as Ipswich is concerned, the people who were at Martlesham Heath, it was a service unit so they spoke with the uniform people and the uniform wing commander as far as they were concerned was the boss man, but he wasn’t. Fortunately the wives could live with that, they got on well together. So there we are, little things of that sort. So it started life, it was started as A&IEU, but my programme responsibility was for the blind landing element of it. Okay? Is that clear, does that, understand?

I’m just going to make a quick…

[pause]

[09:58] And the chap, the squadron leader that… range up the coast.

Foulness? Or was that somewhere else?

No, that’s further south. Anyway. And it’s where a lot of the early radar work was done by Watson-Watt. Anyway, it’ll come, I shall flash back to it I should think at some stage. So on the, almost the structural side, the uniformed side of the outfit, there’s the wing commander, then there’s a squadron leader, Ron Alder, that ran the big aeroplane, there were bombers, and there was another squadron leader, Harry Maul [ph], that ran the flying for me as running BLEU. And they were on two sides of the little airfield, so in that sense it was run quite sensibly, let me put it that way. But in social terms, and a lovely little mess at Martlesham, lovely little mess, we were all together and it was just a common facility, common sporting facilities and so on, and a common social life, but functionally two discrete entities with completely different terms of reference and it did mean that the people who were controlling the armament part of the operation were down at Farnborough. That was Armament Department at Farnborough and they would come up to Martlesham and talk with their pilots and their head of department down at Farnborough would come up and complain to me that he wasn’t getting the service he should

Sir John Charnley Page 141 C1379/30 Track 9 get. And that’s quite amusing because later on we became very, very good friends when he was in NATO in Holland and…

Who was that?

Wilson. Wilson. Yeah, Wilson, Head of Armament Department he was. And again, I think he was the same level as I was, he might have been one up on me. Harold Wilson. However, there it was. My job was to provide him with a flying facility through the wing commander, but with no responsibility for his programme whatsoever. He more or less said what he wanted done and it was up to us to do it. Now on the blind landing side, that was me.

[13:00]

And the blind landing unit had been set up 1945, 1946, something like that, but this is well tabulated somewhere. And it was a clever move that… to put together on a single site experts from RRE at Malvern – I think it was RRE in those days – TRE, RRE, whatever it was, it was the establishment at Malvern, who were familiar and experts and clever at guidance activities. And then a department out of RAE Farnborough who were familiar with autopilots, experts on autopilots and experts on taking a signal from somewhere and doing the mathematics associated with control laws to get the right sort of signals going into the autopilot, putting the two things together and making them live together to work on each other’s problems as an integrated unit. And the thing that was missing – and that had been done from 1945 and here we were ten years on in 1955 and there had been two or three superintendents, the title of the character who ran it, the first one was… the first two… the first one was from RAE Instrument Department, the second one was from Malvern and then the third one, which was Bill Makinson, he was from Radio Department Farnborough, and then it was me. So there was no-one in that little chain that knew anything about aerodynamics, essentially, and big aircraft, difficult aircraft, unconventional aeroplanes with peculiar planform, peculiar landing characteristics. As I said, not that I could help very much to start with. But there certainly was a need for that sort of experience at the unit. Trying to think… names, names, names. I need to look up some names there, anyway.

[15:47]

Sir John Charnley Page 142 C1379/30 Track 9

Before we go any further it might be good if you could just sort of give me an idea of what was the basic problem that you’d been sent out to deal with, what was the Blind Landing Experimental Unit there for?

[pause] State of the art at the time… the terms of reference of the unit, and somewhere I’ve got the Tom Prescott paper had got the terms of reference in it I think, had it not? Related to the facility to land aircraft in all weather, whether they were military or civil, whether they were big, whether they were small, didn’t matter, it was a general need in 1945, ’46 to recognise that the evolution of an aviation industry, be it an aircraft, the operation of the aircraft as distinct from the building of them, depended upon being able to land the aircraft whatever the weather conditions. So there was a problem there associated with in some way getting guidance from the ground. Let’s take fog, which is really the essence, reduced visibility. Now the state of play really was that you could, provided you got good guidance from the ground, a pilot could interpret that guidance, be it visual from landing lights, from lights on the runway, adapt a range in a particular pattern – come to that in a moment – or from electronic guidance as to where you were in space relative to the runway and from that information to deduce what you should then do to get back if you’re off the runway centre line, to get back on to the runway centre line. And the state of play was that you could, that the electronics and the guidance was not considered sufficiently good at heights below a couple of hundred feet, 200 feet, on the glide slope. So if you imagine an aircraft coming down towards a runway when you get to, you come down without necessarily seeing the runway, but the electronics weren’t sufficiently accurate in what had been done to date to enable you to go on and do the whole thing. You switched over at that point to the pilot landing the aircraft, extracting information from the ground in some way or another to tell him (a) where he was and what he should do if he was off the centre line, and if he was coming down at the wrong sort of rate of descent, so he was either going to go in short or go off the far end, that that was done manually because there wasn’t the, either the information accurate enough or the automatics sufficiently clever either to say where you are laterally relative to the runway, or there wasn’t control of the throttle for handling the engines as you were getting to the ground, that was all unknown, not done and was left for the pilot to do. So that all depended upon the pilot getting sufficient guidance to enable him to take over an aeroplane at a particular height, a couple of hundred feet, leaving himself sufficient time to make whatever corrections that had to be made to bring himself back on to the runway centre line, because he could be way off to one side or he could be higher or lower than he should be on the glide slope. And that was the state of play.

Sir John Charnley Page 143 C1379/30 Track 9

So essentially a system that provided information to a pilot to allow him to land a plane himself in bad weather?

That’s right, that’s right. To allow him to do it himself in bad weather. So that meant that to give him time to do it, to assimilate from the information, whether it was from an instrument on his panel or from the visual aids outside, give him time to make the corrections, that meant that he had to move from the automatics to his own flying with sufficient time still to do it. That meant he couldn’t relay on it lower than the height of about 200 feet, because you’re coming down at a rate of ten feet a second, roughly, so you’ve got twenty seconds from 200 feet in which to do all of this, and that was a bit of a task. When the, you know, if you’re relying on visual aids, they could disappear at any moment in fog and you were left with nothing. So the unit was set up to try to solve that particular problem.

[22:00]

America, in the States, they’d got the same problem and they'd got the problem because they were now; During the war they’d been over here operating out of the UK, in Europe and so it had emerged with them to be a serious problem, not being able to operate their aircraft in all weathers. So they had been attacking the same problem. And they’d been doing it with radar systems and that meant they had been working with Malvern, in the main, with just a little bit with the autopilot people at Farnborough a little bit, but mainly with Malvern and they’d had, they’d sent across to Malvern a Boeing aeroplane to give demonstrations to Malvern as to how far they’d got towards solving this problem, and indeed they had a guidance system, a radar guidance system called SCS51 which was a system based at VHF frequencies, and that carried limitations in itself, but there it was. And this aeroplane came across to Malvern, was then flown at Malvern and actually made landings in zero-zero conditions, in zero-zero fog conditions. And you can simulate these in a way by just, you know, blanking the cockpit out while you’re about to land. Anyway, they set our two teams working together on this problem but from RAE and from Malvern, and as I say, the move was then made to say let’s put these two etc. etc. together, lump them somewhere, off somewhere where they’ve got the use of an airfield for themselves for just doing circuits and landings and circuits and landings and let them get on with it. And that was the origin in a very crude sort of way of the blind landing unit, BLEU.

Sir John Charnley Page 144 C1379/30 Track 9

[24:32] What state had the development of the blind landing systems reached when you arrived?

A lot of, in ten years, eight or nine years as I say with one two – ooh, the name of the superintendent nearly came to me then. A lot of, an enormous, a lot of very good work had been done on all the different elements of a total system. A lot of work on the right sort of radio altimeter for measuring height accurately near the ground. So this was a pulse altimeter and a lot of work done on that and on the sort of signal that you then needed to feed into an autopilot to enable the engines to be handled appropriately with the rest of the control system. So a radio altimeter. Engine handling had been worked on, in a funny sort of way, and work done not so much as with a jet but with propeller engines.

[25:53]

The guidance system, lot of work had been done on the guidance system. The chap who ran the guidance team, Keith Wood, very clever, very good indeed, came from Malvern as I was saying, and had a good team with him and felt… felt, felt, had convinced himself that the guidance system which was being used for commercial operation, a so-called instrument landing system – ILS – that phrase will come up a lot in what I’m saying. It’s not a radar system, it’s a VHF system and it has a beam pattern that defines the runway centre line and it has another beam pattern which defines a glide slope that you can set for three degrees, two and a half degrees, whatever. So if you put these two things together, something that defines the centre line, something that defines the angle of approach to the airfield so that the aircraft, if it was left to go straight on, would land somewhere close to the touchdown point a thousand feet down the runway, that’s the sort of thing. And that’s giving information both in the vertical plane and in the horizontal plane essentially, and that is then displayed on an instrument in the cockpit that indicates to the pilot whether he’s on the glide slope or whether he’s left of it or right of it and that comes up on a little dial. And the pilot was then being left to interpret that and take actions from it. Now what BLEU had done, they’d taken those symbols, those signals, and then done some clever control system theory on the signals to provide some better indication to the pilot to tell him not just where he was relative to the runway centre line, but what to do. So it took out some of the thought processes that he had to think about, because it now told him what to do rather than just where he was. Now, they’d done a lot of work on that, but they had persuaded themselves that, and the guidance team in particular, that the information wouldn’t be, as it stood

Sir John Charnley Page 145 C1379/30 Track 9 then, wouldn’t be good enough to continue that process down to zero height, down to the runway. So they needed to look for a new system to give lateral guidance to the pilot, and they came up with a couple of cables that you laid down either side of the runway and they have again, overlapping beams which, where they overlapped was the runway centre line. And that defined the runway – this is called leader cable – and that defined the runway centre line very, very accurately indeed. And they’d done a lot of work on that and they’d got a good system and they had a tiny little receiver in the nose of the aircraft generally, and it sampled the cables on either side, defined the runway centre line and they’d done a lot of work on that. So they’d persuaded themselves that the sort of direction in which the commercial, for civil aeroplanes and even military aeroplanes, the direction which the general thrust was going, led by the States, the US, was not going to be good enough for landing when you couldn’t see the runway. You needed something more accurate than ILS. And they’d done a lot of work looking for it and came up with these leader cables. As I mentioned, the autopilot, the guidance for height from a radio altimeter, pulse radio… and they developed that themselves, done the research on it, and then they were working with industry; Murphy on the… sorry, Standard Telephones, STC, on the radio altimeter and Murphy on the leader cable. So these were elements of the system.

[31:13]

Now on the autopilot side, then here, this team was run by a chap called Tom Prescott, very well known to me because he and I had been at Liverpool University together and he was a civil engineer gone wrong like I was. So I had a high regard for Tom and his activity, but where we’d worked at desks, drawing office desks, drawing office sort of thing at university alongside each other, I was now his boss. Not a problem really, Tom and I got on very well together. He was clever and there were no real… there were odd moments, but no, no. No, no, no. And very clever with manipulating signals to get the right sort of combination of a signal, the differential of that signal, the second differential of that signal, which is essentially – the first differential is velocity, the second is acceleration and to get a control system that reacts quickly in the way that a pilot might do it, you need a combination of both; position, velocity and acceleration and you combine them in a clever sort of way and Tom, that was his world and he was very good at it. So he would take the thing that was coming out of Keith Wood’s bunch and Tom would then process those and do the sums as to the right way to combine and work those to go into the autopilot. And that obviously needed a knowledge of autopilots as well. So there they were.

Sir John Charnley Page 146 C1379/30 Track 9

But in all of this you notice, there was no-one really that knew much about the flight characteristics of the thing they were trying to do.

So essentially they’re just trying to land a bunch of electronics that…

Yeah, in a way, yeah. That’s not being very kind to them. So they’d been working hard on different pieces, but not really put it together into the total system, into a total working system. Now, Tom Prescott in his group, he had designed - I was going to say devised – designed a simulator, one of the early simulators, a flight simulator that included the theoretical parameters of the aircraft in describing how an aircraft would respond to a control system. Now that might be… but it was an early simulator that enabled him to say well, within this simulator there is the equations, the landing equations of an aircraft, which you could vary, depending on what you thought the aircraft, it didn’t have to be anything special. And then he could play tunes on that with the control laws that suited that particular configuration the best. And you did all of this on the ground before you did anything in the air, so that you were aiming to take some of the risks out of doing it in the air, because dear God, you were approaching that landing at 120 miles an hour or something of the sort and, you know, it was going to happen anyway one way or another, and the aim was to have taken the risks out by your simulations beforehand. And that was new to me, all of that stuff, certainly Keith Wood on the one hand and Prescott on the other had the job of educating me in the first twelve months or thereabouts into what it was all about.

[35:45]

They’d been diverted into an area… they’d been diverted into an exercise called Rapid Landing and that was, the air force, Air Ministry, air force were keen to recover – were keen – wanted to be assured that they could recover a flight of aircraft, fighter aircraft that had been on patrol or away doing some sort of engagement, that they could get them back as a stream, again, in bad weather. And they were putting a lot of emphasis on recovering fighter aircraft in a stream and it was called the Rapid Landing Project. And that had diverted attention away from landing big aircraft in bad weather and that was… I’m trying to think whether that particular exercise had been cancelled when I arrived in ’55 or whether it was soon after I arrived that it was cancelled, but it was nothing to do with me, it was the air force losing interest in it and saying, you know, we’re not interested in it any longer, pack it up. So it really wasn’t me, anything of my doing to refocus the activities of this group, of the unit, BLEU, into landing aircraft, big aircraft in bad

Sir John Charnley Page 147 C1379/30 Track 9 weather, in zero-zero conditions. Zero-zero is the colloquial term for complete clam fog, thick fog. I think it might have happened before I arrived, it was near enough, it doesn’t matter. It was nothing to do with me, it was a requirement that was removed from the unit and allowed them to get back into the different bits of the system. And from looking at the different bits, they’d got a Devon, maybe two Devons, easy aeroplane to fly; twin engine propeller, Vickers Varsitys. And that was about, there might, there was, there was a Canberra. Yeah, there was a Canberra as the, not typical, it was a straight-winged aircraft, it wasn’t typical of a peculiar aerodynamic shape, but it was typical of the fact that we were now moving to jet engines as distinct from propeller driven aeroplanes, which produced a whole different set of problems for height control because the response of the jet engine is different from the response of the propeller driven engine, the engine driven propeller. Quite different. So there was that, a Canberra was up there for that sort of activity. When I say up there, across at Martlesham. And the job really that I thought I faced was to put this lot in to, to get a definition of the air force. I think that the requirement, and there’s a number, an OR this, that, or the Operation Requirement, di-da-di-da-di-da. I think the air force had just rewritten that requirement to emphasise and give a spur to the work of the unit to define its activities in the military sphere. So at this stage it was all aimed at a military problem. The application to the more general civil world came later. Is all that making sense?

Yeah. Requires a few follow-up questions as well actually.

Well you go ahead, I’m just waffling on. Give me something specific.

[40:47] No, no, there’s lots of detail here I want to follow up on. I’m interested in these two different groups of the RRE people, TRE, or it would have been RRE by the point you arrived wouldn’t it? And the RAE groups. You mentioned they were working on quite different sort of sets of problems, did they actually sort of communicate with each other much?

Oh yes. Oh yes. Oh yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And in the sense that they didn’t compete – compete is the wrong word – but they… oh, there’s the other com… compatible, in the sense of working out the problem. But, when one was at Malvern and the other was at Farnborough that presented just standard sort of problems which were, as I say, someone and it was London I think, maybe RAE director in ’45, ’46 suggested, I don’t know, but certainly there came a directive to the RAE director to set up a unit of this sort with certain terms of reference and those

Sir John Charnley Page 148 C1379/30 Track 9 terms of reference are written, we can, you know, are there as a reference. The interesting thing about the terms of reference is that it just, it includes civil as well as military so that there was a remit there from the word go, but the emphasis was at this stage on the, you know, doing this sort of thing in bad, in zero weather commercially, cor blimey, you must be joking, you know. So the aim was to solve it and from the military requirement and I wanted to be quite clear that the unit was focussed on that element of it in ’55 when I took over. So… go on.

Were there sort of differences in the outlook of the RRE staff and the RAE staff, because you’ve talked a little bit before about the RAE way of doing things, I was wondering if there was, you know, a difference in the RRE way of doing things when the two teams were working there under you?

Yes, is the… there was a different way of going about things, yes. And this is where Keith Wood and Tom Prescott often didn’t see eye to eye. Oh, how can I be more specific on that, other than there was a culture difference. So there was a culture difference between two establishments. I can move us on to later in my career when I was, after BLEU, which I finished in 1962 and then had a twelve months on a course and was sent back to RAE in ’63, the director was now James Lighthill and there had been a working party set up to consider the air defence of the United Kingdom run by a chap called RV Jones. And obviously on the air defence of the United Kingdom, both Malvern staff and RAE staff had worked on inputs to the air defence problem and they hadn’t always seen eye to eye on the solution to the problem. In their defence, they had different approaches and RV Jones had almost expressed his concern about this, as I understood – this had all taken place before I arrived on the scene. So when I arrived on the scene at RAE, the director of the RAE, Lighthill, more or less said, you know, your appointment is to be the Head of Weapons Department here and one of the first jobs you’ve got is to sort out the problems we’ve got with Malvern, because at the moment, to the outside world the two government establishments are not working well together. And there was a cultural difference between the way in which the two establishments went about it, in that RAE was aircraft based, Malvern wasn’t necessarily. Malvern was electronics based and radars and that sort of thing, which, you approached things at Malvern from almost the frequency range, the frequency band and working in this, that or the other frequency. We at Farnborough worked with aircraft. Different sort of approach. Yeah. Oh, a name nearly came to me then. Anyway, so yeah, and as I say, later on after I’d left BLEU and come back, one of the problems I again, had to talk and go down to Malvern and start talking with the characters down there to… and we did, yeah, very…

Sir John Charnley Page 149 C1379/30 Track 9

It was quite interesting because one of the characters then at Malvern was a bloke who had been in BLEU years before, so, don’t know. I don’t think it’s a good answer but there it is.

It’s one of these, you can’t necessarily sort of put your finger on it can you, there is just that difference sometimes.

That’s right, there was a culture, there was a difference. Yes, difference. Go on, throw another one at me.

[47:27] I was wondering, after you mentioned Keith Wood and Tom Prescott who were in charge of the two groups. I was just wondering, what were both of them like? You’ve mentioned little snippets of their personalities in passing, but…

Again, quite different. Keith and, you know, upstairs I’ve got a book he’s written called, very nicely Echoes and Reflections , which sums up guidance. A reflection from something, it’s back into the whatever, or an echo. It’s a nice little title. And he, I wrote the foreword to it in fact. And that describes his career very well, starting with being associated with Watson-Watt in the early days of airborne radar, again, on the east coast. And Keith needed… needed, Keith, from a domestic point of view needed to be close to home because his daughter, Judith, was committed to a wheelchair from birth, just about. I was trying to think of the… polio, suffered from polio. Poliomyelitis right from birth. And so Keith had that problem over and above whatever he was doing technically, he’d got the problem at home with his wife Dorrie looking after Judith, their only child, and lived in Felixstowe and that conditioned his thinking. Before Judith was born Keith had been on the staff at Malvern and had lived at Malvern, but in his radar work had been down at Felixstowe, he’d been up in Scotland, he was down at Malvern, he went across to the States, in the sense that Watson-Watt had moved more quickly in understanding radar, but this is all stuff I didn’t know anything about at all, dear God, but our knowledge of radar was being made available to the Americans and Keith was part of it. There was ground radar and there was airborne radar and Keith was an airborne radar man. And so – and they were using, again, flying facilities on the east coast, from Martlesham or Woodbridge, or the other, it doesn’t matter. And that suited him fine, he made his home at Felixstowe and so BLEU based at Martlesham, Woodbridge was fine, was great. When we went to Bedford, which was part of my remit, as I’ve mentioned, Keith essentially didn’t move to Bedford and he joined the other part that was still

Sir John Charnley Page 150 C1379/30 Track 9 providing trials up the range up the coast. So he stayed and he transferred across to the Atomic Energy Authority who ran the programme up there.

Trying to think of the place. Did you say it was radar related originally?

Yes, yes.

It’s not Bawdsey?

It is, Bawdsey, that’s right. Yes, Bawdsey, that’s right. Well done. Yeah, yeah. It was originally Bawdsey, exactly. And the island off the… the river was the Deben, and Bawdsey, yeah, that’s right. So Keith always at the back of his mind had a problem domestically with looking after Judith, which meant that he liked to stay in that area as far as possible. So when we went to Bedford he stayed in the district, transferred across to the AWRE staff, Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, and became the chap that ran their trials in that part of the world. He answered to a man called Ieuan Maddock – have you come across that name at all?

No.

Ieuan Maddock, and he and Keith got on well together. That was a great success too. Keith did that for a while and then their programmes moved on and they left that part of the world so he, rather than move house and leave that district, Keith then came back into the, whatever, Ministry of Supply, aircraft production, I don’t remember what it was, and travelled up and down to London, got a post in London and just travelled daily from Felixstowe up to London. And did that for a long, long time because we went to Bedford in ’57, Keith stayed on to mid sixties perhaps, and certainly yes, was in London through the sixties when we… when the programme had now switched. We cracked the military blind landing problem by 1960 and eventually in 1960 or ’61 the formal clearance was given to Vulcans to land in fog conditions, zero-zero, zero- zero conditions. And the aircraft was cleared to do that in about 1961, ’60 or ’61. I could see that coming in the late fifties, that we were making good progress, we were now at Bedford, excellent facilities for the work that we were doing, come back to that. And you could see we were coming to the end of the military programme and there was now the need to think of how you made this technology available to the civil world and the commercial world. So I started talking with the CAA and people of that sort, people of the CAA and the airlines: BEA of the

Sir John Charnley Page 151 C1379/30 Track 9 day and BOAC of the day, and getting them interested although they’d shown interest before. Now I’ve really left Keith Wood aside haven’t I, but that was Keith. And he then, until his retirement, he worked in London and worked in the, whatever the Ministry of the day was on radars and electronic equipment, and then when he retired from… he became a member of the electronic engineering association, the trade association, whatever it was called, ERA, EEA, don’t know.

IEE?

No. Oh no, no, no. That’s a professional body, no, different. This was the trade association of the electronic manufacturers and he worked with them until he finished.

[56:38] How did he differ from Tom Prescott?

Now Tom… [pause] Tom was a nitty-gritty person, Tom liked the detail and liked solving the detail and would spend a lot of time solving the detail which Keith, he was much more a man who wanted the broader picture and Tom needed to solve the control equations, as I said, of getting the various derivatives together in a sensible sort of way, playing with the simulators to solve the equations. And stability and control of an aircraft is all about that and whether you’ve got an autopilot there or not, you have to understand how you operate a few controls with a stick to get an aircraft doing this, that or the other, or up and down and so on. And that depends a lot of attention to a lot of mathematics, equations, which wasn’t in Keith’s mind at all ever, in that sense. He was a frequency spectrum man and those two… So Keith was, Tom worked very well with his staff and again, the staff that were with him were different. Mike Burgan, Joe Birkle on the one hand and Chalky White and Reg Hastings on the other, these are names that come to mind in the two groups. And it wasn’t competitive, but there was a bit of a challenge certainly in making sure that the two sets of very clever people worked sensibly together rather than moving individually. There was, not a problem, a challenge is the better way to put it. Oh, it was very interesting.

How did you go about managing that challenge?

Sir John Charnley Page 152 C1379/30 Track 9

…I don’t know, is the answer to that I suppose, it just happened. Yeah, you… they were both clever enough to understand that the problem would only be solved if they did work together, themselves. You had regular progress meetings, obviously, it was a standard management technique if you like. I used to run regular progress meetings with the two of them and their staff so they were aware that I was keeping an eye on it. You also had the pilots who were conscious that there was this different approach between the two groups. Let’s get… the BLEU at the time was about thirty strong in total, that’s the sort of number we’re talking about, of which, that’s not counting the chaps in uniform, the pilots and the engineers and so on looking after the aircraft and flying them, no, no, just the technical element together with, oh secretarial staff and the sort of admin support. So of the thirty, I’d say about twenty of them were, yeah, qualified technical people. Different levels, different capabilities and I’ve got one, and this is off the record, we’ll talk about it later off the record. But that was the size of the place. So regular meetings, progress meetings and, you know, you were conscious that the flying people were keen of this problem and – not a problem – that there was this different approach, and also how did you go about it? You went about it by emphasising the fact that unless, on an experimental flying, a simple mistake could result in a catastrophe and that does, you know, focus the mind quite significantly, to get that across. And certainly it was a limit on what you could do at Martlesham, when you got to Bedford you now had two miles of runway, 10,000 feet and you’d got 300 feet, 100 yards wide and you’d got, you’d now got modern lighting patterns that you put in because you were going there, so you got a modern Calvert 5-bar approach and lighting pattern. You’d got now a modern ILS at Bedford, so you could take bigger risks at Bedford.

[1:02:48]

But while we were at Martlesham, and these are the days, the two years, ’55 to ’57, when I persuaded another bloke who knew low speed aerodynamics very, very well on these peculiar aeroplanes, he and had I played cricket together at Farnborough and I persuaded him to come and join me at Martlesham, name of Joe Morall. And he and I ever since, used to go to Lords together to watch cricket, so Joe played a useful part in bringing the aerodynamics and emphasising to guidance and to control his aerodynamic contribution and saying, come on chaps, you know, on my behalf. Not a good answer. Not a good answer. There’s no… it’s just a situation which you manipulate around I think. And the way in which, whether you’re tough and dogmatic and dictatorial to one of them depended on the circumstances and certainly, if anything came back from the flying crew that, you know, things were at risk then, then you certainly put

Sir John Charnley Page 153 C1379/30 Track 9 your foot down without any doubt whatsoever. We had an accident. The Canberra at Martlesham had been away on a flight test at Wittering I think, coming back to land at Martlesham, pilot Les Coe and observer one of my people, the pilot was a flight lieutenant, Les Coe, I think so, and mine was Joe Birkle, that was for sure. And it undershot and crashed short of the runway. Nothing to do with any of the experimental equipment at all, but a bit of, I don’t… something went wrong, never really clearly established in the court of enquiry that went on. But it was part of my growing up process which led me to take a very tough line on anything that might lead to an accident in the experimental equipment. And I’d had a grounding in this sort of thing when I was in Aero Flight in the transonic work. And I think, I can’t remember whether on an earlier session I’d mentioned this fact and I was always staggered at the way in which you’d ask a pilot to go and do a transonic test, climb to 40,000 feet, put the nose down and you’ll lose control on the way down, the aircraft won’t behave as you want it to do, but don’t worry, when you get down to a lower altitude like 15, 10,000 feet, the control will come back again and you’ll be alright. You know, believe me. So handling that situation wasn’t new in terms of now. The chance of something going wrong very close to the ground and not a lot of time to do anything about it, that was the big difference. But, as I waffle on like this, as I say, it’s part of my growing up because (a) I then had to identify these heaps that were in the cockpit dead, messed, and I had the job of going to tell Joe Birkle’s widow that, you know, this had happened. And I went that afternoon to where he was living in Felixstowe or nearby, knocked on the door and his wife, forgotten her name, arrived, opened the door with a new baby in her arms. I’d taken one of the girls from the staff with me, certainly. But that has stayed with me ever since as another bit of something I never had thought I’d have to do. But there it was. It had happened and it had to be done. But, the bearer of bad news, certainly.

Did you feel a responsibility towards the test pilots you were asking to do these flights?

Did I feel a responsibility? Oh yes. Oh my goodness, yes. Good heavens. Did I touch… when we talked about my work in Aero Department of a Canadian pilot, I wrote to his mother. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, sure. Oh certainly. Good heavens. It was, you moved forward into new areas in small steps, having satisfied yourself from the results you’d just got that it made sense to edge up a little bit further. Oh, yeah. And that was there the whole time. And although you’d gone from one end of the speed range to the other, different risks, but certainly you were conscious of the risks now.

Sir John Charnley Page 154 C1379/30 Track 9

[1:09:20]

We’ve spoken so far of BLEU of the fact, how far they’d got with the different elements of the system. Once we got to Bedford, it was a big step forward in moving to Bedford because you now, or I felt much more at home on almost a big airfield in which you could take more risk without the same feeling of danger because at Martlesham you were operating a tiny little airfield. Now Keith loved it. He loved to be – Keith Wood – he loved to be out in the sticks away from the centre, didn’t like the big centre. Tom was quite happy, Prescott, coming, but Keith liked to be away from, almost the bureaucracy of a big establishment. That’s a big difference between as I talk on. And – what point am I trying to make here? Oh yes, put it together as a system. At Bedford I could now, with more confidence, put things together as a system and we started with the Varsitys and the Canberra, I was confident enough to run – and this is about ’58 or something like that, or ’59 maybe, yeah close to ’60, ’59 shall we say – to feel that we had done enough to demonstrate to the world in general where we’d got to, by running almost a week of demonstrations of automatically landing aeroplanes to the press, to the airlines, to the military, to the CAA and it was a great success. There were newspaper accounts of it. This, now you could land aircraft automatically. If you like, it was a bit of headline grabbing, maybe. But we’d got sufficiently far that I could see that we were going to solve the military situation very shortly and there was now a need to make the flying community more aware that this potential had come and this got to the eyes of the Palace.

[1:12:10]

And I had a phone call from an equerry of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, saying he’d seen this, it was a great step forward and he wanted to come and have a flight in the Canberra, specifically the Canberra, doing an automatic landing.

Prince Philip or the equerry?

Prince Philip. Oh yeah. So I had a word with the Director, RAE down at Farnborough, from Bedford and said look, this has happened, please give me some advice, what do you think. And [laughs] he said John, I’ve got complete faith in you, up to you, I’m right behind you. [laughs] You decide. And I decided we’d go ahead. So, set up, went through all the protocol and set up for him to come to Bedford and we’d fly him in the Canberra, landing automatically. And

Sir John Charnley Page 155 C1379/30 Track 9 there’s a photograph somewhere of the director of the day, Lighthill I think it is again, and myself walking out to the aeroplane with the Duke of Edinburgh, and I remember going home when I'd decided we would do it – I got the order wrong – went home and decided to go ahead with this plan and went home to Mary and said, well – my wife – saying “My career’s now out, it’s out, either a success or a dismal failure and I’ll be looking for a job because anything might happen, but we’re going ahead.” And so we did and he came and he flew and I went up to the control tower so that I was in touch all the time as he was going round, and he was delighted with it. Enjoyed it, delighted, did several times, you know, did one circuit and then was so delighted off they went again, he and Pinkie Stark I think was the pilot, and got out of the aeroplane absolutely thrilled, absolutely delighted, great success all round and on we went. But I quote that story to you in terms of being conscious of risk, always, always, always. And so were both Prescott and Wood, Keith Wood and Tom. In no sense did they have any difference over that issue. Their difference might have arisen as the way in which they evaluated it, but evaluate it they did and I could sit with them doing that sort of thing, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There we are.

[1:15:34] What did you make of all the press attention that came with the demonstration flights?

It was complimentary, it was opening up a new era in aviation operation… and in a way this was, I’d been down this particular path in my appearance in Farnborough with a jet engine because I’d, you know, the early days of the test flying of the jet aircraft. But this was, as you imply, this was different. You are now offering the capability of more regular commercial operation. And that has happened. So the press coverage was good. Certainly, of course I’m trying to think back to the extent to which there were, the thoughts about whether passengers would be content to be landing, be in an aeroplane that was landing automatically. Now I can go forward to say when it was installed and was flying in commercial aircraft. I’ve heard stories from BEA pilots of the way in which when they’ve landed when they’ve not been, passengers have not been able to see out of the windows because it was thick, you know, they then, a round of applause when they got on the ground and congratulations to the pilot because they didn’t know it was being done automatically. So the pilot was getting a round of applause for being able to land the aeroplane in thick fog.

[1:17:45]

Sir John Charnley Page 156 C1379/30 Track 9

What did the pilots you were actually working with developing this system think about it?

[pause] They varied – it was why I was taking a time – they varied. Whatever the views might have been when they arrived and there’s one particular – Pinkie Stark was the ‘look no hands’ pilot, he was small, he’d been a fighter pilot and as such, as far as he was concerned, getting back on the ground was done by the ground controller and he told you, go left a bit, up a bit, down a bit, and so on. And the idea that he was now being expected to sort that out for himself from an instrument of some sort on the ground or having it done for him automatically and he doing nothing, didn’t please him at all when he arrived. And I can remember in the mess over a beer, with Pinkie saying, Sir, you’ve persuaded me, you know, I’m with you, I’m with you all the way. I will demonstrate it to others on your behalf, you know, I’m right with you. And he became, as I say, the ‘look no hands’ pilot that would sit there in the aeroplane with his hands behind his head, with a character taking photographs of him whilst the aeroplane was landing. You could see the runway in the background and all the ground, and there’s Pinkie sitting there with his hands behind his head. And the press loved that. And he was so – he had been a GCA man and then was convinced. Alfie Camp, another of the pilots, he both at Martlesham and at Bedford, he was with it all the way. Alfie was more technically competent as distinct from flying competent. The two of them were first class pilots, but Alfie appreciated the technology behind what we were doing more than Pinkie did. That’s not to say they didn’t contribute to any difference in their contribution. So no, they on the whole pilots, and the navigators that flew with them if need be were soon convinced of the scope for an improvement in operational capability of this sort. They could be frightened if something went wrong and certainly, when I say something went wrong, if some malfunction occurred in the autopilot or whatever, if something happened that bent the beam of the [ILS]… or something, so the guidance went wrong. Then, yeah, they’d come back and when we were working with leader cables – I’ve moved on from that. Let me go back to that because it’s part answer to your question.

[1:21:45]

When I got there I was presented with the guidance people saying that the way in which the provision of ground guidance was going was through this instrument landing system from the States, SCS51, but they thought it wasn’t good enough for landing, for landing guidance. It was good enough for approach guidance but to leave it at 200 feet and hand back to the pilot, but it wasn’t good enough for giving guidance all the way down to the runway. So they had rather

Sir John Charnley Page 157 C1379/30 Track 9 than working away at the way in which the equipment could be improved, they decided to go a completely different way and set up a couple of leader cables, they're called, down either side of the… So they’d moved away from the way in which the general guidance world was going. (a) I didn’t really agree with that and (b) I then set up soon after my arrival in a couple of trial installations of leader cable at some military airfields, where there were operations going on at the same time as landing big heavy bombers. And it became obvious, sorry, became apparent as that went on that as there were so many cables, wires, leads running around an operational airfield below the surface, many of which no-one knew they were there, that you could easily get interference with these couple of cables, you could easily, and you got interference, spurious signals coming in which gave you a false centre line. And that was one of the things that I expressed my doubts about, whether leader cable was a solution. It was a very good solution for while you were doing research in providing an accurate definition of the runway centre line, but I couldn’t really see it being used operationally, either military or civil on a busy airfield where there are all sorts of electrical signals rushing around to lights of this, that and the other as well as other forms of electricity being fed around the airfield. So one of the early things I did was to dissuade this enthusiasm for leader cables and to encourage more work on improving the commercial system which was rapidly making progress both here and in the States. And so we worked with…

This is the ILS commercial system?

This is the ILS commercial system. And we built, you see the boys then, Keith Wood’s people, they built an experimental new antenna, aerial, a bigger beam width which confined more of the energy down the centre line to stop it going and hitting hangars or houses or whatever, whatever that were likely to distort it. And they built a bigger experimental aperture – it’s in my paper I think.

Is this for the leader cables or for the ILS?

For the ILS. For the ILS. And then, having set this up experimentally ourselves, they then worked with the contractor, STC, Standard Telephones, and out came a much improved beam that didn’t suffer the same sort of distortions, the ILS, that had been there previously.

[end of track 9]

Sir John Charnley Page 158 C1379/30 Track 10

[Track 10]

You were talking about improvements to the ILS system.

Yes. Once they started attacking that problem, once they had accepted that leader cable was not a feasible or practical way forward on an operational airfield they started to address what could be done to improve the guidance coming out of the ILS system and they built experimentally a new antenna down at the far end of the runway defining the runway centre line so that it wasn’t as influenced by outside… reflections, is the word I’m searching. And it defined the centre line much more accurately than had been done before, to the point where you now could use it for landing down to zero height. Well you couldn’t do that with the old system because it lost its accuracy and it could be interfered with by reflections coming, bouncing back from obstacles outside the airfield. But it didn’t, you know, once they addressed it that was the thing that stood out. They were clever enough to arrange an aerial antenna to do it. Big step forward.

You’ve talked quite a bit about different sort of little parts of this problem and some of the solutions, I was wondering if you could give me sort of an overview of what happens between you arriving there in 1955 and the move to Bedford in ’57 and actually having a working system at the end. How does the system actually develop from your arrival to the ability to land a plane?

…Don’t know. I don’t… See… the question is really one of putting it together into a system. That’s I think what you’re getting at and that’s… We were working on a military solution for a Vulcan and… let me preface what I want to say by making the point that the big difference between a military system and a civil system is the higher integrity that you need in a civil system. You can take a greater risk in the military system than you can with the civil system. You’ve got to have a complete integrity in all the various little bits of it when you put it together for passenger carrying aircraft to land safely, so that in the military system you had what you’d call a single channel system – one of everything, and you built into that system reliability that was acceptable for military purposes. When you came to a civil system you had to go further than that and design a system such that there was a redundancy in it so that if some element failed close to the ground there was an intelligence within the system to introduce another one or a second one that would take over. Now, that was behind the… so the initial work was being done, with what was called a single lane system; one bit of altimeter, one bit of engine control,

Sir John Charnley Page 159 C1379/30 Track 10 one bit of this, that and the other, and make that into something which was good enough, satisfied the requirements – and when I say good enough, I don’t mean disparagingly good enough, no way - but satisfied the, again, high requirements for safety in the civil system. And the way in which you went about that, again, the Woods and the Prescotts, you just built it up gradually and you added another little bit of the system. You’d do the radio altimeter work, satisfy yourself that that was sufficient and could stand on its own. You then put Tom Prescott’s element into that, which is the control to use that altimeter signal to give height guidance and a means of slowing down the rate of descent. You’ve got an aeroplane coming down at ten feet a second, you don’t want it to hit the ground at ten feet a second so you’ve got to flare, and you build into the altimeter signal your height – 200 feet, 150, 100 – different control laws to flare the aircraft automatically so that it lands with a rate of descent of say, two or three feet a second. You don’t want to set it for zero because it’ll go floating down the rest of the runway. So you want a positive impact there, but you don’t want it to be ten feet a second, you’ll scare the pilot a bit, dear God. And so you just add, you build up one thing or another – sorry – one element of it, and add a bit more, add a bit more and you put the… so you work on the height guidance and then quite separately you’re then working on the lateral guidance, the azimuth guidance as to laterally how do you improve and get this information to the autopilot. And it’s just building, you know, building it up, being conscious all the time of the risks that are involved in putting something together when you’re coming down at ten feet a second near the ground and you’ve got just literally seconds to do something about anything going wrong. Not a good answer, but I don’t know, it’s just a feel for the way to do it in a way. As I said about the transonic or the high… the transonic flight testing. You edged forward very, very… in very small steps, very small steps.

[07:53] And in this case you’re sort of edging forward a whole system then, not just individual experiments.

Yes. Yeah, you’re building, as you say, you’re edging forward in the build of a total system, adding a bit more to it. And then, in the sixties after I’d left – sorry – before I’d left, we’d laid out the elements of civil systems to get the improved integrity and we’re moving now on in chatting terms, you’ve got to provide in the civil system a different integrity, a higher integrity system than in the military system. And as I say, you do that with more than one channel, more than one lane and the way in which you – this is now a Tom Prescott problem with his simulator

Sir John Charnley Page 160 C1379/30 Track 10

– of looking at the different options, the different alternatives. And in working with BEA on the one hand and BOAC on the other, we had BEA using Smith’s autopilot equipment and we had BOAC working with, to start with Elliott’s, and then Elliott’s became Marconi. So you had BOAC now working with Marconi equipment. And they went for two different solutions. With… for BEA in the Tridents, Smith’s went for three lanes, three channels, three lanes, one of which was working and the other two… and the three systems were voting amongst themselves as to whether they all agreed as to what should be done and how it should be done and if one of them went different from the other two outside some limits, then it was taken out and you’d still got two systems, in other words, a duplicated system even after you’d had a failure. Marconi, they decided, their solution was to go for a double, duplicate system, so they had four channels in essence but not all of them were working. They had a duplicate system and then another duplicate system and they were all talking to each other in a very clever, complicated way, cross- checking each other. And so again, should a failure take place anywhere, then you fetched up still with two lanes working, but at that stage you now had decided that if you got to that point you didn’t go ahead and land automatically, you’d now got a system that was still sufficient to fly the aeroplane safely, but not to take the risk of doing that in bad weather close to the ground.

[11:33] Why the difference in systems do you know? Do you know why the difference in systems?

Oh gosh, Tom. Tom Prescott did enough and done sufficient – and it was Tom’s work, this is where it was his part of ship – and the chap that was with him… names again, doesn’t matter. He had one man, again, who did the numerical analysis of fault finding. Oh sorry, supposing a fault occurred here, how serious would that be, what do you need to do about it. So you had particular points in the system which were critical and you had to do something about them… and others that weren’t so critical. And we now got into all the business of statistical failures and the chances of failure happening, what you’d do about it, which is almost the analytical element. What on earth was his name? And wrote papers on it. And… goodness me. Didn’t really get sufficient credit for what he’d done because in essence you agreed with the CAA – you see I’m leaping all over the place – you agreed with the CAA and their safety people that whatever system you had, it was going to have the same statistical level of a failure as the engine almost the basis of your comparisons with the chances of something going wrong with the engine and you had to satisfy the authorities that your system wasn’t going to increase the risk greater than the risk carried by an engine failure. And – oh, the name nearly came to me then – did an

Sir John Charnley Page 161 C1379/30 Track 10 elegant analysis of an autoland system looking at different places within the system where you needed to have engine, complete engine reliability and others where you could afford to be downgraded because a failure in that particular area wouldn’t be critical. Ah, what on earth… Frank Gill! Cor blimey. I’ve got such a regard for the work he did and I don’t think he got sufficient… I left and he carried on in the sixties with the airlines and I don’t think Frank got sufficient credit because the mathematical analysis that he used is now almost a fairly standard approach that’s just taken for granted. What question am I trying to answer now? Oh, how did two… why and how. And really, Frank did the analysis of a triplex system with Smith’s and a duplicated double system with Marconi and demonstrated that either approach could meet the civil requirements set by the safety people in CAA. You then got on to the detailed electronics as to – and to that extent that became making it compatible with the way in which the two companies went about building their autopilot anyway. And the way in which they built their autopilot anyway led you to two different solutions. Now the detail I can’t tell you, don’t know, don’t know.

But ultimately you end up with two systems that are equally reliable.

That meet the requirements. That’s right, that’s right. Yeah, sure. And that is just saying there’s more than one way of killing a cat, or whatever, you know.

[16:29] I had wondered actually, you mentioned the work of STC in relation to the ILS system and how Elliott and Marconi in relation – sorry, Elliott and Smith’s – in relation to the actual airline systems. What were your relationships like with external contractors from your point of view, running this place?

Making sure they were in the picture from the start, that was the… Down at Smith’s Ken Fearnside was the man and I had enjoyed good working relations. And at Elliott’s and then Marconi as they became, GEC-Marconi, was Peter Hearne, but he wasn’t the main one, it was Jack… not Jack Shaler, he was with me. And we got on so well, there’s an answer in itself. I don’t know whether Fearnside’s still alive. The man I’m trying to think of at GEC-Marconi, I know he is dead, I know he’s… I’m still in touch with his wife because we were… Social terms, socially we enjoyed ourselves together. We could, I was going to say have a fight but that’s too extreme, we could argue vehemently around a topic in my office or in his office, whatever, and

Sir John Charnley Page 162 C1379/30 Track 10 then go out and have a drink afterwards. I think it’s not very, the right thing to say these days, but we would then, we could easily with our wives go out together – he industry, me as government. We could be having different views on a particular subject, we could have set in hand some process by which it would sort out how to solve our differences and whilst that was going on we could be socially mixing, we could be playing cricket against each other. They would have a cricket team, we’d have a cricket team, we’d play against each other. And as far as I was concerned, now that was an essential part of the argument to have them with you right, in understanding what you were trying to do in helping them and having them under contract from an early day when they were working with you with their ideas going in as well as yours and, because in a way… They were under contract to us so they were getting paid to do it and I was conscious that from remarks that they made, and they operated differently as private companies, I’m trying to… Hearne was the man down at, the board man down at Cheltenham with Ken Fearnside involved as a, almost designer and this sort of thing, and across at GEC-Marconi was the boss man… Arnold Weinstock, there’s a name for you.

He’s there as well. I was thinking, I know this one.

And from Weinstock down to Jack… oh, Jack, Jack, Jack… dear God. [Interviewee meant Jack Pateman] But the Jack that I was thinking of made it very clear that… Weinstock kept a very close on him and on his funding and Arnold wanted to see results before he’d commit any more of the company money. Smith’s, different, different. Not quite so critical but certainly conscious all the time of saying, well you know, we’re coming to the end of the contract, or this, that and the other, do we go on? What, what, what, what? Each of them had done the sums, on if it was successful what would it mean for them in the supply of equipment to the airlines and the extent to which the kit that they currently supplied to the airlines would need to have an additional little bit added to it to make it perform autoland. And as time went on, and I was going to say that before it got into the heart of this, I left this world, this area, but Smith’s I think had done the sums that led them to believe that… no, and I don’t know whether it’s true or not, I’m trying, but I can’t…

[22:30]

Because their system went ahead in the Tridents for BEA. Now, you now come to the attitude of the airlines because the attitude of the airlines was completely different. BEA, European

Sir John Charnley Page 163 C1379/30 Track 10

Airlines, were conducting more… their operations were into airfields, countries that had much more range of bad weather conditions than BOAC. BOAC when they did their sums had decided that there wasn’t as much attraction to be able to operate automatically – sorry, in bad weather, in fog – as BEA could demonstrate from analysis of their own operation. This is all in this paper, all this sort of thing, and… In the end, BOAC removed their requirement for autoland in their big jets. BEA went ahead with it in the Trident, but later on again, you see, when BOAC or BA as they were now, British Airways, were thinking about what system did they put in the Concorde, then they went for a duplicate monitored system provided by GEC- Marconi. And so GEC-Marconi got the contract for autoland in Concorde. But there wasn’t a lot of money in it for them because it didn’t happen to any great extent.

[24:50] How did your work actually go from being, you know, originally it’s an RAE project, industry involved on the way helping out as contractors, how does it go from being, you said that it is an experimental project, to actually having those companies involved making production systems? Is it something you were involved in yourself or does it all happen at a Ministry level?

No, it was something that… no, I didn’t get… That was very much moved to a matter between the equipment company and the airline, because it was the airline that had to meet CAA requirements. It was their responsibility to make sure that whatever went into their aircraft met the CAA requirements, so that was the responsibility… Now… and… as with – let’s take as an example of the same sort of thing, let’s take the military system which is just a single channel, a single lane, leave it like that. [pause] The military, the operation requirements branch of the air force, they set the scene by stating their requirement in terms of failure rates. As I say, someone like BLEU then takes that and translates that into the specification for the bit of hardware that then the contractor works to in the contract document. So he gets a specification for an equipment together with a risk factor that’s established as a failure rate, so many rates per 10,000 or a million hours or whatever, whatever, whatever, and he then has to work that through. He might get help from me, from BLEU, from the government body, but his job then is to work that through and meet with that bit of hardware that specification and satisfy his user, be it the military or be it the civil operator, from ground tests. In the civil case you see, most of the sixties was spent demonstrating, BEA demonstrating to itself by using autoland in good weather conditions that they were piling up evidence… [pause]

Sir John Charnley Page 164 C1379/30 Track 10

[28:17]

The Tom Prescott of this world, I mentioned earlier that he had built a simulator to simulate the landing process and the parts of the process that relied upon the guidance, the control, the automatic throttle and so on. Tom updated his simulator, introduced more exotic electronic bits to it and kept it running through the sixties, churning away on building into this system deliberate failures on the ground in his simulator and building, failing the system at that point, how significant was that, how did that change the rate of descent, how did that change the time taken for the pilot to correct back on to the centre line, that sort of thing. And you could do that and play that to your heart’s content, but you needed to feed into that simulator some actual results from flight tests to make sure that your simulator was giving you the answers that you wanted. You were validating your simulator with flight trials. It’s a standard technique now and was, it was to some extent – and the same is true of a guided missile, that you built an electronic system for a guided missile, but you then fired some missiles on a range to bring back results that you plugged into your simulator to justify the use of your simulator for conditions where, you know, it didn’t make sense to deliberately downgrade something in the air, either in a vehicle, in a missile, or in an aeroplane, deliberately failing a critical part just to see how it behaved from then on. But you could do that in your simulator if you’d built up your confidence in your simulator in areas where it wasn’t so critically at risk. Have I said that very well? Not very well, I don’t think.

No, I think it makes perfect…

But with anything like this where there’s a risk involved, you do as much as you can using a simulator, failing different points of the system, but to have any faith in that you’ve got to feed in some validation results which allow you to say, well yeah, the simulator’s doing well here, look at that, it’s great. And that gives you the confidence to extract, adapt, extend the simulator results into areas where you can’t take that risk in flight. So – why did I go down that path, dear God?

So essentially you’re sort of using the simulator to, you’re doing the tests to establish the validity of the simulator data?

Sir John Charnley Page 165 C1379/30 Track 10

Yes, yes in the air. And yeah, that’s right. Now, most of the sixties in BEA were done validating the simulator. Yeah, by making autolands in good weather, getting the results, feeding them in and almost deliberately we’d, starting with conditions which may be getting towards a bit extreme, and failing something, or whatever. And I think that that took… we were here, the word I guess is pioneering in the sense of you’re doing things that hadn't been done before, that the company, that BEA were determined, you know, it wasn’t going to ruin their reputation with having a smouldering heat at the end of the runway, in good weather, or bad weather or whatever.

[32:52]

And so they were pressing for trials, tests and my son was part, as a BEA pilot in Tridents, he was doing this sort of thing and saying, dad, had another couple of autolands today, one was jolly good, one wasn’t so good. I must have mentioned this to you before, oh… Oh. Okay, let’s go down this route for a moment or two. Son, Bedford School and wanted to be a pilot, question - military or civil? Oh dad, civil, I want some money. And goes to, is accepted by BEA somewhere round 1969 when he is nineteen or thereabouts – he was born in ’51 wasn’t he, yeah, January ’51. No, December ’51. Trina was born in January ’49 and Richard nearly three years later, December ’51. And I know that he… he qualified at Hamble, trained as a pilot in the early seventies, ’72 or something like that, ’71, ’72. Yeah. At which stage I’d left this world ten years ago. But BEA had now been through the sixties doing these validation trials, good word for them, and convinced themselves that the system was, had the integrity and the reliability to meet the requirements that the CAA demanded and that they were satisfied with. So it was in operational use when son joins the airline. And the phone could ring with me at six o’clock in the morning or five o’clock or whatever, and it’s son on the other end of the phone and it’s one of two things. It’s the occasion when he comes in, when he gets on the phone, says dad, just got back from wherever, absolute heap of junk, we couldn’t get into Heathrow, the system failed, we were diverted up to Glasgow, Paris, you name it. And he says you wasted your time, you know, heap of junk. And then there’s the other occasion when the phone rings and, oh not again, not Richard, and it is Richard, absolutely enthusiastic. Dad, we got in, we were the only ones that did, you know, everyone else was being diverted, down to Paris, off to Glasgow, and we got in. And there was a round of applause. Now I don’t know what to make of that Tom, other than in the early seventies it became operational, but the whole of the sixties had been persuading – I say the whole of the system, that’s a bit loose, but most of the… and I’d left – was spent satisfying

Sir John Charnley Page 166 C1379/30 Track 10 not just the CAA in our country, but the air operations business, ICAO set up an all-weather operations panel to go through the whole processes of the international rules associated with the requirements for landing automatically. And these things… Keith Wood, back to the question earlier, was in London at this stage and he was the UK member on the international panel sorting out the requirements for the international operation of an automatic system for getting aircraft down in bad weather. And that went through the sixties with the proving trials, the validation trials being done, Tom Prescott updating the derivatives in his simulator and Keith Wood on the international side, and Joe Morall that I mentioned, going to international discussions, presentations, meetings. I can remember one meeting that they told me about in Lucerne when there was the usual difference of approach between ourselves and America to be satisfied almost in the public view of the airlines. The airlines say well, you know, which of these people know what they’re talking about. And that went on for a long, long time before BEA satisfied themselves that the integrity was there to enable… Air France, oh God, isn’t this terrible, the way I’m going around this.

There are a lot of issues involved, it’s…

[38:30] Air France, they introduced it on a Caravelle, that was the French, yeah, Caravelle, and they introduced it on a Caravelle operation that used, just delivering mail, no passengers. So they could take a higher risk factor to start with whilst they were proving it than we were able to, I understand. Now, we’re really beyond the point where I was directly involved now, but it was the important, those sixties were the period when all the international discussion was going on in the civil world and then in the seventies it was, you know, it had been ten years almost, is the point I’m making, in the clearing of it. Now when digital technology – now we get to another sort of slant in it all – when digital technology appeared, the whole business of simulation became easier and making changes became easier and this ten year period of the sixties was now cut down, of proving autoland in a new aeroplane, a different aeroplane, the auto-land system in say, in a different system, was cut down to something like two or three years. The whole thing was speeded up in getting, in satisfying the approval authorities both here and in the States was speeded up with, or simply say, with the introduction of digital technology and the ease with which you could make changes. Anyway, it’s time I had a drink. [laughs]

[end of track 10]

Sir John Charnley Page 167 C1379/30 Track 10

Sir John Charnley Page 168 C1379/30 Track 11

[Track 11]

I had a few more questions about BLEU and specifically I was wondering about high speed and low speed aerodynamics and you’ve mentioned that low speed aerodynamics was very different to what you were used to before. I was just wondering what the difference was?

The… associated planform, be it a delta or a swept back wing, and particularly in the delta, and one is thinking now more of specifically Vulcan. The drag characteristics of the straight, of the thin, straight wing compared with a delta wing are quite different. The drag characteristics, at low speed. And you get to to a situation where… within the aerodynamics there’s a minimum, if you can imagine a plotting of drag or drag coefficient against incidence, attitude, wing attitude, wing incidence, you get to a minimum… the drag goes down as you are increasing the incidence from somewhere very low, the drag goes down so that the wing is performing at its optimum level, but then as you put the incidence up the drag starts going up. So you’ve got a curve that’s got a minimum drag coefficient with incidence, and that is with speed if you like. So if you imagine – and it’s more pronounced, the rise in drag with a delta plan, shall we say, a Vulcan plan, than it is with a straight wing. So – and none of this applies at high Mach number, at high speed because your incidence is just low all the time, essentially, but once you start reducing your speed and your incidence, your wing incidence is going up, then the drag starts going up enormously, the drag coefficient. Now, that means that once you get beyond that minimum drag point where your drag is rising rapidly, it becomes very slow, very difficult to get your speed back again on the aeroplane. So you’re coming in on the approach and if you let the speed go off below the minimum drag speed and therefore the incidence of the wing is above the incidence for minimum drag, the drag goes up quickly and it’s very… it takes… the recovery to get your speed back is very slow and you’ve lost height while you’re doing it. So there’s a greater risk associated with that sort of planform than there is with a straight wing. Does that help? And it was particularly prevalent on the Vulcan and we had seen this at Farnborough because we’d been doing – this bloke, Joe Morall that came to join me at BLEU – had been doing this sort of work on the 707 model of the Vulcan, the third-scale model of the Vulcan so we were fully aware of this problem, not only from the theory of it, but from the actual flight testing of it as well, that even the smaller, the third-scale model, it sank a lot before it picked up speed again and you were in danger then of just hitting the ground if you were too low. So there was this problem.

So a delta wing specifically then being quite dangerous to land at low speeds then?

Sir John Charnley Page 169 C1379/30 Track 11

Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, yes. And the landing speed was, as you say, it was decided with issues of this sort very much in mind and you didn’t let the speed drop off otherwise you were in difficulty.

[04:30] You’ve talked quite a bit about the sort of general development of the blind landing equipment. I was just wondering, you know, in something that is developed in sort of such an incremental way, is there ever a moment in that process when you think, ah ha, it works, I’ve got, you know, something that works, or is it just this gradual building up and never having that eureka moment as it were?

I think moments like that arise more as a result of getting to a point where you think this is never going to work. You know, we’re beavering away, we’re having great difficulty cracking this problem… can I take an example? [pause] It’s in the Tom Prescott area where he’s playing with the control laws, of fiddling with the control laws to get again, the right response, all the time wanting to make corrections without losing too much height, without taking time and therefore losing height, because you’re losing height at ten feet a second. And you can get on the… I can simulate an exercise that I witnessed where Tom was wanting to demonstrate to me, “This is what it’s like now John,” and “here is what we can do by fiddling with the control laws a little bit, putting a bit more velocity term in or a bit more acceleration term to speed things up so that the process takes place quicker and therefore we’ve not lost height in that.” And I can remember feeling then, well yeah, well done Tom. Now within the language generally that’s what you’d expect anyway, that you could speed something up like that, but to achieve it in a tidy sort of way. And it leads - that’s all I could say to answer that particular question - but it leads on to another point, that the Avro chief test pilot on the Vulcan – not chief – the Avro pilot that most of the flight testing of the Vulcan clearing of the Vulcan autoland flying, Tony – he and I worked together in CAA later on – Tony, Tony, Tony… and he still lectures on flight testing the Vulcan, not just from the autoland element of it, but flight testing the Vulcan.

Has he had a book out recently?

Yeah. He’s written several books and there’s one just recently. And his name again, and I’m sure… have I got it in here? But he was a technical test pilot, I mean technical in the sense of a

Sir John Charnley Page 170 C1379/30 Track 11 technical background as well as a pilot background, and he chose to confront Tom Prescott about, if you like, the way in which Tom had solved the equations for the control of autoland in the Vulcan and will now quote the fact that he thinks we got it wrong and that Tom Prescott in particular got it wrong and needed persuasion by him to do anything about it. And it is true that that situation existed for a while, but I thought… it certainly, it was solved for the Vulcan to be cleared, there’s no doubt about that, but I, I don’t know, I don’t know. But Tony whatever… oh, Tony, Tony, Tony feels very strongly about it and makes a point of it in many of the lessons and in his book, makes a point of it, this difference of view on the autoland equations. No, not here, not here.

[09:40] How difficult a problem was it to actually… was this work you were doing difficult or was it just not? Looking at the problem of blind landing, was it a difficult technical problem in your opinion?

Williams, Lindemann [ph], Meredith – Meredith was autopilots. Calvert was lighting, Meredith as I said was autopilot. Ron Howard, Marconi. Tom Prescott. Calvert, Calvert. Ken Wilkinson, BEA. No… David Craig, Gill, Frank Gill. CAA again. All-weather operations. Was it difficult? Yes. Well yes, the… you see in the way in which I’ve been handling some of your questions you can see I hope that I was closer to the autopilot world than I was to the radio guidance world. The radio guidance world was an area I didn’t know at all, that was Malvern, that wasn’t Farnborough, whereas the autopilot world was closer to aeroplanes. Now, in terms of the guidance problem, as I’ve said earlier, the guidance group didn’t think that ILS could be made more accurate and therefore went down this leader cable route on the assumption that it gave them a basis for a more accurate definition of runway centre line for the work they wanted to do without thinking too hard about the practicalities of that on an operational airbase, be it military or civil. When they addressed the problem, to my surprise they produced this experimental aperture which improved the performance enormously and so… and I was left with this thought, why the hell didn’t they do this sooner rather than assume it couldn’t be done and therefore move towards this leader cable solution. Because when they set about it, when old Keith set about it, it didn’t seem as if it took him very long to decide how to improve it quite substantially. But I was in no position myself to know whether that was easy, difficult, an inspiration or should have happened or whatever, whatever, whatever. It just happened that it did happen without too much – or so it seemed to me – without too much trouble. And there was

Sir John Charnley Page 171 C1379/30 Track 11 the blessed thing up on the… being built experimentally with chicken wire, sort of, and working. Tom, on the control side, this is a matter of manipulating equations, manipulating the way in which you automatically manipulated the equations in themselves, within the autopilot. And that was clever design stuff and I could understand that and see the technical merits of what they were doing there more easily than I could see the merits of improving the guidance side. But I’m willing to accept that that was lack of knowledge on my part rather than that they had missed out on it in the early days, because they were quite, Keith was quite determined that – and that was why we started, again, we moved away from the VHF frequencies to microwaves on the guidance and I could understand that, I could understand that argument. And why we went into microwave frequencies to experiment and indeed, we went forward to ICAO. ICAO or IATA? ICAO with proposals for a microwave system for airports - airfields, airports – which were either going to use helicopters on the one hand, or because of the local terrain, steep approach paths even on conventional aircraft. So instead of the conventional two and a half to three degrees that you set up within your system, you’d be going five, six, seven maybe. Now, the way in which you did that with the VHF system was, well, beyond me, I don’t know, don’t know the difficulties, but it certainly seemed to me as if you needed a move to microwave systems to do that. And so when we were thinking of, at one stage, an installation to go into City Airport down in London at the City, we were thinking not so much of a system of VHF frequencies, but of microwave frequencies. And I don’t know whatever became of that, I don’t know what there is there now, I don’t know. Don’t know. And I’m getting woolly because it’s not an area I’m very familiar with in detail. But I’m much more familiar with the Prescott end. And so back to the question, was there a moment when you thought ah, great, it’s all over and done with, it’s easy, it’s done, over, done, all but the shouting. Never quite like that because I suppose, and this would have been, yeah, whether it was the military system or the civil system, it would have happened after… the civil system would have happened after I left when, in the course of this validity demonstration, you came to a point where you had satisfied the requirements of the airline on the one hand and the regulators, the CAA, on the other and they were now saying yes, okay, we agree it can go into operational passenger carrying operations and that’s the moment, and that’s worth a drink, yeah.

[17:15] You’ve talked quite a bit about how the separate bits of the system worked, I was just wondering if you could just sort of briefly give me an overview of how the whole thing functioned as a whole

Sir John Charnley Page 172 C1379/30 Track 11 at the end? When you left in 1960 and you had that system that would land a Vulcan, how did it work?

Aircraft on the… joins the circuit, you’ve been brought in by air traffic, you join the circuit, say 1500 feet – is this what you mean? Yeah. And you’re going downwind, you’re 1500 feet, you’re going downwind, you’re generally doing a left-hand circuit, anti-clockwise, so the airfield’s over there somewhere, you’re going downwind and the airfield’s over there. So now you turn crosswind and somewhere at this stage you decide that the weather is such that you can’t see it over there, but it’s there somewhere, so if you haven’t done it already you now engage your autoland facility and you go through a series of checks to make sure that all the various elements of it are at least functioning properly. And you now start on your instrument panel, you can’t see out there, it’s all fog around you, so you’re looking at your panels and what information you’re getting from your panels, and you start getting information that tells you that you are entering the coverage of the ground guidance system, the ILS, and coming up on your instruments you see needles beginning to move and as you go… then you turn crosswind and as you get closer to the runway centre line your autopilot and the way that you can see the instruments are telling you that you’re now within the beam width of your… defining your beam centre line. That’s gone into your autopilot as well and your autopilot is now saying, because Tom Prescott has built this in, the autopilot is now getting warning that you’re approaching the beam centre line and it’ll start turning you on to start going down the beam centre line gently. And this is happening before you get there, so that you don’t get there and find you’ve overshot and have to come back. So it starts turning you on and your needles start and you’re thinking this is, oh it’s going great, great, great, yes, we’re closing the centre line, but you’re still at 1500 feet. So now your horizontal needle down here, because you can’t see out there, you don’t know where you are other than that you’ve got a needle there which you’ve been turned on to it and your needle is sitting there nicely on the beam centre line. So now you now find that you’re coming in towards the runway and you suddenly find that you now start looking at the needle that’s giving you height guidance and it starts to come off its stop and tells you that you’ve now reached the point where as you’re coming in you’ve now reached the intersection with the glide path beam. And again, your automatic system starts taking you down to start your descent and you start descending at a rate of ten feet a second. Now that might come up on an indicator, but you will know that your, that the horizontal needle should now be in its centre because its beam is now losing height, it’s a line in space essentially and you’re flying down this line in space with your automatics. And whilst all of this is going on, then engine signals are going into your

Sir John Charnley Page 173 C1379/30 Track 11 throttle because you will have wanted to cut back the engines or the automatics will have cut back the engines so that in going from level flight it’s turning you down three degrees to start going down the flight path so as to keep that bar horizontal. And that’s all you can see, because you can’t see anything outside. Now, you’re now getting perhaps, getting closer to the ground and you might now be getting complete blanking of vision as the lights are now giving you just, as in fog when you’re in a car, you’re now getting just a dazzle of light, no information in them because it’s just a dazzle. The lights are being reflected in the drops of rain in the fog, so you’re just getting a blanket of whiteness around you. Still not getting any help at all, but you’re altimeter is telling you you’re down at 200 feet and you still can’t see that ground but it’s coming up at ten feet a second, and you don’t know where you are, other than your instruments are telling you you’re on the middle. And generally now, if it’s thick fog like this there won’t be much crosswind, so you won’t be going down in that direction, but with your nose pointing like that you won’t be crabbing down as if there’s a big crosswind. You can get those conditions and we’ll come to that in a moment, but you’re now in height, you’re on the centre line, there’s no lateral correction to be made, all of that’s been done, if you were off centre it’s brought you back and you’re sitting on the centre line, but there is a need now to start checking the rate of descent and again, the automatics are coming to, say a hundred feet, it tells the engine throttles that now start pulling back and so the engine starts cutting back the aeroplane, cutting back the throttles, the thrust goes off, the airplane starts dropping and at that moment if there is any crosswind and the aircraft is sitting with its nose pointing off the runway centre line, which you don’t want to happen, because you don’t want the nose pointing off to the edge of the runway when you touch, then another signal comes in to kick off drift and any drift that the aeroplane might be having because the nose isn’t on the centre line, it’s off to one side because of a crosswind, that’s kicked off and simultaneously you get a bang as you touch the ground at two or three feet a minute, not zero, and your drift has gone so your nose is going down that runway. And you hope that by now you’ve got lights going tchk, tchk tchk, tchk , because these are the lights that are in the runway centre line. And after that it’s up to you then. We never went any further than to cut the engines automatically, we left that up to the pilot once he was on the ground and his nose was going down the - so that he wasn’t in danger of going off to one side – his nose was on the… pointing in the right direction for him just to throttle back and cut the engines. It’s very unlikely that there’s a lot of other traffic around on the runway because there’s nothing else can see, so that isn’t a risk. There’s not a great risk about going off to one side because you’ve straightened the aeroplane up and there it is, that’s all you – not you straighten, the autopilot has straightened the aeroplane up. So the autopilot is being asked to do, capture the beam to start with, in level

Sir John Charnley Page 174 C1379/30 Track 11 flight, then intersect the glide path beam, so tip the aeroplane down onto a three degree path, control the aircraft in azimuth to keep it on the centre line and as I say, if there’s a strong wind blowing, it might be doing that with the nose of the aircraft pointing way off the runway centre line, so you’re crabbing down on the understanding that when you get near the ground the autopilot is going to say I’ve got to straighten this aeroplane up because I’m at a hundred feet or whatever, and you’ll have set that figure depending on the response characteristics of the engine – and we talked about this earlier – and how quickly the engine will respond to drop the speed to get the right sort of display to descent on landing. And you cut the, the autopilot will then cut the angle, the yaw angle, the crab angle so that you land pointing, you land on the centre line pointing down the centre line with something like a two or three degrees rate of descent so that… and the whole of this will have been set up, your glide slope and your ground guidance will have been set up so that it’s about… the aiming point will be about a thousand feet down the runway. Does that answer the question?

Mm.

That’s been through the process.

And the data for the system – that all comes from ILS from the ground?

ILS from the ground, yeah. Which is in a big antenna down at the, defining the centre line at the other end of the runway and a glide slope antenna down opposite the point where you’re going to put your wheels down.

[27:33]

So, there’s quite a bit to it. Now, following your question and… there was this clever, as I say, this pilot talking to me and saying that you can now run an operations system like a railway because you can get in. That still depends upon the airfield having an ILS of the right standard, and that will be categorised by the licensing authority to be of this sort of – a Cat 1, Cat 2, Cat 3 ILS. Now, of course, what the airlines would like is a system that doesn’t depend upon any guidance from the ground, and of course there’s a thing called a satnav, which they carry with them. So have they got airborne with them wherever they go a system which is going to be good enough for guiding them automatically… put that into the autopilot, why not. Do the clever

Sir John Charnley Page 175 C1379/30 Track 11 things with those signals that you do with the ILS signals so that we carry with us the guidance system wherever we go to enable us to do this clever thing, but without relying on anything on the ground. And that debate’s taking place now as to whether the satnav system (a) can be made reliable enough for this operation and (b) – and this is the sixty-four dollar question – can you be sure that there won’t be a break in it when you’re committed to landing. Because it’s not something that’s there with you, it’s going up there and down again and all sorts of things can happen en route. At a critical phase in flight you don’t want that necessarily. So that debate – and I’m not party to that, I don’t know what’s happening. You could be closer to it than I am from what you hear. I hear bits of it from navigation, when I’m at the Institute of Navigation and it’s still an open issue on both points, both counts; the accuracy and also the reliability. It’ll happen, I’m sure it’ll happen, but where they are with it I don’t know, and I don’t know who is working on it, who might be working on it, whether it’s government labs or whether it’s industry. So I start thinking now, where can anyone get any money out of it, where’s the commercial return in terms of the operators going into mountain airports. That was one of the people who were keen to have something done about it, operators going into Austria and Switzerland, in Europe that is, and of course it’s very attractive to think that in Africa you’re not depending upon some… to get into some small native state that you’re dependent on the way in which that equipment down there is being kept and maintained, you’re taking it with you. Very attractive, if you make sufficient movements into that port to make it worthwhile.

[31:35] I was wondering, just to bring this back to administration for a moment actually, I was wondering, who did you actually report to when you were in charge of the BLEU?

The deputy director, the RAE structure – a director and two deputies. One responsible for aircraft type problems, in other words; aerodynamic structures, materials, chemistry maybe, and the other deputy director answering to radio department, instruments and electrical engineering, guided missiles. Yeah. Yes, that’s about it. So that was the division in functional terms. Now, where things got difficult was because when RAE Bedford, when the planning was done for RAE Bedford, the assumption was that a lot of the aircraft related department would go up there, not just that that is aerodynamics, structures as I said, engines had gone out of RAE at this stage, they’d gone to gas turbines in Pyestock, so there was no engine work, but there were these other aircraft related departments and that they would all go up there. That didn’t happen, the scheme was cut back to a large extent but, when BLEU was at Martlesham they’d answered to the

Sir John Charnley Page 176 C1379/30 Track 11 deputy director responsible for equipments, which happened to be Frank Follett. But when it went up to Bedford, it now came on to a site that was the responsibility of the deputy director responsible for the aircraft equipment, for the aircraft themselves. Aerodynamics, structures, materials. And so I changed my chain of command, that it wasn't Follett, the DDE – Deputy Director Equipment – when I went there, to DDA, Deputy Director Aircraft, Morien Morgan, when I was up there. Now fortunately, Morien had been Head of Guided Weapon Department at RAE and was familiar with this sort of world in general terms, so he wasn’t averse to – and he knew, he and I knew each other well because we’d been in Aero Flight together years ago. He was senior to me then, very much, when I was a PSO he was an SPO so he ran the division and between him and me, Smelt was the PSO level. But Morien and I knew each other well, he knew of me very well indeed and so was willing to say okay John, I hear what you say – he was a good Welshman, with a name like Morien what else – and I’ll take you, I’ll have you. So the chain of command was conditioned by the fact that we were operating out of Bedford as an equipment bunch and we were the only one there that did that. In fact there weren’t many others there. Bedford had the airfield and on the airfield was Aero Flight, Naval Air Department who were playing with launching systems for launching aircraft and also arresting system, ropes and wires and suchlike for stopping them, and also in the launching side for the work on Harriers and the angled deck, and so on. Then there was the Twinwood site which was the wind tunnel site that had a collection of subsonic wind tunnels, supersonic tunnels and a vertical spinning tunnel for looking at the spinning characteristics of aircraft. But yeah, the chain of command for Superintendent BLEU was straight to the deputy director. Whereas – and we were, I think Maths Department in RAE might have been as small as we were - but I was certainly, I was not conscious of size conditioning the importance of my work from the senior management or the views that I may have expressed as being different, of being given different weight from those of the bigger departments. The big departments were Guided Missiles and Aero. GW and Aero. And they were the heavyweights in RAE. Structures, don’t think so. Instrument and Electronics, Instrument Electrical Engineering was quite a big one that I had when I came out of the IDC, because there was autopilots, photography, airborne cameras, electrical engineering, lighting patterns, generators, it was a big department, as well as navigation, bombing and navigation. It was a big department.

[37:58]

Sir John Charnley Page 177 C1379/30 Track 11

And while I was there – and this followed on from my BLEU activity where… [pause] I’d already in BLEU addressed with, almost with aviation medicine, the issues surrounding the way in which you displayed information to a pilot for him to extract from it information to tell him what to do. And so we’d improve displacement instruments and put a first rate on them, which was a rate term if you like, to convert your displacement into instruction what to do. And again, you came to the point, how do you display that, what’s the best way of displaying it to the pilot to enable him to get the information as quickly as possible, but to get it correctly and quickly. And I’d been intrigued by this sort of problem because it raised all sorts of questions – did you need to know precisely what to do? In other words, did you need a clock face or did just need to know where the dial was, where the fingers were, and as long as you knew that the finger was pointing over there, then I know what I do with that and how that finger then varied was sufficient. If the finger started moving back to the centre, well good enough, you didn’t need to know it was 4, 3, 2, or a 1, and so on. And we were in touch with the applied psychologists about that sort of thing. So, when I got to the Instrument and Electrical Engineering Department and again, even in BLEU, I’d been conscious that when you’re searching out there for a scrap of information to help you if you’re going down this particular path, but you’d like to know that anyway, you want to see to what extent you can combine what you see out there with what you see down here on your instruments and how do you arrange within your optical consciousness, the focussing on infinity on the one hand and down there on the other. And so we had had dealings with this Instrument Department on the projection, the way in which you could project these instruments to infinity so that you could see these without looking down there, but they would be projected on the windscreen in some way or another so that you could see the instrument information and then you looked through it to see the visual information in real life down there. So I was familiar with this concept of head-up displays.

[41:23] Was this something that actually gets used in the Blind Landing Unit or does the head-up display come later?

Head-up display comes later, because if you’re going to do it automatically there isn’t the same need for this, this is pilot interpretation. And it was, it’s related to this transition from if you’re in the fog and you suddenly start getting little glimpses of the lights down there – this is before, it’s part of the argument for going fully automatic – but if you’re going to try and break the cloud, shall we say, at a couple of hundred feet and continue with your landing and you’re

Sir John Charnley Page 178 C1379/30 Track 11 getting intermittent bits of information, you don’t want to be doing this sort of thing, looking up there, looking down, looking up there, looking down. So you do want something which allows you to absorb both sets of information from the instruments and from the lighting pattern, to continue if you’re going down that particular path of using a pilot assisted approach or landing, which again, I was never very… I took us down the path of going automatically, I’m afraid, that’s me.

Why do you say you’re afraid? What was the decision you had to make?

Persuading the pilots that an automatic system close to the ground like that was a safer way of going, setting about a landing than they were, than they could do it. Now, you’ve got those that had been frightened by those circumstances, certainly, and were almost relieved to think that there was something that could do better, because they couldn’t do it very well, they’d scared themselves, you know. But you’d got the others that they’d had the experience where the automatics had failed and they wouldn’t like the automatics to fail when it was doing that part of the… so please, no, don’t go down there. But I was convinced that was the right way to go and my colleague across in the States, Freddie Powell, didn’t think much of the idea either because his company wasn’t flogging autopilots. [laughs] Nor was mine, but I wasn’t flogging any… I had two companies in the shape of Smith’s on the one hand and Marconi, GEC-Marconi on the other that were keen to include this idea into their autopilotry. And the person that in that sense did a lot of good work was a chap called Ron Howard in Australia with GEC-Marconi. And he took this business of analysing, failure analysis very seriously, did useful work on it, Ron, very useful work. He continued the work that Tom Prescott and Frank Gill started, but Ron from the company point of view did very useful work on it. I don’t know that Tom would agree with that because that’s, you see that… Tom could almost irritate people, I wouldn’t say very easily, but he could and he irritated the Vulcan pilot, clearly. He irritated Ron Howard at times I know, because they were both inclined to challenge quite sincerely and quite properly, but it could annoy Tom, that anyone would challenge him in that world, in that particular world.

You mentioned that the American take on an automated landing system was different to the British one, what was the difference?

Ah. They were using radar, essentially, just like… They were extending the, the GCA, the ground controlled approach where you use a radar and a controller to give the pilot manual

Sir John Charnley Page 179 C1379/30 Track 11 instructions as to what changes to make to his flight path, and they do it in different ways, you know, up a bit, down a bit, left a bit, right, but essentially they were still keeping the pilot in the loop, and that was an expression which through the whole of this period in extending almost the military system into the civil system, the phrase. Do you or don’t you keep the pilot in the loop? And I was saying no, you don’t. Americans saying yes, you do, and now you get into these arguments, then how do you display it, you get into all the instrument arguments that I’ve just been running over, head-up displays and so on. And whereas we have a head-up display in our military aircraft for our low altitude flying of low altitude bombers so that you will be looking ahead rather than looking up and down, I don’t know that that’s got very far into a commercial aircraft yet, I don’t know. I’ve heard noises I think that it has, but I don’t know that there’s a lot of it, don’t know. I must ask Richard. I don’t think so, he’s never really… I must ask him. So that’s the big difference between the US and ourselves was this question, do you do it automatically, in which case you’ve got to solve the question of integrity; accuracy and integrity. If you do it any other way, by a radar with the radar giving a ground bloke, controller, position, the controller then works out position, then what to do and he relates that back to the pilot and the pilot now has to link that up with what he can see, with what this bloke is telling him what to do. And he can be a bit baffled if the chap says, you know, do something because there’s fog, and he says do something, my radar tells me that you should do something and this bloke can see little bits of the ground – chk, chk, chk, chk , that says oh no, no, no, I’m not there at all. He could be a bit baffled. So I was, I’m afraid – there’s the phrase again – I’m afraid I was of a mind that expecting a confused pilot to sort out the answer to that quite difficult problem with time whistling away very quickly and you getting nearer the ground and you’ve got 300 people sitting behind you. They’re not afraid, they don’t know, they don’t see anything.

Did the American system actually…

But I remember [laughs], I remember when I was arguing this, generally with my son and related to the last point, he said, Dad, I’m terribly sorry, but forget that 300 people I’ve got strapped to my backside, it’s my backside I’m worried about.

[both laughing]

And that shouldn’t be on here.

Sir John Charnley Page 180 C1379/30 Track 11

We’ll put a restriction on it for thirty years. [laughs]

Sorry, you were going to say?

[49:43] No, I was just wondering. Obviously you’ve got sort of two systems doing roughly the same sort of job, was there any ever sort of, any competition between the two or did that happen after you left the field?

Oh, no, no. Here… did we talk about the Americans bringing the aircraft across?

You mentioned that they’d taken one over to the RAE earlier on with the SC… SC151? Sorry, SCS51.

No, no, no, SCS… that went down to Malvern. Down to Malvern. Oh, it was part of this international argument between the States and ourselves and someone from the Federal Aviation – and that was the interesting thing I suppose, I try to look back at this, there’s a man in the FAA, government… Al Winnick, that had been in this world, man and boy, for a long time and I was not man and boy in it, obviously I was aerodynamics, different. And I suppose, have I told you the view that in many ways – and it’s a bit like the DDA and the DDE situation, a little bit – that I lost my, all my friends on the aircraft side because I’d moved over to the equipment side and I didn’t gain any friends on the equipment side because I wasn’t man and boy one of them. So… as far as the aircraft side, I was a lost cause, I’d gone. And it is true to a large extent that after that I was very much instruments, electrics, navigation, guided missiles. The straight aeroplane element of it, aerodynamics straight, gone, lost it, moved on, moved away. Wouldn’t say moved on, moved away. And all the people that I was joining didn’t have a high regard, shall I say, until I’d demonstrated that I, use Hall’s words if you like, a quick learner, because I wasn’t one of them, I hadn’t grown up in electronics, in radio and radar. How did I get there? That was another aside.

[52:13] Talking about competition between the two systems.

Sir John Charnley Page 181 C1379/30 Track 11

Yeah, yeah. And so Al Winnick was the FAA, their equivalent of our CAA. Now, they didn’t have… they were doing their work on this sort of a problem in industry, the industry companies, the autopilot companies, the guidance, the ILS, the… oh, don’t know. Anyway, they were the people and that’s why Bell were involved because Bell were doing some work and Bell were working because of their work on getting aircraft onto carriers. And as I say, if you could land something on a moving platform this wide and that long, then it wasn’t any problem surely to do that on an airfield. You see, but you do steer the carrier into the wind, so that element’s taken out, it’s what wind there is… you arrange for the wind to be blowing down the deck. Anyway. Bell were involved. Oh, one of the other auto… big auto… Bendix also. Bendix also. And there’s a firm beginning with a ‘C’ somewhere around, an autopilot. Ooh, came then.

Convair? Convair?

Collins. Collins. Collins. Yeah, Collins. And Collins became, oh quite prominent later on. Anyway. It was the industry that was doing the work, this was… and with us. In other words they didn’t have an equivalent of BLEU. So on the one hand I was working or talking with the Bells and the Bendix and Collins in particular, and Sperry, Sperry. Sperry at Phoenix in the desert and Long Island. Don’t know where Collins were as of now in my mind. Bell at Buffalo. Bendix somewhere round Detroit, Chicago, somewhere up there. But nothing, there wasn’t a government body like BLEU in that, so it was a bit strange, a bit different. And we got to the stage where I was arguing with Winnick as the, almost their regulatory body, and they had an experimental airfield at Atlantic City called… [pause] FADEC – Federal Aviation Development Evaluation Center - I think that was it. F-A-D-E-C, something like that. And they were flying aeroplanes – DC7, DC8 – big four-engined propeller driven commercial transport and they were doing work on it. And Winnick, supported by industry, was standing on platforms quoting results of how good they were, this, that and the other, distributions, bit of statistics. And I was, if you like, doing the same sort of thing from the work we were doing as BLEU at Bedford. And it got to the stage where, I don’t know how it happened, we just said well, if you send – and I think Smith’s might have been in it, they must have been – if you send your experimental, your big DC7, DC8, whatever it… DC4 across to us at Bedford, we’ll put our system in your aeroplane and we’ll evaluate it, you can do, send your own team over, whatever you like. We’ll put our system in your aero… That was the offer I made. We’ll put our system, with Smith’s, a Smith’s autopilot in your aeroplane using our system, any ILS you like for a ground guidance, and we’ll see what is made of it. So it was about fifty… might have been 1960, ’61, something

Sir John Charnley Page 182 C1379/30 Track 11 like that, this aeroplane came across to Bedford with a crew and servicing people, all the rest of the jazz, but with an aircrew, oh, four or five of them maybe, we put them up in the mess – I think the mess rather than a hotel, yeah the mess – and Smith’s put the equipment in the aeroplane, a Smith’s Mark 10 autopilot or whatever, with an autolanding coupler, and this bunch lived with us for the summer. And were obviously reporting back, I never quite knew what they might be saying, it wasn’t up to me, I didn’t demand that they let me know. The pilot and I became good friends – I can’t remember his name, and they certainly got on good terms with our pilots. Oh they were, they were good blokes to have around and they went back to the States with… convinced that ours was the right solution. We still had to do something after that. Why, why, why? Anyway, they went back to the States and somewhere I’ve got now a copy of the report they made which was full of enthusiasm for the treatment they’d had, the way in which it worked. The only thing they said that disappointed them was they didn’t think much of cricket. They knew that we played cricket, we played cricket as BLEU, we played other people around the Bedford district and they had been encouraged to take part and play as part of our team. They didn’t understand it, they didn’t think much of it, but whereas they couldn’t understand that, they thought blind landing was absolutely “shit hot” - phrase. But still, the pilots had to be persuaded and Joe Morall went across with one of our aeroplanes I think to demonstrate something more to them. And I’m lost now. Joe went over.

[59:15]

But, it succeeded in persuading them and after that they stood on international platforms with me persuading the airlines now, the operators, that this was the way to go. Persuading the airlines and ICAO to start all the issues around getting the legislation right for different standards of equipment, different weather conditions, and so you got this different, Category 1, Cat… again, the things we had devised as a Category 1 condition, Category 2, so on and so on, became international language for all-weather landings, with their support. But it was an interesting battle over that period, once we left the military scheme and started thinking about how to convert this into a civil system with the required integrity, reliability and demonstrating that with a multi-channel system how it could be made to work and did work.

[1:00:32]

Sir John Charnley Page 183 C1379/30 Track 11

You’ve talked quite a bit about how you went about, how after you left more accurately, all that establishment work was done with the aviation people, but I was just wondering when did you first start talking to airlines?

When you say to airlines, if you mean BEA and BOAC, our airlines, just before 1960 at about the start… when we ran this demonstration, which would have been about ’59 I guess. We were well through the Vulcan programme and I was sufficiently confident, we’d made the move to Bedford, we’d got a nice big airfield where we’d got a good installation system in there of ILS with the right sort of antenna to get you a nice straight beam and I decided that we now could go public with what we’d been doing for the military. And that would, that has to be, I don’t know whether this – does this thing say? I think we ran that demonstration in ’59 didn’t we?

I was just wondering as well, not so much the date as how do you start getting airlines interested in it as well, what was their reaction?

Let me… there’s the analysis of failure rates and the different levels, air worthiness requirements. ‘Later led them to cancel the V10 programme with a very similar system for Concorde.’ ‘Trident programme continued with the Triplex system, figure 17’, yes. Oh… ‘1961 the Federal Aviation Agency, FAA, assessing a Bendix, pilot in the loop, perspective picture of the runway on a CRT’ – that was another thing they were thinking about, but we’d thrown that out. ‘FAA sent across a Douglas DC7 for the installation and testing of the system. After about three months at Bedford, further tests on return to Atlantic City’ – I knew we did more when they went back – ‘the FAA were convinced and thereafter strongly supported a fully automatic solution to the all-weather problem’. Yeah, correct. ‘The move to Bedford took place in the spring of ’51.’ I knew that. ‘Later in 1957’, that’s right, it was towards the end of that year. Towards the end of that year. ‘Later in 1957 now with more experience and added confidence in a complete system, a series of automatic landing demonstrations were arranged for the air staff, airline operators, CAA, the industry and of course the press’. ‘Later in 1957’, so that’s when we started talking to the civil operators. Now – oh, and there’s another name. Both airlines – and then we followed that with the international element, of going international, arguing with the States because clearly anything like this needs international regulation as well as European and the UK. But oh, what was I going to say? Oh yes, yes.

[1:04:29]

Sir John Charnley Page 184 C1379/30 Track 11

Before that demonstration we were already talking or I was already talking to the electronic people in BEA and BOAC to persuade them to show an interest in what we were doing and the electronic people said well, you know, the people you have to convince are our pilots. So they each nominated a pilot for me that would come to BLEU and have some runs, some testing to be the ambassadors, if you like, to be our ambassador in the airline. And the BEA pilot, again, rather like, as it turned out, the Vulcan pilot, was technically, had got a science degree or a technical, engineering degree of some sort somewhere and then become a pilot. So he was nominated to… and God, his name. Terrible, terrible, terrible. And strangely enough, his son became a pilot also in BEA and his son and my son were in the airline at the same time. And he was a great help to us, not the son but the father, who was their almost development pilot that the… he was an operational pilot, yes, but he had this additional function of being concerned with British European Airways future thoughts for the way in which their business would develop and he had a little respons... not little, but a responsibility of that sort. So he, he was very good. Name began with a ‘T’? T, T, S, T? And he had a lot of support – sorry – he had support from Ken Wilkinson, the chief engineer I think he was, or chief technical man in BEA of the day that had persuaded himself that if it could be made a success, then operationally it was a money-spinner for them. He’d done those sums. [pause] ‘All-weather operations, Wilkinson. KG Wilkinson 1970.’ Now you see, he’s got a lot of those sixties experience behind him. ‘Automatic landing in BEA’s Trident. A review of effort and achievement, KG Wilkinson 1970.’ So he had been with it through the sixties, had Wilkinson, as the chief engineer or something of the sort, and been supporting this pilot and supporting all these proving flights that were having to be made with, not experimental, but with, not with certainly developed equipment, but prototype-ish, as I’d gone, but this is my understanding, so please… But there was support from Wilkinson and there was support, and from this pilot who was very good.

[1:08:28]

Now, on the BOAC side, different. (a) There wasn’t the management support to the same extent because they couldn’t see the same future benefit to the same extent. They were not making operations into airfields where this was a problem with the same almost density as BEA. So there wasn’t the same push from senior management to the same extent. There was a bit and I’m trying to think of names again. Don’t know.

Sir John Charnley Page 185 C1379/30 Track 11

[1:09:09]

The pilot that was a great help was Michael Magendie, who left the airline business, left BOAC and he was a Stratocruiser, big aeroplane man, and again, highly intelligent, Mike, Michael, knew him very well. His wife, my wife, yes, yes, yes. And he was… gosh, you think back. Dear God, he was coming to see me when I was still at Martlesham Heath, interested in what we were doing. And he and the current group captain in the Air Ministry, that was in the particular area of operation requirements that dictated the operation requirement to which I was working on the Vulcan, Andrew Humphrey, and the extent to which Andrew Humphrey and I were on this course for that twelve months at the same time, and he was a friend with Magendie at Smith’s, so we had a triangle between Smith’s in the autopilot constructor – sorry, no – Magendie at this stage was still with BOAC. We had BOAC and Andrew Humphrey, group captain in OR, who later became Chief of the Air Staff and Chief of the… I think became CDS. Certainly Chief of the Air Staff. And myself. But there were three people here; BOAC man and Humphrey and they were the operators, one setting the military requirements, the other with the big aeroplane,BOAC wish in his own mind, and me. And I can remember the three of us sitting round in my office at Martlesham before we went to Bedford, exploring the possibilities for the three of us, the three interests to move forward. Now, as I say, the BEA pilot - name forgotten, and that shouldn’t have been forgotten, dear goodness – was not involved, this was a three-way, because we all knew each other very well. Although at that stage I hadn’t been on the course with Andrew. Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter. Eventually, Magendie left BOAC and went to Smith’s and became… oh he was – he’s dead now – but he was certainly an ambassador for autoland in commercial operations, certainly. I used him, without a doubt, because he’d got the BOAC attitude, but I think to some extent because they – I thought one of his reasons for going to Smith’s was because Smith’s were much more active in pursuing this in BEA, than the interest wasn’t there on the BOAC side to the same extent. Does that make sense, in a funny sort of way?

[1:13:28] Was he someone who really saw the potential of the system then do you think?

That’s right. Yeah. Yes, yes, yes. But you’re touching again on the human element, the contacts, the way in which you find or probe around, not weaknesses in the system, but the way

Sir John Charnley Page 186 C1379/30 Track 11 in which to manipulate and operate a system to best advantage. It can be technical. It can be very much personal relations driven, I found, I suppose is what I’m saying.

Are there any other examples that spring to mind at this point?

I was going to say I can… no.

Not necessarily in the same period perhaps, but as we’re on the topic?

…I was looking for examples that worked the other way of people I couldn’t stand and therefore they didn’t go forward very well at all. I couldn’t think of one. But I hadn’t looked at it that way. No, no, no. Oh, but in my Aero Flight experience, when I was there I was working with Brown, Trevelyan down at de Havilland’s on the DH108 and stayed great friends with Geoffrey Trevelyan and he now is suffering from Alzheimer’s. I’ve been to see him within the last month or so, two months maybe. That relationship was a success in de Havilland’s. He was in their aerodynamics office and I worked with him on Vampires. When your introduction, after the first experimental aircraft, the E28-39 and we were then, the air force was contracted with Gloster’s for Javelins and de Havilland’s for Vampires. And so as RAE we were supporting both and so I was working with – along with other people, it wasn’t just me – but with other people in the aerodynamics office at Hatfield and the chief aerodynamics man was Clarkson, elderly man, so I seemed to work more with his staff than with him, but down at Gloster the chief aerodynamics man was… oh, I can see him, big man, big build. And he was, now there, he was someone that perhaps I didn’t get on as well with as I might because he as industry didn’t appreciate the views that a government body had on his ideas of aerodynamics of designing the aerodynamics for the aeroplane. He didn’t welcome – that’s a better way – didn’t welcome criticism which was meant, I would have said, in an orderly, friendly, helpful sort of manner. But… his name nearly came then. So yeah, but… So there… you see, at Gloster I suppose I tended to work through their pilots. Bill Waterton on the one hand, Zurakowski, Dickie Martin, knew all the Gloster pilots. Sayers.

What do you get out of talking to pilots?

Pardon?

Sir John Charnley Page 187 C1379/30 Track 11

What do you get out of talking to pilots in this equation?

[pause] Persuading them of, from their knowledge, experience of the things in the aeroplane, the Meteor in this case, that might benefit from some improvements, you could point to them the way in which you could identify with them what they would consider, like you, the limitations of the aeroplane and suggest to them the way in which it might be improved. You might even go further than suggest, you may be able to convince them that the way to improve it was this, that or the other. Duggie Hough, the chief aerodynamicist, Duggie… oh, Duggie Hough? Hough, Hough, Hough? You had difficulty persuading him because he had designed the thing and it wasn’t up to you to suggest ways in which it might be improved. But you could get at that via the people who were flying the aeroplane. Duggie, Duggie… Anyway, it’s the wrong way to put it in isn’t it? No, don’t.

[1:19:50] There are a couple of things in this…

Yeah, go ahead.

…in this same vein, but I’ve been meaning to ask about. The two things that have occurred to me when you’re talking about having good personal relations with other groups, other individuals are that your wife got on with their wife and that you played cricket with them and I was wondering how important were those two things to those sorts of relationships?

Oh yeah. Well, it’s a personal view, but to me they were most important. Now, it doesn’t mean that I was discussing with my wife all the technical details of the things I was working on, doesn’t mean that, but it does… I mean in RAE socially we were dancing, we were… film society, going to see films that were a little offbeat from the main cinema attractions and Higton’s wife, Joy, very close, very, very close with Joy – Mary and Joy. No, it’s… and this is where I get bothered by some of the criticisms today of a bit of a brick wall between the activities of government specialists, government people and their correspondent in the public sector and the private sector, if you wish. And to me it helped my workings a lot to be mixing socially, as long as you knew where to draw the line and keep the two things under control, without any doubt at all. Recognise the dangers were there and certainly, yeah, yeah, yeah. But

Sir John Charnley Page 188 C1379/30 Track 11 the, as I said before, you mentioned the point yourself of arguing technically quite strongly against one another and then meeting… [phone ringing]

[pause in recording]

No, it’s been an important part of the way I’ve played the game. I have to say that. And it’s involved wives, Trevelyan at Hatfield, Geoffrey and Gillian. I’m trying to think of the Smith’s… oh, Ken Fearnside and his wife, forgotten her name. On the aeroplane side at Hatfield, as well as on the guided missile side, George Hough and Hazel. Yeah, you know. On the pilot side, I’ve mentioned Bill Bedford, Bill Bedford and his wife. Oh, lots of wives, pilot wives with functions in the mess here at Farnborough and Bedford. Oh, yeah, Bedford. And a wish, Tom, my own wife, bless her, to be involved, to want to support, to want to be there, but showing no wish to dig deeply into the security issues associated with the military programmes. You can certainly have the friendships with military people without going into that area at all. Not a problem. But no, wherever I went I played cricket. We played most teams, most… Sperry in Bracknell ran a cricket team and I played against them and then later I played for them when I retired. Michael Harper, chief executive of… and his wife.

Do you think…

And with all of these, I’m wondering just how much to say about this really. Let’s leave it for the moment because I’d rather not have this… okay. It could be regarded as sensitive, delicate area, the extent to which I might be regarded as accepting hospitality from industry, and that’s been an issue of late that’s received quite a lot of support, commendation and criticism and so on. And it’s, you can develop this little subject into that area, and I wouldn’t want to do that. Wouldn’t want to do that, because in my view, again, that’s knowing not to cross lines.

I think you made that point clear a moment ago when you were talking about the dangers.

Absolutely.

Would you mind elaborating on the danger aspect of this or… you don’t have to, it’s questions.

Sir John Charnley Page 189 C1379/30 Track 11

I don’t think, I think not. I think not, if you don’t mind. No. The dangers are there and I hope I’ve said enough to indicate the way I played it and let that be sufficient if you would at the moment, I think. Yeah. Because I think it is an important part of the way in which you run your career and you run your life and your married life as well. It’s all part of something, yeah. And I’ll think about it and we might have another word another time, but I’ll think about it.

[1:26:57] Okay. Does bring another question to my mind though, which was something you talked about, the film group and the cricket. I was wondering, what was RAE social life like?

Very active. Oh yeah. Would you regard life at a university active socially? It was there for you if you wanted it. Now RAE was like that, there was everything. It was very much that sort of a place. Whatever you wanted: tennis – on the sports side – tennis, football, rugby, table tennis, badminton, squash, all of those things. On the culture side: cinema, art, art classes. Socially: dancing, bridge, indoor games – bridge, chess. Now of those, of all that lot, my wife and I very keen dancers, modern dancing I mean, not… certainly modern dancing, enjoyed it enormously. And I played chess, I played rugby, cricket. Enjoyed the Technical Society.

Technical Society?

Yeah. Which arranged trips here, there and everywhere, outside speakers coming in and talking on subjects that were not near RAE’s interests, from places like Guildford, Surrey University, Guildford. And also the Film Society, which again we were… So yes, they were all there and oh, theatrical… a theatre, acting, acting.

Amateur dramatics?

Dramatics. Dramatic Society. Yeah. Dramatic Society. So you name it, it was there. And certainly up to the point where, as I say, ’55 when I left the district and was then away from ’55 until ’63 when I came back and then was there for ’63 to ’68 on the staff of RAE, and that’s interesting, you see, although I was away, other than those twelve months on the course in London, I’d had twenty-five years in the RAE. But, at Farnborough, Martlesham and Bedford and then back to RAE. So that ’43 until ’55 RAE, twelve years’ aerodynamics, and than a bit at Martlesham and then Bedford, and then twelve months in London, and then back to RAE in ’63,

Sir John Charnley Page 190 C1379/30 Track 11 which is when we bought this house, always in the back of my mind knowing that very soon I’d be in London, that I wasn’t going to stay at Farnborough for the rest of my career. I’d got, when we came here I’d got… ’63, twenty years to go thereabouts, just under mid course in London, the mid career course and if someone had thought that I was worth sending on that, then the chances were I was going to go a bit further and that to me was going to mean London, and so we bought this place where I was convenient for RAE and convenient, better convenient then for the Camberley train service, which has deteriorated now. And so yeah, and in all of that wherever I went I enjoyed the social side, be they… [laughs] Oh dear God, how talking like this makes… [pause] Where do I start this one?

[1:31:41]

When I was at Farnborough, somewhere between ’43 and ’55 I was playing my rugby and that’s when I got damaged, that’s when I hurt my back seriously, sometime in that period. But also in that period some of the pilots used to play rugby as part of the team representing RAE and one of them was the chap who became a group captain, Leonard Snaith, Group Captain Snaith. He played rugby until he was quite late… diminutive little man; scrum half or outside half, one or the other, at that sort of level of play it didn’t matter much. And again, down here, his wife and my wife used to meet on the touchline watching the two men playing rugby. So I moved to Bedford, eventually found my way to Bedford by the route that you are now familiar with, and who should be the security officer at Bedford, now retired, but one ex-Group Captain Snaith, and his wife. So there are we, Mary and I, on the riverbank watching a regatta of some sort and who should come along the riverbank but Group Captain Snaith and his wife – forgotten her name – whereupon she greets Mary with a bloomin’ great hug, saying, ‘Mary, haven’t seen you for years and you so remind me of smelly rugby socks’. [laughs] Well. I think that’s fun. [laughs] Yeah.

I think that probably seems a fairly good point to stop for today don’t you?

I think it is. I think it is Tom, I think it is. If you don’t mind, I think…

I think that’s a very good place to stop, thank you.

[end of track 11]

Sir John Charnley Page 191 C1379/30 Track 12

[Track 12]

Talked quite a lot about your time at the Blind Landing Unit last time. When did you leave?

Christmas 1961. So I’d been associated with that sort of work, getting aircraft down in bad weather, from 1955 through to ’61. The first two years spent at Martlesham Heath, and then the move to Bedford, and from ’57 through to ’61 at Bedford. And I was then in some way or another selected to go on this Imperial Defence College course in London which was a twelve- month course and for me it was the whole of 1962.

Were you expecting to be moved?

No. No. It was a surprise. I didn’t know much about the course and the college and the purpose until I was told that it was starting in January and that’s where I would be going. We were living in Bedford, so I was travelling up and down from Bedford to London to the college, the place itself is in Belgrave Square, yeah. And would you like me now to say something about it?

Yeah, that would be helpful.

It’s… it’s a very important year for the services. They’re in mid career, as indeed I was, and I think that’s the way to look at it, it’s a mid career update of, without being big-headed, of people who perhaps the system has decided are going to go further and there is now a need to extract them from what they’re doing, give them a twelve months to think, to be… to hear about and think about the world, world problems and the UK’s position and the defence position, all of that. The political, the social, the economic activities across the globe and have a twelve months thinking about those sort of problems, hopefully to come out at the end of it better equipped for senior rank. The course – I’m speaking now of 1962 – it’s interesting that there was a reunion only last week, to which I went, and in my year, the 1962 year, there were just three of us. Now – and that was the three out of a total of something like, at the reunion there were about 145 people there, I was told by the present Commandant. So the course itself. There are about, or there were - let me talk about 1962 - there were about seventy-five people on it, forty of which are from the home civil service, the home services, and the other thirty-odd from overseas, in those days principally the Commonwealth. And of the forty from the home services there were about ten from each of the three services, three military services, and ten from the civil service

Sir John Charnley Page 192 C1379/30 Track 12 with perhaps one or two from industry. Perhaps, but not necessarily. I think there was one in my year. So you have the home establishment, generally set as far as the services are concerned, at say group captain, colonel/brigadier and captain, naval captain. And from the civilian side there were people from the Treasury, from the Foreign Office, from government departments and there were two of us from Defence itself. And the other chap, incidentally, was more of a dedicated scientist than I regard myself. But still, he was an explosives man, but a clever chemist.

Who was that?

He’s dead now.

Who was it?

Oh, Tom. I’d need to go up and get…

No problem if not.

He came from the army place down at…

Fort Halstead?

Halstead. That’s right, he came from the fort. Yeah, he did. And he knew all about guns and shells and in that sense he and I could have a chat because, you know, shells travel at transonic, supersonic speed so we had something of an interesting debate around that sort of thing, never mind. However, getting back to the thing. And within the overseas people, as I say, it was Commonwealth principally. There were a couple of people from the United States but the rest were Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and again, from a variety of the services from overseas. So there was a mixed bag. Oh, and a couple of Nigerians. Interesting; one Christian and the other Muslim. And that sort of thing was interesting to hear that and picture the two of them. And the sort of way in which it went, you worked as syndicates, about ten of you in a syndicate which had been, generally, quite carefully selected so that you got a range of views from the home people and then the overseas people, and in the course of the year various areas of the world were taken as particular topics and in the afternoons you discussed and

Sir John Charnley Page 193 C1379/30 Track 12 debated the problems that related to that particular part of the world and in the morning you had lectures related to the particular exercise that you were concerned with in the afternoons. And the lectures in the morning were very prominent people, for instance, around ’62 Ted Heath came and gave a lecture, it was that sort of level. Ambassadors came from the different countries, in London maybe or even someone would come in from outside. Frenchmen came in to talk with us and Ted Heath. So the concept of Europe was very much in mind at the time. And so a very interesting period to go on a course of that sort for a technical chap like me who’d never thought much about that sort of thing at all before. So it was an eye-opener.

[08:31]

There was a social side to it as well. One of the points that were emphasised in the introductory talk by the commandant – the commandant was a service man, in my case he was a four-star airman, Constantine, Connie, Constantine Air Chief Marshal di-da-di-da-di-da, Hugh. Hugh? Doesn’t matter. But it was that sort of level and he ran it and it rotated between the three services, it wasn’t in any way special. And the home bunch were expected to do some entertaining of the visitors. So we found ourselves at Bedford inviting people out for lunch on a Sunday or a barbecue and one of my children – how old would they be at the time in 1962, fifteen, twenty, something like that? No, not twenty, fifteen, less than that. Born around 1950, we’re talking sixty… twelve-ish, yeah, twelve, thirteen, that’s better. Yeah, that’s better. In the summer months we had lunch parties when overseas people, generally, were invited out on the Saturday and the Sunday for a lunch and I can see now one of my two youngsters being absolutely astonished to see a huge black man from Nigeria sitting in a deckchair in the garden after lunch fast asleep. You know, they’d never seen anything like this before. [laughs] The other interesting thing, very interesting thing that came out of this was that one of the students on the course was a Pakistani group captain, Rahim Khan and he had a nephew that was a boarder at Bedford School where my son was as a youngster. And Rahim Khan had asked if he was coming out for a lunch party and he had this nephew at Bedford, would we object, my wife and I, if this youngster came along with him. And we said no, not a bit, we know Bedford School and so on and so on. And so on this particular day Saeed Rabb appears as about a sixteen year old, seventeen year old, very smooth sixth-former at Bedford School, very smooth indeed. And his father was a Pakistani ambassador, I don’t know where he was at that time, but the name of Maqbool. And this youngster turned up, very pleasant, well behaved, immaculately dressed, so well behaved, and off they went. Okay, all over.

Sir John Charnley Page 194 C1379/30 Track 12

[12:04]

The following weekend, and there wasn’t a party of this sort, we hadn’t got, but our two youngsters were playing around in the garden or something and down the entrance, the path, the drive, this character arrives on a bicycle, completely different now, in scruffy rig, obviously just come for the afternoon and he got together with my two and they played music and jigged and whatever the words were, they rocked the bloomin’ house completely. He was a completely different young man now, completely different. And we became proxy parents, essentially, to Saeed. And he and, his father and I then started exchanging correspondence. He had this uncle on the course but I was then in direct touch with his father and this youngster then kept coming very frequently to the house. We were on the spot and so we were there as proxy parents, and became good friends. He was older than my two. He finished at Bedford School, went to Queen’s University Belfast to study – and I don’t know why this – ancient languages, Eastern languages, got a degree over there, good degree, and I don’t know, with his father’s contacts, went into banking with Coutts in London, did Saeed. And all this time he was keeping in contact with us. I’ll go on with this because it’s the sort of thing you would say, you’ll ask me questions about it because it’s the sort of thing that this business, you tell me, is interested in. And we lose touch with Saeed until he’s on the phone to me saying he wants to come and talk to me about something, yeah okay. So we arrange to meet and he said my marriage has been arranged by my father, and he said, I don’t agree with it, I’m now so Western in all that I’ve done that I don’t think this is right, and would I talk to his father and persuade him that this was the wrong thing to do. So I did talk to his father and his father said, “John, no, no, no, no! Won’t hear of it. This is the way it’s done, this is the way we do it, it’s the way I want to do it, it’s the way my wife, his mother, wants it done” Oh, and the girl was the daughter of a Turkish ship owner. And there was no way that I was going to persuade his father at all, so the marriage was arranged, we didn’t go, we were invited to the wedding out in Istanbul, didn’t go, but… I’m sorry, Maqbool’s point to me was, John, don’t lecture me on what makes marriage a success and a failure. He said we, alright, we run a rule over the other family, we decide that the right sort of person getting married, rather than leaving it to this thing you call love. There’s a better chance of success if it’s organised rather than just leaving it to so-called love, because so many of those fail, don’t they John, you know, look at the history of the Western world. This marriage was a tremendous success, I have to say, and Saeed kept contact, met his wife – oh, we’d met his wife beforehand, his girlfriend, the daughter of this Turkish ship owner – and I was now mixing in a world that

Sir John Charnley Page 195 C1379/30 Track 12 was way, way, way out of anything else imaginable. And two things, and then I’ll stop this little bit of story. The next thing of course is that we keep now getting visits from Saeed, we’re still here, or we are here, and Saeed keeps coming down, he’s now with Coutts in London, living in London, and he arrives on a visit here frequently in his Roller, in his Rolls-Royce. [laughs] And you think, this is unbelievable. And although we didn’t get to the wedding, his father, Maqbool, is now the Pakistani Ambassador to the Lebanon and we get invited for a holiday in, to go and spend the summer or a month in the summer with them, in the Lebanon as their guests, in the Pakistani Embassy, and we go. And that’s out of this world, an introduction to that part of the world. And it has its funny moments. As their guests, with them we’re invited to a Sunday drinks party up in the hills in the Lebanon and we’re going up there with him and his wife in a Pakistani Embassy car and we overtake – and it’s a big American car that we’re in, lots of room, smooth American monster – and we overtake a small British Ford on the way up. Didn’t know at that time that it was going to the same place. Anyway, it turns out it was going to the same place and this smaller, I don’t know what it was, a Ford I think, when we get there, we’re there first and we’ve been welcomed and having a drink, but this car should arrive and who should get out but the British Ambassador. [laughs] I didn’t know him, I had no idea it was going to happen, but certainly we then had a word but he more or less said, was that your car that overtook us, and what were you doing there, how is it that you’re here as guests of the Pakistani… di-da-di-da-di-da-di-da. So I’ll stop there. Where Saeed is now, I don’t know. Haven’t seen or heard of him for some time. The man who was on the course, his uncle, Rahim Khan, he’s dead. He became the Commander-in-Chief of the Pakistani Air Force, he reached that height, certainly. And I don’t think he was of the same political persuasions as one of the other military people that were pretty well running the country, as I understood it. Anyway, forget it, forget it. Rahim is dead, so Saeed’s father would certainly be dead. Saeed himself, I haven’t seen or heard of him now for some time. He must be back in Turkey I would guess, and I look forward to the Roller coming down the drive any time now. [laughs] That was a bit of IDC. And I’ve set out the sort of course.

[20:40]

Now, that’s the structure of the course and there are the two holidays, there is the Easter holiday and there is the summer holiday. In the Easter holiday a trip is arranged in the north of England to give the foreign people and ourselves a sampling of coalmine, steelworks and shipbuilding, all on the eastern and north-eastern coast. Yorkshire, coalmine. Steel and shipbuilding, Teesside.

Sir John Charnley Page 196 C1379/30 Track 12

That sort of area. And so there’s a week or a fortnight, I can’t remember which, around that area where you are exposed to these sort of things and you have lectures and talks from businessmen, from political, local political and trade union – I can remember on the coal, the trade union side. And then that’s that. Then the summer, you were given a choice as to which part of the world you’d like to go and visit, and never having been there before I chose South-East Asia. And this was a month, party of about ten of us with a general in charge of us, General Gordon, one down from the Commandant but on the directing staff, because below the Commandant there was a directing staff that had each of the three services, our three services on it and it just happened that our party was in the charge of a General Gordon. Got on well, no problems at all with him either in the course or on the trip. Flew out to Singapore in a Britannia and there picked up our own aircraft, a Varsity or a Valetta or something of the sort. Wouldn’t be a Varsity. That sort of size, which was now going to take us around that part of the world. The important thing was that the aircraft was just – quite a big aircraft for a dozen people – it was loaded with liquor. Absolutely loaded with liquor, because wherever we went, we were being entertained by the local community in one form or another, either through the High Commission or local politicians or businessmen and there was a need for us to return the hospitality. And so we left Singapore with [laughs] an aeroplane well stocked with liquor of all sorts from our own embassy. First stop was Indonesia. Indonesia. Oh, the name and the name of the town. And then – leave that for a moment – and then Sumatra and then up to Manila and Manila up to Hong Kong and Shanghai and across from there – I don’t mean Shanghai. No, Hong Kong, that was ours. Across to Hong Kong, Shanghai wasn’t. And then into Malaysia and down – north of Malaysia – and then down south through Malaysia, jungle, forest, living in it for a day or two, down to Singapore and home again. Terrific month and a complete eye-opener for me. You can see the impression it made on me. One anecdote – or there are three anecdotes that come to mind – but the one I’ll mention.

[25:25]

Kuching – the country that Kuching is in, whatever it is, we were due in there on a Saturday and the way in which things were organised, one of the ten of us, the students, when we went to each place this one person in rotation was organised to be the lead for that visit and he was the chap that had to make the speeches and the welcome, the words of thanks and this, that and the other. And Kuching was me. And we’d flown in from Indonesia and we’d all relaxed on the aeroplane and when we landed at Kuching there was the guard of honour waiting to receive us, all smartly

Sir John Charnley Page 197 C1379/30 Track 12 dressed and on parade, and steps were pulled out for the aeroplane and I had to be the first off the aeroplane, down these steps and inspect this guard of honour, wander down the front of them and admire their buttons and their uniform and so on and so on. Did that and while this was going on I could hear in the aeroplane behind me tittering and laughter and I thought what, you know, what, I don’t see a joke, what is it, you see. So got to the end of the line, went into the terminal building for an orange juice or something and all the characters were now stood there laughing their heads off. You know, what is it? And it was then General Gordon came and said, ‘John, did you know that you inspected that guard in your carpet slippers?’ We’d had slippers on in the aeroplane and I’d forgotten to put shoes on and none of these sods had been decent enough to tell me. [laughs] That was, Gordon then was a – that had amused him in a way – didn’t really give me a burst because he was too concerned with the fact that there was no-one to meet us, no-one from the High Commission to meet us and it was a Saturday and we were there for the weekend and that was it. So he started getting on through the terminal building there to find out what was going on and eventually a character turns up who was the man that was supposed to meet us and you’d never believe it, but he turned up in a gorgeous cricket blazer, white flannels, cricket blazer, stripes, gorgeous stripped blazer, playing cricket. And he’d got the date wrong, we were not expected till the Sunday and here we were on a Saturday. Well Gordon fumed, absolutely fumed. Anyway, there was then a lot of sorting out to be done and this chap got on the telephone and we got to the hotel and as ever with these things, there was some sort of Chinese celebration that weekend and the hotel was full and there was no room, we couldn’t get anywhere. So this High Commission bloke got round his chums and they all put us up, and a naval captain and I, John Roxborough, submariner, distinguished submariner in wartime, he and I were found digs with the local district officer who was having a party that Saturday night and we were invited, and also to stay on with him over the following day. And he and his wife were tremendous, no doubt about it, wonderful, made us very, very welcome, had a laugh about the cock-up that had taken place. The district officer knew the bloke that should have arranged our visit, laughed his head off when he said he got the wrong date, and then the following day, the Sunday, he was due to make a trip upriver, deep into the forest and of course said would we like to go with him, John Roxborough and I. Of course, of course, of course. So we got into his canoe affair and we sat there like royalty with a couple of locals doing all the work with paddles and this, that and the other, and upriver we went. Two or three things there. We came to, we went to a local village where he was making a visit there and wandered around the village. There was the long house on stilts with all the animals playing around underneath, but with the locals themselves on the first floor, if you like, and up we went to meet some of them, to meet the head man of the village –

Sir John Charnley Page 198 C1379/30 Track 12 this is Roxborough, John and I – and the district officer was with us and he did a bit of interpreting so we could make a bit of sense of what they were saying, we just looked around, but the thing I want to get at, down at the far end of this long house was where the local people did their work, if you like, because their work was making things and selling them. Making things in wood and in material and there for the material in the middle of this work area was a Singer sewing machine, a treadle, Singer sewing machine. Unbelievable. Unbelievable to me. How it had got there, no-one knew, been there for ages and that was it, it was part of their life. Next we went to see this little hut in the middle of the village which was a hut where the young men became men instead of boys and part of their growing up was to spend a night in this hut in the square because on the shelves in this hut were all the skulls of the Japanese that had been killed by this village during the war. And the young men, as part of their initiation, their growing up process, they had to spend a night amongst all these grinning skulls. We didn’t have to, I have to say. We then went on and had tea that afternoon with the Chinese people who were in the village and there was this mix of nationalities, ethnic mix, in this little village. Oh, and we also went to a cave that was inhabited by bats and there were bats flying everywhere. So, tremendous sort of experience that was as far as I was concerned quite unbelievable. Then we went into Manila which was very strong American influence, plantations. And then up to Hong Kong and coming down through Malaysia, again, we were choppered, we were helicoptered into a tiny little clearing in the forest and lived there for a day or two. And then home from Singapore. Wonderful. Wonderful month.

[34:18]

The end of the course came in December in ’62 and I was asked to go and see the Commandant, Connie, and he said John, I don’t know about the overseas people, but as far as the UK contingent are concerned, you are the only one that doesn’t know what’s happening to him when you leave at the end of this month. And he said, I take a dim view of that, if your system chooses people to come on a very special course of this sort, an expensive course, and yet the end of the course comes and they’ve not made provision as to where you’re going next, I don’t think much of your system, I’m going to stimulate it. So a couple of days later, asked to go and see him again and I thought what now. [telephone ringing]

[pause in recording]

Sir John Charnley Page 199 C1379/30 Track 12

[35:30] Sorry, you were saying about your meeting with Air Marshal Constantine?

That’s right. He was annoyed because I hadn’t got somewhere to go, my posting had not been arranged. He then called me again and he said, don’t worry, it’s all under control, it just happens that there’s an argument going on as to where you should go. You’ve not been forgotten and it’s good news for you because on the one hand, James Lighthill wants you back in RAE, he’s got a job for you there, but on the other hand, the people in London, the staff people in London want you down at Boscombe Down to look after things down there, they think you’re suited for the post down at Boscombe. So he said, don’t let it bother you, it’s a promotion either way and they’re having an argument. In the event it turned out that Lighthill won and I went back to RAE. But that was the reason why there had been a delay. So that was the end of my twelve months on IDC. The name, it still exists, it’s now called – the Imperial has gone as you might expect – and it’s now the Royal College of Defence Studies, RCDS. Still in the same place. As I say, I was there one evening last week for a reunion and the format of the college has changed appreciably, you can now get a degree or a masters degree because it’s now related to King’s College, it’s much more serious, there’s more emphasis on the academic side than there was with us, than there was with me. And I can remember meeting a very interesting and powerful chap from the Foreign Office and he’s dead now, that I do know, in fact two Foreign Office people are dead. One of them became our Ambassador in Moscow later on, and so on. But whereas for decades – and I mean that don’t I – the reunion was just a buffet supper and meeting people, this year and last year it was started by a lecture and the lecturer this year, a few days ago, was Lord David Owen, Lord Owen. He’d just written a book. [background phone noise] Listen to it, never stops. And he was really lecturing on his book. And he sat there afterwards signing his book, obviously it was a PR exercise in a way, but it was a good lecture and he was, the thrust of the lecture was the way in which when from his experience, whether you were a businessman, a politician, a military man, you had to be very careful that when you got to a position of power in whatever you were doing, that you didn’t misuse it. Well there, I’ve spent what, half an hour on IDC, which, goodness me.

[39:23] Is that a hypothesis you’d agree with yourself?

Sir John Charnley Page 200 C1379/30 Track 12

Say again?

Was Owen’s message one that you’d agree with?

Oh sorry. Oh, gosh. Yeah. He chose, and I suppose this was based on his book, he chose to really illustrate his thesis by taking individual people and how they had reacted and operated the position of power they had, and they were politicians. He started with Churchill, for instance, but then he went on and he covered Thatcher, Eisenhower, oh and generals – he went military of course for the audience. Patton, Montgomery and I suppose mainly then went military rather than political. But certainly, Churchill, for whom he had a great regard. And when I was in London, I was there when he was the navy minister, before he left the Labour Party and became a Lib Dem, with Jenkins and Barbara… whatever.

Castle?

Barbara Castle, yeah. I was there when that happened. So, anyway.

As someone who was in that mix as well with those sorts of people, what did you actually think from your own experience of Owen’s hypothesis, do you think there was something in it?

Yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yes. Yeah, I do. I’ve forgotten what is the word when you get so, almost get an exaggerated idea of your own importance and again, we’re back to the sort of thing we touched on, ego trips.

I think hubris was the word you used over lunch the other day.

Hubris. That was his word. That was his word, yeah. Yeah. I didn’t know what it meant. [laughs] Well that’s a long diversion I think, I’m sorry.

[41:55] No, no, I’ve got follow-up questions as always, actually. You talked a bit about your Pakistani contacts. I was interested in the fact that, well for instance, was it Rahid?

Say again?

Sir John Charnley Page 201 C1379/30 Track 12

Was it Rahid who went on to become Chief of the…

Rahim.

Rahim. Sorry, Rahim.

Rahim Khan – R-A-H-I-M and then K-H-A-N. Rahim Khan.

Who became Head of the Pakistani Air Force, you mentioned.

Yeah, yeah.

I’m just wondering, of the people in your class such as him, did you encounter them later on in your career?

[pause] Overseas, no. I kept in touch with them socially, but I didn’t encounter them professionally in anything… that’s not true. Australia, yeah. Again, when I was in my guided weapon period and when I had responsibility for our interests in Woomera and was going out to Australia, the then army chief, the Australian Commander-in-Chief, army, whatever that… he was an ex-IDC and yeah, he and I met, certainly, in terms of my interests in Woomera, and his for that matter. I didn’t meet… I’m trying to think of our own service people. Oh, Napier Crookenden, another Brigadier. He became the Commandant of Shrivenham, the army advanced… he went on… Napier was very, I don’t know which part of the army he was from, he wasn’t an engineer, infantry of some sort. But he became Commandant at Shrivenham when I was, again, with the guided weapon world when I was being used by Shrivenham to review papers that Shrivenham students were writing on guided missiles. I met Napier on that. But no, that was about it. I didn’t meet the Nigerians again, the two of them. Australians, Canadian, and so on. I could go… And even with our almost domestic officers, yes, oh gosh yes, the one… Andrew Humphrey, group captain, and that I have mentioned at BLEU because he went, after IDC he went into the OR branch and was the OR man responsible for the air force interests in automatic landing. So yeah, I think… Did I mention that on the autoland there were the three of us, there was Andrew Humphrey and chap from British Airways…

Sir John Charnley Page 202 C1379/30 Track 12

Jerry…

…BOAC of the time. Anyway…

Was it Jerry something?

No, no, no, no.

Michael?

Mike Magendie. That’s it. So there were these, and the group captain, the way in which Andrew Humphrey and I knew each other, we’d been on this course together for twelve months, so that’s almost, that settled a respect that we had for each other, rather than meeting for the first time and wondering, you know, what the hell is this… No, he and I knew each other and would trust each other, certainly. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. And he became Chief of the Air Staff. Let me think, didn’t Andrew become Chief of Defence Staff, I think. Died young. But I think he, he certainly was CAS and might have been CDS, I couldn’t be sure. Doesn’t matter. But certainly went on. Most of the military people went on to high command, almost the object of the exercise was a briefing, preparing for high command, on this course.

[47:13]

Now, if you fast forward, when we come to my period of CER, Controller of the Establishment and Research with responsibility for the science group, not so much the engineers, the science group in MoD, I had the job of selecting people to go on the course.

What did you look for in those people you wanted to send?

Again, people that were being recommended as people who were bright and were going places and who would benefit from a broadening out on the sort of thing that the course does. So, as I say, it’s changed appreciably, it’s more, in a way more serious, more academic. Whether it’s giving better value, I don’t know these days at all other than it’s very different and talking last week with people who are on it at the moment, the Commandant who is, at the moment it’s a naval man, Style, Admiral Style – S-T-Y-L-E – in his words of welcome to the gathering when

Sir John Charnley Page 203 C1379/30 Track 12 we were all assembled waiting to hear Lord Young talk, he welcomed us all for the reunion and announced to the general throng that they’d be interested to know there were three people here from the 1962 course who must all be either late eighties or early nineties and invited us to stand up so that the gathering could see, and we got a round of applause, a round of laughter, you know, and so on and so on and so on. Which meant that when, over the meal afterwards and the drinking afterwards, we were approached, we were well looked after in that a little table had been set for the three of us, we had very good service from the staff and people coming up and saying, what was it like in your day. However, however, however. All of this, it made us, it was a privilege to be selected to go there, no doubt about that, and I made this point when I was recommending from the civilian side of defence. And I think I was – was I allowed one or two technical people? There was a defence administrator always. And I see the names – no, better not. I don’t know, I don’t know. Leave it, leave it. I was going to say that the people that I recommended that did go have really moved on successfully and to my knowledge I hear their names and I think oh yes, yes, yes, yes. But, don’t know. It’s so different now. I don’t know how Qinetiq handle this scene now because in essence they’re just like someone from, just like an industry firm and competing with industry. And I see that they’ve got a contract with an American defence outfit.

It’s with NASA isn’t it, the latest one?

Is it NACA, NASA?

I think there was a NASA one announced yesterday.

Yeah, that’s the one, that’s right. News to me, but there we are. Just like any business company might. Not a government body, it’s completely divorced now, completely different. Anyway, there we go, I’m wandering on. Please, another question, what else?

[51:33] Was there any particular message you think you were intended to take from all those varied visits around different places in Britain and abroad on the course?

Any particular message? It didn’t surprise me, long after I’d left the course, that the Imperial would be dropped. That was one of the messages I got on the course, that the, particularly when

Sir John Charnley Page 204 C1379/30 Track 12 we went to… didn’t go to India, the nearest to India was Malaysia, but you certainly had this feeling that the British Raj no longer occupied that position out there. You see, you were going to High Commission countries, our own Commonwealth, but equally you were going to Manila, which was American essentially, really, and Sumatra which was itself, that wasn’t the UK. And you got this opportunity to, I suppose, compare the running of those people by an outside body, or the involvement of an outside body, like the States on the one hand, with our Commonwealth activities. And it was at a time when the importance of the Commonwealth was certainly stressed. Now when the Queen in her Christmas message always spoke about the strength of the Commonwealth and I don’t think that exists to the same extent in Canada and in Australia certainly not, and Canada, not to the same extent at all. Anyway. So I don’t know if that answers it, but you could see a change in the influence that the UK was having in these various distant remote parts of the world that didn’t feel as closely connected to us as perhaps they did to the States as the world power.

[54:24]

As I say, I was heavily influenced by Heath who was pro-European and I was fairly familiar with our links into the States, into America, even then because as a transonic whiz-kid I was going backwards and forwards to the States a lot. And didn’t think too much of the so-called special relationship we had with them. As far as they were concerned, if it suited them to be closer to France or to Germany than to us, then so be it, that’s where they went. I think it’s still true. That’s me. So no, that… I suppose the other thing in military terms, the only – yeah – the only way in which we were likely, which we should, and to some extent, yeah, the only way in which we should get involved with any military activity in that part of the world would be as part of, an integrated union, but as part of, one of several countries that the idea that we could do something on our own at that distance away didn’t make sense to me, effectively.

In South-East Asia? In South-East Asia?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you could link now perhaps to, in the other direction, the same sort of distance away, the Falklands in ’82. That really is moving on, because that’s when I was about to retire.

Do you mind if I adjust your mic, one second?

Sir John Charnley Page 205 C1379/30 Track 12

Sorry, yes.

Talking about the special…

Well I’ve enjoyed that little bit, you can see I enjoyed IDC enormously. Did such a lot for me, I thought.

[56:52] What else do you think you took out of it? What do you think you took out of it?

Oh, for the first time really, it took me out of my technical world completely. Not completely, it took me out of my technical world. It introduced me to the thinking of the services, which I knew the air force well, the navy not as well, the army very little at that point. Yeah, at that point. It introduced me to their differences domestically, but more than that, it opened my eyes to the world scene, not just South-East Asia but the other lectures in the course, in the course of the twelve months you studied, is the right word, about ten different areas of the world and those are the things you did in the afternoons as syndicates, like North America, South America, Middle East, South… like Africa, Russia and so on. There were ten major headings of that sort. In the mornings you then had lectures from experts on different aspects of those subjects.

What sort of aspects?

Oh, military, economic, political, that sort of thing. Geographical, resources. And then in the afternoons you were presented with a series of questions, which at the end of that particular exercise you, as a syndicate, you agreed a brief paper, and someone had the job of writing it, agreed a brief paper which you then presented to the rest of the course as your answer to those questions. The whole course would be studying that same subject for that period. You went away into your syndicates and you were all arguing the same points which then didn’t stop because they went on in the evening over a beer or something, because you were all doing the same thing and you all had, within the syndicate, representatives from the three services, you know, everyone who was on the course, and overseas visitors – a Pakistani, a Canadian, an Australian, whatever. And they were all feeding in to this syndicate. And you did, I can’t remember which one, but I couldn’t believe on one occasion that another syndicate could reach a

Sir John Charnley Page 206 C1379/30 Track 12 conclusion to the same set of questions so different from the ones that our syndicate had got to. If you’d told me beforehand that that could happen, I wouldn’t have believed it, because there were people there with very strong views, different backgrounds. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember being flabbergasted, you know. They must be mad, you know.

[1:00:40] I’ve got a quick follow-up question, just a clarification question actually. It was on something you mentioned when you were talking about the special relationship. I wasn’t quite clear whether you meant that you thought Britain would be better off siding with France and Germany when it needed to or you were talking about the US.

Oh, about the US.

Oh, then that was their attitudes?

Yeah, yeah. This close link that allegedly existed then between them and us, and to some extent politicians like to believe now. I could be cynical and just say that it gives them a good excuse for going backwards and forwards to the States, but I wouldn’t say that.

What sort of lectures… sorry?

No, no, no.

[1:01:31] You mentioned being lectured by Ted Heath then on the European angle, did you think there was something in defence co-operation with Europe at that point?

No. No. Europe as an entity didn’t exist at that point. It was, as far as we were… no. There was… and Heath was on our, in the UK, Heath was the pro-European man, and that’s what he lectured to us on. There had been, oh what… we were linked up with a commercial agreement that included the Scandinavian countries.

This is the one that isn’t the EEC, this is the other one?

Sir John Charnley Page 207 C1379/30 Track 12

Correct.

European… oh, I forget.

The Common Market.

Yes.

That existed as a common market, but Heath was keen to go further politically and making Europe into a more united body. And to some extent I think he was ahead of his time in seeing the way in which things would go in due course, you needed to be bigger than we were, as the UK. You’re going to ask me, what do you mean bigger? Stronger commercially, stronger – not militarily – economically. Stronger… stronger in the sense of our view having more weight internationally and certainly, even then, more influence on the United States’ view. Have more influence. Because even then, I was never persuaded and there was all this jargon about punching our weight and suchlike now. No, no, no, no. Didn’t… anyway, we’re getting into politics and that’s not the object of the exercise, as far as I’m concerned.

I was wondering though, what you made of Ted Heath’s take on that at that point?

Oh, he persuaded me completely. I… and have ever since been a confirmed European. Yeah. Oh yeah. Now, obviously limitations but certainly I made up my mind from oh, dear, that there was no future for us as a tiny little island off the coast of Europe, we’d better get with it. And that our real position, and I think I’m still of this view, that our position is to be part of it, influencing, shaping it to suit us rather than sitting on the side making rude noises about matters, because the time was going to come – and we’re closer to it now – when they would be calling the tunes, largely led by France and Germany as now, they would be calling… I didn’t foresee it being a Europe of twenty-six or twenty-seven nations, all the others coming in, I didn’t see that at all. But I could see the size that there was going to be, and my trip around Asia may be part of this, that there was going to be, as then, as they were then, the Soviet Union, they were then still the Soviet Union, and as such they were an enemy in those terms, but a big place with lots of resources, human and minerals and so on. So they would be a power and the States would be another and there’d be something out in the Far East, and I wasn’t clever enough to know whether it was China or whether it was India or a combination of the other countries, I couldn’t

Sir John Charnley Page 208 C1379/30 Track 12 see that. But certainly there was going to be something over there and there was going to be the Soviet Bloc and the States and there was going to be Europe. And that the UK as the UK, in my mind, just didn’t fit into that in the way in which things were going to go, as an individual separate little entity. Now there’s me political speech, which I never thought I would make. And I wouldn’t know whether you agree, I wouldn’t know what other people would think, and I wouldn’t want that – and this is whether you use it – I wouldn’t want that to divert people, saying, oh this is a madman, he’s got views which really now reflect on his views on the subjects that he is more, better informed on. This is a ramble of an eighty-eight year old geriatric…

Don’t think it’s…

…and throws doubt on a lot of the other things he says.

I don’t think it’ll be taken that way at all. It’s a very interesting period in British history if you look at it, you know, this question of where does Britain sit in the world and within that debate, I think perspectives like that are really, really interesting. It’s obviously something that’s still in discussion now.

Oh yeah. That’s right, that’s right.

Essentially what, sixty years since the Empire’s gone!

Absolutely, absolutely. And Ted Heath’s still around.

Is he? I don’t know.

Oh yes. Oh yes. Yes, yes, I’ve seen photographs of him recently. Oh please, don’t, don’t… Cor blimey, yes. He lives round the Salisbury area, surely.

I avoid reading the political parts of the paper, I’ll be honest, [laughs] so I’ve got no idea.

Well, we must check that Thomas in one way or another because… gosh.

Shall we return to…

Sir John Charnley Page 209 C1379/30 Track 12

Yeah, let’s get back.

[1:09:00] We’ve sort of skipped around a little bit, but narrative-wise we’ve reached that point at which you…

Well I’m now really at the point where at the end of the course, let’s get that out of the way, I then found myself back to RAE, that James Lighthill, won whatever argument was going on, and I was back at RAE. He wanted me to run the Instruments and Electrical Engineering Department, but the present head of the department wasn’t due to… there was various moves going to happen that meant that the present head of the department was going to be a Deputy Director I think, going to be elevated to Deputy Director – Roland Lees was the man, by name – but the vacancy running the department wouldn’t exist until the Easter, March-ish of ’63. Yeah. And so I was spare from January through to Easter ’63 when I was doing various specific tasks for the Director, directly to him for a couple of months. And then in the – and I was preparing myself for this, again, a continuation of the sort of thing I’d been doing on Blind Landing in the sense now concerned with the equipment fit to go into aircraft rather than the aircraft themselves. But the equipment fit now was broader than the Blind Landing activity in the sense that the department that I was going to, and went to, had divisions related to autopilots and now I knew a bit about those from BLEU, instrument displays, bombing and navigation systems. I say instrument displays, and instruments themselves like very, like gyroscopes, very hi-tech gyroscopes that would form the basis of navigation systems, and oh, electrical generation and distribution throughout an aeroplane, the generators. That was a new addition to the department. It used to be a department in itself, Electrical Engineering Department, but it had been merged with the other bits of instruments and navigation and bombing and autopilots for not – ah yeah, God. I was going to say, for fixed wing aircraft and helicopters, and I’ll leave it like that, fixed wing aircraft, because the fixed wing bit wasn’t just military, that’s why I hesitated, because in the two years that I was there, from ’63 to ’65 running that department, I was now involved in two major projects to mention others, but two, one was the TSR2, which was military and was cancelled while I was there and there I was involved in the bombing and navigation systems in that aircraft and the other thing I was involved with was the equipment fit in the Concorde, which was now an ongoing firm Anglo-French project.

Sir John Charnley Page 210 C1379/30 Track 12

[1:13:15]

I’d been involved in 1952, ’53 with the research activities to decide whether we had the technology to go for a supersonic transport and if so, which speed should we aim at, the speed of sound for a cruising speed or twice the speed of sound or three times the speed of sound, and I’d been involved aerodynamically with advising, not me personally, into the Supersonic Transport Research Committee, which from its deliberations decided we should aim for twice the speed of sound. This was way back in the fifties. And now that had gone on and it was now, yes we were committed with France to a supersonic aeroplane, commercially, and I was now involved with the decisions on the equipment that were to go in it. And whether, yeah. And this is, this is the civil side of the activity. It had already been decided where the airframe, how the collaboration between ourselves and France with the airframe on the one hand and the engines on the other would be done, but the things that were still up for grabs, to put it crudely, was the equipment to go into the aeroplane as to whether that would be British, whether it would be French, whether it would be combined between the two countries, how it would be combined. And I, as the technical bloke down at Farnborough, was involved with the director in London, DA Nav – Director Air Navigation – who happened to be a bloke called Bill Broughton that I knew well, again, from my previous BLEU activity, because he spanned from Headquarters that activity as well, knew him. So I was working with him. He was the policy man in London, I was the technical man down at the establishment giving him advice and going across to France with him, talking on things like electrical generation, powered flying controls, autopilots and so on, and arguing with the French that we knew more about it than they did and therefore these various things should be left with us and our industry.

[1:16:29] I was going to ask actually, how were your dealings with the French?

…At which period, because they changed, when I was mainly military and then now, civil. But in…

Regarding the Concorde stuff I was thinking.

Oh, okay. [pause] Let me try and… [pause] In this period they were Concorde. When it gets on to my work in weaponry, then again I was talking with the French. [laughs] As part of that I

Sir John Charnley Page 211 C1379/30 Track 12 went, they took me, I went down with them to a guided weapon range in the Mediterranean where the range is one half of the island – I’m not going to tell you… - the other half of the island was a nudist camp. [laughs] And it was a… a French navy admiral that was taking me around and said, oh John, we’ve got to go down there, you must come and see the kind of weapon range on this particular island because I think you’ll be interested. [laughs]

[1:18:20]

Getting back to Concorde, oh, as I say, the engine and the airframe arrangements had already been set up and it was always, because the equipment wasn’t a major part of the aeroplane in financial terms, and even in technical terms to some extent, but it was bitty and no-one had grabbed this one before. And they, the French people I was dealing with, with Broughton, were as aware as we were that really we were – oh, it’s a terrible thing to say isn’t it – we were fighting over the scraps and that the arrangements, and that they had done quite well out of the other two areas, the airframe in particular. And I don’t want to go down that path because I don’t know enough about it, other than that… oh gosh. [pause] The structure for… our structure for handling the debate with France… The Controller Air was Morien Morgan, civilian, in MoD with responsibility for aircraft for both military and civil, his deputy was Handel Davies and I knew both of them very well from my earlier days in Aero Flight in RAE. But across in Mintech or whatever it was, the civil side, a separate division had been set up to handle Concorde, Concorde development, Concorde financial matters because it was a civil project. But… Jim Hamilton had been set up to run that and he was staffed by various technical people from RAE and Jim Hamilton I knew well, so that I was closely related to a lot of the Headquarter activity going on and Broughton as DA Nav was on the staff of the Morgan and Handel Davies, DA Nav was a member of that operation. But all the executive responsibility for spending our money and therefore negotiating with France on the project as a whole was now with Mintech or whatever it was called, was now civil. And all the defence activity, which is where the expertise lay on the aeroframe, on the engine, on the structure, on the automatics, was still in defence. So there was a very, in negotiating with the French, was a bit of a mixed bag where all the expertise was in the defence field, but the financial, political – political in particular – responsibility was not in MoD.

Did that cause problems?

[laughs] They were sorted.

Sir John Charnley Page 212 C1379/30 Track 12

What sort of problems? Just sort of wondering about, you know, that split of expertise in responsibility, as it were.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Morien is now dead, Handel is now dead. Jim Hamilton is still alive, not a very fit man. He would say that the problem aged him enormously, in sorting them. And as far as I was concerned on the equipment side, Broughton and I just, you know, fought our corner as hard and as well as we could and we, for our own industry, we collected the powered flying controls and that went to Boulton Paul and the autopilotry that went to GEC- Marconi, and that was a duplicated double arrangement. Think that’s it, that’s what it was called. But the electrical generation side and distribution of electricity around the aeroplane, that went to France, from memory. I think as near as dammit nearly all of it. So there was, yeah… Because the aeroplane didn’t survive as time went on, so I don’t think any of our companies made any money out of it, I don’t think so. There was no great production order of anything. Whether they benefited from the experience of running or contributing with it as a project, I don’t know that a lot came out of that. But certainly I don’t think commercially it was a great success to them.

[1:25:33] Were you in communication with British industry over this as well then?

That is British industry I’m talking about.

Yeah, but I mean you were directly talking to British industry?

Oh yeah. Yeah, when I went on… I can see a deal when we were negotiating the powered flying controls, when I was in the main conference room debating with the French, but outside in case I needed him, was the man from Boulton Paul, the designer, the chief designer – forget his name now – from Boulton Paul, sitting out there. It was a government to government meeting, but we had the industry men, man in my case, outside in case I needed to talk with him or needed him with me, or whatever, whatever, whatever. Name nearly came to me, I can see him sitting there. Yeah. Didn’t happen like that on the autopilot, but the powered flying controls, the hydraulics, because that was going to be duplicated or whatever, the integrity had to be demonstrated. And I’d worked with BP, again, on an experimental aeroplane at Farnborough, so I knew Boulton

Sir John Charnley Page 213 C1379/30 Track 12

Paul well. Does this surprise you? Am I saying things that really you find very difficult to believe?

No, no, it’s just interesting. Because I’m thinking yeah, it’s all, you know, it’s a national project to some extent…

Oh yeah.

I’m just trying to get an idea of where does the RAE, where do you fit in, in the RAE between industry who are actually making this thing. You’ve talked a bit about it, a little bit in the military world.

But at this stage, at this stage the contract hasn’t been let so industry isn’t making anything yet, industry are bidding in, hopefully to make something, and you’re arguing and debating with the French in this case as to whether it’ll go to France or it’ll come to – and I’m trying to think of the French company that were involved. Oh, my memory’s gone Thomas, sorry. No. Oh but, the position of RAE is no different from almost, even if we were just doing a domestic project. There would be headquarters that would be in the end placing the contract on a provider in industry with RAE and that provider would then be under some sort of project management arrangement, and there could be a project manager in London in the nav area, shall we say, or the autopilot area and they’re closely associated in this particular neck of the woods. There’d be a project manager in London and he would have, in his project staff, someone from RAE and there’d be a little group at RAE that would be supporting the project direct with the company. So this triangular arrangement of Headquarters, RAE and industry was not new at all. It’s the way in which it worked and it happened in missiles, it - I was going to say it happened on aircraft, I don’t know the engine side, I’m not close enough to that – but on the aircraft side.

And the RAE role, or your department’s role in this early Concorde stuff is it not so much just negotiation but are you setting specifications as well, for instance, and that sort of work?

Oh, and then, when it was going, then responsible on behalf of the UK for monitoring the progress, technically. Again, it would be, as far as the UK is concerned, there’d be a headquarters man and his technical support, which would be RAE. And they would take part in

Sir John Charnley Page 214 C1379/30 Track 12 and attend project progress meetings. Yeah? But that, you know, that’s the way in which it worked.

[1:30:30]

If we go now to the military side when I got to RAE in 1963, back again, and was now installed and the major project on the military side as a project within the department again, the department, the Instrument and Electrical Engineering – with any of the RAE departments – there would be, and we’ll come to it on the weapons certainly, there’d be project activity to support a particular project and a research activity, which is quite separate. And the research is more fundamental and was essentially working with universities to promote research into the areas that were likely to be useful in solving military problems. So that as RAE on the research side, you were sponsoring activities in your own labs and in universities and in industry with contracts on universities and industry for research into promising areas which you wanted taken further than the university itself was prepared to go without support. But on the other side, you’ve now got direct support to major projects and one of those projects when I went to IEE was the TSR2, the Tactical Strike/Reconnaissance Aeroplane.

I need to just…

[end of track 12]

Sir John Charnley Page 215 C1379/30 Track 13

[Track 13]

We were talking about the TSR2 side of the project.

I was going to say, TSR2. Tactical Strike/Reconnaissance, and so a multi-purpose aircraft and intended to be a delivery of a nuclear weapon as part of the deterrent philosophy. So it’s intended to go in at low altitude and deliver its weapon and then in a very dashing manoeuvre of some sort, do a 180 and get the hell out to come home afterwards. And the department was involved in the nav/attack system in the aircraft as well as the autopilotry. So the department was concerned with the equipment fit to go into a multi-purpose aircraft of that sort and they were involved in the autopilot, they were involved in the nav/attack system, and that was the principle activity in the department. There were all the usual electrics, instruments, all of those the department was involved in. And so I find myself in that when I was posted in there in ’63 and the nav/attack system was completely new and was an inertial navigation system, was the favoured answer to the problems of going in fast at low altitude, navigating on the one hand and then knowing when to release the particular weapon to be most effective, and then for the aeroplane to get the hell out of it. And there was a division of the department was involved in the bombing, the navigation and bombing system. But was another division and that – sorry, the one I just spoke of was concerned with the system as a whole - there’s another division.. Sorry, let me go back. The bombing and nav division was run by a chap called Roberts, Robbie, and one of his prominent support staff was a lady, very clever, and still lives in Farnborough, Margaret Howell. Margaret… Anyway, the surname will come I hope, doesn’t matter. And then another division was concerned with the actual, the research associated with the actual gyros, accelerometers themselves that would be part of the nav/attack system. And this was a bunch that were doing research on getting the precision and the accuracy out of the inputs to go into the system. Margaret… Howells I think. No, no. And that was run by Ivor Thomas. So those two worked closely together and I found myself new in the department locking on or trying to acquire fairly quickly the technologies associated with the separate elements of a system and then the totality of the bombing and the navigation system as part of the overall operational use.

[04:35]

In ’63 we got to the stage where we were talking, and I ran a meeting, that was a meeting between the RAE and Boscombe Down on the sort of trials that would be done at Boscombe

Sir John Charnley Page 216 C1379/30 Track 13 when we at Farnborough had got to the stage with industry of a system that was suitable for trial purposes at Boscombe Down. And I can remember running a meeting between the two establishments together, just the one meeting, because in laying out the plan it never happened after that because the aeroplane was cancelled in ’64 or thereabouts, ’64. Maybe I ran two meetings, it doesn’t matter. There is all sorts of little interest there. The man that was representing Boscombe Down at that time was a Wing Commander, Pinky Grocott, who later went up to be an Air Commodore, rose to be Air Commodore, then retired – and I knew him then on – and he then retired and became a President of the Royal Institute of Navigation a few years after I was President, so we knew each other there. He now is retired, lost his wife a few years ago, he lives in Cornwall, still alive, Pinky. And interesting character in the sense that in his retirement has taken on board the subject of how do fish, birds, animals navigate - what are the senses they use, how do they do it - and is a world expert on that subject and organises conferences, on behalf of the Royal Institute of Navigation, organises conferences on the subject, where the main body in the conference are all academics from universities all over the world, who are concerned with understanding how the different animal, bird kingdoms, fish navigate, whether they’re using inertia, magnetism, time, whatever, whatever, whatever. And Pinky’s at the centre of all of this and he and I first met in the TSR2 in the sixties. That’s Pinky Grocott, not to be mixed with the other Pinkie at BLEU, Pinkie Stark. But he was there representing Boscombe and the aeroplane was cancelled and the decision was made that we would buy from America. So I was then involved – sorry – the man, there’s another name here, the man that was responsible for inertial navigation to be used in the aeroplane, and inertial… was a new subject, a new science, was a chap called Andy Stratton and he was a prickly bloke, very clever, prickly, and if I move on, he left the instruments and navigation world to go into the Weapons Department, so he left me on instruments and in particular, nav/attack systems. But we then joined up again when I went across, when he went to weapons and I then went to weapons soon after and Andy and I worked together there as well. So I have a great respect for Andy Stratton and really, was the chap that took this country into inertial navigation, did the fundamental work of developing it into a system along with Thomas, who was the chap that did the bits and pieces, the instruments themselves, as I say, the accelerometers, the gyros, but it was Stratton that was conceptually running the bombing and nav system. And the chap that was doing it with him was Gwilym, Gwilym Roberts and Margaret… doesn’t matter, it’ll come.

[09:53]

Sir John Charnley Page 217 C1379/30 Track 13

However, elsewhere in the – so that’s the bombing and nav and the gyros – also in the department were the autopilot people and I knew them from my BLEU activities, and that was run by a chap called Twinney. And then there was another man, Naish, that ran instrument displays, and we’re back to the BLEU activities in a way, of the way in which you present information, the best way of presenting information to pilots, perhaps whether they can see whether the external gives them… But also, this was an aeroplane, the TSR2 again was going in at low altitude, a few hundred feet, very fast, and the pilot was going to need, we came back to this problem of not, it didn’t make sense to think of him having to look down at instruments on his display, his instrument board, and at the same time looking up through the windscreen as where he was going, so there was a big demand for displaying this information that he needed for his primary source of information, as well as other supporting activities like his engine conditions which really weren’t essential to have that up there, how did you display on the windscreen information from the instruments. And Mike Naish had built himself a simulator, rather like Tom Prescott had built a simulator at BLEU, for examining this problem, displaying on a head-up display, the information head down. And he had co-opted to his little group applied psychology people from aviation medicine to help him, but Mike was another difficult character. They were a bunch of difficult characters, that department.

[12:25] In what sense difficult?

Pardon?

In what sense difficult?

They were… [pause] Within the department, amongst themselves, externally, whether they were talking with Headquarters or with industry or with the pilots, whatever, they all knew their stuff very well and knew it so well they were confident about it to the outside world, quite properly. To the inside world within the department, they all had not only their ideas on their own subject, but they had ideas on the subject of the others. And so running meetings within the department, just reviewing the way in which progress was being made in these different areas, you could expect, wouldn’t quite get to the stage of fighting, but certainly it got to quite intense technical intellectual discussion without any doubt at all, with no problem whatsoever. Because they all had ideas, they were ideas people. As I say, the gyros, accelerometers, autopilot, the gyros and

Sir John Charnley Page 218 C1379/30 Track 13 auto, and they spanned a lot of the activities of the department. Then you’d got the electrical generation bunch that I didn’t have too much to do with because they were new in the department. I was new, in other areas as well and I left that aside to Charles Cooper - Cooper? - was the man that ran… no, Charles Hudson, Charles Hudson. And I was sufficiently confident about the way in which Charles was going in the sense of developing an electrical generation system and distribution through the aircraft to satisfy the needs of all these other autopilots, gyro… with the right integrity to demonstrate the sort of thing I’d been working on at BLEU in the landing side, of getting an integrity that was, in risk terms, no worse than the chance of an engine failure. That was the sort of definition you were aiming for. And in the way in which I had done, or I had done, but Gill I think mentioned, Frank Gill had analysed a blind landing system looking at where the likely weaknesses were. Charles Hudson did that for the electrical distribution system throughout the aircraft; the generation of it and then the distribution of it to satisfy the requirements of all the equipments. Mammoth job, in all aspects of the aeroplane, you know, the things that bring the undercarriage up, for instance. Could be hydraulic, it could be electric, but even if it’s hydraulic, it’s got an electrical supply that’s got to work. And Hudson was, again, well… satisfied me that he had the knowledge and the wherewithal to continue the way in which he was going. So much so, I left the designs and I was more concerned at that stage – and it was related to the TSR2 again – but it was going alright, that wasn’t a need. But inertial navigation was certainly a new thought, a new idea, it was analogue at that stage but you could see that it was going to go digital and there were issues as to whether it was going to be digital in time for the TSR2 and so on. So I was more concerned with that area in my time there. I was only there two years was it? ’63 to ’65.

Sounds like there’s an awful lot going on in that department.

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. With a bunch of whiz-kids that were very clever, but liked to stray outside their own area. [laughs]

I’m going to have to ask quite a few follow-up questions.

And I haven’t mentioned helicopters in this, which was also in the department.

[17:37]

Sir John Charnley Page 219 C1379/30 Track 13

Let’s start with the TSR2. You mentioned inertial navigation systems were new at this point, I was wondering, how did inertial systems differ from the ones you were already using?

[pause] Essentially, an inertial system is an integration with time. You know your starting point, so you plug in with co-ordinates, shall we say, of your starting point and then from then on you measure acceleration with your accelerometers, you integrate that, and that gives you velocity, you integrate that and that gives you distance. So with a double integration you know where you are relative to where you started, because it’s continuous in that sense all the time and you are getting a display of some sort. Or it’s going into your nav system, depending on what you want to do with it, control a bombing run or something. So that’s giving you distance. You also by the same means or by other related activities, are giving you what your flight path is, not just in distance, but in geographical terms, north south, so that you are integrating all the time from the moment you start, from history you’re integrating where you are at a particular, I’m giving you a point in space from your inertial arrangements. Prior to that, you would have just been doing that sort of thing, you’d have been looking at your airspeed, which was down there and you’d have been feeding that into a computer of some sort and you’d have been doing this, that, the same sort of sum to give you a position and a direction in which you were going, but it wasn’t an integrated affair as it is with the inertial system. I don’t think I’ve explained that very well. It’s the same process, but you with your inertial system, as I say, it’s a double integration continuously all the time which is giving you distance and off track or on track and as I say, we were originally doing that analogue but thinking about the conversion to digit. And it removed, in the sense that it was doing it as an update all the time, it removed the job, it removed that job from the pilot or the nav… it’s a two-man aeroplane as far as TSR2 is concerned, and it removed doing that job and allowed the other, the crew, to concentrate on this business of flying at low altitude at 500 knots, which is a formidable task in itself, you know. As I began to appreciate because in this head-up display activity that Naish was running, and we had the research elements of it in a twin seat Hunter, a side-by-side Hunter and I did several flights at low altitude in the right-hand seat on the low altitude flying routes, which had been cleared for our use, off to Wales, off from Farnborough going west down to the Welsh hills, up the west hills into the Lake District, all of this at a few hundred feet at 500 knots. And you were screaming along in this Hunter and you can see the Welsh hills coming up and you’re waiting for a signal to come up on your windscreen that says, it says to the pilot, pull up for God’s sake, you know. And it isn’t there, it isn’t there, it isn’t there. And you’re thinking, aargh, and then there… and you think, oh thank God for that.

Sir John Charnley Page 220 C1379/30 Track 13

[23:15] What stage was the head-up development work in when you arrived?

Well, it was at that sort of stage where Naish had done a lot of useful work in his simulator and with his IAM is it, aviation medicine people had decided upon the way, the symbols decided upon, were experimenting with the different symbols to project on to the windscreen and so the concept, the need was obvious, the conceptual attack as to how it was best met, how the requirement was best met was under examination. And again, rather like the BLEU activity, a lot of work had been done on simulators with the pilot sitting in a seat and looking at different – and I’d sat in the wretched seat before going flying on it – and looking at the different symbology, which again went back to BLEU, because you were going to use the same sort of symbology for providing the information, down here or up there. And it was at that sort of stage. There was nothing set in concrete whatsoever at that stage. We were still, as a department, exploring the research activities of the form of the display, the important things to display, the form of the display, did you have things presented continuously, how often did you need to know what the engine was doing if you were looking up there, did you want something displayed when a crisis occurred, when something went wrong, or did you want something displayed regularly but intermittently which gave you, again, a history associated with how things were behaving in the general running of the aeroplane as distinct from those features where you needed to see. And that was a research programme, very much so.

What sort of symbols would a pilot see? Just give me one or two examples.

[pause] The important, before symbols, the important conceptual argument is to get across to the pilot the fact that, how does he want the information displayed. Either from the outside world looking in or his own position from the inside world looking out. And obviously you can solve that, that’s not difficult. It’s the inside world looking out, so that he wants to see on his display some sort of symbology which says that’s me and I now want it to tell me what to do to get out of the state I’m in. I don’t want the outside world, I don’t want a pictorial display that almost says, here you are relative to this, that and the other, I want to know what I have to do. So (a) there’s a position and there’s a first derivative of the displacement. And so you want something which maybe is a little circle, or a little circle with wings, because if you have a little circle with wings that can, if you just have a circle that doesn’t tell you about your attitude. If you put

Sir John Charnley Page 221 C1379/30 Track 13 wings on it, that tells you whether you’re banking, whether you’re going straight. If you’re banking, whether you’re banking left, right. So you can readily accept ideas of that sort, so you fetch up generally with a little circle with wings that tell you, that’s my position now, that’s where I am now and it will also tell me – sorry – do you now want, there are certain things like on an airspeed indicator or an altimeter that you’ve got down here, how much of that do you want displayed up there. Do you want the figures, do you want to know the figures or do you just want a position of on a dial, like is it a needle and a pointer with the needle pointing to eleven o’clock, shall we say, do you need the eleven as well. Can you just say, the analogue situation is you don’t need the digits of the numbers, but the analogue position is, oh that’s where the needle, that’s all I need to know. And I’ve stored in here that that’s going to be eleven o’clock, I don’t need it to tell me. And so on. So that’s where you use the, almost the IAM people with you, but Naish himself, been through all of this in conceptual terms and was now looking at it – do you have colour, you know, all these. The extent, what use do you make of colour, either for your own little symbol representing you, is that black and white, is red the sort of thing you use if you’re getting near the mountains, do you now start changing the colour, saying for God’s sake, it’s gone red… And the aim all the time is to make quite sure that, number one, the pilot isn’t being confused. Anyway, go on, move on.

[29:47] Sounds like you’re integrating a lot of systems that are still very much in development at this point.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Would I be right in saying that?

Oh yes. Oh yes. Vickers were building the aeroplane, but even that, you see, there was uncertainties but they’re in the process of designing, building, building, designing. And there are the questions, what are the systems to go in the aeroplane and who’s going to get the contracts to do it. The people that were involved: Ferranti, Sperry. Ferranti, Ferranti on the inertial nav side, Sperry on instruments, Sperry on gyros, and in all of this gyros are a very important part and the accuracy that you can get from the gyro and the ease with which you extract the information that you then integrate into velocity and again into distance and so on. Sperry, Ferranti. They’re the two main… And Ferranti Edinburgh, Sperry in Bracknell at the time, and Ferranti, Edinburgh,

Sir John Charnley Page 222 C1379/30 Track 13 in this country. GEC, GEC-Marconi, more on the autopilotry side, a bit on the instruments but not, I don’t recall them as being prominent. I could be wrong on that. But certainly the main dealings were Ferranti and Sperry. But all, in all of this there is this close link with the industry that’s going to be involved. They may even have been involved with research contracts so far, but certainly you’re then thinking in terms of a development contract for the aeroplane itself. Now, Mike Naish on the instrument side, who was he with? It was another company where the man was a chap called Clark. Forgotten, forgotten. Sorry. Pass.

I was thinking about with cutting edge systems, integrating them all together into one aircraft which is, as you pointed out, multi-role itself, I was just wondering, were there any sort of problems in development?

Oh blimey, yes. You’re going to ask what? Well, the standard sort of development problems. How do you answer that in the sense that things don’t go right?

Are there any particular problems that stick in the mind from work on the TSR2 systems?

Well… [laughs] the big problem was the concept of the whole thing; flying low, fast, avoiding the radars at that sort of speed. I don’t think I can answer that in any depth because they were what I would have regarded almost the standard sort of development problems. The snags that you run up against could be in terms of you’re thinking about the performance that you want from it as well as the integrity and particularly in something that’s charging along at that sort of height you mustn’t have a height error of any sort that’s likely to lead to, a fraction of a second later, being a heap on the deck. So integrity, risk, safety was so predominant in whatever it was that you were doing, on that particular project. And you were satisfying, or having to do your best, even in those early days, to say that conceptually the thing you were going to fetch up with could be made to look after the safety of the crew, that you were guaranteeing – guaranteeing too strong maybe – but the chances of it happening were such that it was acceptable to them.

[35:14] Did you, were you surprised when the TSR2 was cancelled?

Yes. [pause] You see… at the, towards the end of my work at BLEU, when the Vulcan was cleared, around that time, it was before that… there had been the public statement by

Sir John Charnley Page 223 C1379/30 Track 13 government that there wouldn’t be any more manned aircraft design, everything would be done by guided missiles in the future. I was trying to think of the name of the Minister.

Sandys.

Duncan Sandys.

Sandys, yes.

Duncan Sandys, yes, that had made this, that there weren’t going to be any manned aircraft, it was going to be done by guided missiles now. There were those who still continued and there was, the TSR2 in effect was the last one and it didn’t survive. So it was under threat when that sort of statement had been made, and so you were conscious that it might not survive, and it didn’t. But we then went and thought about buying something from the States, as you implied, and it was the F-111 I think, which was a straight wing, very thin straight wing, and Stratton and I, Andy Stratton and I, went across to the States to have a look at the proposed fit in terms of bombing and nav systems that were going into that aeroplane so that we were then expressing views as to whether it would suit our requirements, whether it was the sort of thing we could go along with or what would need to be done to make it so that it met our requirements. Someone from the OR branch went with us, I’ve forgotten… But that was at a time – oh Lord… it was about the last thing that Andy Stratton did before he went to Weapons Department, that trip to the States. And it wasn’t very long after that and that must have been sometime between ’63, ’65. It’s all this two years, all of this is happening, and it must have been in the ’64 period that Stratton went to weapons and then it was in ’65 that I followed. I can’t – oh, Harold Robinson followed me as head of the department, that’s right. HGR Robinson, who had been in Space, in space programmes and our launchers and – when were they cancelled, when did we get out of the launching business?

Believe Blue Streak cancellation was 1960.

Blue…?

Blue Streak cancellation was 1960.

Sir John Charnley Page 224 C1379/30 Track 13

There we go, there we go. Okay. Well, Harold had been involved with that sort of thing, and what he’d done from then until ’63 or ’65, ’65…

I think the ELDO work still goes on for a while.

ELDO still went on didn’t it? You can see the way in which… it’s the same bunch of blokes that are circulating around this neck of the woods. And as I say, Harold Robinson then followed me into IEE Department, Instruments Electrical Engineering, from the Space Department.

[40:15] You mentioned on that trip to the US to view the F-111 systems, I was just wondering, how did you think they stacked up against what you’d been developing for the TSR2?

Very similar because we’d had contact with them. It was specific because we’d been aware and Stratton… got it, got the name. Cor blimey. There was a professor at MIT, Draper – D-R-A-P- E-R – who really was Mr inertial navigation, and he and Stratton were the best of buddies and had been in close contact and so we were aware of the sort of thing that was likely to be in the F- 111 but it was a specific, there were other people, there was a specific visit on the 111 which included us, but had other people looking at other areas of the aeroplane, so this was all specific. And my memory is of not being surprised at what they were doing and not being highly critical because we’d known enough beforehand to know what to expect, is my memory of it as of now. But Stratton and Draper had very close links. Yeah. And the American companies were Collins and like we had Ferranti and Sperry, and I’m trying to think of any others… But in the States it was, again, Sperry, Sperry Long Island, Collins - two that come to mind. Bendix. All the American instrument firms were all working related to the aeroplane, some with hard contracts, I can remember that, some with others nibbling away at more contracts, and the work was being, almost the American equivalent of us, RAE, was Wright-Patterson. Wright-Patterson Field in Ohio, WADC. But they had more work going on in universities, and this is where Draper came in, on the IN side. They were doing more with universities rather than in-house themselves, and that was fairly typical of a lot of their activities, that they had the, they ran the research from somewhere like Wright Field or Ames on the wind tunnel side, the laboratory near San Francisco. But they didn’t do as much in-house as we tended to do over here. And now you’re into a different subject altogether now.

Sir John Charnley Page 225 C1379/30 Track 13

[43:47] I wonder though, it brings me on to one of my other questions I was going to ask about this, which is you mentioned that some of the research work the RAE did in association with universities, is that the case when you’re in charge of Instruments and Electrical Engineering?

Can’t say that I’m conscious of it, it doesn’t come to mind, it doesn’t stand out. But they must have been doing some. We must have been doing… And this is where, yeah, on the IN, on the inertial nav… this is where Ferranti, we’d been in… yeah. Oh, with universities, sorry. With industry I can see it clearly. Universities, I don’t think so. I don’t think so. Where… part of Stratton’s division were already thinking about the change from analogue to digital and they were working with universities on that one, certainly, and Manchester comes to mind. And Manchester comes to mind in terms of experimenting, yeah, with an airborne digital computer – DDA, Differential Digital, or Digital Differential Analyser, DDA. I can’t go further, don’t remember. But yes. Yes, yes, yes. That was certainly in progress, but on the gyro side, certainly on the… I don’t think, no, there was nothing on the display side that was of interest to a university. Now let’s get this, just clear the lines a little bit here. Yeah, you could only persuade a university to work with you on something when you satisfied them that there was something in it for them. And the something in it for them was in the way of something they could write, a thesis or something that would enhance the reputation of the university. So always in the defence field there were problems associated with security and when you were negotiating a research contract with a university, one of the things you ran up against immediately, you know, what will we get out of this in the end, suppose we go with you. We might have the expertise to help you, but what do we get out of it, we’ve got to get something and it’s in the sense of freedom to publish and if there’s any restriction on that they wouldn’t be interested. And this is an area in which that sort of, in the early days of something like this, it’s a bit different from wing design and wind tunnel activity, this has got design rights, this has got not just freedom to publish but freedom to manufacture in some ways. So it’s more, it’s more dependent upon security. The low drag area of aerodynamics is a bit like that, but it’s not so sensitive as this area, so you couldn’t often persuade the university to join with you because they’d got a bunch that you knew were good and could be helpful. And you didn’t want a bunch that just did, as PhD activities, work that the Prof was familiar with and was his particular subject. I was always suspicious of that one.

[48:35]

Sir John Charnley Page 226 C1379/30 Track 13

We should probably take a little break in a moment, but before we do would you mind if I just asked you just two more questions actually which relate to something you mentioned a little while ago. You mentioned when you first got back to RAE after being at the Imperial Defence College that your first sort of, not quite posting as it were, but job was doing tasks for the Director. I was just wondering if you could give me, well firstly a flavour of what those tasks were, just one or two examples perhaps?

The pressure was already on to make economies – we’re talking of the mid sixties and the TSR2 is another example in the big world, but already there was a demand to reduce the running costs of RAE and directors were running meetings with heads of departments to… assess, is not a good word, but that’ll do for the moment, whether we’d got the right structure in RAE. So the thing that – and I was a dogsbody for his wish to consider did it make sense to merge some of the departments, to do as much as we were doing in the establishment rather than outside – universities on the one hand, industry on… universities if you look backwards and industry if you look forwards, and as I say, I always saw the job of RAE as in the middle of those two. And talking with the OR branch. And this again, if I get back to the other question, that the OR branch were not very keen on talking with universities because the OR branch were conscious of their security issues and they would rather that we did it, (a) understanding the university language a bit better than they would, but our job was to interpret their requirements in technical terms to talk on the one hand with the universities and on the other hand with industry. And that I saw very clearly as the sort of RAE role. Now, were we as well organised as we might be in RAE for handling that sort of task. And for instance, I think I mentioned on a previous occasion, when I went into, next in 1965 went into the Weapon Department, ran the Weapon Department, were we doing – in Farnborough – were we doing the right sort of things relative to Malvern and was there an activity that we should say, we’ll get out of that and leave that to Malvern, or we should try to persuade Malvern to leave it and give it to us. That’s inter-Establishment, but within the RAE itself there was inter-departments; Radio Department and how did Radio Department fit in with Weapons Department, guidance systems for weaponry. Was that a Malvern job, was that a Radio Department, how did it fit? All sorts of ways in which you could kill a cat and had we got the best one in specific areas. It was largely in the equipment field and the equipment areas rather than… aerodynamics was fairly… and even there, even there… within Aerodynamics Department there had been a supersonic division with a variety of supersonic wind tunnels and suchlike. An argument had taken place following almost the defence statement of Sandys, let’s say, in the late sixties was it? There was now a need to

Sir John Charnley Page 227 C1379/30 Track 13 emphasise guided missile or missile technology and missile technology work rather than fixed winged work, at least to increase the emphasis on guided missiles. There was the need from an MoD point of view to, if the work was going in that direction, to establish a guided weapon industry to back it up. How did that relate to the current aircraft industry? How should it relate to the current…? And in RAE and the government Establishments…? And an argument went on with Westcott who were dealing with liquid fuels and rockets. I mean RAE wasn’t, Westcott were the rocket people. What was its title, Rocket Propulsion Establishment, RPE. So once we started going towards weaponry, then was the way in which you propelled them, was it liquid rocket, was it solid fuel, di-da-di-da, the whole area of activity around there, but with RAE maintaining its own position for running the thing as a missile of which the fuel was only a part. So there was no question as far as RAE were concerned that Westcott were going to be the main driver, that was going to be us. And I wasn’t involved at this stage, I was still in Aero, but that argument had gone on, and so in Aero Department a supersonic division was now created into a Gas Dynamics Department, which became Weapons Department as time went on. Now in Lighthill’s, in ’63, this sort of debate was going on and he was asking me just to clear my mind or do some thinking for him around the structure of the RAE. I wasn’t… what changes… Again, rather like this activity, it wasn’t something that pleased me. [laughs] And I was only there for two months. [laughs] But I had to do something. What did I do? I certainly… Morgan, Morien Morgan had been identified as the new Head of Weapons Department and Smelt had been pulled out, and he was my boss – in fact they’d both been my boss – and Smelt was pulled out to be Head of Gas Dynamics Department in Aero, gas division, which had been the supersonic division of Aero and now it was the Gas Dynamics, so you’re going to ask me the difference. Well gas dynamics is a broader department than just supersonics. And that then went into… guided weapons and became Guided Weapons Department with Morien. Now, Smelt at some stage in all of this went to America. No, he’d gone long before this.

[57:30]

Anyway, that was the sort of thing I was doing with Lighthill. Now, in particular technical terms, what was the subject that James was an expert on at Manchester before he came down for… not aeroelasticity, but things concerned with Mach number seven, eight, nine, ten, that sort of thing.

Hypersonics?

Sir John Charnley Page 228 C1379/30 Track 13

Bit of hypersonics, but… And really he needed some off the cuff, back of the envelope work done to decide whether RAE should be setting up to do some of that activity or whether it was far too much, far too far ahead, if you like and that we ought to concentrate on; it would be nice to do it, but could we? Could we really do it, and the answer was no, we couldn’t. Sorry, no we shouldn’t. It would have been nice maybe, there would have been those who would have loved it. But that would have meant tunnels and, you know, in half an hour you could produce an argument against it that was pretty compelling. But no.

[58:53] My other question on this front was I was just wondering what Lighthill was like to work with in those sort of close circumstances?

Well, bright, demanding is – sorry – pleasant, easy. Easy, demanding, high standards, thinks very quickly, as I said, was ahead of me and in the sense that I could produce an answer for him, he got there before me, no doubt about it and as such, well I’m wasting my time for this man. And he’d got all these other skills. I was a chess player, James would play half a dozen boards at the same time, you know, the skill of playing six or seven, eight other people all at the same time. And would store what he was doing on that board well enough to do the other six and then come back to that one. Oh yeah. He, oh when did he go with a bunch to Russia? Obviously it must have been when the Cold War, but certainly it had got to that stage where we were thinking of where RAE might fit in relation to whatever was in the Soviet Union, and he went as, I don’t know just the precise terms of reference, but he went to Russia as part of a mission and to prepare himself for the task he learnt Russian. And [laughs] – and we’ll talk… remind me about this over lunch when this thing isn’t on because I’m not going to say this into… at all. So let’s leave that for the moment. But he was, his wife was a – which way did it go? A pianist, or was James a pianist and she was a violinist? I think she was the pianist and he was the violinist, I think so. But he was certainly musically talented. No great interest in sport that I would say, no. No, no, no, no. But culturally, oh, you know, you couldn’t fault him. You might fault his views. And you’re going to ask me in what way? I hesitate about making remarks like that because it’s just an opportunity to follow it up. Oh well, let me stay with the Russians, because of this trip he learnt the language. There then was a return trip from the Russians coming to us and Handel Davies, that I’ve mentioned earlier, at this stage was now in London and he was the Director- General of research into – DGRD, Director-General Research and Development – and as such

Sir John Charnley Page 229 C1379/30 Track 13 had a major interest in what RAE were doing, principally on the aerodynamics, structures, engine side, not much on the equipment side. But Handel was very involved, was responsible if you like, DGRD. There’ll be another bloke on the equipment side in London. But it might have been that Handel is also part of the mission to Russia, I could believe that. When they came back to us, Lighthill made his presentation on the work of RAE, to them and he made it in Russian. He got so far, not very far in Russian, when Handel Davies in the audience popped up and said, ‘James, do you mind presenting this talk on the RAE in English? There is an interpreter here, she can look after the translation into the appropriate language but I want to know what it is that you’re saying’. [laughs] And there’s an ex… you see, I shouldn’t make these remarks. You say well, was that typical of the relationship between RAE and Headquarters in London, and it was the way in which Handel played his job, that he wanted to know what the Director of the RAE was saying to a Russian team that were over here. And, you know, there were going to be minutes of this meeting in some way or another and he wanted the record, he wanted to know what was going in the record as to what the RAE Director was saying. Quite legitimate. It stopped the meeting for a moment and, you know, where do you then look? I can remember the looks around the conference, where do you then look for someone to decide it? Who is now going to say whether James goes on in Russian for the benefit of his visitors or whether he listens to what Handel has to say as his man in London and James gave way. Had to really, because there was someone there to translate.

[1:05:25] Why were the Russians actually there? It seems sort of strange that, you know, it’s one of Britain’s top secret research establishments at the height of the Cold War and…

You know, you’ve got to put that the other – why did we go to Russia?

Yeah, that was the other half of my question actually.

That was the start, because we were only returning our visit to them. Why did they invite us or why… I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that specifically. But you can, in all of these, yeah you can separate out the fundamental physics and science and the work that RAE did without getting too involved in its application to the defence field particularly. And here you can regard RAE as an extrapolation of an academic outfit that is concerning itself with the science that might eventually find application to defence. I didn’t, I wasn’t in the bunch that went to

Sir John Charnley Page 230 C1379/30 Track 13

Russia. I don’t know who… it must have been about this time for James to have been party to it. And was I the Instrument Department or was I the Weapons Department when this bunch went? I could well believe, if you like, that if I was running either of those two I wouldn’t have been involved in that group for the very reason that you mention. I’m trying to… don’t know, don’t know. But… I don’t know the detailed background which led to our visit to them and, you know, it wasn’t un… you can argue it’s a bit extreme because of the Cold War, but it wasn’t unusual for us to be hosting visits from France in particular, or the States all the time, from France. Germany? As time went on, more and more. But to start with of course we just collected a lot of the German scientists over here, a lot, good ones. Oh, there’s a subject there in itself as well. And I think you asked a question much earlier this morning on our relationship with France on Concorde and I think I sidestepped it a little bit by saying that, not by saying, but I was involved in going across to France and because we had a lot of this experience of flight testing aircraft as they were approaching the speed of sound, the French in setting up their industry post-war were thinking about how they should address that problem of designing aircraft, the Mirage, thoughts were in mind and I was over in France talking with them about flight testing near the speed of sound and at their, the experimental establishment at Bretigny, that they were thinking of setting up to do that sort of work and to become – it became more of a Boscombe Down than a Farnborough. And you’re going to ask me what’s the…

Shall we stop for lunch?

I need a drink.

[end of track 13]

Sir John Charnley Page 231 C1379/30 Track 14

[Track 14]

How did you come to be transferred into Weapons Department?

[pause] The previous head of Weapons Department, a chap called Joe Lyons – his name is Dennis but he’s a Joe obviously, for Joe Lyons. [laughs] He was in Aero Flight, he was yet another of the chaps from there, finding their way into other areas. He had followed Morien Morgan into Weapons and was head of the department and he had decided he’d had enough – and we’re talking now of 1965 – had enough of defence and all that went with it. He’d applied for and got, was awarded the job of Chief Scientist to the Ministry of Transport in London, to the Department of Transport. So he was on his way out of RAE, so there was a vacancy at the head of department level and again, I don’t know, within the system, I don’t think I had any interview at all and I can’t think whether James Lighthill was still the Director. Yes, yes he was. Yes, James was still the Director and so he would have known me fairly well by now, so whether he had said that he wanted me to do this job, the next thing I knew, I was appointed to be Head of Weapons. So when you say how, how did I become, it was an appointment, it was another promotion and it was a half level between an Assistant Secretary, which was the equivalent, the Head of Department was that level, and then an Under Secretary lining up with the academic, with the admin world, and this was a halfway… it was. Do I mean a one and a half? It was a half star anyway. Under Secretary was two-star wasn’t it, yes, I think, whatever. But it was a half, so another little promotion. And there I was, Head of Weapons. Not knowing much about weaponry. Well not knowing anything about weaponry, but knowing a bit by now about bombing and navigation systems and therefore what was required. And in sense of bombing and nav, they were very much… The TSR2 that we’ve been talking about earlier, that was, the weapon it was delivering was the nuclear weapon, essentially, so your bombing and nav situation was related to something that was going to be delivered from low altitude and, not to put too fine a point on it, didn’t have to be too accurate. Guided weapons would look after themselves - and I’m touching now on the three areas of weaponry: there was nuclear weapon, there was guided weapons and there was conventional bombing – and the conventional bombing was the one where you wanted to be accurate. The guided weapon would look after itself in the terms in which we’re talking now. You didn’t need to be very accurate for nuclear so you concentrated now in the accuracy of the weapon delivery system to be more conscious of the conventional attack and now what was it you were attacking? Were you attacking an airfield, runways, an industrial complex? And so on. But there were these – I’m still answering your question of how

Sir John Charnley Page 232 C1379/30 Track 14 and the why – and really, of the two areas of the nuclear and the conventional bombing and the guided missile, no, but the conventional bombing I knew a little bit from the bomb and nav attack system in the earlier department. Can’t say more than that, don’t know. And I’d only done two years in the other department and seen the demise of the TSR2, but seen the arrival of the Concorde. And now I was leaving Concorde completely, for the time being. I don’t think it ever was seen to have weapons on it.

[05:37] So this department essentially contained conventional, guided and nuclear sub-sections then, or…

I was going to say, if we now talk about the department, Weapons, it was structured into – and I touched on this earlier – two definitely discrete parts: one was the project area run by Fred East, and the other was the research area run by Andrew Stratton. And I’d known Stratton previously, hadn’t known East, but was aware that they both went to Exeter together and they were both skilled and talented characters, yeah, but different, very different. Now, East’s area was definitely the projects area of all three weaponry. Stratton’s was the research, the technologies, the sums associated with the accuracy of the bombing nav system, the accuracy of the delivery system for the conventional bombing system, [drilling noise in background] and also he was concerned with the development, research into the different forms of guidance for guided weapons. And this was, there was a link into Malvern, because Malvern also was concerned with the guidance systems, depending on what those guidance systems were in the radar... cor, this is opening up a bag of worms isn’t it? However, Andrew, Andy Stratton was the technologist and the research and the sums and the calculations, and the performance – leave it? Let it be?

Shall we pause for one moment while he’s just…

Yeah, sure.

[pause in recording]

[07:55] Right, okay. In that case I will pop back on.

Sir John Charnley Page 233 C1379/30 Track 14

And there was Fred East running the project side and there was Andy Stratton running the research side. But in… East was very concerned with the nuclear programme and our concern with the nuclear programme was the delivery and that’s the TSR2 type of delivery of the nuclear weapon. Not concerned with the mechanics of the weapon itself, that was Aldermaston, but with the way of getting it there and delivering it, okay? He was very concerned with all aspects of the guided weapon projects and the projects that were running at the time were Sea Dart for the navy, either Bloodhound or Thunderbird, I don’t know, for the army and for the air force – oh and also for the army and the air force, Rapier as a short range guided missile, almost airport defence, or certainly the defence on the battlefield, short range. And on the air-to-air side, then… de Havillands – what was their weapon?

Blue Jay, Red Top, Fireflash?

Fireflash, a little bit. That was all over and done with by the time I’m talking about, really. But air-to-air, air-to-air. Red? No, not Red. Anyway, doesn’t matter. Because I’m just reviewing the project, but there were a number of projects in all three areas of land, sea and air. Nearly came then.

[10:15]

Stratton was doing research programmes on all the little bits of the… a little bit of guidance, not much though, but the warhead was someone else’s responsibility, but the safety and arming and the fusing and the various technologies for doing those things were with us in the department. And then the simulation of an effective weapon, whether it was a guided missile or whether it was a conventional hard bomb type missile, Stratton was developing oh, again, analogue, digital issues that were raising their heads so that was an area. And then as well, the calculation of the performance and as an example, in calculating the performance of, and some way to attack a runway as came into prominence at the Falklands later, twenty years later nearly, what’s the best way of attacking a runway, putting an airfield out of action, denying an enemy the use of an airfield. Do you attack aircraft, do you attack the runway, you obviously attack the runway really and put that out of action, and how best to do that, what sort of a bomb does that. And those sort of studies, those sort of sums were with Stratton. So there they were. It was well structured, well organised and in the hands of a couple of very competent characters. So I just

Sir John Charnley Page 234 C1379/30 Track 14 put my feet up and sat back, just kept the two chaps happy themselves and let them get on with it. It worked, I think. Another name that I will mention, or shortly, no doubt at some stage, within the Stratton area, the – and you obviously are familiar with the civil service levels – each of those chaps was a DCSO – East and Stratton – Deputy Chief Scientific Officer, two-star. And I was the two and a half star, I was the half level above, not a full level above, but just a half level. Why that, why not a full, I don’t know. I mention that because the two-star level that was running – sorry – the one-star level, the SPSO, that was running Stratton’s simulation and performance measurement work was a Tom Kerr who later became Director of National Gas Turbine Establishment at Pyestock – NGTE – and then later again became Director of the RAE. And he had worked for me in Aero Flight. [laughs]

Popular place to work, Aero Flight isn’t it?

It was indeed, it was. It was a bunch of blokes who were skilled but knew what they were doing and had their eye on the ball, I think. It was, it was a good place to work, yeah. With a lot of people who went further. As I say, Lyons went to be the Chief Scientist to Transport, Morien Morgan became the Controller up in London, as indeed I did. Andy Stratton became Director of DOAE and a professor at Cranfield. Handel Davies became in many ways Mr Concorde in defence terms, although Hamilton was the… and so on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And others; Bethwaite became a professor at Cranfield, and he was in Aero Flight. Yeah. And I’m sure there are others and I’m not doing very well. Roy Ewans, Roy Ewans went up to Avros in Manchester and became Chief Aerodynamicist up there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There we go. That does that little bit I think. So we’ve got the structure in Weapons Department.

[15:34]

Oh, the air-to-air, the Hatfield air-to-air – Sparrow, [drilling noise in background] was the air-to- air guided missile that Hatfield did. Now, that was the American.

Sky Flash?

Sky Flash was Fairey’s with a short range…

I think Sky Flash was the British development of Sparrow, or am I getting my times mixed up?

Sir John Charnley Page 235 C1379/30 Track 14

[pause]

All these missiles with similar names.

And the man that was responsible at Hatfield for the weapon work was George Hough, I mentioned him before as someone that, he and I became close to because of this link of the Hatfield guided missile work. The airfield – sorry – the aircraft side of Hatfield on one side of the airfield and the weaponry were over on the other side. Ah, I thought it was Sparrow. Doesn’t sound quite right. DH is air-to-air. Sky Flash, Sky Flash… Anyway, sorry, sorry. Fails me. Shouldn’t, but never mind.

Red Top?

No. No, Red Top was for Javelins and I went down to Gloster… No, no, no, no. So, the range that we used for our air-to-ground weaponry was up in Scotland, Stranraer, West Freugh, and the chap who ran West Freugh, the armament man was the same bloke that had been out to Denmark with me, or he and I had been to Denmark together. He was the chap who took a look at the…

We haven’t mentioned that yet.

No, I was going to say I’ll stop there. Don’t ask me why we went to Denmark. No. No, no. But he was the Laird of West Freugh. Sturgess. Sturgess. S-T-U-R-G-E-double S, and a very good pianist was Sturge. He could set the mess alight with his piano playing. He also used to arrive down to see me in Farnborough with a salmon. [laughs] From Scotland. [drilling in background] But he ran West… and the point I was going to make was that I did a number of trips up there in an F4 Phantom looking at the general problems of bombing from a low altitude. We would go in on the bombing range up there at low altitude, fast, and simulating a sort of TSR2 type flight path attack. Low altitude, fast, and then peeling off to get out of it as quickly as possible. And also, as well as that sort of attack, also the bombing of a runway and the accuracies that were being… that Stratton and his boys were looking for, and East too for that matter. And they were doing pseudo attacks on a target on an airfield and I went up once or twice just to have a look at what it was like, to get the feel for it. There we go, that’s it. And more than that on the weaponry…

Sir John Charnley Page 236 C1379/30 Track 14

[20:00]

Obviously close links with Aldermaston and the man at… I was in Weapons Department for three years, from ’65 to ’68, in the course of which the Director RAE changed and it went from Lighthill to Bob Cockburn, Sir Robert Cockburn, and he was an electronics man, a radar man essentially.

Was there any change in the way the RAE was run?

Yes. A different style. Oh, for better or for worse? Changing scene completely. For instance, and it’s a point we’ll come to next, that with Bob Cockburn as the director, we’re now getting up to 1968 and Labour government are still in power – Wilson – and we now come to the ‘white hot technological revolution’ day and when I imagine, debate took place between Headquarters and Farnborough as to what part Farnborough could play in this. And from Malvern, Dr Macfarlane, George Macfarlane had been extracted and had been sent up to London to Mintech to run a team, a research, aimed at introducing… I think, I don’t know quite how to put this, introducing – I was going to say introducing the non-military industry of the UK, introducing them to the Malvern military activities. In other words, George Macfarlane was to run this group, it’s a bit broader than that. He took with him examples of the way in which Malvern technology in all its features would be an advantage to our civil industry outside defence. Bob Cockburn had been asked the same sort of thing from Farnborough and his choice of someone to join Macfarlane in London to exploit into industry outside defence, the RAE’s defence expertise, and I was that bloke. So I went up to London, but George was, Macfarlane was, senior to me so Macfarlane ran the research unit in the Ministry of Technology and I was down from him as Head of Research Planning, Head RP was my title. Head of Research Planning.

And that’s 1968?

And that’s 1968.

I’ve got a few more questions on…

And that’s in – you’ve got one of these haven’t you?

Sir John Charnley Page 237 C1379/30 Track 14

CV, yeah.

And it’s in there. Yeah. I think we’ve left weaponry. Have you got any loose ends around the weapon area?

[24:24] I was wondering about the management aspect of it actually.

Again?

We talked about the management aspect over lunch, but [laughs] don’t think we’ve mentioned it so far here.

Other than the fact that there’s…

I just wonder, how do you balance that, on one side the project and on the other side, the research? You’ve got, it sounded like, slightly different personalities under both.

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. (a) Different personalities and East, with his project responsibilities had a very, very close link to the guided weapon area of London, within MoD, and again we’ll come later because I came to do the job. Within MoD there’s a Deputy Controller of Guided Weapons. There is also, in a different area altogether, a chap responsible for conventional weapons, and a different area again, a chap responsible for nuclear weapons, all in different parts of MoD. But certainly, with East’s main activity, which is guided weapons, then he had a very close responsibility, very close, very close with DCDW, Deputy Controller of Guided Weapons. DCGW. I was trying to think of his name. Dickins. Dickins. Dickins, yes, yes. Because, as I tried to suggest at some time earlier today I think, although the contract responsibility for a project, for the development of a project would be with London, the technical support to that project would come from Farnborough and that would be from East’s boys. So you had a management organisation run by a project man in London with the company in industry, but the technical support would be coming from Farnborough, from East’s area. So East was working quite directly on a number of projects, be they sea, land or air, East would be linking directly with an opposite number in London, through me if you like, but getting on with the job directly

Sir John Charnley Page 238 C1379/30 Track 14 with the project people in London. Now Stratton on the research side, we were more responsible for that ourselves. There was a bit of control from London in the sense that they had to provide some funds, but it was then up to Director of RAE with his team and me, in particular in this case, to agree, with London certainly the research programme, but our attitude would be generally they didn’t know much about it and left it very much to us as the technical side of its experts. Does that make it clear? But the project side was a distinct, direct London/Farnborough link on the project.

[28:02] Do the project and the research sides of this talk to each much or are they separate organisations, as it were?

They do, they talk… and you’re on the same point again, that it was my job as the department head to make sure they did and make sure that the project people were taking full advantage of whatever was going on in the research areas to make sure, and also if they had any problems in the project areas, to make sure that the research people were involved in solving those with whatever they could come up with. Now down at the working level, down in the labs, there wasn’t really a problem. When you got to the two people running it, then they were each looking after their own corner.

How do you manage that?

Oh, come on. How do you manage that? You understand the strengths and weaknesses of the characters and you do your best to solve the, or avoid the weaknesses and use their strengths and, you know, this is just part of, wherever you are, of working, getting people to work together by recognising the strengths they have and the weaknesses and doing your best to make sure, and that’s a curious phrase, you know, if you’ve got a place where the strength of one is the weakness of the other, then for God’s sake don’t let that boil into a really serious issue. No. No, no, no, no. And you, you get into the detail of chatting or talking – chatting is perhaps not… - talking straight with one of them saying, look, look, look, look you’re going too far, back off. And you can do that informally. You can be conscious that their staffs are aware that this problem might exist, their staffs will be aware that on a particular issue it might become serious. They might know that these are two different people and therefore this problem’s likely to arise, but then it does arise and at that stage if it gets serious on a particular project where East wants

Sir John Charnley Page 239 C1379/30 Track 14 some help and Stratton says no you can’t have it, I’m too busy with something else, that’s where you have to take a strong line. Anyway. It’s… the simple answer is just understanding the two people concerned and the jobs they’re supposed to do. You’ve defined what your impression is of where the limits are and within those limits, fine, but once you get close to the point of almost exceeding them, then beware and recognise beforehand that there might be some sorting to do and then some straight talking. I had my differences with each of them, and don’t ask me what they were. But it never got to the stage of falling out. I think we all, the three of us, we all essentially wanted to do a good job. We were all determined to improve and maintain, maintain and improve the effectiveness of Weapons Department in the general structure of RAE and in relations with London, with headquarters, and with industry and with the services. So you’ve got a lot of balls in the air at that stage and from me as departmental head, you were trying to make sure that – and I mentioned the problems with Malvern. There were sort of problems in the running of the place all over the place, but that’s normal. But there are a lot of them [laughs] and I wouldn’t know if I solved them all very well, but…

[32:50] Could you maybe just give me one or two examples, if there were any that were at the top of your mind?

Getting… to say what I’ve forgotten. [pause] No, no, no, no. And it’s not that I’m avoiding the question, it’s just I don’t remember. So you could argue that in the way that I’ve remembered some of these other things very vividly, why don’t I remember this vividly? I don’t know. I was trying to think of BL755 – does that ring a bell with you? That was a conventional bomb and a runway, I mentioned attacking a runway and BL755 was…

Cluster bomb? Cluster bomb?

Yeah. I was going to say, I was just going to say that, but it was… Certainly two distinct types. One was a form which would penetrate the runway before it went off and make a big hole in the runway and the other – and you dropped with the penetrating weapon – you dropped a cluster weapon to make it difficult for people to go on to the runway because of the cluster, to repair it. So the two things were linked together. Now in that, I remember the relative merits of those two elements, Stratton was doing the sums and Fred East, almost from his instinct was saying no, you’ve got the balance wrong between which is the more important of destroying the runway or

Sir John Charnley Page 240 C1379/30 Track 14 preventing the repair of it. And East had been a weapons person for a long time, Stratton as I’ve said came in from another department that was responsible for bombing and navigation and they had different views on the relative merits. Don’t think I can go further, didn’t get any of it. I can remember a discussion with the three of us – oh four, I think Tom Kerr was there as well because he was doing the sums, oh God, and was… yeah, don’t know, don’t know, don’t know. And I don’t want to make too much of this, I’m really answering the questions you’re asking and spending more time on it than perhaps it really deserves, because yes, there were differences, yes there were problems, but they never became such that – let me be honest – there was never an occasion when I felt I’d got to go to the Director of RAE and say look, I’ve got these problems, I can’t sort it, will you come and sort it. Or, may I have one of them moved because I can’t live with the two of them. Never. Never, never.

Would you say there was something just about the day-to-day work about doing an engineering job that is about, that that is part of the job as it were?

Managing people. And it’s just part of the job to me. And if you got people with the right strengths, the right skills, the right strengths, nurse them. And we were, we were I think an effective department. Yeah, I think so. As you say, what I knew as BL755, attacking weapon, this has been used, certainly used in the Falklands in ’82, certainly, in the attack of the airfield there and I think I’ve heard it mentioned, have I not, in Afghanistan still? I wouldn’t have thought they’d have gone for the cluster weapon there because there’d be too much media attention to attacking personnel; women and children, I can see the headlines now. Don’t know. But there we are.

[37:32] You mentioned that there were these three distinct areas: the conventional, the guided and the nuclear underneath you, as it were. Were any of them pursued more vigorously than others or did they all have the same weighting?

In the sense that, as I said earlier, you didn’t have to be too precise with hitting a spot target with a nuclear weapon. That relaxes your mind. You look as if you don’t believe that. Relaxing isn’t perhaps the right word to use, if I’m ahead of you. But with the attack of a runway, then you certainly, for an airborne attack of a runway you’ve got to be precise, or more precise, if your aim is to make a bloody great hole in the runway to stop aircraft taking off. If you’re attacking

Sir John Charnley Page 241 C1379/30 Track 14 the airfield, different. And that’s, if you come to the guided weapons side, well now, if you’re talking about a ground launched guided missile, then your propulsive system is quite different, if you’re talking about an air launched guided missile, well you’ve already got the speed of the vehicle to start with. Different problems there. So certainly, as far as the project are concerned, tried to say already, you’re really, you were supporting your headquarters and the policy and the strategy was – strategy, policy – the demands came from London and you had to make up your mind whether within Fred East’s area you’d got the right balance between sea, land and air missiles and within the balance between East’s resources and Stratton’s resources, you were sufficiently keeping in control the support that Headquarters were asking for all the time for more support to the projects. There was a balance there between Dickie, Deputy Controller, knocking on my door or ringing me up and saying, John, I want more effort on this, that and the other, the company’s going astray, or whatever, it’s way behind its programme, it’s costing more than it should, please can I have more help to sort it out. Now, the decision then was do you do this at the expense of Stratton, or do you do this at the expense of someone else within East’s area. No. In my mind, just management problems. But between the three areas of nuclear, conventional and GW, the… you didn’t need the same, you didn’t need the same technical effort on the nuclear side in terms of accuracies and delivery accuracy as you did on the conventional weapons side. And the guided weapon was different altogether, different altogether. You see, we were not concerned with firing from a gun, a round of a gun, from the ground to destroy an aircraft, that was Fort Halstead, that wasn’t me at all. So I didn’t have to think in terms of – sorry – in a guided missile, whether it’s ground launched or air launched… Oh God, you split the technology up associated with how is it being launched and at the other end what is the target. Is it a soft aircraft target, a soft target in flight or is it a hard target like a tank on the ground? So you’ve got a range of technologies associated with launch and another range of technologies dependent upon the target and whether it’s an air target or a ground target or a hard target or a soft target. And in the air in particular, the aim of your guidance system – and remember you’re attacking a mobile target – the aim of your guidance system is to put your weapon within sufficient range of your target such that your weapon load can be released sufficiently close to the target to take it out. So that means you’re now concerned with the effectiveness of the warhead against a soft target and the fusing and safety and arming that all goes into that bit of weaponry. When you come to a ground target then the emphasis is as much on getting something that goes through the tank and explodes inside the tank - I hate to say this – rather than just bashes away against the outside. And so you’re now splitting up how you want to look at the technologies associated with that sort of weaponry. And that’s very much a Stratton

Sir John Charnley Page 242 C1379/30 Track 14 activity, but talking with East on the one hand before a project starts and making sure that the best solution is there, and then if the project goes astray, East calls on Stratton to help him out. Have I made that clear or not? Let me go and see if these chaps in this cold weather would like a cup of tea. Can you take this off for a moment?

[end of track 14]

Sir John Charnley Page 243 C1379/30 Track 15

[Track 15]

I was going to ask you, is there such a thing as a typical working day over your time managing those two departments at the RAE?

Let me put you straight first – it was three, because BLEU, BLEU was a little department you see.

Oh sorry, yes.

I ran BLEU, and this may be of interest to you, as an SPSO. And I think you understand that language. I ran the Instrument and Electrical Engineering as a DCSO and I ran Weapons Department as the next level up as a DCSO plus. And Weapons Department and Aero Department were the two big departments of RAE and one was in the, I think I went over, one was in the DDA side and the other was the DDE side, and they were the two big RAE departments and I was head of one of the two big departments. The other one, the Aero, was Dietrich Küchemann, one of our German scientists, who designed the Concorde wing, essentially. However, there we are, that was a bit of the structure. So I ran an RAE department at three different levels, different sizes, as well as completely different programmes, completely different. Well, related in a way. Yeah, related lightly or quite tightly. BLEU and IEE were tightly related and the first Superintendent of BLEU came from IEE department in the ’46s whenever. So now, what was the question again after all of that?

I was just wondering, your time.

How do you spend the day.

Let’s take the latter two, let’s take the latter two, perhaps.

Yeah, leave BLEU out, sure. Sure, sure. There wasn’t…. sorry, yeah. Gosh, it comes back to… A lot of management, a lot of thinking about where we were going, and this, I’m going back to BLEU quite deliberately here. At SPSO level running that department, although it was small, I had the same, almost authority in RAE as the bigger departments, I was there around the table at meetings run by the Director on the running of the establishment, I was there as the little boy in

Sir John Charnley Page 244 C1379/30 Track 15 terms of size, but not in terms of pulling weight. But it pleased me because it was at a level where I was seeing the structure of RAE, the structure of Headquarters of the technical side, the structure to some extent of the operational requirements on the military side, so I was seeing policy at that level, but I was also sufficiently technical to make a contribution myself. And for the first time now I was able to put together for myself interpretations of policy with the technical capabilities. And that was a great period in my career that I enjoyed very much. I could make a technical contribution and I could go flying to see how difficult it was to land an aeroplane in a bit of fog with bits of visibility coming up and so on. And then I could talk on the international platforms of having had that experience. But at the same time, I was able to see where the policy was going on the military side and on the civil side. So I enjoyed that level and the work and Bedford very much indeed. It then led on to IDC and I enjoyed that. So that period, clearing the Vulcan, moving by now into the civil world, going on to IDC was a very enjoyable part of my career. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy transonics beforehand, but in all of that, and the point I’m making is, once I left BLEU and IDC and came back to Farnborough I was moving into management and that was now concerning more of my day, to come back to your question, it was the problems of running a department, knowing what was expected of you, wondering whether you’d got the resources to do it and on what sort of timescale, what sort of funding, what the commitments were, and this is managing an outfit. And indeed, the way in which, when I was going down from London to my twelve Establishments, when I was running them all – running, too strong a word – keeping an eye on them, and going down to see them and asking directors to tell me things of which they were proud. When I was at my departments, you know, I was, it disappointed me, they didn’t happen. If someone came down from London and asked me to give him, arrange for a presentation of something of which we were proud, what would I do, have I got something, am I earning my keep in running this department, are there things of which I am proud? And will show the OR branch in the RAF or the army or wherever, or headquarters or on the civil side, anything that’s happening there. All the time questioning, if you like, whoever the customer was, was he getting value for money from me. Now the customer might be the Director of RAE on the one hand, in one relationship, locally running the RAE. On the other hand it might be MoD Headquarters, whatever. But… so my day would be many more meetings within a week, shall I say, many, many meetings. They might be formal meetings around a table like the TSR2 co-ordination meetings with Boscombe Down. They might be with my own Andy Stratton in that area and even when he came to… So meetings of one sort or another. Or up in London, a lot of the time, a lot of the time. Not a lot of actual technical work from me, but, as I’ve said earlier, enough knowledge to ask the questions to know

Sir John Charnley Page 245 C1379/30 Track 15 whether the other chaps were doing the job properly as they should. Now, there’s a long, long answer. I don’t know, but that’s what I regard as the job of management, giving sensible questions and the extent to which that means you need to look outside your narrow activity so that if you’re running things sensibly. I have answered the question – I’ve got to keep an eye on the director of my Establishment. Is he doing in his area what I’m doing in mine and how does he judge what I am doing? How does he put a little tick in the box, or whatever? What are his yardsticks, what are his standards and against what he’s asked me to do. Perhaps I’ve not seen him for a month, shall I say, because that was the last formal meeting when he met all his heads but there’s been no occasion for me to see him other than that, and there was no issue there that bothered me or him in my area, perhaps, so they’re all good signs. So that’s one. And then, as I say, there’s my Headquarters directorate and then there’s the customer in the sense of the service. And I’m speaking military all the time here because in those latter departments they were all military. My flirtation with the civil side went with BLEU and then came back again, certainly. But I was just keeping an ear opening for what was happening on the BLEU side and was very, very pleased that things were happening. Anyway.

[pause in recording]

[09:42] Are you typically working long days as a manager?

Oh yes. Well that was a choice I made that… When I was working at Farnborough and at Bedford and at Martlesham, I lived close to my occupation. Early days at Farnborough, a cycle ride away. Martlesham, now I’d elevated to a motorcar, and then back here and Bedford, car. So I was within quarter of an hour in any sense or even half, yeah, something like that within my workplace. But had an enormous amount of support from home, both from Mary when we were on our own and then when the family arrived, she was wonderful and terrific support. So I could ring her up and say I’m going to be home late, because something was happening or whatever, whatever. And I wasn’t of the mind that said that you didn’t take your work home with you, that you left it all behind in the office. If there was a problem that was bothering me it would go home with me and I would wrestle with it, and still do to some extent. I was going to follow that with some particular point. When I was in London I’d catch a train home about half past six, I’d be home an hour and a half, an hour, an hour and a half, half past seven to eight, we’d have supper, which would have been beautiful, prepared, beautiful drink, and if there was a problem

Sir John Charnley Page 246 C1379/30 Track 15 going that was up in my mind, Mary would go to bed and she’d leave me with a cup of coffee and I would work on. I can easily, and it isn’t a problem, to work in the night. I don’t like working first thing in the morning. There are those people who are that way inclined. There’s a description for it, I don’t know. But I’m a late night person. In my youth, I don’t know if I could do it now. But then I’d certainly work until one, two and the fact that I’d been at meetings with – and particularly when I was in London – with – and meetings of all sorts: technical, financial, with the Treasury, you name it, with the services – I had the feeling I didn’t have time to think of where I was going and I would do that at home. So as far as I was concerned, when I was in the office I was at the beck and call of other people, but where I wanted to be creative myself in satisfying myself I was on the right path and I was going in the right direction, in whatever element of my job, that sort of thinking I did at home late at night, or early morning if you wish. So (a) my job came home with me, I could stay late in the office if that made sense, but I’d certainly bring it home with me and work on it at home. And I had a very long-suffering and forebearing wife, bless her. Yeah. Oh yeah, sure, sure, sure, did a lot at home. Does that answer the question?

[13:43] Are there any sacrifices you have to make outside work to have that sort of work focussed life?

What sacrifices? Sacrifices?

Are there any?

I hand it to my wife, in many ways. I’m not cultured – me? And I think she wouldn’t mind me saying she wasn’t either, although she was more cultured than I was, in terms of art and theatre and music, yeah. My interest was sport and so that was… I did try to maintain the weekends for ourselves and I remember her remarking how she found it hard to understand how I could switch off on a Friday night on TGIF – Thank God It’s Friday – come home, gin and tonic, di-da-di-da, and then pick it up again on Monday morning. The way in which over the weekend I would be playing cricket, or interest in cricket, whatever’s going on, or rugby, mainly those two, she was badminton and she had a full activity at the hospital pushing a trolley as a volunteer for twenty- five years or things of that sort, got a little award from the hospital for doing it, as did Mrs Kerr, the Tom Kerr, the two of them and Evelyn is about, is still about and I see her. But the quick answer to your question, which I haven’t given you yet, is that my satisfaction has been, in my

Sir John Charnley Page 247 C1379/30 Track 15 mind I’ve produced, or we’ve produced two successful kids and the extent to which they were growing up at different periods... when all of this with me was going on, she was looking after them and taking care of them and really making sure that they went down the right sort of path, with reference back to me if need be. But there’s a daughter and a son, three years between them – Trina and Richard – and Trina born in ’49, January – sorry – yes, ’49 and Richard born in December ’51, so it’s almost three years and my wife made the point, oh – early in our married life – I’m not going to be carrying a baby around in the middle of summer. If we’re having any family it’s going to be in winter. [laughs] So we did and they came in winter, either side of Christmas. And she then really ran domestic, ran the house, ran the household and looked after them, let me know when there were problems, if there were, and there were of course.

[17:12]

What did I give up in all of this? Not a lot. Not a lot. I hope she didn’t, I don’t think she did. We used to go to the cinema, we used to go to the RAE when I was here down at Farnborough, when I was back again. Then on a Technical Society, which I was prominent, they ran a Film Society, and so on. And, as I say, I was never very cultured so I didn’t miss [laughs] not going to… and I played bridge, she didn’t. I played chess. No. No, no, no. I don’t know if that answers the question, but my success, my real answer to the question was that, to whatever extent I gave things up, we managed to produce two sensible kids of which we were both proud. And they’re both alive now and they’re both keen to look after me.

Did you want anything particular for your children when they were growing up?

Did I?

[18:34] Did you want any particular path for your children when they were growing up?

Interesting question. I’ve just mentioned, daughter was born in January ’49. You also have heard from me that I was moved back here in ’63 so that she was fourteen when we moved from – and Richard was eleven or whatever – when we moved from Bedford back to here. Offered them the choice of boarding at schools in Bedford, good schools. He said yes, he was already in the boarding school but as a day boy, so he would convert to being a boarding boy at Bedford

Sir John Charnley Page 248 C1379/30 Track 15

School. Katrina in – and that’s, the boys and girls are Dame Alice Harpur, they’re in the same trust educationally. She was in the girls’ side. She wanted to come with us, she didn’t want to stay up there boarding, so she came down here with us. We were, I wouldn’t say we made a mistake, but it was very difficult because we hadn’t realised how difficult it would be for a fourteen year old girl who’d got two years to go to whatever it was then, GCSE or the equivalent, and fit into forms where all the friendships had been made and had been running for a couple of years. So she was two years into a four-year stretch where relationships had already been made, and that was very difficult for her. And she, it was very difficult. The other difficulty was that the nearest school that suited her in our view, and again we took these decisions collectively, Mary and myself, was at Woking, so she had a journey. She would either, she would cycle from here to Camberley station, train from Camberley station to Ash Vale, change trains on to a train to Woking and then a bus from Woking station to school. And that in the morning and reverse in the evening for a fourteen year old, you know, was more than I had appreciated it would be, but she did very well. So were there any problems as they were growing up? Whether we should have pressed her and left her at Bedford, I don’t think that would have been right. She was, technically she was mathematically qualified, whatever that means in this sense, but certainly her strength lay in that direction, but as well it was music. It was singing and it was playing the piano and playing the violin. So there was a question of whether she should continue, if she went on to university, whether she should continue with the cultured side of music, if you like, and singing and so on, or whether she should go mathematics in one way or another, and keep the music as an interest. And that’s the way we chose to do it. And I don’t think, certainly I wouldn’t regret it now. She’s still singing, she is still musically, with her husband, her husband is the choirmaster, she sings in the choir, they sing in several choirs for that matter. They’re going up soon to the Albert Hall for Messiah from Scratch , to do their part in that. And so really… and they’ve got their own three children, or have had, and they’re both knocking around sixty, she and her husband. So if there were problems, and we solved them in a particular way, I’ve no regrets about it.

[22:44]

Richard: sports, like me, not at all cultured, no, but sports, yeah. And bit of boxing, certainly rugby, cricket, came home in the sixth form or upper fifth or something, came home one Easter from boarding school, came home for the Easter holiday and I don’t know whether I asked the question or he offered it and I said, you know, are you all set for this summer term, and he said

Sir John Charnley Page 249 C1379/30 Track 15 well I’ve got something to tell you dad, I’m not going to play cricket any longer, I’m going to row. And Bedford is certainly a good rowing school on the river. Said, I’m going to row, so you know, what the hell. And said well, rowing is something you never did and you’ve been too keen to criticise my cricket so I’ve decided to do something you’ve never done.

How did you feel at that point?

My defence is, I don’t remember. [laughs] I don’t know. How did I feel at that point? Disappointed, disappointed is the phrase because as far as I was concerned, my remarks about his cricket were intended to improve his cricket, whereas I couldn’t make any contribution whatsoever to whatever he was doing at rowing, so really he was going down a path, quite rightly, that I knew nothing about. I was willing to go up and stand on the towpath at Bedford and watch what went on and hear of him afterwards, and this, that and the other. And let’s face it, you know, he finishes up of captain of boats at Bedford, so he’s a success at rowing in the school. Whether he would have been a success at cricket, I don’t know, who knows? Not something I want… But he was a success at rowing.

[25:15]

Now that leads on to, in his final year, I think this might have happened the year before his final year, in his final year at Bedford he then spends the summer term rowing rather than working for his A levels, so he doesn’t do well in his A levels and doesn’t… ah. In his final year, he’d always been keen on animals and his final year, as one of the off-curriculum activities, he was going round with a vet, around the Bedford farms and – he was boarding – and as long as it didn’t interfere with his rowing he was going round with a vet. And so he wanted to be a vet. But because he made a mess of his exams he didn’t get sufficient qualifications to enter a vet school – there were six of them, I don’t know what there are now, but it included Liverpool, my old place; Cambridge; Edinburgh; there were six of them – and the standards they wanted were higher in those days, whether they are now, than the standard you have for medical school. And he just wasn’t good enough. So the holiday came that summer and he’d finished school now, at least we had a heart to heart session as to why he’d made such a mess of things, in my language, and that, was I disappointed about his cricket, it didn’t enter into the disappointment I was about his results. So, you know, well you’ve made a mess of things Richard, what do you want to do? I want to fly. Okay, air force. Oh no, no, no, I want to fly civil, make some money. Well, okay,

Sir John Charnley Page 250 C1379/30 Track 15 and I was familiar with these sort of things in those days. That means training at Hamble, and to get into Hamble to train as a civil pilot you need two good A levels, you haven’t got them. Okay, between September and Christmas, whatever the year it was, he went to a crammer in London. I was going up and down to London, yeah… no. No, no, no, no, I’d left there. I was going up and down from here daily. We’re talking of 1970-ish. I was going up and down, I was in London, that’s right, gone back to… yeah, yeah, yeah. I was in London, going up and down from here and he and I were travelling up together for a term. And he got sufficient levels to be accepted by Hamble so he trained to be a civil airline pilot, and that’s what he did. And as of now he is a retired airline pilot that finished up flying 777... He started flying, as I mentioned right back in…

Autoland.

Autoland days, he was in Tridents at the time when I was helping solve the all-weather landing problem and he was doing Tridents at that stage. Then BEA was amalgamated and so on and so on and so on, and he fetched up flying 777s. Didn’t go to university as a result of all of that. Didn’t, I don’t think it bothered him one little bit, I don’t think it allowed him any lack of sleep at all, that his sister did and she made a success of it without a doubt.

[29:29]

And there’s another little story there – this is going is it – because when she got her maths degree at Loughborough, she went on the trawl around as to where she might work. She’d done a year in Germany, I’d fixed that for her with one of the German scientists; she went to northern Germany for twelve months, so she came back fully German speaking if need be.

One of the German scientists at the RAE?

That’s right, that’s right. He’d gone home, Karl Doetsch. He’d gone back to… [Braunschweig] well, the place from where he came, but certainly… And I, through him made contact with the German arm of a company that was represented in this country in Baker Street, their headquarters. Metal Box, Metal Box Company, and she worked for the Metal Box Company in Germany for twelve months, came back and joined them in this country in Baker Street, so lived in London. And before going into Metal Box, in this country, she had applied to British

Sir John Charnley Page 251 C1379/30 Track 15

Aerospace, or whatever they were at the time, and they had, they’d been very slow in replying, in the course of which she’d taken this job with Metal Box. After two years she got an enquiry from – not an enquiry – a note from British Aerospace saying it’s two years since you last applied to us, we like the look of you, we’re involved with Germany, your command of the German language that you claim would be a great advantage to us as well as your technical background. It’s two years since you applied, it may be that by now you’re looking for a change, after two years in your present job, would you like to come and see us or can we come and see you. And she joined British Aerospace at Preston, where, the aeroplane was, the Tornado and she got involved with the Tornado up at Preston, met her husband up there and so on. So you’ve got both a son and a daughter, that her career was quite straightforward, Richard’s was more difficult because of the interest in sport. I can fast forward; he then joins the airline and as a keen sporting bloke, in no time flat almost, is captain of British Airways ski team, where they were playing all the other European airline – about six or eight of them; Lufthansa and Swiss Air, Air France, di-da-di-da-di-da, and [laughs] he never did tell me how many clubs were in this outfit, but when I said, how well are you doing? It was something like, oh we’re six or we’re eight. Well how many are there in the competition? Eight, you see. [laughs] So why don’t you say you’re the bottom. Doesn’t sound as good dad, no, no, no. Anyway, that was a funny answer – what was the question that led to all of that?

I was wondering what you wanted your children to do when they were older.

Well there’s an answer.

Yes.

And that’s right, did I feel they were neglected because I was so busy with my work? The answer, I’m satisfied with the way they turned out. You know, if I neglected them, then their own strength of character saw them through. But in all of it, let me leave you in no doubt, my wife was the lynchpin at home, whether it was in Bedford to start with or whether it was down here, she was terrific. Yeah. Richard started life, as I say, in nineteen fifty… did I say ’51 or whatever? Yeah. January ’51, by the time he got to school age we were in Bedford, or near enough Bedford, and he went to the little village school and it was just that, a little village school down by the station. It was a footpath away from the bungalow that we had rented. This was at Martlesham Heath now, to start with, and that, I was very well pleased with that little village

Sir John Charnley Page 252 C1379/30 Track 15 school at Martlesham, very well pleased indeed, and went straight from there to the inky department of Bedford School itself. And the inky department, there was a Miss Davis.

The what department, sorry?

Inky. The nippers, the youngsters. It was called, they made such a mess of everything they were the inky. [laughs] And they were whatever, from seven, seven to eleven or whatever, whatever, whatever. And he just stayed at the school but then went from being a day boy to boarding when we came down here in ’63.

Interesting that he goes on to become an airline pilot, given your line of work I suppose, and your daughter as well with the…

Oh yes, you could see, because there was so much talked around the house here and pilots would come and talk and be with us. Yeah. Our friends were of that sort, their children, you know, they… Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wouldn’t say it’s the same, but so many doctors are children of doctors.

[36:00] While we’re on the subject of pilots and flying though, I was wondering about the flying aspect of your work at the RAE, you mentioned a few times that you, on sort of test flights with actual dropping bombs for instance and testing navigation systems, heads-up displays.

Yeah.

I was just wondering, what was the benefit of you going along for those flights? Doesn’t sound much like a management job, it’s a bit more hands-on.

Yeah. Oh yes. Yeah, well it started in Aero Flight. I mean you’ve picked up areas that have happened when I transferred across from almost the airframe world into the equipment world. Now, when I was in the airframe world, in Aero Flight, Aero F, I was flying then. Sometimes for flight experience so that I could hold my own with the pilots just about, you know, what flying an aeroplane was all about. I never went on a flying course. Dennis Higton did. I never did and I don’t know why that would be, I don’t know. It… I don’t know, just didn’t seem to

Sir John Charnley Page 253 C1379/30 Track 15 think I could climb into an aeroplane, sit alongside the pilot, we could get so far, we’d get airborne and then he’d say, alright John, it’s all yours. And that didn’t present me with a problem. And then of course when it came to landing it wasn’t me at all. But I did a bit of flying. I can, you know, quoting examples of why – and Higton will tell you about our flights in a Fortress with, I think he was in the upper turret and I was in the lower turret, and I can’t think right now why we were flying in a fortress, there was some job that was being done that we were concerned with. I can remember in my work with the Spitfire – difficult to explain this. Difficult to explain. I think I’ve made the point that the wind tunnels were choking near the speed of sound, therefore you couldn’t believe the results from the wind tunnel, therefore you needed to examine the characteristics of aircraft in flight, therefore it meant even in flight with a powerful Spitfire, it meant climbing to 40,000 feet and diving down. Now once you started diving down in the Spitfire, in any aeroplane, you were changing your height so quickly that the instruments on the panel and the instruments you were using from a record to illustrate what speed the aeroplane was going to, there was a lag in those pipes so that the thing you were seeing on the instrument display was different from the actual speed you were going. And there was therefore a need to arrange for some other means of establishing just how fast the Spitfire was going than relying upon the altimeter or of taking pictures of the Spitfire coming downhill, losing height, and at the same time take a picture of the aeroplane and a picture in the aircraft of what the instruments were saying so that when, if you could see the aeroplane going past at 25,000 feet and the instruments were only saying, were saying ah, this bloke’s still at 26,000 feet, you could then correct to get the right speed of the aeroplane to then attempt to co-relate that with the wind tunnel experiments. So there was a need to take some photographs of a Spitfire going downhill at something like 25,000 feet. So we had a Lancaster and I went up in the Lancaster and sat in the rear turret, open, all the glass was out of the bloomin’ rear turret, I was wrapped up in all sorts of woollies with a big, big camera and the Spitfire was positioned, I’d be going along shall I say like this, and the Spitfire was positioned to dive down just behind the Lanc and when it got to the same height as the Lanc I switched my camera on, pressed the button for my camera, which took a photograph of the Spitfire going past and started the instruments going in the aeroplane. So there was a radio link between me in the Lancaster and the aeroplane. So there was I, sitting in a Lancaster, in the fresh air, at 25,000 feet for half an hour or so at a time waiting for this Spitfire to come past or switching this camera on when it did go past. And then, waiting for him to climb up again and do it, and so on. So I was airborne for quite long times in the fresh air in a Lan… And old Dennis Higton will talk to you, if you go and see him, he’ll talk to you about this, about when John was in the Lanc. So I’d done flying

Sir John Charnley Page 254 C1379/30 Track 15 and then sitting alongside in the Mosquito where it got to… Before I got involved in guided weapons, in Aero Flight we were dropping, drop bodies, inert, there was no engine in them but we were dropping them again because the wind tunnels weren’t giving the answers, we needed to do things in flight. You’d push just a projectile underneath a Mosquito, climb the Mosquito upstairs and within the projectile itself you’d have, you’d release it, it would go through the speed of sound on the way down, you’d have instruments in it to give you warnings. You were finding all sorts of ways of getting information around the speed of sound because you couldn’t use the wind tunnel. So the Higtons, the Charnleys, Smelts, Smiths, our little unit were all devising other means of getting that sort of information.

[43:10] What was the value later on in your career when you were sort of flying…

Of flying, of flying?

…with the heads-up display for instance or the…

Well, I must go now to when I went to BLEU and to some extent head-up display there, but before that, flying into Heathrow at four o’clock in the morning in thick fog, when I was airborne and you could see the lights of Heathrow and you could understand how difficult it was to extract information. And Heathrow had a very good approach lighting pattern and a landing pattern and – well, I’m not sure whether it did then, we had that at Bedford – but an approach lighting pattern and as you saw, you could see these glimmers of where the runway was, but you couldn’t extract either lateral information or vertical information out of what you saw. Now to have that facility yourself meant that when I was talking on the international platform with airline pilots, I would have more experience of flying in fog than many of the airline pilots who were expressing an opinion as to how easy it was, or so on and so on and so on. So yeah, it paid off that I was airworthy, if you like. No regrets. None whatever, no, no, no.

[44:43]

And then with Taffy Ecclestone in the Meteor that related to Korea. This was where – I mentioned this? 1952/53 Korea and the Americans were using F-86s and we were using Meteors and we weren’t doing very well, and indeed we were breaking them, the Meteors. I say we,

Sir John Charnley Page 255 C1379/30 Track 15 that’s the RAF, because they were attacking ground targets and then they were pulling away and in the pull away, if they exceeded x gs, whatever x might be, the wings came off. Doesn’t help. So we were asked to take a look at this in Aero Flight and twin-seat Meteor and a fighter pilot, Taffy Ecclestone, a ground attack pilot, and so we put some instruments and some measuring equipment on a Meteor, twin-seat Meteor, and I sat behind him in this case; he was upfront, I was behind, and we climb out over Boscombe Down or Bristol or somewhere over there and somewhere about Boscombe start a descent against a target that had been put out on the airfield at Farnborough for us from whatever, 15,000 feet or something. Taffy says right, we’re off John, we’re down, we’re going down, and to start with you can’t see much of the target but then, as it gets closer, you suddenly see the target, and I could see this from behind, and suddenly here’s Taffy Ecclestone going, tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat , and then we’re on top of the target and oh, and we pull away and you think dear God, I hope these wings aren’t going to fall off and, you know. What was that? Oh, he said, five G. Five. And how far are we going? We ought to go a bit further, you know, we ought to go a bit further. We didn’t. I’d had enough. It wasn’t that I’d had enough but I was conscious… at least let me put it this way as I think back, I wanted to see the results at five G before I went any further and I could persuade myself and others that we’d got enough at five G to tell us what should be done about it and there was no need to go any further until we’d done something.

Did you ever do the maths that would have suggested what would have happened at more than five G?

Erm, no. No, no, no, I didn’t, no. And Taffy went to Handley Page, he left the air force, went as a test pilot to Handley Page and killed himself. It’s not an answer to your question.

[end of track 15]

Sir John Charnley Page 256 C1379/30 Track 16

[Track 16]

When we finished off last time we discussed the situation where you were asked to leave RAE. I was wondering after all those years spent there how you felt about the move to London, or the prospect of it at this point?

It wasn’t a surprise, that’s the first thing to say, that when I moved back to Farnborough in 1963 from Bedford a move up to London was from then on was inevitable at some stage and it was now 1968 and the director had changed from James Lighthill to Bob Cockburn. I had been at RAE for twenty-five years – 1943 to 1968 – different places, as I’ve said, but really I had been on the books of RAE for that time and it was inevitable that a change was in the minds of those people who might have had an interest in me and my career. So Wilson was the Prime Minister and his catchword, if that’s the phrase, was ‘the white hot technological revolution’ that he thought was necessary for the country and as part of that there was technology in defence as a whole, which it was thought ought to be made more available to the commercial, civilian industry. So within the Ministry of Technology in London – and the Minister there was Wedgwood Benn – a little group was set up to exploit defence technologies into the non-defence industries. And George Macfarlane had been moved up from Malvern to run this group and I was moved from Farnborough to be part of his little outfit and I went up there with the title Head of Research Planning, Head RP, under Sir George Macfarlane. The Permanent Secretary of the department, Mintech, was Otto Clarke. And there’s a little story right away I suppose, that almost within days of going up to London I was asked by his office to provide him with a brief for a meeting he had to go to and really without being given much advice by anyone I set to and produced a piece that I thought suited, would suit well for the particular meeting – I can’t remember the meeting now – and felt fairly well satisfied with what I’d done. But after the meeting he asked me to go and see him and then tore me off a strip in the finest of words saying what a mess it was, that it wasn’t in the form, didn’t I know the way he liked his briefs and didn’t cover the points in the way that he expected them to be covered, di-da-di-da-di-da-di-da. It was a real tearing off a strip, so I went home that night saying to Mary, well that’s my career gone for a burton and I’ve not done very well in my first two or three days in London. Went in the following morning and my lass, my secretary said, Sir Otto wants to see you again. And I thought oh, I don’t believe this. Went along there and he got up from his desk to welcome me into his office and I thought that’s a bit strange, and he apologised for behaving so badly, he hadn’t been told that I had just arrived and that I was a scientist, a technical man. He really said

Sir John Charnley Page 257 C1379/30 Track 16 the fault wasn’t mine, the fault was of those that were already in London that ought to have given me some advice as to how he liked the stuff done and apologised most sincerely for being so rude the previous evening. After that we were the best of friends, he and I, and we met at this, that and the other. He was a chess player, I was an old chess player, and so on. There were things in common; he’s a mathematician. Now I wouldn’t claim to be a mathematician, but there we are. No, it was a little incident that certainly was my arrival in London. Thereto after, I was asked to go and see the Minister for the first time, Mr Wedgwood Benn. He had been told about this apparently and he had a little joke, a little laugh about it with me and said that he now understood the way the Permanent Secretary liked his work done. So [laughs] the whole thing was quite a, a little entertaining the way in which it turned out, it could have been different. So that’s a little story about my arrival in Mintech, the Ministry of Technology.

[06:18]

I was there for something like eighteen months I think. I think, yeah, about that sort of thing, in the course of which I became much more aware of the civilian R&D sectors, more aware of the part by DSIR, Department of Scientific and Industrial – DSIR – and that meant NPL, National Physical Laboratory, which I’d always known was, and indeed knew of their work in wind tunnels from my previous Aero Department background, but became more involved with their non-aerodynamic activities on standards, on precision, on clocks, very accurate clocks and their links into the civilian sector, which – and the universities. And so in the course of that period… I then had, as I say, research planning, my job was to try to take some of these things that had come out of RAE; carbon fibres, some electronics and stimulate the use of these in the non- defence areas. As such, I put my weight behind… what were the… just a moment, I’ve got a note somewhere. The, oh yes that’s right, the work on air cushion vehicles.

Hovercraft?

Hovercraft. Hovercraft on the one hand, and also Imperial College were doing some work on magnetic…

Maglev?

Sir John Charnley Page 258 C1379/30 Track 16

Maglev, that’s right. So I got to know those, when I say got to know, and certainly supported them, made visits and supported them. On the… the… not maglev, the other one?

Hovercraft?

On the hovercraft – goodness me – company down on the Isle of Wight, Fairey’s.

Saunders-Roe?

[09:10] Saunders-Roe, as you say - well done, thank you – and Fairey’s were active in that area and it looked as if Saunders-Roe would be the better thought, but we did provide a bit of support to each of them, certainly, both companies. And as far as the maglev was concerned we set up a little bit of railway track in east of Cambridge somewhere, where that sort of thing could be researched by IC. I think I’ve got that right. The hovercraft side was much more successful and we did back that quite strongly. I can’t remember figures, but certainly I remember being well pleased with some of the work that was going on at Saunders-Roe. Maurice Brennan, I think was involved. I think Maurice was. And of course, since then it has gone on to be quite, I don’t know what in terms of exports, but certainly some were sold quite around the world in different places, the advantage being that the thing was transport, either on water or you could run on to the beach and run up the beach and therefore that had advantages in certain locations. So it was a good… and a great idea, very pleased with that one.

[10:52] What did you think the prospects were for hovercraft at that time in the late sixties? Were you thinking in terms of civilian use, military use?

Oh yes, both. But principally civilian use. The military use was elsewhere, that was not in my remit now. But I knew that the military were interested, certainly, that the marines, the Marine Corps were interested on the military side. On the civilian side, you could see opportunities in parts of Canada, parts of… rivers in jungle, rivers in forestrys, opening up new territories that hadn’t been possible before with something that went both on the rivers and on the land. So I’d have to go back to Saunders-Roe I think, as the people who were looking at it commercially in

Sir John Charnley Page 259 C1379/30 Track 16 that sense, but certainly it was something which our Minister, Wedgwood Benn, was very keen to support at that time.

[12:15]

A completely different activity was fish freezing and there was a research establishment at Aberdeen, Aberdeen, that was used for freezing fish that had been caught before it was sold at market. I think that was the way it went. But the aim was to convert some big trawlers to do that at sea before it was landed and therefore the frozen fish – cleaned, ready for market – could go straight for sale. Now I didn’t know anything about this at all other than it sounded like a good idea to me and it needed a bit of backing. But it gave me the opportunity of a night at sea doing North Sea fishing, which was completely different from anything I’d ever thought of doing, ever thought I’d have the opportunity to do at all, and getting myself involved with these people who were de-gutting and cleaning fish. The sort of thing that you see pictures of women doing in the market, this was now moving it on to the ship before it landed.

Why moving it on to the ship? Why moving it on to the ship?

Oh, to get a quicker… I think it gave a quicker delivery to the market because by the time you landed, you came into port, then you’ve got fish already frozen, already cleaned, all ready to go into the market for immediate sale to wherever, wherever, wherever. And the ship that the… the ship itself can turn round that much more quickly, off it goes again. It speeded up, they said, the whole process, and to that extent they wanted to go down that route. So that was something else we supported.

So they actually sent you off to visit a trawler overnight doing that?

That’s right, a trawler visit overnight. Yeah, you’re quite right. Another area that I then got involved with, and I can’t think why, there’s a hydraulics unit down near Oxford somewhere, a hydraulics R&D place. Can’t go down there, don’t remember it.

[15:10]

Sir John Charnley Page 260 C1379/30 Track 16

The disappointment, the big disappointment, and I’m talking 1969 now was already it was common knowledge that there was oil and gas under the North Sea and the debate was how to get at it, the best way to do it, how to set up the particular sites on land, the lines, and the equipment for drilling, either exploratory or when you’ve done the exploration, then the whole business of a production run for oil or gas, or oil and gas. And that was the thing that I really enjoyed doing, but I went… Our shipbuilding industry was having a hard time and it seemed to me that, not just to me but to Mintech generally, that our shipbuilding industry would be keen to start a new facility of building oil platforms and drilling and all the equipment, the heavy stuff that was needed for drilling the North Sea. So I went to a number of the… in the… the north east industry, Newcastle and further south, shipbuilding area that I’d been to from a defence point of view. Anyway… river, river…

Tyne?

Begins with an ‘m’. Forgotten, forgotten, sorry. And the disappointment was, and I’d got government money in my pocket, essentially, for some R&D to be done on the right sort of equipment for doing this, that and the other, can’t remember it now. What’s around the Doncaster… no, further north than that. Another big river associated with shipbuilding and marine technology, which is what this is. Don’t know. But no, the industry just wasn’t interested. And this… I was now in the commercial world for the first time and was being exposed to the relationship between manufacturing industry, the City, the financiers, the banks, how they got their money, the industry and their story was that for them to persuade the City to invest in this sort of area, the return was not likely to arrive for far too much into the future and they really were, at that stage the City was really interested in a return in something like two to three years’ time and after that they weren’t prepared to invest. Now, that was the late sixties and it bothered me no end about the relationship between our own manufacturing industry on a long term basis... I’d been used to long term projects in aircraft of course, ten, fifteen years in many ways, but when you came to the commercial world, anything on that sort of timescale was a no-go, a no-go area. So, what did we do? The platforms that we started with, and I don’t know if they’re still the same, don’t know, were really, they came from America and they were the sort of thing which was used in the Gulf of Mexico and not all of them were really appropriate for North Sea conditions, but by the time that was all sorted through, I had left Mintech and was back in defence. But it was a big disappointment to me that the prospects were there but they weren’t on a short enough timescale for the money to be… and also, I’ll make the other point,

Sir John Charnley Page 261 C1379/30 Track 16 that I was a government official, a civil servant, coming along with government money in my pocket to do some research and development, research essentially, and as far as they were concerned there must be a catch in it somewhere and they didn’t really, they kept asking, what’s the catch, you know. You’ve got government money you’re offering us, what’s the catch? This was very different from a defence field. So it was all…

[20:57]

The other thing about that area, not just that area, but Mintech as of my exposure to that sort of R&D in the industry more generally, you didn’t quite know who, in the sense that they were dictated by a market and the sales into a market, abroad more than anything – sorry, more importantly – you didn’t know who your customer was to be talking to, to understand what the requirements might be for this, that or the other. Hovercraft is an example. Now what was the market, where was it likely to be. You couldn’t get a very positive, definite answer in the way that I was used to getting an answer in the defence field by talking to the OR, the Operational Requirements people, and you knew who to talk to, you could get an answer. You might not agree with it, but that was the point, you could then debate or argue. Now when you went into this other area, into the civil world, very difficult to get that sort of dialogue going in a sensible way. Now behind all of that of course there were the universities and we were linking into the universities as well, but they really weren’t commercially orientated to any great extent and part of the job of research planning was persuading them to become more involved in the commercial world. So it wasn’t, it wasn’t a period that I enjoyed. Put it the other way, I was very glad to get back to defence where (a) I knew more about it, (b) I knew who I was talking to and I could understand and extract more specifically the requirements for bits of kit, whether they were navigation, whether they were missiles, whatever. I knew where to go, I was happier and I went back into defence as the Deputy Controller for Guided Missiles, DCGW, and felt much happier now I was back in the sort of area that I had left to go up to London, when I was running some guided missile work down at Farnborough. So I was much happier in this role. Still in London obviously, but responsible now for, as part of the procurement executive, for the procurement of guided missiles for all three services.

So I suppose at least you knew who your customers were in that case.

Exactly. Oh, exactly, that’s right.

Sir John Charnley Page 262 C1379/30 Track 16

After that short little interlude into the civilian world, it just sounds like defence is so much more defined in comparison to it.

Yeah, that’s right. That’s it. That’s in a sentence exactly that. As far as I was concerned, certainly. And there would be those people that would enjoy the challenge of not having it as precisely defined as I liked. So I’m not saying it was wrong, it certainly opened my eyes, but I think my big disappointment was the attitude of manufacturing industry in some cases, in some areas, to be almost suspicious of something the government wanted done.

Can we talk a bit more about the Minitech part of it? I’ve been jotting down questions as I’ve been going along as always and there’s just so many little things that have come up I’ve wanted to ask you about. Just wondering where to start actually. Could pick up on the hovercraft as one…

I thought this would be an area that you’d pick on. Yeah, this little period in there that I wasn’t too happy with, but go on.

[25:15] Let’s return to that point about you not being happy in that situation, but having other people there who were. I was just thinking, what sort of other people, what was their background compared to yours?

George Macfarlane was ex-Malvern and he was… and he was senior to me and George maybe had had more experience of this sort of thing as the Director of Malvern before he went up to London. So he was more relaxed, and he was a more relaxed person anyway than me. We knew each other. So he was more relaxed. One of the other people, and I’ve forgotten his name, was the man that Otto Clarke thought ought to have given me advice on how to prepare a brief for him. I’ve forgotten his name, but he was a prickly character, he was an administrator, he was an admin boy, Richard something, forgotten, Richard… And he was really the admin man in the little group. Peter Twinn was in the group as well. It was just a small group and they could, I would think, the administrator didn’t have a problem, but the others, Twinn was an administrator as well, as an Assistant Secretary. The one, the man I’m trying to think of was an Under Secretary, an AUS, and then Peter Twinn was there as Assistant Secretary. And he sometimes

Sir John Charnley Page 263 C1379/30 Track 16 would come with me and we knew each other because he’d been the Secretary at RAE. So… he’s dead now I think.

An administration secretary then or…

At RAE?

Yeah.

Was a Secretary of the Establishment.

That’s on the administration side?

On the administration side. Oh yes. Yes, yes, yes. Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, there were other people that were comfortable with it and of course the way in which it had been done before was a lot of it through DSIR and NPL, as I think back now, and they were all used to that way of working. It wasn’t sharp enough, it wasn’t precise enough, it wasn’t sharp enough, it didn’t go quickly enough for me and that sounds strange doesn’t it, when you’ve been concerned with projects that last fifteen years or something. But no, no, no. It didn’t suit me. Whether it’s the right way of doing business, now you may, I don’t know.

That touches on one of the other things I meant to ask about as well, sort of moving to headquarters, Minitech in that situation, difference between the scientific branch of the civil service, who I guess you were very familiar with from the RAE and the administrative branch.

What’s the question?

I was just wondering, what was the difference from your point of view from going into that environment? What do you think that both of them had to contribute?

[pause] Different ways of answering this one. One way, a cynical way of doing it, but the administrator regarding himself as protecting his Minister and making sure that his Minister was doing the right sort of thing in relation to policy. I was not as clear-minded that, if I thought the Minister was doing something that I didn’t agree with, I would say so. But – and that happened.

Sir John Charnley Page 264 C1379/30 Track 16

But I found that the administrative generally were not sufficiently strong in their views, if they didn’t agree with the way in which things were going, the direction in which things were going. They would make points but they didn’t make them strongly enough, to my way of thinking. Now, at this time the Perm Sec in defence, certainly when I was CGWL, was Frank Cooper, a man for whom I had a great regard. And he and I – it might have been a bit… no, it was when I was DCDW – he’d call me along to his office of an evening to have a drink and chat about this sort of thing, because he felt very strongly that there weren’t enough scientifically, technically qualified people in government departments as a whole, but particularly in defence where so much of the funding related to efficient defence equipment. And we’d got a strong set of establishments – we’ll come to this later on maybe – twelve of them, covering all the various elements of technology related to the services, and I can spell the twelve out when I think about it, and he felt that they weren’t sufficiently represented in London. They weren’t sufficiently strongly represented in London, there weren’t almost enough of them and what would I do, what could I do, and at that stage as DCDW, not a lot because there was a Controller of Establishments Research. It was his job, and I’ll come to that later because I’m in that post. But the point I was making to Cooper, even as CGWL, was that in the administrative structure, a bright chap - there was a fast stream, administrative – and so the bright young man after his university, which might have been in classics, for instance, but he’s bright, his thought processes are right, he joins the civil service and he goes into a fast stream and before very long it’s right to have him say, in the outer office of a Perm Sec or the outer office of a Minister getting the experience of that sort of thing. So that’s when he’s in his late twenties or about thirty. Now on the technical side, that’s when I could not agree that. My bright scientist or technical person at that stage should be in a lab working as a scientist because he’s now got a bit of experience, that’s his career, and (a) he wouldn’t be good in London and (b) he shouldn’t be in London and (c) he wouldn’t thank you for coming up to London into a semi-admin post, he wants to be in the lab. So you have this dilemma of around the thirty age, you’ve got the scientists that I don’t want in London and you’ve got the administrator, the bright administrator, who is making his way up the chain. So you have an asymmetry between the two chains of people which I don’t think is easy to solve, frankly. Don’t think it’s easy to solve. So my administrative friends, yeah, they taught me how to write, they taught me how to construct a sentence, and for that I’m grateful to them. And some I enjoyed, some I didn’t enjoy. Some didn’t see the need for technical people, or scientists if you like, even in a scientific department like defence, but there we are. As I say, Frank Cooper from all his experience, he could see the need for them and wanted more, but to…

Sir John Charnley Page 265 C1379/30 Track 16

[34:26]

One thing I did when I was later, and you’ve asked me a question really which is more appropriate to coming later, but I had twelve, as Controller of the Defence Establishments, there were twelve of them and I used to go and visit one of them every month, very definitely. It was convenient that that’s the way it happened, twelve, twelve. And they all knew, in one way or another, they all knew that I was not prepared to appoint the Director of an Establishment who hadn’t served in London for a period, so that they were familiar with the London scene, they knew the problems that related to defence links into the Treasury, or defence links with the Treasury, and so when they thought that as a Director of Establishment they were having a rough time, they couldn’t get the money they wanted, or if they could get the money it was designated for staff on the one hand, or the control over staff numbers as well as a control over money. And as far as they were concerned, they were running an establishment and both money and staff were the resources that they wanted to have control of. And, you know, if they’d been in London they could understand no, they were handled separately by staff numbers on the one hand and money on the other and for the Director of an Establishment to handle those as a combined resource, they needed to have been in London to appreciate that particular point because there was one particular Director who had been responsible for managing a major project, a major aircraft project, that when he was then appointed to be head of an Establishment and found that he didn’t have control, complete control over the resources, whether they were men or money, gave him great difficulty.

Did he last long as a head of department?

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, we found a way of working.

I’d ask you who it was, but I suspect you won’t want to tell me, but if you do I’d be interested in knowing.

Well, when we’re talking…

Sir John Charnley Page 266 C1379/30 Track 16

What was the argument about not having scientists in technological departments like the MoD? You mentioned that some people were against the idea on the administration side, they didn’t see the need for having scientists, or scientific civil servants there.

[pause] I would guess the argument was, or the view was, that there were these Estab… We’re nearly on to when I was CER, rather than when I was running guided weapons projects in London, buying on behalf of the services, because… But I’ll take this point now. There were twelve Establishments and in total that was 28,000 people, of which about half of them were scientists or engineers and the rest were supporting staff; secretaries, running the Establishments and catering and all the rest of the supporting facilities, which important they are, but they were not the productive part. And the administrators felt that they could run that outfit from London without the need for technical people up there to do it. The technical people were out in the field down in the Establishments and they could run those by controlling the purse strings really. And the staff and they were… you see… you’ve got a Treasury link in here, you know, we’re talking more broadly about the relationship of government R&D at the moment, which is different in different areas, because now I’d seen something of the civil world as well as the, the civil R&D world as well as the defence R&D world, so again, different. Shouldn’t… yeah it should be, should be. As I say, defence to me has got a clear – it’s a bit blurred now and again – but it’s a clear procurement process, whereas the commercial, the non-defence world is more diffuse. Now we’ve wandered off a lot from guided missiles.

I’ve still got one or two other questions I was going to…

Yes, go on.

[40:08] It’s in relation to this actually. I was thinking that as, you know, a senior scientific civil servant in that environment, are you treated any differently from an administrative civil servant at your level?

By whom?

Let’s take other civil servants, for instance. There are connotations attached to being a scientific civil servant.

Sir John Charnley Page 267 C1379/30 Track 16

Don’t really understand the question Tom.

I guess the question I’m really wondering is, are experts treated differently at that level?

Again, by whom? Because at that level there… are they treated differently? In the sense, yeah, yes. Yes, I suppose the answer has to be, if you’re asking, are the few scientific civil servants at that level amongst a much greater number of administrative civil servants, then you are different and you think differently, yes. Yes, yes. That’s, you know, that’s why Frank Cooper wanted you there in defence, because you did think differently. There was a period, again when I was CER, when I went with him, I was the defence representative, with him on a government committee, really a Permanent Secretary’s committee, and when I was Controller of the R&D Establishments, CER, Cooper insisted that I went to that meeting along with him because he wanted to show that defence had senior people at that level with Permanent Secretaries of other departments. And I was alone on that, as a… What was it? Did I mention in here somewhere? Oh, I’m sure somewhere I’ve… There we are, there we are, the MoD representative – I might have been on my own then – MoD representative on the Cabinet Office Science and Technology Committee. Now, although it was a Cabinet Office Science and Technology Committee, there weren’t many other scientists on it from the other departments, is my memory, you know. I’m talking now Tom, what, 1970s, we’re talking forty years ago, 1970s, yeah.

I guess I just found it interesting, the idea of being a scientific civil servant, you know, there are almost two jobs going on there.

Well…

There’s the civil service part of it and there’s the science part of it and yet you have people who are only one or the other.

Yeah.

And I wonder what it’s like mixing in both those worlds, as it were.

Sir John Charnley Page 268 C1379/30 Track 16

Well the man that made the transfer across very successfully, Jim Hamilton was in Aero Department at RAE, went up to London as DG Concorde in London and transferred across in some way, and I can’t remember it now, I can’t remember the detail, and became the Perm Sec in Department of Education and Science. And Jim I know very well. He’s not very well, sorry, he’s not very well in health now, used to live in Farnborough when he was in RAE and when he was in London. Has retired now. Is he the same age as me? Same age, near enough, and he lives down in the… not as far as Chichester, town towards the south coast, big place, cathedral city. Winchester. So Jim is down there now. But he went, I think he went straight from RAE to be DG Concorde and that, to my knowledge made a success of that and made himself known around the corridors of Whitehall and was made Perm Sec in another department from the defence department and I think retired from that, retired from there. Not many others have done that, and I certainly didn’t.

Very much out of choice by the sounds of it.

[45:55] Can I ask you, again, one or two more questions about Minitech. I was just wondering what you thought of Tony Benn, what was he like to work with?

[laughs] [pause] What was he like to work with? I think that in the sense that he was the spearhead of the Prime Minister’s launch into getting our own industry in better, more up-to-date – let me put it different… - more up-to-date in their approach to the ‘white hot technological revolution’, that was what it was all about and I’m sure there are all sorts of records, and Tony Benn was the spearhead for that. And one thing I can remember that he did and I think probably very successfully, and that’s where some of my activity came from, he ran a day or a couple of days’ conference on marine technology and that’s where the fish processing came from. It’s also where the hovercraft to some extent came from. I think they were both going beforehand but he put an urge behind them. So he did that sort of thing very well. I had no trouble, I hope I wasn’t a trouble to him. I didn’t always agree, now you’re going to ask me what didn’t I agree on, so I’m careful of making remarks like this. He would listen, certainly. I’m not saying he was always persuaded, but he would listen and would certainly listen to his Permanent Secretary, to Otto Clarke. No, he, I think he did a good job when he was there. But I was glad to be out of it. I didn’t have any trouble working for him, no, and the chain was either through George Macfarlane and then the Perm Sec and Minister of Perm Sec, George and myself. But I didn’t

Sir John Charnley Page 269 C1379/30 Track 16 see too much of him in the sense of working for, it had been his views maybe had softened up a little. No, didn’t have a great problem.

Just one specific question I was wondering about was one I asked a little while ago, which was in terms of were experts treated differently, I was wondering how he reacted to sort of expert advice and technical detail, that sort of thing?

Willing to listen. Generally… now you see, was the Wilileaks [Wikileaks] leaking business. Generally liked to assume that he knew more than he really did on the technical front, I would say. But as I say, would listen, would hear what you had… he didn’t attempt to cut you off or that sort of thing, in what you were trying to say, provided you presented a well argued case, he would listen. And sometimes yeah, accept and other times no, so that’s why I say didn’t have difficulty with the way in which he treated affairs with which I was concerned. I would generally have a good idea beforehand which way he was going to go and that made, you then made up your mind whether you wanted to make an issue of it or whether you were going to accept that no, no, no, you’re not going to dig in on this one, or whatever. [pause] I don’t… he was probably… No, no. I was trying to think, did I get closer to him than I did to any other Defence Minister, and the answer is no. I was trying to think of who the Defence Minister I was closer to, was Heseltine. But no, no, no. So although I was up there and it was a fairly senior position, I didn’t see too much of Ministers, which is perhaps just as well.

[51:35] When you think of the overall, you know, the mission of the Ministry of Technology taking R&D out of the research establishments into industry, it sounded like you had one or two reservations in the way it was actually carried out, but I was thinking about the more overall idea of it.

You’re touching on the very broad question of relationship between government and industry aren’t you, and government, one sector of government would be the function of R&D within that, of government R&D or just R&D and does government get involved with it and how does it relate to the private sector business. And it’s… there is a place, it’s the same as in the defence field in a way, I can see differences, but liken the two as to whether it’s defence or non-defence. There’s fundamental basic research, opening up new avenues, new thoughts, new thinking, uninhibited thinking, universities in other words, in my language. That’s the function of the universities. You’ve then got industry who are concerned with exploitation, marketing, making a

Sir John Charnley Page 270 C1379/30 Track 16 profit, contributing tax-wise, however. And in between there’s the business of converting the fundamental thinking and the ideas into marketable products and that is where on things that haven’t necessarily got, as yet, a commercial exploitation, I think that’s where government has a place, in the middle there, as I say, in the middle. It’s a continuous line and there’s a function for government in there, particularly on those things where – and this is where the debate – when industry doesn’t feel yet that it’s reached the stage of them putting their money in it, even if they’ve got some research activity of their own, within their own company. And that varies so much from say, the pharmaceutical industry on the one hand and the defence industry that do a lot of their own, to other areas where I don’t think there is the same dedication to doing their own R&D, not set up the same way. But there’s a function for government and government funding and government work, government sponsored work, and that can be done in the universities, with more of it being done there, that can be done by funding the manufacturing sector, yes, but somewhere in there, whether it’s within their own research activities, DSIR, MoD, whatever, there are different ways of playing it then, but there is a function there for government. But different ways of playing it. I don’t know if that answers the question.

The question that occurred to me was, well possible examples of that, would things like maglev and hovercraft, for instance, be within that mould do you think?

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yes, they were in that mould. Yeah. I can’t answer other than that, yes. Yes, that was why I was willing to in Mintech – well not willing, but was convinced – that they were things which should be, and still – I don’t know what’s happened to maglev now, is it still going?

I think there are some places that actually have maglev trains. I think the only example that was built in Britain may have been at Birmingham. Don’t think that’s operating any more. I could be very wrong.

I’m not aware of anything actually operating. We had a length of line in, as I say, somewhere round Cambridge which was used for more work but I don’t know just where it all got to and why it didn’t or whatever, don’t know.

[57:13]

Sir John Charnley Page 271 C1379/30 Track 16

The hovercraft, what’s the name that’s associated with it?

Cockerell?

Cockcroft [sic], that’s right. He had done, and in that sense it’s different, in the sense that he’d done the work, he’d had the original idea, but needed supporting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which I was very willing, very pleased to do.

Was he someone you actually met yourself in the course of this?

Yeah. Yes, yes, yes. Didn’t get close to him at all in the way that I did with defence industries, didn’t think of him in that sense. No, good man, yeah.

What sort of support – was it purely financial or were there technical things there as well? Let’s take the hovercraft as an example perhaps.

[pause] The one obvious thing that comes to mind, and dear God, it is so long ago, you’re really taxing me, the material for the cushions was something that came out of defence. Simple as that, if you like. When the vehicles moved up on to the beach, shall I say, after the water, they were wearing out, just the abrasion. And with some defence experience, and I can’t think of who it was, but certainly we got a tougher material. Now what it is now, I’ve no idea. But then, certainly, there was an improvement in the wear and tear on the material. What else was there? Anything that comes to mind? Nothing on the blowers, they were all… No, no, no. No, nothing. I can’t remember, don’t know.

One thing that actually occurred to me when you were talking about materials a moment ago was you mentioned that carbon fibres was something you were involved in as well, carbon fibre materials.

I wasn’t involved in them.

Oh right, okay. In terms of taking it from the RAE into industry?

No, all I did there was pointing industry in the direction of the people that knew about it.

Sir John Charnley Page 272 C1379/30 Track 16

Oh right, okay.

It had, the carbon fibres came out of the materials department at Farnborough. Forgotten the name of the bloke, and no, I just acted as a link of pointing people in the direction of Farnborough. People that the Farnborough people hadn’t met because they were defence and now there were these other applications and, sounds silly doesn’t it now, I can remember one application that hadn’t been in RAE’s mind were golf clubs. And I think I got together with Dunlop or someone and out of that, yeah, it moved carbon fibre technology into a different world altogether, into the sports world, which had not been a defence objective. And all I did was just (a) I got folk together, put a bit of money into it, into the RAE end to enable them to do a little bit of work for whatever, and got… and it was… Dunlop, to start with I think, although I don’t remember them particularly in golf club terms. I don’t know the golf club names now, but certainly that’s the way it went. Don’t know, don’t know. But so much of it, as you put your finger on, was just introducing a side of industry and a side of R&D that were in different worlds and hadn’t talked to each other before because they were aligned for different, the Establishments had different objectives. I remember Bob Cockburn talking to me about that very thing. This is, you know, this is what you’ve got to do John, bring the two sides together more closely, make the defence world think more broadly and make the industrial world be more aware of what is available. Not for me.

In terms of making those contacts, do you just sort of, you know, let two people know they exist or is there more a sort of social function of bringing them together there as well?

Social function?

You talked before about personal contacts, that importance of meeting people and knowing them…

Yeah, yeah, yeah, but what’s the question Tom?

I’m just wondering, are you just sort of, you know, dropping a couple of people a line to let them know they exist or are you…

Sir John Charnley Page 273 C1379/30 Track 16

Oh no. No, no, no, no. No. More positive than that in the sense of, no, personally introducing the people personally, getting someone from the Establishment – I’m thinking of RAE – and you can take carbon fibres if you wish, and the individuals there, the group, who at that stage would have been known to British Aerospace or whatever they were at the time, because that’s where the carbon fibre applications first were, but they didn’t know much, they didn’t have experience much further than British Aerospace and whoever, and I’m trying to think whoever it was, getting them together, running a little meeting, you know, the formal meeting of introducing the two. If you get to the, almost the social side, certainly have a meal, a lunch or something as part of it, no doubt about that, so the hare could come down or so that you could talk off the record and see how they were melding one with another as to whether you were going to be successful or not. So yeah, that was that sort of process, which maybe I was good at, I don’t know. Don’t know. I certainly didn’t achieve it in any exploration of the North Sea. Didn’t get anywhere.

There were just I think two other just vague areas of activity…

You see, we haven’t got out of Mintech yet, dear God.

[1:05:51] They might be quite short questions. [laughs] Just sort of thinking of the other things that were happening around that time really. I know you talked about your involvement with Concorde – I was just wondering, did that continue at all in Mintech or was that in a different area?

No, it didn’t continue. No, no. There was… [pause] I can only believe that this was Ministry of Civil Aviation. There was a separate department, I think at that time, which Hamilton was in because Jim Hamilton was never in Mintech in the way in which… as part of Mintech, I don’t think he answered to Wedgwood Benn. I think it was MCA, because people were brought up from Farnborough to be part of the Headquarters team with Hamilton concerned with, I mean Handel Davies was involved, Morien Morgan, and we’re talking different periods in the Concorde programme. But Morien, Handel, Hamilton and then at a lower level, another name, forgotten, came up and they were part of the project office, the Concorde project office, and that was MCA, I’m pretty certain now, not Mintech. And they of course handled the relationships with France.

Sir John Charnley Page 274 C1379/30 Track 16

The other one I was wondering about in terms of areas was well, space actually, thinking about I know that Tony Benn cancels, was it ELDO and Blue Streak in ’68 and I was wondering if there was still any space activity within your remit when you were there?

Short answer, no. And why wasn’t it, I don’t know. Again, separate altogether. And presumably was it somewhere else in… I’m not aware that it was… where else would it be? It would be in technology I guess. Don’t know. And not with me, not with Macfarlane, so some separate place in the department. Don’t know. [pause] I can’t fit it in, can’t place it. Launchers. It was the launchers that were cancelled.

I think Blue Streak gets cancelled in ’68.

This is Roy Gibson’s sort of area was it?

ELDO. I think he was with ESRO.

I was going to say, yeah, because I think of him as the space research side rather than the launcher.

I suppose the other one was Black Arrow, continued until ’71.

Did it? Don’t know. Don’t know.

I was just wondering if any of that had fallen within your remit.

No.

[1:09:42] Last question I have on Minitech, and this is the last one. I was just wondering what it was like to work there, actually? It’s a hi-tech, the Ministry of Technology, I was wondering if it was a hi-tech place to work?

No, no. In my opinion, no. Frustrating, because you didn’t get the sort of response that I had hoped for, perhaps I wasn’t very good at it, but no, no. The take-off wasn’t fast, the take-off

Sir John Charnley Page 275 C1379/30 Track 16 wasn’t good, to my way of thinking. Whether it wasn’t launched properly, politically that is, but it certainly didn’t satisfy me very well. No.

Thinking about the use of technology within the place as well, you know, computers, communication technology, that sort of stuff.

No, no. No, nothing of that had sort crossed my way, no. Within the department itself, no. I’m thinking back to the… you touched on space, you touched on things that… and Concorde that I don’t, I don’t remember almost the government, the organising that included those, where they were, how they fitted in and then the, almost the instruments that were used for proceeding and pursuing policy. But nothing, there was nothing in my area or in Macfarlane’s area…

I actually meant within the office itself.

Yeah, I understand you.

Oh right, okay.

Ted Lee was another one in the office that… a names that I… And he had been DSIR man and boy, I think, for a long time, Ted. And Ted was so conservative, you know, as far as he was concerned, I was a rush of blood to the head coming in from the defence end, was expecting things to happen much more quickly than they ever would, they ever should, and he and the admin man between them, that were conservative in the sense of proceeding as they had done before, and just didn’t really appreciate this younger man, younger, I’d be younger than him too, as well, coming in and almost wanting to stir things up and get things moving, this was not the way you did things.

[1:12:39] How did you come to leave Mintech?

How did I come to leave? I’m not aware of how I came to leave, other than being told that the – and I didn’t put any bids in to leave at all or ask for a transfer, nothing of that sort – it just happened. I was trying to think of the name of the Deputy Controller of Guided Weapons, DCGW, that retired, yeah. Dickie, Dickins, Dickins, Basil. Basil Dickins. Dickinson. [Dickins]

Sir John Charnley Page 276 C1379/30 Track 16

And he’d been DCGW for some time and had been my Headquarters man when I was responsible for Weapons Department down at Farnborough. Sorry. Now there’s… oh. With the scope of my activities at Farnborough for guided missiles I answered to Dickinson [Dickins] in London, but for conventional armament like BL755 I answered to a different Director-General and not a Deputy Controller. He didn’t have the same sphere of interest, sphere of influence, sphere of interest, and that was Harold Wilson, HM Wilson as the armament man. But Dickie was the guided missile man. The nuclear side of course was completely different. So I was reporting in three different ways up to London when I was down at Farnborough.

Sounds quite a complicated chain of command.

Well, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Three completely different subjects. They’ve got common elements, but depending how you want to organise an arrangement, there’s a lot of history behind it. Now if I come to when I was… so, answering your specific question. I was just approached as to Dickie was retiring, there was a vacancy as Deputy Controller Guided Missiles, would I be interested. And the answer firmly was yes.

[1:15:30]

And that I think disappointed me a little, I think it disappointed my wife in the sense she felt much happier with me being involved outside defence than being so thoroughly defence related. Because when I’d been down at Farnborough in the… and in BLEU, I’d got into the civil airfield, civil aircraft, civil aviation area and that she was, she liked the thought of me more involved with that than defence, but there we go.

Any particular reason?

Oh, no. No. Just I’d been long enough in defence. No. No, no, no. And I could argue another way, that I don’t know whether we’ve touched on this. She lost her brother, as a Fleet Air Arm pilot, she lost him in the war, World War II, and it had, the defence world… no. No, no, no. was… oh God, war and anything to do with it was not something that she liked, it’s almost as obvious as that. And the fact that I was part of it and certainly in the guided weapon field, it was obvious that it was all defence. But she knew I enjoyed it, she thought I was making a contribution, that always pleased her, and we made a lot of friends both in the aeronautical

Sir John Charnley Page 277 C1379/30 Track 16 research world, the R&D world, as well as in industry and that… But really, no, if I could have found myself enjoying Mintech more I think she would have been happier. But she knew I didn’t really, not an easy brief period. So back to…

[1:18:09]

And then as CGW… as Deputy Controller of Guided Missiles my Controller was Cliff Cornford, a man for whom I’d known at Farnborough, he was an ex-weapon, he was an ex-head of Weapons Department, several times earlier, and he and I knew each other well. I hadn’t worked for him before but he’d been head of an RAE department, a big RAE department, when I was head of a little one, BLEU, and in terms of size BLEU was the only small, little department, and then you got to medium sizes like Instruments and Electrical Engineering and then you had the big ones which were Weapons on the one hand and Aero on the other. And so I’d sat at meetings with Cliff in RAE with the same sort of responsibility of running a department, albeit a little one as against a big one. Whether he had asked for me, I don’t know. He lived in Camberley and he and I (a) were good friends, as I say, and we were good friends because we both played cricket and we played cricket against each other, but we also played cricket together for an RAE team when we were both RAE. That was when we were down at Farnborough. So I knew him, as I say, socially and professionally. Had a great regard for him professionally, great respect. So he was the CGWL, Controller of Guided Weapons and Electronics, and he had two Directors-General; one running the guided weapons and the other running electronics, which was radars, communication business and so on. And I was the guided weapon man. Now, it made sense, I had four directors and it made sense for a director at Air Commodore level and Brigadier level and Captain level, naval Captain, one for each service. So one was running air force weapons, another running procurement of air force weapons and army weapons and naval weapons, and then there was a fourth which was the trials Director. He ran the ranges and co- ordinated the trials programmes for the other three. And I mention him because DGW… Director of Guided Weapons Trial, he it was that looked after Woomera, specifically. Woomera was in his bailiwick under me and he would take me out to Woomera. I’d been before when I was in Weapons Department, to see what was there and how things that we were sending out there were handled, but now in London then the running of Woomera and our involvement, the UK involvement, was mine and I had a Trials Director doing that. And he had his own little airline for sending stuff out to Woomera. They used Britannias a lot and they always seemed to break down in Ceylon, always. They always carried a spare engine with them because they were

Sir John Charnley Page 278 C1379/30 Track 16 going to break down in Ceylon. [laughs] Which took a week or so to… No, a couple of days to put right.

When you say his own airline, were they not just flown out there on the RAF or something, or was this a separate organisation?

It was, and I don’t, you know, I don’t remember the why and wherefore. No, it was, I think we used Monarch, just… and I can’t… I’m sure my admin man, my finance man, DGCWF, would have crawled over this. We didn’t use the air force aeroplane, that’s for sure, we didn’t use an… we hired a Monarch whether we were sending equipment out or men out for trials out there and that was all the industry associated with the guided weapon industry – sorry – had teams out on the range at Woomera, in Woomera village, running the various programmes that were on the range. And it was a busy time, busy job. But they all, like Marconi, British Aerospace, the companies that produced for us, warheads, safety and arming, fusing, all the companies that were combined and with the bits and pieces that went into a guided missile all had offices, staff out there on the range to look after their part of the missiles that were sent out there for trials. And that was DGWT. Now, I’ve spent a bit of time on that, but it was… it was set up before I arrived and I saw no reason to change it, but the three directorates and T.

[1:25:37]

But in 1971 or whenever it was that Derek Rayner was brought in from Marks and Spencer’s to run a rule over the procurement operation, CDP, Chief of Defence Procurement – I’ve forgotten who that was at the time… Yeah. Yeah, I’ve moved on, because I was now Controller of Guided Weapons and Electronics, I’d gone up from being the Deputy Controller to be Controller and it was now ’71, ’72 – ’72 maybe and Derek Rayner was brought in to look at the procurement operation and when he looked at CGWL’s area, he – and particularly at the guided weapon area – decided that there was no place for a CGWL, that it was sufficient to have the three services looking after the procurement for each of the services and my guided weapon businesses fitted in nicely in that sense in that there was already a Director of Air Guided Weapons, a Director of Land and a Director of Sea almost set up, to move into the other Controllers that existed. So really, I could see the way in which this was going to happen and then I was a CGWL and put out of a job, essentially. The post went. This was ’72 was it, or ’73? ’73. ’73. But what had I done before then as DC, Deputy Controller Guided Weapons,

Sir John Charnley Page 279 C1379/30 Track 16 because I moved on then. It’s DCGW, this is where I mentioned earlier in relation to Labrunie …

Exocet?

Exocet. If I can think on the navy side, it was Exocet that was the dominant thing I can remember. On the army side it was Rapier. The big things like Bloodhound and Thunderbird were all over and done with at this stage, they were in service, they were working, I’m not conscious of there being anything other than repair and maintenance. But Exocet for the navy, certainly. Sea Dart was the other naval weapon, the heavy one, surface-to-air. Sea Dart. Sea Wolf. Gosh, I’d been involved with Sea Wolf down at Farnborough, that was a short range surface-to-air defensive weapon. Those are navy. Army was Rapier and… what was the other? Smaller, shorter range.

Blowpipe?

Well Blowpipe, certainly with Shorts. Rapier with British Aerospace or whatever they were at the time, George Jefferson at… oh, what’s the place up the M1, the M1A? Stevenage. The plant’s at Stevenage and Jeff ran it there. And he answered to George Edwards I think, doesn’t matter. He was the guided missile man in British… BA, British Aircraft – BAC. BAC.

BAC at that point I think.

[1:30:26] BAC, BAC. Yeah, yeah. And that was Rapier and short range, what was the other one? And you mentioned Blowpipe, but that was Shorts. Come back to that one. And on the airborne side, this was HSD at Hatfield and that was George Hough and that was Sparrow and Firestreak was over and done with, near as dammit. So it was Sparrow with them, it was mainly Rapier and it was Exocet and Sea Wolf for the navy. Now, the… mentioned Exocet, talked about that earlier on.

Don’t think we mentioned it on tape. It might be a good, you know, example of…

Oh, did we not?

Sir John Charnley Page 280 C1379/30 Track 16

No we didn’t. I think that’s a good example of the sorts of work you do in relation to some things.

Oh right. Right, right, right. Sorry. Okay. Well, Exocet, two versions: one was – and they’re attacking sea targets – one was air launched and that Hatfield, de Havilland’s, Hawker Siddeley and George Hough were keen to do and the other was a surface version, ship-to-ship, or ship-to- target. And that one was BAC. But, there was this promising missile being built by the French, again in two versions, don’t think a third, but two versions, of the same sort that we had in mind and I was told to go away as the Deputy Controller and forget any idea of developing something to meet our own requirements, but to go and negotiate the purchase of this weapon system from France. The man that said this to me was Bill Cook. I’ve forgotten what his position… he was Chief Scientific Adviser, something like that. He had a very prominent post in the defence hierarchy, CSA rather than… Chief Scientific Adviser. He was… and he also had a nuclear responsibility, that post. International nuclear…

International Atomic Energy Agency?

[1:33:49] Yeah, yeah. Well no. No, no, no. No, defence nuclear weapons, not… a separate function. Aldermaston, although Aldermaston was one of my twelve Establishments as CER, almost the policy responsibility for nuclear weapons was with Bill Cook, and that’s not unusual in the sense that the Establishments would be working for headquarters directors in the guided missile field, for me as DCGW. The programme control would be from the Headquarter director. The actual technical, the scientific technical control would be with Farnborough, for instance. And that’s the way the division went on the nuclear side. There was a nuclear group in London that answered to Bill Cook, but that was only part of Bill Cook’s function.

So were nuclear weapons like not part of guided weapons then?

No. No, no. In London quite separate, at Farnborough, within the same department. One of, if you remember, nuclear weapons, guided weapons and conventional weapons. BL755 and nuclear and then… That’s wrong, on nuclear weapons, on nuclear all that Farnborough had was the delivery system. The actual weaponry was Aldermaston. And the actual weaponry was

Sir John Charnley Page 281 C1379/30 Track 16

Cook and the delivery system also. He got nuclear weapons. But we had the whole, the attack profile for the delivery of the nuclear weapon; the aircraft, the delivery system. As I think I can remember saying, comparing the accuracy that required, remember saying that somewhere to you. Now where have I got in this rambling?

We were talking about Exocet. I was just interested to hear that nuclear wasn’t one of your areas as Director of Guided Weapons.

No. No, no, no. No, er…

So, for instance Chevaline and Polaris would come under different departments?

Different department altogether. In Headquarters. In…

At the headquarters level then, but not further down.

No, no, no. When you get to Chevaline, if I may… It wasn’t air delivered, was it? It wasn’t carried on an aeroplane.

No. Polaris front end I think.

That’s right. No, no, no. Chevaline was a name to me but it was never something with which I was concerned. Either Farnborough or in London, no. But certainly Aldermaston and Hunting, the manufacturer, the builder, and Hunting were never involved with guided weapons, they were involved with the nuclear programme and they were involved with the conventional, BL755, so they were, I saw a lot of, I saw a lot of them because on the one hand they were concerned with air launch missiles and on the other hand, whether that missile was nuclear or conventional, it was never a guided missile from Hunting.

[1:38:40] Sorry, I’ve diverted you a bit there from talking about Exocet. [laughs]

I was sent, I was told to go to France and negotiate the supply of Exocet for the navy and this was for the surface-to-surface version. We were not interested in the air-to-surface version, just

Sir John Charnley Page 282 C1379/30 Track 16 the surface-to-surface. And when I first went across there I was negotiating with an army man on the French side, that we didn’t get on too well together, he and I. He was... My brief, my negotiating position was that before I could sign, I could even show a lot of interest in the Exocet that we wanted, I needed to know what the counter measures were built into the missile to prevent it, what ECM, what electronic counter measures were built in it. And he on his part obviously had been told that he was not to release information on ECM until he’d got an order. So there was a bit of an impasse and we didn’t get very far. Then for some reason, I don’t know why, on their side, he – and I can’t remember his name – he was replaced by a General Labrunie [ph], who although a general was in some way navy, don’t understand that. And he was much more reasonable and I can remember an occasion soon after Labrunie had… we were getting on quite well together, but we reached the same position of this impasse. The only other country that had ordered from France Exocets up to this point was Greece. That does stay in my mind. And for what reason, I don’t know why, but Greece was the only person who’d, if not ordered, shown any interest. And they weren’t, they hadn’t made any great demands for ECM, for counter measure provision so that no-one else had been told what was in the French mind at all. Labrunie was tough, but we were on better terms, he and I, and I can remember this meeting where his team were on one side of a table, my team were down the other and we’d been at it halfway through the morning. He was in the middle over there and I was in the middle on this side of quite a big table and coffee arrived, the two little ladies came in with trays of coffee; one for the French side and one for the English side, and they moved down the table serving each one. And when this little girl got to me, as she was leaning over my shoulder to put it on the table, somehow it got, went astray and I got coffee down the back of my coat and down my neck, starting up here, very hot coffee too. She was very, very embarrassed, I won’t say screamed, but she was very upset. Labrunie on the other side, very embarrassed, walked round the table, round and came and looked at this mess on my neck and on my coat and apologised immediately and said, well get your coat off John and we’ll continue with the meeting and by the time we’ve finished at lunchtime your coat will be back with you and cleaned. And it was. It was. But, the incident changed the atmosphere of the negotiation completely, completely and now we were much, found it much easier to get closer to what we wanted without too much argument and I came away feeling that the next time I’m going to negotiate with someone, I’m going to arrange for some coffee to be spilled over me, because it did seem to ease the negotiation and we did quite well out of it. I came back well pleased with the deal that we’d done. So we bought some Exocets, yeah.

Sir John Charnley Page 283 C1379/30 Track 16

[1:43:40]

And if I can fast forward, it did mean in the Falklands when the Argentinian French aircraft – what were they, not Etendard.

Super Etendard?

I want to get away from that altogether. I want to get away from Etendard. The triangular thing.

Mirage?

Mirage. I think Argentina were using Mirage, I think so. Doesn’t matter, but certainly they were carrying Exocets and so we knew fairly well what was likely to be in them, how effective they were likely to be and also what counter measures they were likely to have, but we couldn’t be sure because they might have altered them or not paid the price that we were prepared to pay. Don’t know. And I’d left, well no I hadn’t left, but certainly we certainly had a good idea of what was in the Argentinian Exocets. But that was a nice little story of my army, my navy activity. We didn’t go ahead with the Hawker Siddeley version, it was a version of Sparrow that they were producing as an air launched, air-to-surface weapon. And of course when you’re thinking of a guided missile, then the way in which you almost break the missile down into, is it being launched from an aeroplane or is it being launched from the ground? And so there are different technologies associated with the launch conditions. And at the other end, is it attacking a hard target like a tank or a soft target like an aeroplane? Because that alters the armament, the warhead, whether it’s armour piercing or whether it’s soft skin, and the fusing and how close you’ve got to get with your missile before you set it off. So that’s all associated with the target end and then there’s the launch situation that I’ve described, and then there’s the range; the motor, the fuel and so on. And you can divide a missile up into those different areas and have various parts of your R&D activity addressing all of them separately and then brought together by the project of whatever it is. And that was again, to me, a very satisfying period of my career. I enjoyed DCGW.

[1:46:40]

Sir John Charnley Page 284 C1379/30 Track 16

And I did – how long did I – I did that for quite some time I think and all the time working for Cliff Cornford as the Controller. Then Cliff retired, we’re getting near to retirement now, Cliff retired and I was promoted to be CGWL, Controller of Guided Weapons and Electronics, with now a seat on the Procurement Executive Management Board, PEMB. And as I said earlier, I can’t remember who Chief of Defence Procurement was, of the day, but… hang on, Cliff hadn’t, he was promoted to be CDP, yeah. Cliff was promoted to CDP and I then was promoted up after him.

CDP?

Chief of Defence Procurement. Yeah. And he had a Procurement Management Board, which contained on it the three system Controllers. Controller Air, CA. MGO, Master-General Ordnance for the army. Controller Navy, obviously from his name, obviously navy. Me as CGWL. Victor Macklen representing Bill Cook, he was the nuclear man on the PE board. And then there was the, it was Cornford, CDP’s administrative man, which was Ewen Broadbent.

How many of these people did you already know?

Strange question. Most of them, one way and another, as DGCW, yeah. Some more closely than others, some I’d known from my days at Farnborough one way and another, because you’d grown up with some of them. Was there anyone else on the PE board? I think I can see us all sitting there. Cliff Cornford was a heavy smoker, had been a heavy smoker in his earlier days and had given it up, but now was, instead of smoking he just chewed Polo mints. [laughs] And he always had packets, his pockets were always filled with packets of Polo mints. And when he ran the PE board meeting he was getting through Polo mints at a hell of a rate, little packs of the blessed things…

I’m going to have to actually change this in a moment.

Yeah. You said two hours, we’ve been at it, we’re at three and a half, we’re getting on for over three hours.

No, we’re nearly at two actually.

Sir John Charnley Page 285 C1379/30 Track 16

Pardon?

Nearly at two hours.

Oh yes, you were three… yes, we are, aren’t we?

I was late.

Sorry, sorry. I was an hour out as your… yes, yes, yes.

I was just wondering, it might be better to cover the PE stuff tomorrow perhaps.

[1:50:40] Well let me just finish, if I may, because – or have I said enough about Derek Rayner, because essentially it was Derek, when Derek Rayner reviewed the PE board, the PE operation, Procurement Executive, the procurement process, Cornford was the CD, Chief of Defence Procurement, and I was CGWL and Derek Rayner decided that there wasn’t a place in procurement terms for CGWL, that the guided weapon activity – sorry – the guided weapon activity should be split and be handed to the other system controllers who already were on the PE board. One handling air, one handling… MGO handling the army affairs and Controller Navy, obviously what he says. Although it wasn’t quite as neat as that because Controller Air handled aeroplanes for all three services in the way in which I handled guided missiles for all three services, but he was an airman. Can’t remember whether it was Dougie Lowe or his predecessor, doesn’t matter. Anyway, the three Controllers existed and my activities were spread between the three of them with a trials man to look after things on the trials. And that meant I was out of a job.

It seems a strange, well from my perspective now, I’m just wondering what you thought of bringing in the Chief Executive of Marks and Spencer’s to analyse the military procurement business.

Well that’s about it, that he was, he’d got experience of procurement of commodities on a major scale and it was thought it would be relevant to defence activities. There were those of us who

Sir John Charnley Page 286 C1379/30 Track 16 didn’t really agree, but it was one of those – I can’t remember who the Minister was at the time. Who was the Minister? Gosh. I don’t remember.

Trying to think.

I don’t remember. John Knott was the Minister at the time of Falklands. I’d have to work back. I don’t know. Don’t know. Molloy? Don’t know, don’t know. Anyway, there it was. No. And I don’t know that it was a good answer in the end. You can argue both ways as to the way in which you divide up functions. You can relate them to each service separately or you can read the function of saying aeroplanes, do someone for all three services and guns for all three services, so the technology is such that it doesn’t matter whether the gun is for the navy, the air force or the army, there’s a technology of guns, there’s a technology of guided missiles, wherever. So you can have this sort of argument. And it changed then, no doubt about that. And I was, oh, in a way downgraded, because I became Chief Scientist to the air force after that. And the CAS, Chief of the Air Force was… oh dear, I always have difficulty with this name – Splinters, Splinters… There were two with names very similar. The ACAS OR, Assistant Chief Air Staff OR was ‘Splinters’ Smallwood. That’s it, Smallwood. And CAS, Chief of the Air Staff was Spotswood. And we’ll finish after this. I’ll finish this. I’ve forgotten his Christian name, Spotswood. And I was asked to go and see him. Went along and he more or less said that he and I, when I was CGWL, had not always seen eye to eye because he was keen on buying American, I was keen on supporting British industry, Hawker Siddeley Dynamics in fact, with guided missiles, wanted development by HSD, whereas he wanted to buy from the States. And so we’d had words, as he put it, but he accepted the fact, and I’m paraphrasing, he’d accepted the fact that I had a job to do as CGWL and I’d always, and he quite admired the way in which I’d done it and therefore instead of almost being – and he knew my background of aviation and aircraft at Farnborough and suchlike, he obviously had a brief – and therefore would I, instead of arguing against him, would I join him as his Chief Scientist.

Did you think about it much or just say yes on the spot?

Just said yes on the spot. So I became Chief Scientist RAF with a seat on the Air Force Board and responsible for a lot of thinking around air force operations and also a team, I linked up with, I had a group out of Bomber Command, I had a little group out in Asia, in Singapore, but certainly a group in Bomber at High Wycombe, and various individuals in different places

Sir John Charnley Page 287 C1379/30 Track 16 around the country. But within my headquarters, I had a team of applied psychologists run by, I’ve forgotten his name now, an applied psychologist obviously, whose job it was to devise and monitor the various selection tests for air crew, for joining the air force to start with and then for selecting for air crew and the tests, devising the tests and deciding whether the air crew would be fighter or bomber or helicopters, essentially. Fighter or transport/bomber and helicopters. And the filtering out of staff as they made their way through the almost recruitment process and then the training process. And I always had this feeling, I’ve forgotten his name, but the chap, the applied psychologist that ran this group, that whenever he came to see me or I went to see him, he was always analysing me. And did it very nicely, but I always felt that - what was his name – and I said this to him at one stage, so-and-so, so-and-so, get off it, you know, I’m not one of your students, I’m not one of your chaps being trained. And we grinned. So I was then familiar with the various arguments, theories, associated with how you select people for this, that and the other task. But the one thing he did say very definitely, and we’ll stop here, is that the object of his tests and the whole of his approach wasn’t aimed at identifying the chap who was going to be a future Chief of the Air Staff. That his job was to regard selection as a Gaussian distribution and he was aiming his tests at the middle hump of the majority of people that were going to come along and it wasn’t looking for the bloke who was going to be extremely bright on the one hand and Chief of the Air Staff at some stage, and at the other hand his tests were to eliminate those who weren’t going to be suitable. His tests were aiming at the broad majority of folk who would come along, who were in the middle, and to extract from his tests whether they were suitable for fighters, bombers if you like, or helicopters. So that was another little bit of news to me.

[2:01:56] It actually brings me on to a question I’ve wondered about actually over the whole interview really, not just today. But you’ve mentioned it today as well as in, people who had an interest in me and my career, the system put me there, I was selected for the IDC course. I was thinking about the selection process you’ve just described versus the selection process that your career went through.

I don’t know. Are we on?

Yeah, we’re on.

Sir John Charnley Page 288 C1379/30 Track 16

Ah, okay. In the various posts I’ve had, I’ve been very aware of people who in many ways were career minded and thought more about doing things to enhance their career than really getting on with their job. And that was not, I always took objection to that, in wherever I was, I was doing what I thought was the best way to do the job and, you know, career opportunities came along without me necessarily thinking about them. I was very fortunate I guess, because all these things just happened and went on happening after this because, well, yeah. The next move was that staff started. There were pressures on staff within MoD and my job as Chief Scientist, Air Force were now combined with… George Macfarlane had now come back from Technology – I don’t think that was a very good idea, that Technology – anyway, George Macfarlane had come back and he was now CER – Controller of the Establishments and Research. And I think it might have been Rayner again. No. Well it might have been but it didn’t happen until a year or so later that the three Chief Scientists - air force, army and navy - were combined, the posts were combined with the chaps in CER’s area responsible for research for the air force, the army and the navy. So you now had – anyway, this is the start of another topic I think – but it just reminded me, George Macfarlane must have come back from Mintech. Cor, yeah. So neither of us… what happened to it? I don’t know. Don’t know. But according to my career, my CV here, I had two years as Chief Scientist, Air Force. It may only have been… it wasn’t as long as that. It might have been late 19… and then in 1975 that post of Chief Scientist, Air Force was combined with the Deputy Controller under George Macfarlane as CER. So the pressure, the squeeze was on already in terms of reducing numbers.

Seems like a good place to stop.

Is that enough for today?

I think so.

[end of track 16]

Sir John Charnley Page 289 C1379/30 Track 17

[Track 17]

You mentioned yesterday about your involvement with buying Exocet during your time as Director of Guided Weapons, or Deputy Director of Guided Weapons. You mentioned as well that you were also involved with the navy and the air force projects as well. I was just wondering if there was any difference between running projects for the three services?

No. Not… nothing that comes to mind. When you get into the detail of how you design the weapon for the three services then there are the differences, as I think I mentioned, that when you look at the launch conditions and obviously, the launch conditions that you have to design are different if you’re launching from an aeroplane than if you’re launching from a ship, there’s a speed difference, for instance. But at the other end, whether it’s for the navy or the army or the air force, if you’re attacking a hard target, then it’s the target that dictates things and not the service. Service affects the launching situation but not the end geometry, as I’d call it. And you model in your design, you model the geometry of the terminal engagement, which dictates the size of the warhead, what sort of warhead, what the target is, whether it’s hard or soft and how close to the target you have to almost detonate the warhead with your safety and arming and so on. But that doesn’t, that’s not service orientated, the launching is, so that’s in the design. Now in the attitude towards them, no. No, no, no, no. As I say, I had a director for each of the three services: a naval captain, an air force… an army brigadier and an air force… good lord, squadron leader, wing commander, air commodore? Air commodore, yeah. No. Nothing more to say.

I was wondering, when you talked about the Exocet job, obviously your role there was going over and negotiating with the French, but I was wondering if you’d give me an idea on what you might do on one of the other projects, maybe one of the domestically run ones.

What I would do?

Yeah. So in terms of the Exocet deal, I was negotiating with another… I’m wondering, let’s take for instance…

Okay, take Rapier.

Okay, yeah.

Sir John Charnley Page 290 C1379/30 Track 17

Rapier for the army. Handled more by – sorry – it’s a short range air defence weapon so you, it’s a soft target, in other words an aircraft, and launched from the surface, and short range. It’s a perimeter defence weapon, that’s the scene. And after the early research work, which you’re talking with the Operational Requirements branch, the army’s OR, and you’ve satisfied them and yourself that you know enough about the technology to go ahead with development. The process is the research and then a feasibility study which is done in conjunction with the company, and the company in this case was BAC, British Aircraft Corporation, at Stevenage and you’ve done the research, generally in the Establishment, in this case Malvern. Then when you’re satisfied that the technologies are understood and known and you’re thinking of a particular project and you’ve talked with the OR branch as to what the target is that you want to be going for, you then involve the company, in this case BAC, and that would, the chief designer, more than that, the technical MD there, George Jefferson, and he and I would start talking about, how we would go about this generally, you’d have your staff around you, in my case say, the Director and he’d have his Director there. And you then, and you have, in my case there would be the contracts people would be with me. And so you’re now letting a feasibility study contract, that’s the first thing, assuming that goes well, the next stage is a development contract. And now the company is now, they’ve let you have their proposal, formal proposal, umpteen… a thick document generally, which lists their proposals, it lists the risk areas in their view, it lists the timescale, the project management, the financial implications and the technical aspects of this. You have, you’ve got your own Director running that as a total programme, but the technical elements of it will be handled as much as by anyone by Malvern, shall we say, by the Establishment so that they will be your technical authority and they will probably, they could easily be working direct with the company. And that’s the general plan as to how one goes about a development programme. You have regular meetings then, progress meetings, your own financial people, the technical people, you’ve appointed a project officer in London and there’ll be a project officer down at the Establishment, in this case Malvern. It would be the same if it was Farnborough or Sevenoaks at RARDE, he’ll be the chief technical man, but you have your own project director in London who will be a member of, in this case as an army weapon, a member of the brigadier’s team. And there we are. You’ve now got a development programme set up and that now depends on were we right in saying that these were the technical problems and we know how to solve them? Are things going according to plan? If not, what do we do about it? And so on. There then comes the trial period when, depending on the nature of the weapon, in Swingfire I think it was done or would be done from the ranges in this country. There’d be a bit of, oh there

Sir John Charnley Page 291 C1379/30 Track 17 could be, yeah, there’ll be some down at Woomera so there will come a period when you’ll be testing the little elements on their own; the motor, the warhead, the safety and arming, the fusing, all of those little things will be examined or developed separately. There may be sub-contracts from BAC out to another contractor. There would be, on the warhead, for instance. And our own warhead people at ERDE, they would be involved. So it then comes together as two teams, you hope, working together well. And if they don’t, then that’s the job, that’s my job or my director’s job to sort it out. Is that the sort of thing you were hoping for? That’s a development programme, essentially, but the steps are the research and then a feasibility study. And of course in the whole of this you’re keeping the army itself, the OR branch in the army, involved. You might have the engineering branch of the army involved in some cases. Yes, you could do. But that’s the general programme and that would be the same for all three services. That’s a development programme from the raising of the requirement and all of that would be against a formal OR number. OR - di-da-di-da-di-da.

So essentially your role is sitting there managing this process then and just…

Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. Along with whatever else is going on, but as far as I was concerned as the Deputy Controller, DCGW, yeah, you’d have several going on for all three services and as a… no, at that stage I wouldn’t be on the PE Board, I’d be reporting to Cornford as the Controller and he would be on the PE Management Board, which I then joined when I became Controller.

[10:30] What was the PE Management Board actually responsible for?

As it says, PE, procurement. It’s a Procurement Executive and it’s got… it is the body responsible for the procurement of equipment for all three services. That’s their job and within the Ministry of Defence there is this procurement department whose function is to equip and negotiate the supply of the delivery of equipment to the services. And the process there is the services make, state their requirement formally, an operational requirement, and the function of the Procurement Executive then is to procure the equipment to meet that requirement. And so there’s a board which has on it CDP, Chief of Defence Procurement, and then he has a Controller for each of the separate services: CA, Controller Air who is responsible for the supply of air equipment, aircraft to all three services; you have the MGO, the Master-General Ordnance for the supply of the equipment to the army; then you have Controller Navy for the same sort of

Sir John Charnley Page 292 C1379/30 Track 17 thing for the navy. They’re all on the PE Board, and then also on the board is the CER, the civilian – the others are all servicemen – then there’s a civilian, CER, the Controller of the Establishments and Research, and he is a civilian technical man, which when I was Deputy Controller was George Macfarlane and then I succeeded him so I then as Controller of the Establishments and Research sat on the board.

[13:03]

Now the title, CER, perhaps needs a bit of explaining in the sense that he’s responsible for all the functioning of the twelve R&D Establishments, but each Establishment has within it the support of projects, as I mentioned already, but also a research programme. So the Establishment are doing two things; they’re doing their research, but they are also managing and monitoring projects on behalf of London. And if you go back to when I was in the Weapons Department at Farnborough, then I had Fred East running the projects and I had Andrew Stratton running the research. Again, there’s this separate function. Now, in the projects, what the Establishment and what the man in London, CER does, the responsibility for the Establishments are direct to the project director, but the research programme is CER’s own responsibility.

[14:26] I think I follow this, but I was wondering what the relation is then between the two of them. So as you’re in charge of the research stream of this and the project stuff is happening with other heads above it, how do the two relate from your point of view as CER? How do you decide what research needs to be done for those projects, as it were?

When you ask how, it’s the sort of question which you’re debating with your project director on the one hand and the director of the Establishment perhaps on the other, because the director of the Establishment will be very conscious that he has to fulfil these two functions and he will be listening to the head of the department involved. If you take my background as Weapons Department that we spoke of yesterday, you’re sufficiently – we’re talking about now rather remotely – but you’re sufficiently aware of what is going on in terms of the technologies, the science and the technologies, you’ll be in contact with the universities as to what they’re doing, you may have universities under contract to you, to your research people, and there then comes this, the business of the feasibility study and you’re picking up the research that you’ve done and say right, it’s now feasible to do this. Now, when you’re in the Establishment you’re very

Sir John Charnley Page 293 C1379/30 Track 17 conscious that at that stage it’s going to move from research into a dated, costed, firmed project programme and, you know, your thinking about this is just part of your daytime everyday job, and how you go about it, you know, that’s your job. And at the different levels, at the director level, at head of department level, and down within the department, you have all your experts on fuses, on armament, on this, that and the other, and it’s there, it’s a debate, it’s a negotiation, it’s a discussion, it’s an argument between what, you know, the monies available, the capability of the contractor, of industry, and the resources that are available as to whether you think within the expenditure available, within the resources available generally, the men on the one hand, your own people in government, the contractor, whether the time has arrived when you can start a major project and that you’ve got the resources to do it. Well, that’s all part of the feasibility stage of assessing whether the resources are available. There’s the technical programme, there’s the timescale, that’s what we would like, have we got the resources, manpower on the one hand in industry and in the Establishment, and money on the other to achieve that programme and say yes, that’s a working programme to meet the date by which the OR branch of the service would like it. Does that make sense to you? It’s an ongoing rolling operation all the time, that’s something that’s happening all the time on this project or that one or the other, that’s the job.

[18:30] What if during the pre-feasibility study – or the feasibility study or the pre-feasibility study?

Well, whichever you like.

What if you notice that the resources aren’t there or you’re weak in some areas? Does the project get cancelled or do you…

Yeah, you don’t start it. It’s not going yet. You’re not ready to start it.

So do you fix those problems or just abandon the project?

Oh, that’ll depend on how keen the service are to have what it is that you’re thinking about. If it’s desperate, you certainly wouldn’t… I’ve forgotten what the… At one stage there was a little formula that someone worked out as to how much money you would spend on a pre-feasibility… what percentage of the total cost of a programme you should spend, let’s say on the feasibility study, so that by the time you go into the main development programme you know where the

Sir John Charnley Page 294 C1379/30 Track 17 risks are, you know where you want to put the effort, you know that you’ve got the effort to do it, you think you know the way to do it and oh, it was something like ten per cent, or I’m quoting, I can’t remember it but it was a small figure that was worth spending at that stage to satisfy yourself that you could answer the questions you were answering. Now if you can’t answer, if you’re not ready, then, you know, that’s it for the moment and you put research work, if that’s the thing that’s needed, into that particular area to take the risk out of it. You may feel that there is still some risk, but that you’re confident in the course of a programme you can solve it, so you go ahead. These are the judgements that you’re making all the time, that’s your job to make these judgements. Now you may get some of them wrong I guess. Trying to think whether any were? Rapier was a good one, Rapier was a very good programme and a good weapon in the end. And it was used for short range air defence; defence of airports, defence of towns, that sort of thing. I think Rapier had something like a fifteen, twenty mile range, something like that. Fifteen maybe. Fifteen is more likely I think. Anyway, what would, yeah, what we would be doing there is running, is really deciding how you run projects for whoever and whatever. The principles are the same, the degrees and the way in which time you spend, the resources you deploy will depend on the risks that you see in the programme and whether it’s the right moment to start the programme, that’s the feasibility study. Very important element. And you don’t go into development unless your feasibility says it is feasible that we can complete that programme, we can accept the risks, we know how to solve them within that timescale, within that money and therefore go. Yeah.

[22:02] Did this, this sort of activity, is this purely something you have to think of in CER or does this go back to Controller of Guided Weapons as well?

Oh, this, it’s more Controller of Guided Weapons, it’s more the CGWL than the CER, although it’s a combination of the two. It moves from one to the other. The feasibility, it’s not a CER. CER’s, this… I obviously haven’t explained it very well. CER’s formal responsibility is the research programme. His responsibility also is the running of the Establishments. Now in the running of the establishments, the director of the Establishment will be providing support to the projects. But CER in functional terms will not be responsible for… he won’t be in the line of responsibility. The director of an Establishment will have two separate lines of responsibility, one to CER for research and the other to the system controller, as he’d be called, for the projects and he does that through the staff of his departments, as I explained in the weapons case.

Sir John Charnley Page 295 C1379/30 Track 17

Okay.

And if I go to the IEE Department, same sort of thing, then you’ve got people who are researching on gyros and they were programmes that were handled by CER, but within the department you’ve got the people who are supporting the TSR2 and the navigation system for the TSR2. They’re both within the department but they’re answering to two different people through various chains. The whole thing, that’s the way the place ticked.

Just so I’ve got one other thing straight in my mind as well, your position on the Procurement Executive Management Board.

Yeah.

That was when you were CER?

No. CG…

Right good, that’s fine.

That was when I was CGWL.

[24:32] Right, that’s fine. That’s what I thought, I was just double checking. Can we talk a bit more about the Procurement Executive Management Board? I’m just wondering, you say you get an operational requirement from one of the branches of the services, how do you decide what to do with it then? Do you, you know, do you decide to buy off the shelf, do you decide to develop some new system, what’s the decision making process?

Oh well, this is the point. You’re making this is an individual… you’ve been following this through for eighteen months perhaps before you got to this stage. You’ve been talking with the services. The OR branch, this is why when I was in Mintech I felt uneasy because within the defence there was this established procedure, that you may even have someone in the OR branch working in your department for a while. I had OR people working when I was in IEE

Sir John Charnley Page 296 C1379/30 Track 17

Department on the sort of, the opening up of digital systems as distinct from analogue systems. Now, what was the moment when you made the decision to go from analogue to digital and was it appropriate for the TSR2 to think in terms of digits rather than analogue? Now, that didn’t happen like a sudden thing out of the air. You’d been talking with the OR people, oh for years, the way in which your own research was going. They were in contact with it, you had this linking between the research work. They were keeping an eye on it and there was then this moment when you think it’s gone far enough now, we ought to move it out of research and start with the feasibility issues and do some flight tests and putting it together into a digital system with digital computing in the aircraft, comparing the digital nav system with the analogue system and the other means of navigation. Now all of that were research programmes. You’ll then get to the point – and you’ll involve OR in that – and there’ll then come the point where you say right, I think we know enough about the technology, we know enough about the problems and how to solve them to perhaps… you will have, you’ll have reached a point where you’ve involved a contractor, in that case say Ferranti, and taken him along with you, you’d have put a small research contract on him and he’ll be working with you so you have this three, your own technical people in the Establishment, the contractor and the service OR branch, maybe the service technical branch as well depending on it, but in the one I’m quoting, moving analogue to digital and choosing the moment when it makes sense to think of doing that in a project related to say, an airframe. It doesn’t happen overnight is the point I’m making. It’s this rolling programme of just keeping in touch, keeping the various people, the various departmental organisations involved and it’s then a collective decision as to whether this is the moment to make a project out of it, a costed project with the technical problems highlighted. And it was Downey, it was a chap called Downey that produced a little formula for saying that let’s take the risks out of the hard development programme and no, going back years, gosh, generations now, dear God. And I think this was a case that was presented to the Treasury, defending, if that’s the right word, why you spent quite a substantial sum on removing the risks before you got into a hard development programme, a costed hard development programme with timescale and money. And it’s a pity that it’s somehow you then… you have to be very careful – I don’t know whether that was in your mind when you’re asking some of these questions – because you still get cost overruns, you get time overruns and you have to watch the early bids from industry very carefully because to some extent if things don’t happen as quickly and as well as they should, that’s when industry will make money out of it. And that’s something you had to be careful of all the time. It pays industry to produce something, produce a programme which can’t be achieved and then to introduce later the difficulties they faced.

Sir John Charnley Page 297 C1379/30 Track 17

[30:34] Is that part of the pre-feasibility study then to identify where those are going to be?

That’s where the feasibility study comes in, to try to…

Does that strengthen your hand then in dealing with industry?

Oh yes. Oh yes. Yes, yes, yes. And they’ve been involved in it, the feasibility will be something that they will produce as part, with you, with your own technical people. But it’s a proposal from them as a feasibility study leading on to a development programme. Yeah. And it’s the area where the whole idea, as its name implies, it’s removing, it’s defining the risks and establishing how confident you are that you can… not necessarily know all the answers now, but that the risk of not knowing the answer as the programme develops is low and that you’re sufficiently confident that you can solve it. And that, you need from, if you’re in London now as the project director or you need your technical people down in the Establishment, be it Malvern or Farnborough or wherever, RARDE, their view as to how serious the technical problems are. And, you know, they’ve been working on it, it’s not out of the blue to them. We talk about it now as if it’s just coming, something that’s happening immediately. They’ve been conscious and working with it for months and months and months, with their programmes.

[32:30] With regards to things like cost overruns, problems with technology, with such a thought out process, it may sound like a naïve question, but why do things like that still arise?

Someone’s got it wrong and where that someone would be, it’ll be… Someone’s got it wrong in that in assessing the risks they’ve made a mistake and the risks are higher or the work that they’ve done isn’t solving the problem as well as is required to – and now you’re into a PERT sort of example where in your programme management, your project director has got his layout and his programme is going to run smoothly if, and he’s got say, a missile body with all its problems solved ready to go on to a trial at Woomera or something but the programme is held up because the fuse has run into problems, so that the whole programme now is set back. Because there’s a fuse problem, the thing can’t go to Woomera, Woomera are standing by waiting for it, the arrangements for getting it out there have all been made, but the whole programme is now

Sir John Charnley Page 298 C1379/30 Track 17 delayed because of unforeseen problems on the fuse. So that what sounds like in itself solving the fuse problem is x pounds, the cost of that delay to the whole programme is 10 x or 20 x or something of the sort. So the, what I’m trying to say is that the financial consequence, the financial penalty of what appears to be a relatively small problem maybe, because of its effect on the total programme, is enormous and the delays… yeah. And that is just, as I say, some error, for whatever reason you like to think about for error in judgement at an early stage by everyone. If I was Deputy Controller, as I was, then you’ve got to form, it’s your own knowledge of that area as to whether you believe the views that are coming out of the establishment and why they may be weak, why their assessment of the risk and the solution in technical terms, whether you’re convinced. And there you’re making judgements from your own knowledge, your own experience and often from your experience and your knowledge of the particular chap that’s given you the view. What’s his background, what’s his previous background, is it good, is it whatever.

[35:59] Are there any external pressures on you in the Procurement Executive Management Board? Treasury, industry, those sorts of groups?

They’re there all the time.

What sort of pressures do you get from them?

Extraordinary set of questions.

You’ve got to bear in mind that this is a world that I can make guesses at how it functions, but it’s not one I’ve worked in.

And the question again is what?

I’m just wondering about the groups who somehow contribute to what the Procurement Executive Management Board is doing or like, you know, adds external pressures to what it’s doing. Do you have dealings with the Treasury, for instance?

Sir John Charnley Page 299 C1379/30 Track 17

Well yes. The answer to that is yes. And you’re getting now into your annual, the annual construction of your programme at the different levels: the PE’s programme with the three system controllers, CER. There’s a PE budget, we all contribute to it, that’s reviewed annually. It’s a ten-year rolling programme so you’re forecasting ten years ahead and obviously the further ahead you get the more guessing it is. Your first three or four years have got to be fairly precise, and then out of the PE budget you get your budget, whoever you are, and the Treasury has people who are keeping an eye on that all the time. Now depending on where – what am I trying to say – depending on the Treasury reaction to a large scale programme, if they from their experience of previous dealings with you, again, have cause for concern, they’ll put a particular enquiry in a note across from the Treasury saying, please explain why this, that or the other. That might be at the PE Board level or it could come in at, depending on the precise nature of their concern, but they’re keeping an eye on it all the time, principally through the programme that we submit, that is submitted as a departmental programme going to the Treasury. So they’re keeping an eye on it all the time and do raise questions, detailed questions in some cases, broad questions in others, but it’s their prerogative to feel and have the facility of questioning your financial management.

At the time did you feel that sort of level of oversight was justified?

The whole system works on checks and balances. The whole government, well running a company, the same sort of thing. When I then retired and became on the board of private sector companies, same sort of process. This is a process of running a business, doing work, and as I say, it’s checks and balances all the time. You’re checking your own affairs and certainly with the Treasury responsibility for spending government money, I would accept that they have a right, they have, yeah, to question the way in which the different departments are spending the money that they are allocated to them. And this goes, this can happen at a political level. This can happen between the Chancellor and your own Minister. So it’ll work down from very large, broad questions down to what you might consider nit-picking around something very tiny. Whatever they feel, the Treasury, whether they feel – we’re talking financially now – whether they feel that they’ve spotted something which they think is worth referring back to the department because they believe something’s going wrong. And these are checks and, as I say, checks and balances all the time, whether it’s externally, whether it’s internally, whether it’s from the Establishment up to – and we’re still talking about CGWL in a way - but when you get to CER, then… I have, CER has something like quarterly or I think either three or four times a

Sir John Charnley Page 300 C1379/30 Track 17 year, I can’t remember particularly, meetings with all his heads of Establishments, directors of Establishments, running over with them the total of CER’s programme. And that’s under review, oh, three or four times a year with the directors, as well as individual meetings with directors and whoever, whatever part of their stuff is under concern, on some specific issue. And as I mentioned, I also made these monthly visits or annual visits to an Establishment to ask for, to speak with the director about particular problems that he might have or I might have had, and then hear of some exciting work that’s going on. As well as that, and I’m on to the CER now, because the same process of monitoring the activities of an Establishment or project, two separate things.

[43:35]

As CER I used to run an annual meeting, a day when people, whether they were in London, in Headquarters, or in the Establishments, it was a big meeting, symposium if you like, it was that sort of thing, down to… with directors and oh, with some quite big numbers from the different Establishments of senior staff now, when I would make a pompous statement to start with as to the state, warts and all, the state of the operation in the running of the Establishments and the programmes, and then I would have picked, for the course of the day, particular issues that were relevant to what was happening at the time. And that was keeping the senior staff in all the establishments involved, not only – sorry, aware – not only of their problems but what might be going on like from Fort Halstead in Kent, what might be troubling Malvern down at RSRE, so that the totality of the resources, hopefully were being informed as to what was going on within the PE research area, or a bit of project activity, whatever. And that was a major task once a year, a day. Church… don’t know where, one of the rooms in London. And that was an attempt to keep senior staff well informed of a global, PE problems. It was appreciated, at least… it was appreciated. You’d get remarks at teatime in the afternoon, saying, oh I didn’t realise, we thought we had our problems, di-da-di-da-di-da, didn’t realise they were like that over there, you know.

Was this yearly meeting established already when you became CER or was it something you set up?

Oh no, it was established already. No, no, no. I won’t take credit for that, no. No. Because I had been to those meetings when I was at Farnborough, certainly. No. You then, it’s your own

Sir John Charnley Page 301 C1379/30 Track 17 style as to the way you run them, as to the way you go about it, and that will vary, but the meetings themselves were established, yeah. Oh no, not me. Don’t take credit in that sense, no, no, no. So that’s, that’s that area. Gosh, we’ve spent an hour on that – do you know that? All that lot.

[47:25] Would you like to move on to talking about your time as Chief Scientist to the Air Force?

[laughs]

So what does Chief Scientist to the Air Force actually have to do? We talked about how you got the job last time, but what’s the actual job spec as it were? What are your roles?

You are, in broad terms you are studying the operation of the air force, you’re looking at the threat that the air force is hoping to counter, the equipment that they’ve got to do it and for this you do a lot of mathematical modelling. [interviewer sneezes] That’s one area of activity. The other area, as I mentioned, was the selection processes to make sure, to reduce the cost of training people for the different functions that are required. And you have these out-stations where again, they are assisting say Bomber Command at High Wycombe, assisting in the Bomber Command operation up there, in the general running of the operation to C-in-C Bomber. Let’s, I mean there’s a lot of analytical study going on all the time. I mentioned, I think I mentioned in some earlier context, the DOE, the Defence Operational Establishment at Byfleet, who were conducting exercises on any area of MoD activity, whether it’s land, sea or air for instance, and they do broad systematic analytical studies of the performance of a service and we, as the air force, I would be working into that, linking up with it, but as well I would be doing my own studies.

[50:40]

As an example, I was there in mid seventies, wasn’t it, mid seventies when I was… yeah, ’75. ’73, ’75-ish and we did a study on attacking Moscow with a nuclear weapon, the V4s. And you knew the performance of the aircraft, you knew you’d got a nuclear weapon on board. You knew, from intelligence – and that was the other, intelligence gathering element – what the defence of the Soviet Warsaw Pact would be as you penetrated Warsaw territory. You knew that

Sir John Charnley Page 302 C1379/30 Track 17 the first line of defence would be long range fighters, there would then be surface-to-air, long range surface-to-air missiles. There’d then be perhaps short range fighters, but you then get short range, the air-to-surface missiles and you get point defence eventually. So you get these rings of defence around the target and you will hopefully know from your own intelligence the capability of those various elements, the particular missile that is part of that ring and then as you get closer in again the missile characteristics will change, because you know this from the work that you’ve been doing and you’ve been kept, your intelligence system’s kept you informed all the time, it’s not just, again, not just something you pick out of the air. So there’s a defensive in- depth capability and you now put these into your model and you run attacks and you find that you lose so many aircraft initially and then more and more and more as you get closer to the target, you deliver your weapon and you then have to come home and you’re again under attack on the way home. So you finish up with having started with x aircraft and crew and you fetch up back at your home base with a percentage of x aircraft and crew. And you then think as to whether against those defences your attack, whether, I said nuclear, you could be a nuclear, it could be a conventional attack depending on the state of the international scene. But you now have a view as to whether you’ve now still got sufficient resources for a second attack, should it be needed, resources either as aircraft or as personnel, crew. Now that’s the sort of thing, that’s an example of the sort of analysis that you can make. And that was one we did when I was there, of just a conventional low level attack on Moscow. And there’s nothing unusual in that, I just picked that out. That sort of thing is going on all the time and that’s part of the Chief Scientist’s function, to be running exercises like that. And you might as a result of that reach a conclusion such as, well, to make that operation worthwhile we’ve got to, the aircraft’s got to go in lower so that he’s not seen as quickly, so that he’s not seen by the first line of defence, he’s got to get under it, and so on. And you then play games as to well, suppose he does go lower, suppose he goes up higher, and you then start playing games to get a feel for how better to penetrate those defences. Now, I hope that doesn’t surprise you because that’s the sort of thing you’d expect to be going on and that’s what the Chief Scientist, his chaps are doing, as an example.

[55:45] And the outcomes of that sort of research work are in terms of tactics, operational requirements, what sort of things?

This then feeds into the, as you say, into the general running of the air force and oh, it can, the outcome can go into various things: change of the equipment, change of the operational plan, of

Sir John Charnley Page 303 C1379/30 Track 17 the equipment itself. Another element of the Chief Scientist’s analytical function is analysing the results of exercises and for instance, people out of Bomber Command, Bomber Command might run an exercise on, oh, on anything, either a bombing exercise, a navigation exercise, and the Chief Scientist staff will have set up, will have had discussions on the programme for the trial, what was to be measured, how it’s to be measured, how, therefore how, almost, convincing the results can be and, you know, just the… they’ll have been involved in, as I say, laying out the trial programme or the test programme and then analysing it to see, again, the improvements that might be, the weaknesses, the improvements that might be made and it’s all the time looking at improvement in equipment, personnel, training, selection. And you see, again there are checks and balances all the time. Each service has its own OR branch and the Chief Scientist works very closely with the OR branch, but as well, there is an OR branch looking at the whole of MoD. There was – I’m speaking now of mid seventies – a DC, a Deputy Chief Defence - DCDS – Studies. Deputy Chief of Defence Studies. And he had his, he was a serving officer that rotated, as they do, and he was looking at, he had a staff and was looking at exercises related to the whole of the defence scene and you as the air defence, along with the other service Chief Scientists, were working with his staff and that’s where the Byfleet people came in, because DCDS looking at the function of, the working of MoD as a whole, his resources were at Byfleet. He didn’t have many resources of his own, other than seeing what the programmes were that they wanted addressed and then Byfleet operated on it. So you’re now very much in the system study area of the running of MoD and within that the running of the separate establishments and all that goes with it. And, you know, you can debate that for days as to the right way to do that.

[59:48] How different was… as Chief Scientist to the RAF are you still in the same sort of part of the scientific civil service that you’ve been in before or is it somewhere separate?

Oh, different. What’s behind the question? It’s just another element of defence that is very concerned with analysis and… you’re not members of the PE, you’re not in the Procurement Executive because you’re not procuring anything, and that produces a tension between the Chief Scientist staff and boys and bodies and the establishment people at times, because they’re both well equipped scientifically technically; they can both look at the problem, they might well come up with different answers. And that shouldn’t surprise you because that’s the nature of science and the nature of looking at problems from different points of view. But certainly there was a time when the Chief Scientist and a particular Chief Scientist, when I was down at the

Sir John Charnley Page 304 C1379/30 Track 17 establishment and was having dealings with him when I was in RAE and we argued at length on something where we had different views and set up a little programme to try to resolve it, and we did. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But it was a trial programme and I think… yeah. One of my people that were… had been in Singapore and done a stint there supporting C-in-C Far East, Air Force, came back to London, certainly I thought he’d spent enough time in Singapore, brought him back to London, swapped people around a bit, and it then became clear that – clear to me – that he would be better occupied within the PE, on the procurement side. The chappie in PE, VCA – Vice-Controller, that’s a good phrase – civilian, the CA of the day was an Air Marshal, Air Chief Marshal, doesn’t matter, but his deputy was a civilian and he wasn’t too impressed with the individual I’m talking about and didn’t react very favourably to my suggestion that he should, he would be better placed within the PE somewhere than he was within Chief Scientist. And this sort of thing is happening all the time. Eventually CA said let’s take him, so they did, and he became a great success within the PE and his career went on, where previously it would have been stopped in CS RAF, but his career went on, to the advantage of the system and certainly to his advantage. But it made better use of his facilities, his skills, his facilities, his ability. Now again, that sort of thing was happening, that’s day-to-day stuff. But, the CS RAF programme responsibility function was quite different from procurement, they weren’t part of the PE, the Procurement Executive. And they answered, as I think I said right at the start, or the end of yesterday, I answered to CAS, Chief of the Air Staff, through ACAS OR, Assistant Chief Air Staff OR. That was the chain of command; from me to ACAS OR and then to… and even ACAS OR generally was quite happy for me to be talking to CAS direct, but that’s depending on the individual.

[1:06:00] Who were the individuals at this point? The Assistant Chief of Operational Research and the Chief of the Air Staff you had to deal with?

As I said, I think I touched this yesterday…

Spotswood?

‘Splinters’ Smallwood was the ACAS OR and Spotswood was CAS. And what was his Christian name? Oh dear. Forgotten. But Splinters was ACAS OR and he was, well and also, sorry, changed. Obviously when I was there – well not obviously – but the postings changed

Sir John Charnley Page 305 C1379/30 Track 17 and… ACAS OR changed. Forgotten, forgotten. Forgotten, it might come later. No…. Ruthven, Ruthven, I think his formal Christian name was Ruthven, but never called that, that was too high-powered for him. Wade. Wade. Wade. Gerry. Gerry Wade. Cor blimey. ‘Splinters’ Smallwood and then Gerry Wade, yeah, it was that way round. Different characters. I think Splinters had been a fighter man, I think Wade was a bomber man, but I’m talking now of, don’t remember. But certainly different characters, each with a high regard for the work of a Chief Scientist and what he did. Yeah.

What were your relations with them like?

Pardon?

What were your relations with them like? That’s your immediate boss, as it were.

Yeah, I thought that question would come, that’s why I hedged around the chain of command before as to whether I went to them or to Chief of the Air Staff, because with both of them it wasn’t a question of level, we just worked… we worked as a pair because he had a seat on the Air Force Board. I had a seat on the Air Force Board and we sat next to each other and we drew cartoons when the discussion got a bit odd or a bit dull and nothing of concern to the OR branch. It might have been engineering or whatever, which perhaps was not of vital importance at the time and Splinters or Gerry Wade was on my left. And so in that sense we were both on the Air Force Board, I wasn’t reporting through him in that we were both there. [pause] I’ve got that wrong. [pause] I’ve got that wrong. When I was on the Air Force Board, yeah, when I was Chief Scientist I wasn’t on the board, but when I was CER I was, and I was on all three service boards as CER. But no, it’s better to think of me as Chief Scientist answering to CAS through ACAS OR, that’s the better way to look at it, yes.

[1:11:28]

And this, as I relate back to last night, this all happened as a result of the post of CGWL being abandoned, because the CGWL post was a much more senior post than Chief Scientist. Oh yes, to any of the… CGWL at controller level, you’d have… oh well, never mind.

So effectively, was that a demotion then almost?

Sir John Charnley Page 306 C1379/30 Track 17

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You could call it that if you wish. It was a case of finding a home for this chap, the job didn’t exist, find a job for him, and Spotswood more or less said, how about coming to work for me. Yeah.

How did you feel about the change?

How did I feel? Oh, it happens. Disappointed, it happens. It’s handling that sort of scene, again is part of the growing up. You make a decision then; do I want to stay with this or do I go outside, do I pack up defence and go out to industry somewhere. Or something else, or do something completely different. So yeah, those moments arise. Sure.

Did you enjoy the job as Chief Scientist of the RAF?

Yes, yes, yeah. Yes, yes. Yeah. Part of it. See, within the defence world wherever you are, whether it’s this country or the States or NATO, studies and analyses are taking place the whole time. This seems that you’re having difficulty, I don’t know, taking on board. There is a lot of analysis going on all the time. I can fast forward up to the Falklands in the summer of ’82, which was one of the last things I did before I retired, and, you know, as that was going on we were analysing ‘what if’ scenes all the time, and I was then CER. Yeah. But you’d got scientific staff doing analysis of – rather like this attack on Moscow – the same sort of analysis of what he’s got, what you’ve got, you know his attack in this case, his attack weapon, Exocets and his aeroplanes and you’ve got your defence, you know what your defences are, di-da-di-da-di-da, and you play that sort of scene.

[1:15:00]

Now that’s going on all the time is what I’m saying, and so each organisation has a body that’s doing this sort of thing. I make the point because NATO had a body doing this sort of thing. And also NATO had its own Experimental Establishment in Holland and it was… oh God, I can see all the questions coming on this. Oh, tedious. As Chief Scientist Air Force I certainly sat, and I don’t know whether, I can’t remember whether I was there as air-minded or whether I was there representing MoD as a whole rather than just the air element, and when I went, first went to the NATO Experimental Establishment in Holland on a visit and was delegated to be the chap

Sir John Charnley Page 307 C1379/30 Track 17 that sat on the governing body, because again, you had the Establishment with a director in Holland but the body that governed and set the programmes for the place was NATO as a whole and they were all the NATO members. So there was a committee of scientific people, principally, but not necessarily so, depending on what the countries sent in, but there was a representative from all the NATO countries on a functioning body for NATO research and I was our member on that body. It was run to start with by an American, forgotten his name, and his time, he served his time – three years, whatever, I don’t remember – and I was then, was experienced enough in what was going on, that the NATO authorities, and don’t ask me who, decided that I would be the next chairman of this committee. So now I was running a committee of whatever the numbers were, but it had on it representatives from all the NATO countries and I'll make the point right now, including Turkey and Greece and part of the skill was to get Turkey and Greece to sit round the same table. And the Establishment then had analysts of the sort I’ve been talking about, but it also had some research programmes of its own, NATO research programmes, principally concerned with air defence and the NATO defensive pattern. And so you can see now the modelling of NATO defence where, what the defence pattern was, what the equipment was, what requirements you needed for it and so on, and you worked with the NATO countries, but you were the central thing. And in this function as chairman of this committee, I reported to SACEUR – Supreme Allied Commander Europe – who at the time was Al Haig. So I got to know Al Haig well, professionally and socially. And used to have meetings with him, report to him; he insisted on having a report of what NATO research was doing, was it healthy, what was it doing, this, that and the other. He went back to the States, obviously, did his time. [pause]

[1:20:17]

Much later, when I’d retired, and you may remember the part he played in the Falklands diplomatic work, he was then within the US Foreign Affairs office in some respect, I don’t remember. But he… I can’t, I’d better not go down that line… other than he was then politically minded – he always was politically minded – and I’d retired and my wife and I had been out to California or somewhere over there, were making our way back, got off an aircraft, changing aircraft somewhere in the mid-west and a group of people started marching through the departure lounge where we were waiting for our other aeroplane and who should it be but Haig with his entourage going for the same aeroplane. And he saw me sitting there and more or less said, ‘John, what are you doing here?’ This upset his entourage – who the hell was this that their boss

Sir John Charnley Page 308 C1379/30 Track 17 would just pick out sitting there? Was he a threat? What should they do about it? And he more or less said no, no, no, he’s alright, you know, I know this bloke, I’ve known him for years, di-da- di-da-di-da, and are you going to Washington? We were going to Washington, yeah. Oh I’m going there as well, come and join me. And so we travelled to Washington, there you go. That goes, you see, what does that demonstrate? Making friends, if you like. And that came out of the NATO research committee that I ran and reported to him. Don’t know if it proves anything, other than you never quite know when something is going to be useful to you. Don’t know, don’t know.

What was your impression of Alexander Haig?

Yeah, I knew that was going to come. Dear God.

You’ve met some interesting people. [laughs] I have to ask something about them.

[pause] Why am I hesitating, I’m not really hesitating, just that I don’t, I don’t like… It’s not, it just is niggling at the back of my mind Tom, that there’s this, the Wilileaks [Wikileaks] stuff, and we’re now talking about the character of individuals, in the way in which this has happened in the diplomatic circus and it’s now coming to light, there’s been a leakage, this, that and the other, and as a result personal remarks that are made about characters and whether they are liked or whatever their failings might be are now in the public mind and it’s all been criticised and pulled to pieces. You know, there’s the remarks that our own Bank of England made about Cameron and our Chancellor before they came into office as to whether they were up to the job or not. Now, you ask me about Al Haig, was he up to the job or not? Whatever I say, with the best will in the world, it may not be secure what I say. And so I’m…

I can put a thirty-year restriction on it.

I realise that, I realise that and I’ve thought of that overnight. Is that what… in thinking of answering your form, is that what I want? I’ve spent all these hours with you flogging through this sort of stuff, which I don’t enjoy doing, it’s a chore to me, but there it is. If it’s thought to be a good idea that it should be done I’ll do it, but having done it, if it’s to be any use at all, I don’t want it sitting there for thirty years. So that’s the dilemma I’m in. Having sat here for what, six or seven sessions, two hours at a time or even longer and thought what I’m going to say, and

Sir John Charnley Page 309 C1379/30 Track 17 yakked on, which isn’t me really, do I want it sitting there for thirty years. And I think, for God’s sake, why? No. Because what is it about? I’m back to the basis of it, what is it about?

Let me phrase it another way, well in this particular case…

[1:25:58] Well this is back to Al Haig. Now…

From your point of view, having worked with him…

[both speaking together]

…as SACEUR he showed an interest in what the group was doing. He wanted to know, he was intelligent, no doubt about that. You know, you don’t get to that sort of level whatever you are, without being intelligent, I think. He earned the respect of people that were working for him, within the people that I met, certainly, within the NATO headquarters, in oh, near Brussels, begins with an ‘M’. Near Wellington, where Wellington fought, the battle.

Near Waterloo…

Near Waterloo.

Is it Meuse?

No, no, no. Anyway, that’s where the headquarters was, that’s where I used to go and report to him, go and see him. And it wasn’t frequently, when I say go and report, it would only happen two or three times in the course of my posting and his posting, because they weren’t linked in at all. I think it was twice or three times. Met him socially at functions. But what I’m getting to here, with my post as Chief Scientist RAF this brought me into the running of NATO in a sense and the fact that, as I said, all organisations and certainly defence, have within them a scientific, a need for a scientific study, a technical study on how they work, how they run, modelling this, that or the other. And it’s offline from the procurement operation, quite definitely offline. And as I say, in this country, there was DCDS OR, Deputy Chief of Defence Studies had Byfleet to do this for him. And then within the separate services, each of them had a group doing this sort

Sir John Charnley Page 310 C1379/30 Track 17 of thing. Chief Scientist Army, Chief Scientist Navy. Chief Scientist Army, Bill Penley; Chief Scientist Navy, Basil Lythall; Chief Scientist RAF, Charnley. And I don’t know, I’ve rambled on about that and as you have said, yes, at the level, it was a level down from where I had been as Controller of Guided Weapons and Electronics. And not the same sort of financial responsibility in any sense. Where do we go now? I’m dry, I know that.

[1:29:17] One final question actually. I was just wondering, were there any parts of the job, any projects you particularly enjoyed as Chief Scientist to the RAF?

I enjoyed attending the NATO meetings and being concerned with NATO research activities. And that’s opening up another bag of worms. [pause] I’ve touched on Greece and Turkey. Greece was operating American Phantom aircraft, F-4s, and were keen, they’d got experience in maintaining the aircraft and had thoughts about – keen is too strong – had thoughts about… forming, developing their aircraft manufacturing facilities, which were small aeroplanes, light aeroplanes, into something more tangible. They’d got experience of the Phantoms and they wanted to use that to build up their ability to build more military aircraft or more powerful military aircraft, and as a member of NATO they applied to NATO to help, to assist them in setting up some sort of aircraft industry, manufacturing industry bigger than they’d got. NATO decided that a Frenchman and I should go to Greece and offer to help, offer help – and help, not offer it, and help. I got approval to do it, to go and so Rolland Willaume and I found ourselves being welcomed at Athens airport by the Greek C-in-C Air, and we were there for three or four days. And had a briefing on what their almost defence, what their air policy was from the staff of the C-in-C and this led to the question being asked, that I asked the question, you know, where do you see…? It looks as if your radars aren’t really looking where I expected them to look? And the answer – I’ll cut all the crap out – the answer was, well they’re not looking across at the Soviet Pact, at Warsaw at all, they’re looking at Turkey, within NATO. Now don’t go down that path, ‘cos I didn’t have anything more to do with it, other than… – that’s wrong – [pause] As we were leaving, and again, we were seen off, Willaume and I, by the airman and as he was shaking hands with me to get into the aeroplane to come home, he offered me a job in Greece to help build up their aircraft business. Which I said “no” to. You could argue it was a tempting offer, there was various attractions associated with it, but I was still working, I was still in MoD, I wasn’t too close to retirement at that stage, well mid seventies, another five or six years to go. I suppose I could have thought of it, I didn’t. No, no, no, no. But, you get moved into particular

Sir John Charnley Page 311 C1379/30 Track 17 areas when you say anything, when I was there that, was it particularly attractive or whatever? Different, certainly. And, you know, as I… One thing that stands out was this tension between the two representatives on my committee, on my NATO committee. But then you saw when I was asked to do this thing on behalf of NATO, this obviously came to light that no, no, no, they were looking after the defence of… well, there we go. So, that certainly came out of my Chief Scientist Air Force interest.

[1:36:15]

And I’ve always enjoyed analytical studies, always. System studies, analytical studies, systems. Back to BLEU. The thought there was a lot of work had been done on little bits and pieces, but it was the putting of them together into an effective system. And certainly the analysis of… war gaming, if you like. What was the other example of this? But war gaming, not in the sense of having a little model battlefield laid out and this, that and the other, but in mathematical terms being able to describe the capability of that defensive system and where it’s placed and, as I say, different rings, different layers of defence and analysing how to penetrate. I found that absorbing and enjoyed that sort of activity. I enjoyed that more than the applied psychology business as the right sort of tests to establish whether this chap would be a good pilot, and if so, to do what. This was run down in Kent, what was the airfield down in Kent? World famous.

Biggin Hill?

Yeah, Biggin, Biggin, Biggin. And the tests, the actual physical tests, were done down at Biggin and as I said, the chap who ran that part of the work didn’t, I wouldn’t say insisted, but he made it that I’d better run through those trials myself, he’d better put me through them so that I’d know what he was talking about. So I went through the test programme as if I was joining the air force and at the end of it, I think he was a little surprised, he said that, you know, John you’d be alright but I don’t think you’ll be spectacular as a fast jet pilot. You’d certainly be alright as a bomber pilot, but I don’t think you’d be spectacular – those were his words.

Interesting thing to tell your boss really I suppose. [laughs]

Pardon?

Sir John Charnley Page 312 C1379/30 Track 17

Interesting thing to tell your boss.

Well, there you go. [laughs]

[1:39:27] I was wondering about the attractions of the war games, the analytical problems and sort of thinking back to what you were saying about enjoying maths as a child – do you think there’s a link there between the two sorts of activities?

Oh yes. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Certainly. Yeah. If you can go back to the guided weapon programme, and we spent some time earlier this morning on a typical sort of project structure. Now, you’ll get to a certain point in the project where to satisfy, whether things are going right and going well and where are the risk areas, you’ll have set up a mathematical model of the missile. And you will play that missile against a defensive – if it’s an attack missile – against a defence and you’ll then, and you’ll do this because... [pause] That’s not the way to go about it. You will take your missile at some stage in its programme and you will fire it off, either if it’s air launched you’ll fire it from an aeroplane, if it’s a ground launch you’ll, locally you’ll go to, send it to Aberporth and you’ll fire it out into the Cardigan Bay and you’ll take measurements and this, that and the other. And you will feed those, the results of those firings of that sort into a model that you’ve set up of the way in which you expect the missile to perform. And you will – what’s the word I’m trying to get at – you will evaluate, not evaluate, but you will… compare the results you’ve actually got with the results that your model said you’d expect. You’ll take those two and you’ll compare them and use those. Hopefully your firings will have confirmed what your model was telling you’d expect it to be, therefore you can use your model to extrapolate the performance of this missile into areas of your operation that you can’t do practically. What’s the word I’m searching… not evaluate. You’re confirming, you’re… You validate, that’s the word I’m… you validate your model. That’s the word I’m looking for. You do test firing, you set up a model of the way in which you expect your missile system to perform. You then do some trials to validate that model because now you use the correspondents to extract the performance into delicate areas that you can’t simulate in a test, but which you may have to use operationally. So that was a process again which I enjoyed, mathematical modelling in that sense. That’s not war gaming, but it’s building models analytically of the way in which – and you’re into, building models analytically is probability. There’s this sort of system and the probability of it doing this bit is such-and-such. You then add

Sir John Charnley Page 313 C1379/30 Track 17 that to the probability of another bit and you combine the whole lot, and we’re back to BLEU and the probability of there being a failure as the aeroplane is coming in to land. So, all of that I always found attractive. The airworthiness or the worthiness of a system and how do you demonstrate that and how do you pick out where the risks are high in a… and work on it. Yeah. And that was in all the various things I’ve done I think, that that was of interest to me.

Shall we take a tea break?

Pardon?

Tea? Or equivalent.

Yes, it’s a quarter to twelve.

[end of track 17]

Sir John Charnley Page 314 C1379/30 Track 18

[Track 18]

How did you come from being Chief Scientist to the Air Force to being appointed as Controller of Research Establishments?

I think we’ve touched on this, but there was a… a lot of that stems from Rayner and the need to reduce the staffing in the PE and there was a merge. It was thought a good idea to merge the three Chief Scientists to the three services: army, navy, air force, with the three Controllers of Research in CER that handled the research programmes in the three separate areas. So you now had Charnley as Chief Scientist Air Force and Deputy Controller responsible for air programmes. You had Bill Penley who was Chief Scientist Army and responsible for research programmes in guns of various sorts and mines for the army. And you had Basil Lythall who was the Chief Scientist Navy and at the same time, was the Deputy Controller and a CER responsible for navy research programmes. So we all had now two functions: one in the PE as CER staff and the other in the service boards as answering to the chief of the particular service. And so it was a good move in many ways, once you could understand that you did have, not a divided loyalty, but a different responsibility, yeah, two responsibilities, two separate functions. And you needed to be able to understand that to do the job properly. And Penley and Lythall and I got on very well together, if that’s going to be the next question – How did I get on with the other Chief Scientists? Penley, a background of Malvern, RSRE, RRE and RSRE, a radar man and a man that had been involved in wartime with the setting up of our air defence radars around the coast. That was Bill Penley. Basil Lythall had been in the, as a naval scientist and he, we get again within the government, in MoD, there was the Royal Naval Scientific Service. The navy historically had always had scientific backing and Basil was one of those. Trying to think of another well known name that was another one. I’ve got his book outside somewhere. We’ll look at that later, just as a name. Another naval scientist. And they had been a little breed of their own that had been involved and integrated into the CER organisation with naval responsibility. So Basil was that sort of a person and I was a person with an air background, a bit more than that maybe, but certainly different, but we got on well. Bill Penley had a great voice, he was a good singer. And I remember when all three of us at some stage, the Medical Officer, MoD Medical Officer decided we all needed a medical exam and Bill Penley and I went together for this and apparently – well, I was going to say apparently – when he did his various tests, the doctor that was running it was very impressed with the size of his chest and the voice box that Bill Penley had and he went in first and I came along later and the doctor said, ‘You’re a

Sir John Charnley Page 315 C1379/30 Track 18 poor specimen aren’t you?’, you know. [laughs] Bill had a nice voice, a good singing voice. He’s still alive, he’s older than me, he’ll be in his nineties I guess, and he lives down in the Weymouth area somewhere. When he retired, and I’m wandering on you see, when he retired a few years before me, he lived down in the Swanage, Weymouth area, can’t be more specific than that, and went into local government, which is something I could never see myself doing. Never, ever, ever. I’m surprised that Penley did as well. So there’s the CER set-up.

[05:28]

Now, none of this, and within CER at this stage, he did not have a nuclear research function. I think I’ve said earlier that that was Chief Scientific Adviser, CSA, with a separate function altogether. And CSA, although CER had the Aldermaston responsibility, he didn’t have – as an Establishment – he didn’t have responsibility for their programmes and their research. But, the director of the place, director of AW, was one of his staff, was one of his boys and indeed, David Cardwell was a director of Aldermaston and he became CDP, I think. I think David did for a short period. Colin Fielding was Director Aldermaston and he succeeded me as CER, but as that happened an ‘N’ was added, because there was a change of functions, a change of role, and CER became not just Controller of Establishment and Research, but Nuclear as well. And so he now accepted some nuclear programmes. But there we go, that’s a bit of a detail, that happened after I left. I was only CER, but you could well find references to CERN and wonder what the hell ‘N’ was, and that was it. So now why did I start on all of that – what were you asking me?

I was asking you how you became CER.

Well, there we are. Why did I inherit rather than Penley or Basil, I don’t know. George Macfarlane had been the CER and he retired and one of us was going to be – or it could have been someone from outside I guess. Anyway, it was me. It didn’t last long with Bill Penley. He was, as I say, he was older and he left… I don’t know that I ever really ran Bill. But I certainly ran Basil as the navy man. And my successor, as the post of Deputy Controller and Chief Scientist Air Force was John Alvey. Now John Alvey had been an electronics man – yeah – as a naval scientist, another naval scientist. And he was electronics and hadn’t had much to do with the air side at all. So why did he get appointed as CER, Chief Scientist with respon… for air programmes? And Basil was there with the navy and John Alvey, don’t know. Very good man and later, when he retired, John Alvey, he joined the board of BT, British Telecoms, responsible

Sir John Charnley Page 316 C1379/30 Track 18 for their R&D programmes. Still alive I think, lives in the Guildford area, and very good electronics, communications and radars. So he could really fit into principally the navy world with radars on ships, that’s what he’d been doing in the navy, and for the air force. So… and Bill Penley was replaced by, relieved by – forgotten his name – didn’t have as much to do with him, forgotten his name. Dear goodness. Forgotten, doesn’t matter. But there we were. George Macfarlane retired and I was appointed, I was in the outfit, I was one of three and I was lucky enough to get the job, so that after a few years, whereas you touched on what was a demotion, I’d had a completely different experience from procurement into Chief Scientist and analytical studies related to air force operations, and now back again at Controller level in procurement, responsible for R&D in the establishments, as I’ve said, the twelve of them, di-da-di-da-di-da. [telephone ringing]

[pause in recording]

Ready to go?

[10:40] Yeah. So there, I think that answers that question of how I became CER and I stayed there until I retired. I retired as CER, so that really was the end of my MoD career.

How important is COR? How important is COR within MoD scientific structure?

[laughs] Of course it doesn’t exist any longer because of Qinetiq. I suppose there’s a subject there in itself, that when I left the exercise was in play on the transferring the responsibility for defence R&D into the private sector and oh, who… who is the man that took over Qinetiq? John, John, John… became MD of Qinetiq to start with and then floated it… Now, need to get this name. I’ll get it when we start again, I’ll look at it over lunch and bring it up. John, John, John… [Chisholm] He had been involved… oh, how far down this path do we want to go?

It was a question I was going to ask you actually, about changes in the way that government R&D was carried out from that last part of your career, I’m aware there were big changes afterwards with the private sector becoming more and more involved, but…

And the answer is, I don’t know. The answer… [pause] Let me go back. John…

Sir John Charnley Page 317 C1379/30 Track 18

Shall we pause for one second?

[pause in recording]

[13:20] In your time, I guess in the early 1980s and towards the end of the seventies, I’m aware that there’s quite a lot of change in the way that government research happened afterwards with more involvement from the private sector, but was there any sort of early rumblings of that happening, as it were, in your latter years as an MoD scientist?

It’s a good word for it, early rumblings. Yes, is the answer, without any doubt at all. The thoughts were already being, the scene was already being set for a transfer to the private sector and the debate was taking place. There’s something I haven’t mentioned so far that’s relevant to this, that we’ve spoken earlier about checks and balances within the system and we’ve spoken about the Chief Scientific Adviser and he was outside the procurement process but was there to keep an eye on the R&D that was going on within the procurement process. He had another, he had another responsibility for nuclear programmes but also he was there as a bit of a, to keep a check on the CER area of activity. And this, when I became CER, this post was filled by Hermann Bondi; very active, very energetic, very agile, very deep thinker, very clever thinker, great respect for Hermann. And he, it had been set up before him. I’ve mentioned his predecessor or one of his – Bill Cook – that set me off on the Exocet trail and then Hermann, I’m not sure, I think it was set up in Bill Cook’s time, the Defence Scientific Advisory Council, DSAC, and this was a body chaired by the Chief Scientific Adviser, looking at the CER programme as CER was running it for all three services and the constitution of the committee had the services on it, but also it had representation from the private sector, from industry. And so you had a collective body here, that the agenda for the Council was always really looking at some element of CER’s research programme as the Defence Scientific Advisory Council. So you had on it big barons, scientific barons from industry, universities. Not very strong representation from the services but they were there, or could be if they wished. But essentially, you were looking externally from defence at the running of the defence research programme by CER. And one of the people on that committee was John Chisholm, and I’m trying to think of the company that he came from. Electronic company, did a lot… had done analytical work for

Sir John Charnley Page 318 C1379/30 Track 18 defence, in modelling as much as anything. Mathematical modelling I think of this, that or the other, doesn’t matter. However.

[17:15]

Talks were going on about, almost private… looking at the possibilities of privatising the R&D establishments and CER’s programme and sorting out his programme into the defence elements and again, elements which might find broader application than defence. And the thought that was in mind was that Chisholm would be a sort of a… there was a holding post, a holding man – sorry – After I retired then Colin Fielding was appointed for a while and then Donald Spiers, but we’re now into the mid eighties I think by that time, would be, yes. But then the scene was set and a body was set up, Qinetiq – funny name, funny title – to privately, in the private sector, to fulfil the functions that CER had had, had held. And John Chisholm was the man appointed to do it and he became the Chief Executive of Qinetiq. Industry was not very keen on this because this bunch, Qinetiq had got now the, if you like, the privilege of conducting defence R&D in competition with the private sector work that was going on in the defence industry, but with an inside track, having come out of defence itself. So there was this – and I’ve left the scene now – so what I’m saying now is hearsay and I’m sure that there are other opportunities for you or anyone else to find this from people closer to it than me, from John Chisholm himself maybe. But it does mean that there was no, that places like Farnborough, Malvern, an examination had been done of those particular areas of what were the defence R&D Establishments, the twelve that I’ve mentioned earlier. Some of them which were specifically and so closely related to defence that they should stay in defence and they became something like the Defence Scientific Service.

DERA? Was it DERA?

No. Qinetiq started as DERA. In this transition phase, DERA set up before Qinetiq appeared and in the DERA phase when the structure was being examined, it’s something like DC, Defence something… Don’t know. But it’s there now as – and part of Farnborough for instance, part of Boscombe Down on the air side are still closely linked into the defence world as defence scientists. I can’t say, I don’t know enough about it now. But it’s separate from that Qinetiq which now operates as, not just a private sector R&D firm, but a private sector defence firm. And it’s, again, from just my public reading on the subject, it has contracts from the American

Sir John Charnley Page 319 C1379/30 Track 18

DOD, in the way in which they bid in for contracts with our own defence, and American defence to my knowledge, and have been successful in America. Different way of doing things altogether and I talk with, I meet with people from Farnborough, RAE in particular. There isn’t an RAE any longer; the site is demolished, the old twenty-four foot big wind tunnel is there as a feature of our own aeronautical history, but it’s not doing anything. The site is now being converted into offices and other development projects by a development company. It’s been sold off by defence. You will pass it as you come from wherever you are, as you come to the traffic lights there, where the big motorcar salesroom on the site. So, I’m rambling on. I meet with people who worked at RAE for years, who don’t think much of the new ideas, but I speak also with youngsters from university who are working for Qinetiq, that are pleased with the work that Qinetiq is doing and the job that they’ve got with Qinetiq and are thrilled with their activity. So where the rights and wrongs are, I don’t know. I don’t know enough about it, I’m not close enough to give you a view, other than Qinetiq exists and it’s like a private company operating in the defence field.

[23:41] To go back to that early point in the late seventies and early eighties when you said this debate was happening, what did you think about the prospects for change?

…Why I’m hesitating again is that I had accepted that there was a need for change and was thinking in my own mind of what the changes should be. The driver was Treasury pressure on the department, on the Defence Department, reduction in expenditure, reduction in numbers, cut down the size of the Establishments. And we’re going down a path I don’t remember the details at all, but certainly CER was expecting to have to make substantial reductions in the running of his defence R&D Establishments and therefore reducing numbers, reducing functions, reducing project support activities, the whole thing was needing a review. And we were what, five or six years on since Rayner? That sort of thing, I guess. No, more than that, eight years. From ’72 to ’80, I guess, that sort of thing, since Rayner had previously taken a look at the procurement operation as a whole. But I was being concerned, or CER, N, CER was being tasked with looking at his organisation to make economies and I hadn’t got very far with it, other than I can remember a meeting with directors of Establishments where I launched this need with them, saying look, we don’t have an option here, we’ve got to look at it. I shall be expecting all of you to answer questions on how you can reduce resources in terms of money, in terms of men, and so don’t argue with me as to whether the rights and wrongs, just get on and do it. And the emphasis

Sir John Charnley Page 320 C1379/30 Track 18 then fell off a little bit because the Falklands War arrived, that was the thing which… and after that I retired. So I was never then involved in actually conducting the exercise that I knew had to be done. So when you ask me now what my thoughts were as to how it should be done, I hadn’t got very far at all. And you see, as I’ve tried to say earlier on, the Establishments had two distinct and discrete, interwoven; one research and the other supporting projects. And those things related to each other, you couldn’t support the projects unless you did some research or the basis on which you were able to support the project was the fact that you’d been researching in that area and been responsible for saying okay, we’ve done enough research, let’s start a project. So the whole thing was sensibly intertwined and you were searching for some way of separating that, and not wanting to separate it to make economies, either in spend or in manpower. On the spend side, all the Establishments annually made a bid for new facilities, equipment for their labs or for their trial purposes, so that was something you could look at and say well you can’t have this, you can’t have the other, da-da-da-da, and that was the ongoing debate which I had started, but didn’t get very far. Didn’t get very far at all. But certainly, the need to do something was recognised. It wasn’t in my mind to sell it off to the private sector, that wasn’t in my mind at all. And as I say, when you talk to people now who are working in Qinetiq, the old boys will say terrible, no, don’t like it a bit. The new youngsters will say great, because they don’t know anything different. I won’t say anything better, but anything different.

[28:47] When you said you hadn’t got very far with thinking about what to do about it, but if not the private sector, or just sort of vague thoughts about general direction you might want to take it?

Well you’re already looking at reducing defence equipment field anyway, so the whole of the procurement equipment, the PE was being looked at. Defence procurement programmes and the way in which support to the projects was provided and part of the… my thought processes were along the lines of maintaining the research and reducing the amount of project support that might be needed, but that my starting point was in this continuous programme from universities doing fundamental work into establishments doing the applied element of the fundamental work, then the feasibility, then the projects and so on. And as part of that programme, part of that continuous scene, I saw the need for the applied research being more important, if that’s being… more important than the support to the project activity which could be better handled, perhaps from headquarters with tighter examination of the industry project work, rather than relying on the Establishments to provide so much support. That was the way my thinking was going.

Sir John Charnley Page 321 C1379/30 Track 18

Didn’t get any further than that. But to certainly maintain the research programmes, applied research, the fundamental research being universities, the applied research then into the defence area, then the feasibility, then the projects, that was a defence scene and the one I wanted to keep was the research at the expense of the support to the projects.

Why the research part of it? Why the research part of it specifically? Is it because it was that link between…

Yeah, that’s right. Because (a) you were this link between – said it – the university and the application to defend. You were talking with OR, you’d got access into the OR branches, you’d got the security clearance that was needed for that sort of thing so that you could talk with your service associates in terms of their requirements and the state of play in that field in the research area. And you were now knowledgeable in arranging for the two to link. And I feel – I don’t know whether that exists now, I don’t think it does, I don’t think it does from what I hear in almost in the gossip areas. I don’t think it does. However.

[32:38] Talked a little bit about some of your roles as CER; visiting all those twelve establishments, asking people what work they were proud of. I was wondering what was behind that particular little part of it, asking people what work they were proud of?

Oh, because I had to talk with Frank Cooper and tell him. He asked that question of me. The Perm Sec, because he was answering to whoever, either Ministers or the Treasury or whoever, you know, you’ve got this vast array of scientists, you know, just justify what they’re doing. And I was being asked that question continuously and therefore needed to know from the Establishments, what I should be saying. This was almost a normal reporting channel. And we’re back again to the checks and balances thing we’ve talked a lot about this morning, that always from somewhere or another, and it may not appear from the outside world that this happens in government, that government just spend the money that they raise from taxes and that there’s no check kept on what they’re up to. I defend the checks, balances argument that, dear God, that as far as I was concerned, the continuous tough line was coming from the Treasury one way or another, either direct or through the Perm Sec or however to say, what the hell are you doing with all these men and this money that you’ve got? How are you spending it? Justify it. You know? Tell us, tell us. And in many ways that was CER’s function; organising it with the

Sir John Charnley Page 322 C1379/30 Track 18 establishments in such a way that you could sustain the spending that was going into it. I can’t think of the figure right now, three or four hundred million a year on the research programme, something… It was, in defence terms not very big, but in terms of what a private sector company could spend on research, very, very significant. So as CER I certainly accepted that I had to justify the way the money was being spent, right and proper.

How much financial… I was thinking in your role as CER then, with these pressures on you, financial, how much sort of freedom is there within the organisation to pursue research underneath you?

You… how much freedom is there? Well… [pause] It’s an evolving process of talking with the services informally, formally. Informally it’s an ongoing programme, you know what they’re up to, you know the way, the threat, you know what they’re trying to do. You’re all the time, you’re in touch – and I haven’t really touched on this to any great degree – you’re in touch with the intelligence world and the sources of information as to the sort of threats that you’re being asked to counter and therefore your own state of knowledge, be they universities or your own establishments, how do you stand in this area, that particular area, is there need to set up some research programme to examine that more carefully because they look as if they’ve got something, what is it that they’ve got or have they not. We’ve had this report that there’s some activity going on here that’s all very exciting, have we got anything like that, and so on. Now that’s going on the whole time, is one element of it, so you’re putting together a picture of where we stand relative to a potential enemy. An enemy then was the Warsaw Pact, even after, you know, the wall came down. You’re still, in ’82 which is when I left, it hadn’t happened long ago had it? I’m trying to think back. Certainly… The eighties wasn’t it?

’88, ’89.

I was going to say, the Warsaw Pact was still there I think, all the activity happened after that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, that sort of game was going – game again – was going on. What have they got? What have we got? Where do we need to do more research? How relevant would that little bit to defence, if we could change it a little bit here and there, so let’s get our own people looking at that, or, and as I’ve said earlier I think, in many ways the sort of work you want. There was an area of work that needed to be done which wasn’t attractive to the universities because it couldn’t be published. So there was an area of work there that needed a

Sir John Charnley Page 323 C1379/30 Track 18 body of work with contacts into defence directly to look at what was being done, and so on. The link is the word, and it’s right, yeah.

[38:46] Talked quite a bit about the formal link aspect of this, but I was wondering about, you know, the informal links then and I couldn’t help but notice that your club is the Royal Air Force Club. Is that part of that scene in terms of talking to…

No. No, that was when I became established as Chief Scientist Air Force, the CAS of the day and I think it was, it was Spotswood, who said, “John, I think, you know, you are air-minded, you’re one of us now, I think you should be a member of the club.” And I certainly said yes, that will suit me well. I’d been toying with the place used by professors and academics…

Athenaeum?

Athenaeum, yeah, I’d been under pressure to join the Athenaeum and had resisted that, it wasn’t, it didn’t suit me in being almost active enough, lively enough. Don’t take me down that path please.

I was just wondering about ‘under pressure’ to join the club, that’s the sort of phrase I was interested in.

Yeah, yeah, the RAF Club. The club in that sense, yeah.

No, under pressure to join the Athenaeum though, under pressure from whom?

[pause] Academics, university profs, as CER I was working with… Under pressure is perhaps too… why wasn’t I a member? Are you a member John, well why not? And, you know, come and join us. That’s the way in which the world worked and hopefully still does, hopefully, I don’t know. But I’ve been well pleased with my membership of the RAF Club actually and stay there, go there for lunch, go there in an evening prior to the theatre or something like that. Yeah, very pleased with it. And at that stage, and it’s changed a bit now, at that stage there was a welcome for wives and Mary was an associate member. So she could pop up to London to shop and pop into the RAF Club, with her friends if need be. But certainly she was welcome in the

Sir John Charnley Page 324 C1379/30 Track 18 place and that was different from the Athenaeum. As I talk about it now, there it was, yeah. There was no way that she would be as welcome there as she was in the RAF Club. And the RAF Club was in that sense different from so many other clubs. It was a younger club, it wasn’t steeped in history in the way in which so many of the others are with traditions of centuries maybe. No, no, no, suited me well and still does. Still does. The chap in – we’ll have some lunch I think – the chap in reception now, forgotten his name, knows me well, shakes me by the hand, you know, wants to know what I’m up for in London now, am I at a meeting of some sort, am I going shopping, di-da-di-da-di-da, and what can we do for you.

What does one do at one’s club? It’s never a position I’ve been in.

Oh blimey! Is this on or off?

It is on actually.

You don’t need that!

I am just wondering.

Oh…

[42:44] It seems so relevant to your work. For me sort of on the outside and looking at it, Chief Scientist to the Air Force, MoD scientist, it seems work related – is it to some extent?

Oh it is, oh yes. Yes, yes, yes. Yes, work related, certainly. It’s work related, but it’s very sociable, very social as well. And as CSRAF in those days, we’re thirty years ago, don’t forget you’re asking me, we’re thirty years ago. I would take, it was a place I would use for lunching people, or for dinner in the evening with someone from industry, someone from overseas. I can remember Labrunie, I can remember taking Labrunie on Exocet, on a visit over, for lunch in the RAF Club. It was just central London, it’s in Piccadilly near Hyde Park Corner, very convenient, and oh, you need a centre like that, that’s got a couple of bars, that’s got a function room that you can hire as a function room for a group, a discussion, whatever. If you want to be outside MoD for some reason or another. Oh, gosh. Yeah. And I enjoy it, I enjoy the place. The

Sir John Charnley Page 325 C1379/30 Track 18 main corridors are lined with photographs of either aircraft or squadrons. Squadron crests, the first floor has got masses, got rows upon rows of squadron crests, obviously pictures of famous RAF personalities, Fighter Command, Battle of Britain, and then Bomber Command, Harris, they’re all there on the walls, as well as more recent people that are contemporary with me. I’m not there, let me say that, but many of my colleagues – not many of them left now – are on the wall, as well as some of the very elderly World War I figures. But essentially, it’s just a place now, it’s certainly a place that I use to stay overnight in London. I went recently, earlier this year, to the south of France because I wanted a ride on the TGV. I had to be at St Pancras by eight o’clock in the morning to catch a train out at nine, so I stayed overnight and made sure that they woke me. I had my own alarm, I had the thing I could set in the room, but I also got reception to make sure I was awake, ready to get a taxi across – they got me a taxi, di-da-di-da. I don’t know that it was a good idea – don’t know why we’re recording this for God’s sake – I don’t know that it was a good idea really, because it meant that I was trailing some… the. Like any of the London clubs the dress format is quite strictly adhered to and… but it’s looser in the RAF Club than it is in many of the other clubs that I go to as a guest of someone else, in that there’s almost an off-duty drill but then there is a formal drill, and for eveningwear in the dining room they want a coat and tie. Daytime, not so formal, you may need a tie but you don’t need a coat. You can be working in relaxed dress. I probably have got that precisely wrong, but it’s relaxed, I’ve forgotten the formal name for it. But that meant on this occasion, because I had a meal in the club before staying overnight, I had with me and never used again the whole time I was away, an evening kit. Wasn’t exactly a suit, but it was a blazer, which I never used again and I was carting this thing around when there was no need at all. So I’m not sure it was a good idea. However, there it was. That’s the sort of thing I use it for. Oh, I enjoy them.

[48:17]

You do need a centre in London where you can stay and invite businesses associates. And now, any… there was a company that I was a consultant to, Kidde. It started with Wilkinson Sword and went to something-something else with all the takeovers that take place, and became Kidde. Fire protection and detection, detection and fire protection. And… three or four of us from that company still meet, in turn hosting and when it’s my turn to do things, I take them to the RAF Club. And they always enjoy it, without a doubt. Got some nice wine, club claret, the standard sort of stuff, and so on. And as your career progresses you ought to think about it.

Sir John Charnley Page 326 C1379/30 Track 18

Perhaps not the Air Force Club. [laughs]

Or perhaps not. I’m not saying that, but the point, I'm making a base in London of some sort.

Apart from the practical side of it, are there any other benefits to that club membership?

Like what?

I’m just wondering, you know, the sort of people you meet who are kind of in line with your work perhaps, that sort of thing.

Well, yeah. Not as many now. [pause] I don’t quite know how it happened. I don’t know why I was there, but I was certainly there within the last three months on some occasion and I had someone with me, but that doesn’t matter, and I was there for an evening meal and in the dining room was a table with four or five people on it, all of whom were ex-test pilots or a member… government test pilots, squadron test pilots, service test pilots that I’d known at Farnborough and at Boscombe and at Bedford, one of them, with a test pilot from industry, from Hatfield, de Havilland’s, Hatfield that I’d worked with on Comets. Another test pilot, another pilot, from Shuttleworth. So there was a Shuttleworth pilot, a Hatfield pilot and a couple of chaps I’d known from my own Farnborough experience. Duncan Simpson, that was a Harrier, Bill Bedford was the main start of the Harrier programme, was the test pilot, then it went to Duncan Simpson, then it went to various others. But certainly Duncan then became an SBAC man that was associated with the running of the Farnborough Air Show, so he was air-minded. And there they were and they saw me coming into the dining room and more or less as a man leapt up from their table saying, ‘John!’, you know, ‘What are you doing here?’, the obvious question. ‘You look fit and well, what are you doing? What are you doing here?’ So no significance, but it happens, that’s all.

So you run across people in your line of work there then?

Sure, sure. Sure, sure. Yeah. And it bothers you because you see other faces and you can’t remember the names. Not often you see names that you know and look for, that’s the wrong face for that name, but certainly see faces and you can’t remember the names. That’s age. Let’s

Sir John Charnley Page 327 C1379/30 Track 18 have something to eat shall we? Is this a sensible time? Have we finished, we must have finished CER and defence.

I have one other question about CER.

Go on then.

[53:06] I was just wondering about the university link part of it.

Go on.

In terms of talking to, you mentioned that you also knew academics, you were talking to academics as well. I was just wondering in what sort of context?

Not a lot. [pause] I’ve mentioned the Defence Scientific Advisory Council, one or two of them were on that. And that reminds me that Hermann Bondi changed that to ask one of them to run it rather than he running it. Oh dear me, you see. And there’s the chap from Cambridge, a biochemist was he, from Cambridge that then took over the running of the DSAC. Oh, I don’t know, don’t know. [pause] It’s…

Just sort of thinking about, you mentioned how you saw the RAE as this link between universities and industry, I’m just wondering, you know, is that part of that process as it were?

Well, I was going to say that I did more of that when you were out at one of the Establishments than when you were in the London Headquarters, that’s the point I was going to make I think, I was getting round to. As a Deputy… certainly as CGWL you weren’t touch - you really weren’t very concerned with the research programme, you’re much more on the project side and the big defence programmes in radars, in communication equipment and so on, in aircraft, in aviation. But as CER still, not a lot of contact. Certainly contact when you were in the Establishment with the university, with the academic world. And… the, you know, in the scene that I’ve been describing the contact was much closer from the Establishments rather than from the Headquarters. And even in the Establishments, you know, you were, in your negotiating with the universities for them to do some work for you in a particular area that you wanted explored

Sir John Charnley Page 328 C1379/30 Track 18 more, one of your problems, as I say, was the restriction on publication. The other thing which was so, came across so clearly to me, that so many of the profs – and really you’re talking now about the hiring of a couple of PhD programme chaps, maybe – and you were very conscious that the sort of thing that the prof was keen for them, for you to engage them on was something that was close to his interests and not always yours. Because his interest was in maintaining or even improving the status of his particular university, his particular department within the university, for the obvious sort of reasons, and so he was looking for work which would encourage that sort of… therefore he wanted to publish, therefore he wanted something that he was identified with. You were probably going to him because he was identified with it, but he really didn’t want to do it unless he could publish. So you often had difficulty. They didn’t like security work, they didn’t like work that was security classified. It meant you needed a part of their department which had to be looked after with a fence of some sort. Anyway. But, you could build up a relationship, and again, you might have lunch in the RAF Club as part of that building up. Don’t know. Don’t know.

[end of track 18]

Sir John Charnley Page 329 C1379/30 Track 19

[Track 19]

I had a few other questions about your time as CER. One of them was something that came up a while ago, which was you mentioned a few interviews ago when you were talking about your time at the Imperial Defence College, how later on you were selecting people to go on that course and I was just wondering in terms of the personnel of the establishments and looking at people who were coming up, is there any sort of career guidance from you there for them?

Career guidance for them from me? That way round?

Both sort of offered advice and also sort of thinking, that’s a good person to put in that direction now.

The second one certainly. That first, whether I then offered advice to the individual, I wouldn’t, I think. I didn’t, let me say that. I don’t remember. Oh, at what level? You see, I pulled Higton out for one thing. He may… [pause] How did I work the system? I’ve mentioned to you the visits I made once a month to each Establishment and as part of that discussion at the Establishment I would have asked directors to earmark career prospects, their bright boys, and in fact one of them might be invited to make a presentation to me as part of the afternoon. But essentially through whatever mechanism they themselves had, I wanted from the directors, promising names, a short CV, a short character description of candidates that they thought were going to go further and therefore ought to be nursed in some way or another. So I was collecting a bunch of thirty or forty characters who needed to be nursed, one way or another. Now you get to the levels at which people were suggesting things. What sort of level were they within the different establishments, because I kept a master chart of the career prospects of these people that were being identified by the Establishments. I knew my own people in London, but there weren’t very junior people in London, mainly people in London were certainly, oh PSO and above, even SPSO, but PSO and above really. And I knew the various posts that I wanted to see filled, either in the Rstablishments or in London, and the levels of them and I had a magnificent multi-dimensional chart attempting to solve an insoluble problem of putting these thirty or forty folk – let’s say there were forty, which is three different Establishments – that were being recommended by the directors. And some of them you’d say immediately, or the director would have said, deserves promotion but really not a manager, going up the scientific single merit line rather than into the management sphere. So it could now build up a little bit of a chart, a career

Sir John Charnley Page 330 C1379/30 Track 19 planning chart. It was my CPC, and these names are on it and the different levels: SPSO – not many PSOs – SPSO, DCSO, AUS, and looking at the various opportunities at the different levels and filling in, playing the game, just putting names on them. And as a result of that, deciding what the next move ought to be and talking with the director of that Establishment, if that was the case, as to shouldn’t you be thinking of putting this bloke in this hole? Do you agree that this is a sensible career planning route for this [bloke] and does that mean a twelve months on IDC at some stage, would that be a good idea for this man. And so on. So yeah, I had a CPC, a career planning chart, tucked away in my bottom drawer. Now, the extent to which that got to the individual, I now left to the director of the Establishment, or whoever. If he and I agreed that this individual, it was time for a move or in twelve months’ time he should have a move, because the work he was doing at the moment might be at a stage where he needed to finish it, or whatever. That’s just managing programme. But at some stage, the how and why that’s presented to the individual is not really for me, unless it’s at the senior level, and then I’ll chat with the individual, and I did that once, twice. But generally I was more concerned with, among these 7,000 scientists that I had, allegedly, where were the bright people and were they doing the right thing and we… and it was something, as I say, when I went down to the Establishment I would talk to the director about it, I’d get him to nominate people. And I didn’t interfere with whatever he had his processes of recommending these names. Does that answer the question?

[06:37] Well. One of the other questions I had was, what about the sort of, changing governments that would have happened during your period working in London, I’m wondering how much, you know, a new Minister coming in, for instance, actually affects what’s happening underneath him?

Well, it’s a very formal process. That when you know there’s an election coming up, months beforehand, you’re putting together the brief that a new Minister’s going to get, in some way or another your little bit will be merged into a more general document, but you’ll be submitting up your chain into, in this case, the Perm Sec who will then be providing for the new Minister a brief as to what his job is and what the state of play is within the department of which he ought to be aware and you will, whether it’s a repeat of the old government but a new man, that’s one scene, but if it’s a change of party as well as a new man, that’s a different scene altogether and to some extent I could argue that you’d have two briefs: one for one situation and the other for another. One where it’s a new… you wouldn’t know the new man but you’d know the new

Sir John Charnley Page 331 C1379/30 Track 19 party, and you’d know the extent to which your programmes were likely to be influenced and changed by a change of government. So there’d be a brief to do that, but if it was a repeat of the same party but a new man, there’d be a separate brief for that. Don’t know, we only had the two. So you submitted up your own chain in a department an appreciation of these two elements in your area. Standard stuff. In the last election that we had that resulted in the – now you see that’s an interesting one - in the coalition. At some stage when I was in London there was a coalition government and I can’t remember when, I don’t remember which post I was in. But the thing that it did, as far as I was concerned, it slowed the process down because it meant that your own Minister, who was a member of a coalition, couldn’t decide on his own what he wanted to do, he’d got to talk to his member in the other party in some way, within the coalition. Anyway, but it did slow down the process. You couldn’t expect to get a quick answer, a quick answer in the way that you could before. I can remember that and I can’t elaborate on it other than my feeling was oh, we’re not going to get a decision for weeks on this because it’s sensitive, it’s delicate and he won’t feel able to do this on his own. Can’t say more than that, but there it is. Now, whether that’s happening now, but certainly we’ve, running our country with a coalition is something we haven’t done for donkey’s years and we’ve got to learn how to do it. And in the process, like the students’ tuition fees and suchlike, when you’ve got a coalition decision one way but independent members within it voting differently prior to the election, got to find a way of living with that. There we are, but my experience of a coalition was just a general slowing down, for what it’s worth.

[11:07] Highlighted one sort of issue there of, you know, changing government meaning a slowdown in that case. I was wondering, from your point of view, what makes a good or a bad Defence Minister to work for?

I don’t think in the Defence Minister what a good or a bad Minister to work for, whether it’s Defence or whether it’s Home Office or whatever. (a) A knowledge of his party policy on the particular issue, in other words a knowledge of where he stands within his party on it, whether he agrees with his party policy or whether there is a party policy but with which he doesn’t agree. And under those circumstances it’s quite strange to find him in his position if there’s a party policy with which he doesn’t agree and yet he’s, you know, responsible for it, it doesn’t make sense, but it happens. Yeah. Don’t ask me whom – I’m not putting names on that, at all. That’s the first point, what is the government’s policy and within the government’s policy is the party

Sir John Charnley Page 332 C1379/30 Track 19 policy on it. And next, a willingness to listen to what you have to say on that policy in terms of your programme, willing to listen to it to either say yes, yes, yes, that’s fine, I agree, I agree – this is the Minister – that’s the way we want it done, like that, yes, yes, yes. Or, Charnley, not, no, no, that might have been the situation before but it’s no longer the situation. Now go away and rethink it and come back in a couple of months’ time and produce a new programme for me. So if you ask me what makes a good Minister, I’d like to think that (a) he says what his requirement is, (b) you tell him what you’re doing, the way in which you think your work is currently going, you try and match the two and hope he will there and then say either yes or send you away to rethink it. Rather than saying, well I hear what you say, or I don’t, but oh, I need to think about that or I need to go and ask and talk… so on and so on. That’s very simple, that’s very simplified, for goodness sake, for the sake of an answer. But there are subtleties within it. Don’t ask me what they are. It’s whatever the particular scene is at that moment.

[14:25] One of the things I was wondering about was we’ve covered quite a period of time of you working in London. I was wondering exactly where were you working in London?

Physically?

Mm.

I had a lovely office on the second floor of the Ministry of Defence main building on the Embankment. I looked out over the Embankment onto the river and, as I say, it was the second floor of MoD main building. And next, in the next office, in fact the second floor the four of us: CA, MGO… the navy man, Controller Navy – CN - Controller Navy and me. And we were in, all of us, on the corridor, long corridor, all looked out on to the river. Very nice indeed. And on the opposite side of the corridor were a series of loos and bathrooms so that you could get changed for going out in an evening to some formal function. You didn’t have one each but you shared and, so there was a changing room. Didn’t have a gym or anything of that sort there, there was a gym and squash rooms for the defence building as a whole.

This is in your time as CER then?

Was there.

Sir John Charnley Page 333 C1379/30 Track 19

How much did you see of the people in the offices next to you?

GC… what did I do as GCDW… Oh gosh. [pause]

I was just…

As, as in Mintech I was further down, I wasn’t in the defence building at all, I was further down the river, down the river, yeah, down the river. No, up the river, in a different building altogether. Again, on the river, just the road and then the river, looking out over it. It wasn’t a very efficient building that one, because it was… it was oval in shape and as such with lifts and so on didn’t lend itself to the efficient use of space, to my way of thinking, as an engineer rather than an architect, and there’s a difference. I can’t think back to my GCDW. I think I was up in, near Tottenham Court Road, up there as GCDW. Certainly the team were. How strange, isn’t it? Anyway, I can’t… Certainly, CGWL, I was there in the main building, and I had a secretary, which had three people in it. One was my technical assistant, male, and strangely enough he was a career prospect from Aldermaston, very good and did my job well of sorting out the technicalities. Then there was my secretary who looked after diary and my social side as well as typing and general secretarial work, but then there was a third lady, older, who was really a filing clerk and just kept track of all the papers that came through, and there was vast numbers of them. But the work was being done by my secretary on the one hand and my technical bloke on the other, as I say, who came from Aldermaston. And you can ask why Aldermaston, go on, go on, go on. Just that he was bright and needed a career move, and needed a move from the Establishment – we’re now back to career planning out of the Establishment into Headquarters, into the equivalent of a fast stream administrator, into the outer office of a senior officer and getting an idea on the way in which the system works for moving back to the establishment in due course. The theory of it.

[20:00] Talking about your time in the CER offices on the same corridor as the MGO, Controller Navy and people like that, it all sounds a very neat arrangement for keeping you close together – did you see much of them?

Yes. Much. How did I see much of them?

Sir John Charnley Page 334 C1379/30 Track 19

Let me rephrase the question – how much did you see of them?

With my air background and with the fact that I’d been Chief Scientist Air, I had a close link to CA and the successors of the various CAs that were there when I served. But the man that, when I retired, the CA was Air Chief Marshal Dougie Lowe, Sir Douglas Lowe, who’d been a bomber pilot, a bomber man and lives at, lived at… next station down towards London from Woking. Has a cottage down there, but doesn’t matter now. It’s in… cor blimey, I say it doesn’t matter. [sighs] Depends where you… I’m scared of when I say this where it’s going to take me, because when Dougie had retired and I had retired – we’re talking I think now mid eighties perhaps – a company… [pause] a company was aware - and I’ve forgotten the name of the company, so just as I say, these things, they cross my mind as I open up – had had an approach or had decided, they’d known of an engineering, a defence engineering company in China – and that’s going to surprise you, wonder where the hell’s he taking me now, and I’m taking you to China – that built guns for the Chinese government and in some way this English company were associated with this Chinese company in gunnery. The Chinese company wanted to move into the guided weapon field because they wanted to bid in on a Chinese government RFQ – Request for Quotes – on a guided weapon system, but they didn’t have the experience themselves. So they’d approached this English company for some help in how to get into, and the skills needed and the facilities needed for the development of guided missiles. This English company came to defence, said they’d had this request and what would defence think they should do about it. This was the defence export section. The defence export said 'give them some help and we will help you, we’ll supply you with a couple of experts to go along with you and see what help they can give.' And it obviously was, as I think now, an air weapon. And so Dougie Lowe and I, with the chief technical man from this company, went off to China and we had a week in China talking with this company, which was in Beijing or just outside Beijing. [pause] The company met us at the airport, three of us, with a young man who was to be our baggage holder, if you like, was to be our escort, is the better word, for our stay there. Spoke English, had an engineering degree that he got in America, interestingly enough, but he’d almost, almost, he had a company car with him, but you had the feeling that he’d acquired the company car at the airport and he’d made the journey from his base to the airport on a bicycle. It had that sort of feeling. This young man clocked us into the hotel, that was fine. We then went to the British Embassy to make sure they knew we were there and to explain to them why we were there. They had been informed. They were aware of the sort of contract that the Chinese government had on offer, although they didn’t

Sir John Charnley Page 335 C1379/30 Track 19 know much about it. Didn’t know really whether it was worth the while helping a Chinese company, but if that’s what they wanted and the English company and everyone else thought it was a good idea, okay, we will back you while you’re here. But, said they, where are you staying? And we said oh, something like the seventh floor in the Beijing Hotel. Ha, ha, ha said the embassy, that’s the floor that all the defence contractors use, the rooms are bugged, just make sure you don’t say anything that you don’t want them to know about.

[26:49] Is this post-retirement now for you?

Oh yes. For both of us. So we had a week there. I learnt again, another bit of experience. They were very kind to us, there’s no doubt about that, and we saw some great engineering in terms of guns, heavy artillery stuff, but we talked with them quite seriously and left a report with them on what we thought they needed to do. We couldn’t cost it, didn’t know that, but just said the facilities they would need, the laboratory facilities, the various areas of weapon in which they’d need to have some sort of experience or access to. The systems approach, I can remember that clearly, and came away. And this young man was with us all the time asking, yeah, he was answering our questions related to the company, but he was asking us questions about working in the UK and what sort of status would a young man like him with a PhD in engineering of some sort. What sort of status would he have in the UK? And he’d been, as I say, he’d been educated, some sort of course in the States, doesn’t matter. When we came to come away and we’d said all our goodbyes and so on to the company at their plant and this young man came with us in the car, he had a suitcase affair with him and dear God. I thought, this young man’s coming to England with us, you know. He’s asked all these questions, he thinks it’s going to be the right move to make and he’s coming with us. Out to the airport carrying his little bag, well a big bag, and that’s the end of the story. No, he wasn’t, he was going back to his plant and so he was going straight on from seeing us off to his home base and said how much he’d enjoyed it, enjoyed meeting us and how much he’d learned and, di-da-di-da, but no, he wasn’t coming to England. So there’s another little episode. And that, you say, well now Dougie Lowe and I, we had the next door office to each other, so we know each other, we could work well together and somewhere in my room upstairs I’ve got the photograph – he was a keen photographer – and I’ve got the photographs. I am not a keen photographer so I don’t have photographs of places I go to, perhaps as much as I should. I rely on other people to take them. [laughs] And Dougie took a lot of pictures, there’s a whole series of them up there. They took us on, we went on the Wall,

Sir John Charnley Page 336 C1379/30 Track 19 they took us out to the Wall, we walked on the Wall quite some way. Trying to think of what… there was a bit of a scene associated with that and I’ve forgotten it. Forgotten it, forgotten it. On the way out. Doesn’t… something had disturbed both of us I think on the way out. Technical, some technical issue about the way in which things were done. Forgotten, forgotten, forgotten.

[30:34]

Controller Navy. Enjoyed, he enjoyed a very direct link. Yeah, a direct link, and no way for me to interfere, with the two naval Establishments; surface weapons and underwater weapons, the two Establishments and the navy in that sense, well CA with Farnborough, with Boscombe Down, MGO with the fort, Fort Halstead, with the Chertsey armoured vehicle place; tanks, fighting vehicles – FVE as they were, Fighting Vehicle Establishment, or FVRD, it doesn’t matter – fighting vehicles. So the army were at Chelsea [Chertsey] and the fort and that was MGO’s area. And then, as I’ve said in talking about the Establishments, you had the discipline, the science, the explosives place on the one hand, and the propulsion place and then the biological place which spanned all three services, rather than specifically any one. But no, I enjoyed relating to the three controllers, got on very well. And as I say, even with Dougie Lowe when we'd retired, we went to China together.

What was your impression of the development of China by that point?

Pardon?

[32:33] What was your impression of the development of China by that point?

Here we go, I knew we’d… [laughs] I knew it!

It’s interesting, having gone round all those similar sorts of establishments in the West, I’m wondering how the Chinese scene compared from…

Well, I didn’t go to establishments. As I said, I went to the company that was going to bid. Oh, let me finish the story then in that case. When we cleared with the embassy on the way home and went in to say goodbye to the embassy and they said well, we’ve made some enquiries,

Sir John Charnley Page 337 C1379/30 Track 19 we’ve been devilling around while you’ve been here and what do you think of the company that you’ve just been talking to and seeing, and Dougie and I said they’ve got a long way to go, it’ll need a lot of investment, they need a lot of facilities that they don’t have at the moment to enter this field. And the embassy then said yeah, that agrees with the enquiries we have made and really we think that the company were just going through the motions of being seen to take advice from someone. He said, there is another company that went to America for the same sort of advice and we think that they’re better placed than the company you’ve been talking to, but essentially that in bidding in, it made sense for the bidding company to associate themselves with the expertise from someone else. So, you know, the embassy was saying, not quite you’ve wasted your time, but don’t expect them to get the contract, because we think the whole thing was just going through the processes. They didn’t. Get the contract. So Dougie and I wasted our time, perhaps. So I can’t answer the question directly as to how they compared with the way they think about it, other than it seemed to me that they made some good fighting vehicles and some good artillery, but I’m no expert. Perhaps I should be from what I knew of RARDE and… Chelsea. Chertsey, Chertsey. But I didn’t see a lot of their facilities other than enough to show that they were not sufficient at building guided weapons. So I was asked in retirement for guided weapons in China, I was asked when it was Ministry of Defence for aircraft factories in Greece. I don’t think either of which happened. [laughs] So perhaps I wasn’t the right sort of person to ask. [laughs]

[35:38] You’ve talked quite a bit about what your office is like in London, the people who are there, I was just wondering…

Good heavens above. Go on.

I’m just trying to place in my mind what…

The geography?

No, what sort of things you actually do over the course of a day. So I’m presuming you still live at home here…

Yeah.

Sir John Charnley Page 338 C1379/30 Track 19

… in Farnborough?

Errr… here, in Camberley. Good heavens above, what a question! How, what on earth way does your mind work to get to this sort of thing? Okay. Living here, posted back to RAE, James Lighthill, 1963, accepting now you’re at the level where if you’re going anywhere your time in RAE is limited, you’ll be in London. You therefore need a place from which you can commute daily up and down to London. Bought this place and again, either motored – the motorway wasn’t built then – so there was a direct route from here to Camberley station, Camberley station, and I either cycled to the station or I motored, depending on how I felt and what the weather was like. Up to London from Camberley via Ascot and the mainline up to London was from Reading into Waterloo and it stopped at Ascot, so there’s this little branch line that came up from Camberley and Frimley and it joined the main Reading line at Ascot. Now, I say the main… at that stage I don’t think it was obvious which was the mainline, whether it was the mainline that came down here or whether it was the mainline that went down to Reading. Didn’t matter. But your train, coming from Camberley, they were every half hour. Sorry, the service, there was a service to Ascot from London that was every half hour and going the other way as well, but at Ascot it then divided and one half went to Reading and the other half came down here. So the train split, literally, you didn’t have to get out of the train, they just split the train and they went their respective ways. And I was in London sometime before nine o’clock, so I was leaving here before eight, so you know, it was from home here, seven o’clock-ish, quarter past seven, something like that, catching something like a ten past eight train and in London by nine o’clock and depending on the circumstances, it’s then a walk over Waterloo Bridge – not Waterloo Bridge - the little bridge, into Charing Cross and a walk Charing Cross to Ministry of Defence. Time, twenty minutes. I was in the office by half past nine and I would leave at half past six, doing that in reverse it got me home about eight o’clock or thereabouts, in the course of which, as I say, the train split at Ascot and Reading. And I can’t remember when it – I was still in London, still working in London regularly, daily – when British Rail decided that they’d alter the service down here and they would regard Waterloo to Reading as the mainline with a funny little line that went off down to Camberley. So you now changed trains at Camberley, at Ascot to go to Camberley and equally in the morning you got on a little train and you changed to get on to the mainline at Ascot. So you were now spending time on Ascot station. And you were coming home at night, a bit tired, maybe, half past seven, thereabouts perhaps, you get to Ascot and bugger me, you find that the Camberley train has gone because your Reading train is a little

Sir John Charnley Page 339 C1379/30 Track 19 late. So you now abandon all hope, sort of, and go into the pub on the forecourt of Ascot station, and I know it so well, I’ve spent hours in there waiting for the Camberley train, one way or another, for whatever reason it hasn’t turned up or it’s left or whatever. So at that stage you then decide, enough of this, I’ll start using Farnborough. And so you now pack in the Camberley service and you come to a mainline service that either is coming up from Southampton, well you know it, or from the West Country, Salisbury, whatever. A busy line, even then, busier now, I use it to go up to London now. But now you’re in the business of certainly a car journey down to Farnborough, car parking at Farnborough station getting tougher and tougher and tougher, as it was then, until you got to the stage where you couldn’t really guarantee that you’d find a space in the car park. And now there’s the main car park and then there are a couple of auxiliary car parks run, not by British Rail, but by the local authority. And there are two other local authority car parks to take the overflow, if you wish, from Farnborough station. And so when I go to London now, depending on the time of day, but generally now, I don’t take the car to Farnborough station because I can’t guarantee I’ll get in. So I taxi in. And the same thing coming home at night, I just taxi home. Which annoys me, but there it is. And that was my day in London in those days when I was fulltime.

[42:17] Sounds quite a long day.

Yeah, well. Half past nine – the working day was half past nine until leaving the office about six o’clock and across to Waterloo, half past six, home just before eight, and you know, chat with Mary, my wife, as to how the family was, how her life had been during the day, what she’d done. Sit down and have supper, listen to the ten o’clock news maybe, and then think – well even before then – decide, you might have brought work home with me, I was the sort of chap that did, I worked at home. Ah God, you’ve got me talking… I regarded my time in the office as time at the disposal of other people, either attending committee meetings or being available to answer questions from my staff. God, they'd got problems, they needed to come and ask their dad, and I was their dad. So when I got home I’d often sit down with a pot of coffee, out there, a pot of coffee and work until one. I could work easily until two o’clock. I couldn’t work in the mornings, I’m not that sort of person, but I could work at night. The house was quiet, Mary had gone to bed, no children around really of any sort at this stage, gone. Son still at school, Trina away or whatever, don’t know. Don’t know when we’re talking about really, but certainly the house was quiet and I would settle down and work.

Sir John Charnley Page 340 C1379/30 Track 19

So that’s a full day’s work.

Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah.

And what you’re doing in the office then, is that mainly responding to requests from people and meetings and…

Oh, meetings, requests. Yes, a bit of thinking. I was doing my thinking back here, essentially, where I could just, yes, think around the programme, the problems. And daytime was meetings, a lot of them, and responding to either requests from Establishments or from my own directors up there, or whatever. But never a dull moment. Or from industry. Never a dull moment, that’s for sure. And now we’re at half past three and we still haven’t got on to my consultancies.

And I need to change the card in a second as well.

I was going to say, we’ve done two hours I’m sure, now.

[end of track 19]

Sir John Charnley Page 341 C1379/30 Track 20

[Track 20]

I had one or two just quick other questions to ask about your time towards the end of your career as CER. And one of them I suppose overarches over your whole career, which is secrecy. I’m just wondering, what is it like working when so much of your life, you know, part of your life is secret, the things you’re involved in?

It wasn’t difficult. Very seldom did it arise as a problem. The family knew and wouldn’t ask, they knew only too well, whether it was daughter, son or, and my wife in particular, knew exactly. She knew when I was being bothered by something, if I’d come home and she’d know that there was something on my mind that was a bit of a problem. She’d know whether to ask or not to. She knew there were areas that I wouldn’t talk with her about, that I couldn’t – wouldn’t – couldn’t. It didn’t, it never, never became an issue between us, if that’s the nature of the question, and no, no, no. A thing that she always said astonished her was that I did, although I would be willing to work until the small hours of the morning after she’d gone to bed, she was always surprised the way I would switch off for the weekend and with a TGIF drink on a Friday night – Thank God It’s Friday – I would then switch off and almost remove myself completely from work for the whole of Saturday and Sunday and then, as she said, you’d pick it up with your bag as you left home on Monday morning, but you’d have the weekend and she always admired the way I could switch off for the weekend. Never… people that you were mixing with socially knew what you did, knew you were Ministry of Defence or whatever and the people I chose to make friends of didn’t pursue it, just recognised that John would be like that. Okay?

[02:35] I guess the other question I had was another of those slightly overarching ones, which I guess we’ve touched on a little bit, I was just wondering you’re spending so much of your career working in defence, if that sort of aspect of the weaponry work had ever bothered you at all. You mentioned last time your wife was happier when you were working on civil projects.

We touched on that in that context once before. No, didn’t bother me. Oh, doesn’t this sound terrible. I accept the fact that there was a need to defend ourselves nationally, that meant forces, that meant being prepared, that meant going through the ways and means of fighting. That meant that you were going to be associated with something that involved killing. Did that bother you? No. You were entering into an arena, an area where you would accept that if… that you

Sir John Charnley Page 342 C1379/30 Track 20 were working in the arming of forces for your own national defence. Now that very fact means that some people are going to be killed. There’s going to be loss of life, and you’ve now got, can you face that or do you want to leave it to someone else. Or have you got something that you think can contribute to your own national defence. And you can develop big ideas of yourself as to how important it is that you could live with that. I could live with it. Always on the basis that it was part of a defence and that meant there was likely to be fighting. It’s a problem I have with some of the Afghanistan situation now, that… you don’t join the services unless you expect there are going to be losses and you might be one of them. If you can’t live with that and face it, don’t join it, you might still be one of them if your own country’s coming under attack, as indeed in World War Two. Certainly. But no. No, no, no. I can accept that as a fact of life, as part of the scenery of life, that… in whatever context I want to be able to defend myself in whatever context, either personally or as a family or as a nation. And if we’re going to be attacked I want to be, if I can contribute to the defence, then so be it, I will. But in so doing, I accept that I might get killed and I might be killing someone else. Okay? That’s a decision I can take and live with. Does that make sense?

[06:19] Brings me back, well in terms of interview…

We can debate now for the rest of the evening on this one.

No, no. I was thinking about something you said in the first interview actually, which was talking about unexpectedly being posted to the RAE rather than REME and seeing that as, you know, your contribution to the war effort, is…

That’s right.

…is what you’ve just described something of a continuation of that do you think?

Oh well, you’re absolutely right in saying that I expected to go to REME. The whole of my university life I’d been privileged, I was of an age where I might have been in the services, I’d been privileged… I think when I first started, I can’t remember the age of conscription, but I think I could have been conscripted rather than just relying on voluntary. I don’t know, I can’t remember back ages, doesn’t matter. But I realised that I’d been privileged not to go into the

Sir John Charnley Page 343 C1379/30 Track 20 services on the understanding that when I finished my degree I’d be better qualified for what they wanted, and dear God, I had no idea of any of this at that stage. I was just a little lad from a council estate in Liverpool, dear God, that had won a scholarship to university and did I go or didn’t I? And if I didn’t go, why didn’t I go? Well because what you want to be can make a better contribution if you’ve got a degree than if you haven’t, because you’re going to be part of a new service associated with engineering in the services and that was a privilege that I didn’t think more than that. I had a chum called Terry Dignan who went into the air force whilst I was at university, he was at my school. Went into the air force when I went to university, and he was killed. So you were conscious that you were privileged at this stage until the bombing of Liverpool started, and then like anyone else that lived in Liverpool, there was no privilege of being there, in a way. But you didn’t think deeply about that, other than we’re under attack, what can I do to help? And if that’s what they – I didn’t question they – if that’s what they would like to do with me and let me get a degree, that on the basis that when you’d got it you’re going into the service, and then when that time comes you don’t go into the service because they want you to do something else. I don’t think I thought any more of it than that. At that stage I didn’t analyse the essentials. I don’t think I was, you know, media orientated to be looking at newspapers or looking for… I was conscious of conscientious objectors, certainly. I don’t know, we’re getting into all sorts of funny places now, because as I might have said, one of Mary’s uncles was, as a Quaker – not her uncle, but her guardian… she regarded him as an uncle but he was related to her guardian as Quakers and he had been a conscientious objector in the First World War. And she was aware of a train of thought, but I didn’t get involved in it in that sense. I was involved with other elements of being a Quaker, yeah. But there, there. Why did I go down that route? What was your question?

It was talking about how, talking about how your later role as a Defence scientist was about defending Britain and I was just thinking about something you’d said in the first interview or the second interview about starting at the RAE and, you know, that being your little contribution to the war effort, as it were.

At that stage.

[11:04] I’m just wondering if that later, you know, feeling about doing this for defensive reasons is any connection to that earlier thought?

Sir John Charnley Page 344 C1379/30 Track 20

Oh yes. Oh yes, oh yes. I think, yeah. What’s the… And I don’t like using these words because they sound so crass and almost so cheap and so big-headed, but yeah. I like to think of myself as a public spirited sort of person that (a) is willing to help other people, and does, (b) I contribute to various bodies that have affected me personally. I contribute to the Heart Society, Cancer Research, Parkinson’s, all of which I’ve had direct family connections with, and I’ve responded to all of them in my will. And some little lady rang me recently in one charity – I’ve forgotten which one it was, a well known, not Poppy Day, not British Legion, I’ve done that on a monthly basis, do that regularly anyway - it wasn’t her, it was another well known charity. Red Cross. Red Cross rang me saying, Sir John, you’re very, very helpful, all the lather thanking you, and then saying please, would you like to do a bit more and please, would you like to, you know, up your monthly subscription to this, that and the other. And in the end I said, oh for goodness sake, yes, go on. Because I think Red Cross, I’m happy to support the Red Cross. So public spirited, that isn’t the word really, but it’s… I can afford it. Don’t regard myself as a very, very wealthy person but certainly…

Relating that back to your work, do you think there’s an element of public service in being a scientific civil servant?

Oh, I don’t think I thought that deeply about it. I think when the end of the war came, 1945, I’d now been an aeronautical engineer of sorts for two years, two and a bit years, and I was a temporary civil servant up to that point. I was then presented with making a decision, did I want to become established or did I want to go back to the private sector or university or whatever. And there were two decisions in that one; one, did I want to stay in aeronautics or go back to civil engineering, or did I want to stay a civil servant or look for something else where I could do civil engineering, like a contractor building bridges, dams. But, the aeronautical bug had got me well and truly. I was enjoying it, thoroughly excited about jet aircraft, transonics, supersonics. Well, transonic more than super… Flight testing. Oh, it was exciting, it was great, it was… and it was making a contribution as well, you thought, so stay with it John and get yourself established. Sign on, be a government scientist, don’t think any more about it, you’re enjoying life. The war’s over, you’re thinking of getting married, you’ve known Mary since you were at school together, the war is over. So in June 1945 we get ourselves married and my thoughts are now far, far more along the lines of married life, family life, a family, when do we start, what’s the future, what goes on from here. And in all of this I’m slap happy, I’m content, doing what I

Sir John Charnley Page 345 C1379/30 Track 20 am, why do I think any more than that at the moment. And I didn’t, so second of June ’45 I got myself married. And we found, we had this little place in Farnborough, I think I’ve mentioned this, use of kitchen, dining room, bedroom, whatever the phrase was at the time. And yeah, I stayed as an established civil servant.

[16:40] I was wondering about that actually. You spent almost all your career in the scientific civil service and despite, as you pointed out, occasionally being offered jobs elsewhere in industry, I suppose looking at some of the things you’ve done post-retirement as well, there are one or two in the commercial sector, there are other ones that are quasi-government, civil bodies, that sort of thing. I’m just wondering why did you stay in that particular stream of work rather than being tempted out of it?

Whenever I was presented with a decision to make on an issue of that sort, this is where my son gets it, I was too bloody lazy to think differently other than stay where you are. You’re alright, you’re doing alright, you’re happy – and you’re happy, that was the important thing – you’re playing rugby or you’re doing this, that or the other, you’ve got an interesting job, an exciting job, an interesting job, do you want to move house, do you want to go and do something different? If you’re looking elsewhere is it another aeronautics job, or whatever. And it was a certain indolence to do… the effort of doing something different, you know. And I’ve no regrets that I didn’t do something different. I’m sure I could have made a lot more money, I’m sure of that. But, until I retired, if we get back to where we were, until I retired I had never had occasion to use an accountant. It was all too straightforward, civil service, you knew what your output was, you knew where your salary was coming from, you got an insurance policy or two maybe, one for you, one for your wife. Doesn’t matter. I was just guided on those lines by early principles. You know, we’re now talking about how you run your married life, if you like. But retired, and you’re now moving into the [interviewer sneezes] outside world which is going to be different from your nice, easygoing civil service pace, if you like, if you think of it that way, which I didn’t think of it in terms of the job. But now you’re going to be a consultant, you need to know something about consulting one way or another, you’d better get some financial advice and a sensible accountant or something. Which I did and he’s still with me now. He was with me at the end of last week in a meeting here with an investment [adviser]… we were reviewing my inheritance tax planning.

Sir John Charnley Page 346 C1379/30 Track 20

[19:57] Career-wise we’re almost at retirement and there were I guess a couple of other little things I was going to ask about, and the first was I’m aware that you get a knighthood in 1981?

Early ’81, yes.

How did you find out about that?

How did I find out?

I always wondered, you know, do you just get a letter in the post, does someone tell you in advance? How does it happen?

That was a January, it was a New Year list in ’81, and I’ve got the bloomin’ records upstairs, and about January ’81 and about the November, and I’ve got this letter, a letter through the post and the wording is lovely. I can almost quote it. Your own boss, the Minister has it in mind to recommend to the Queen – or the government, the government I think – has it in mind to recommend to the Queen that she might choose to honour you with whatever it is I’ve got, the Knight of the British… no, it’s not the… Oh, you see how important it is. The Royal… what am I, a Knight Bachelor, yeah, whatever it is. If she were to do so, would you accept? And all of this is to avoid you turning down something that the Queen has offered you, so this little dance is done beforehand. But if she says she’s willing to do it, then you’ve committed yourself to accept. So that happened in about the November and this had come through the post with a regal franking on it, which wasn’t too unusual – I’d had a CB in the early seventies didn’t I, I don’t know, I can’t remember that. Got a CB, I think the early seventies. Your Who’s Who will tell you. So I’d been through this process once before, although not in quite such a formal sense, I don’t think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don’t think it covered all the business of the government proposing to invite the Queen to honour you with this, if she does so, will you accept. No. Now, it made me – is this thing on?

Mm hm.

Sir John Charnley Page 347 C1379/30 Track 20

Oh well, I’m going to stop there in this case. I’ll say something later if… but no, there’s no point in putting… because what I’m going to say now is names and I’m not going down that road in this context.

Were you surprised?

Yes. Yes and no. I say yes because I knew that the job that I – I was CER now – I knew I’d be retiring in a couple of years’ time, so it was getting to the stage where this was the time when you might expect for this sort of issue to be arising. And I know that previous people in the post I was doing had been honoured in the same way. And you know that the other chaps down the corridor, the other system controllers, they would expect it anyway with their service connotations. So that you as a civilian, as one of them, and a member of the PE board, if you like, it was not un… it was not unusual that it should happen. So that side of it didn’t surprise me. The thing that was sort of surprising, but certainly pleased me, was that the system thought I had done whatever it was that was in the citation - and I don’t know that, if you’re going to ask that question next, what did the citation say, I don’t know – but whatever it was that had gone into it, I was pleased that it would appear as if I’d done the job fairly well. So that my predecessors, such as they were, had all received it and someone had decided that I was worthy – worthy – of the same honour. And that was very, very pleasant. Wonderful and pleasant and something you'd, way, way back when I think of joining the RAE at 1943, who the hell would have thought it? It was never in your sight, never, never, never. I don’t know when it might have entered my sight, at what stage. I suppose when I went on to IDC, I had the feeling then that, as I said, this is a mid-career course for serving officers who are going further. At that stage it was, it was in my mind, there is something here that someone thinks you’ve got something and they’re willing to give you the right sort of coursework to go further. But how much further I had no idea, none whatever, and I didn’t know in which direction. I’d been flight testing and I’d been BLEU and I’d moved from Farnborough to Martlesham Heath up to Bedford. Where was I going next? I don’t know. And then, the end of IDC comes along and Connie asks to see me and says why don’t we know where you’re going, and then you hear that people are debating where you should go, and you think oh, they’ve not forgotten me. And I had a simple faith in the system in that sense. Maybe it doesn’t happen like that for other people, why should it happen to me, I don’t know. I didn’t look for it, I didn’t search for it, I just carried on doing a job I liked doing, at Farnborough and at Martlesham, Bedford. And in almost my simple faith, if I do this job well, someone will recognise it. Don’t know. Don’t know. Never really… got on with

Sir John Charnley Page 348 C1379/30 Track 20 living; my wife, my youngsters. I had two, when I went on to IDC I was then forty, wasn’t I? 1962 and born in ’22, I was forty, two youngsters. And I can remember the parties at Bedford, I told you about that, the luncheon parties, yeah, yeah. And never… I didn’t think career-wise, I got on doing a job and living with my family. Too simple maybe, but I’ve no regrets. What’s the other question? That was one, there were two, or whatever.

[28:53] The other question was well, talking about right at the end of your career, your career at the MoD then, you said that the last thing you pretty much did was the Falklands War and I was just wondering in what sort of context? Most of the time we’ve been talking the country has been at peace to some extent, give or take small wars, but what difference does the outbreak of a war suddenly mean for you as Controller of the Research Establishments?

Yes. Yes. And obviously you’d seen a war from your early days, as I say, 19, 20s, 21, 22s. University, school, being evacuated, and so wartime in that sense and all that went with it, along comes the Falklands, completely, completely different. No threat to your own life, no threat to your own living as such, you’re not under attack yourself. But, and we’re back to the modelling and my analytical people modelled the Falklands as a, not in geographical terms, but in mathematical terms in terms of probabilities. And… we obviously knew what our own capability was, limited though it was and the time it was going to take to get anything down there and the way in which we could get anything down there. And we made our guesses, informed guesses from our knowledge of what the Argentinian services, forces were capable of, be it from air power, be it from submarine, be it from land forces. So you could set up an engagement model of a war, a battle, a battle. Doesn’t matter. And you could rehearse that with almost standard modelling technology with a series of what ifs, suppose he does this. Where are we? What do we do? And it’s a bit like the thing that we did as Chief Scientist Air Force in relation to an air engagement, this was a bigger engagement, bigger in terms of the dimensions of what happens in the air, on the land and at sea and you were thinking that through. Now, as the engagement developed, then you were rehearsing – the man that I was most closely in touch with was the Vice-Chief Naval Staff – VCNS. [pause]

[34:00]

Sir John Charnley Page 349 C1379/30 Track 20

In my earlier PE board activities – PEMB – where I was CER, and I’m talking about my early days of CER and on the PE Management Board, the Controller of the Navy who sat opposite me at the table, can’t remember his name, was now, oh, a senior admiral and very much involved in the running of the Falklands War. Mention some names and I… John, another John I think. I can see his face, as ever. And he was now… very involved in this country as the co-ordinating officer for all three… the navy were pretty well in control, in charge. We hadn’t got a lot of forces to do much attacking of the Argentine, we were defending our own forces and our own forces were naval forces getting out there, getting carriers out there to deploy, and so on. And so the navy were very much… and Vice-Chief of Naval Staff… [pause]

Not…

…lived in… Sorry?

Not Fieldhouse? Fieldhouse?

John Fieldhouse. That’s right. John… that’s right, that’s the name I was searching for a moment… John Fieldhouse. He and I sat opposite each other on the PE Board, so we knew each other very well. And it’s back again to the associations that you make. But he knew where I was and had words with me because the Vice-Chief Naval Staff, because John Fieldhouse was navy, certainly, but was certainly multi-service at this stage, but the VCNS, who lived in St Albans, near St Albans, somewhere around there, and that’s important because he came to work always with a rose as a buttonhole because he lived near the place where roses are researched, experimented on, different sorts of roses are bred and so on, and he always appeared with a rose in his buttonhole. And almost regularly, I’ll say every morning, but it may not be every morning, but every two or three mornings he and I would meet and he would tell me what the intelligence has said about what was going on and I would then be plugging those in to my modelling and going back to him with saying well, if they do this now, this is likely to be the effect and, you know.

[37:37]

There is one stage, and it’s pretty well publicly known now, but it doesn’t… so there was one stage – and I’m not going into any detail on this – when if they had done the right thing at that moment we’d have been very badly placed. Very badly placed. Trying to think back now, did we take out their

Sir John Charnley Page 350 C1379/30 Track 20 submarine? There was a submarine hanging around that was a threat to our things going out there. And we did something about that.

I think there was a submarine, Argentinian submarine sunk off South Georgia.

That’s the one. That’s right. That if we – it was there menacing a lot of our movement of stuff getting out there and…

Or there was the Belgrano which was sunk by one of our submarines.

That’s right. There was quite a keen, almost submarine activity on both sides. And certainly their submarine was a threat, a real threat to our disposal of forces in the area to provide air support on the one hand, we were getting Vulcans out, we were getting heavy stuff out there through Ascension Island and I’ve got a book on that, on the Vulcan. And that was a hairy operation as well, but that wasn’t anything to do with me at the time, that was quite different. No, I’d got a bunch of chaps that were modelling on the basis of information that came in as to how things had gone and how we should then react. Now I didn’t take the decisions, it then went into the – through VCNS – into the operational system, the operational planning system and so on. But the background probability modelling and the chances of something coming off or not coming off, I wasn’t doing it, but I had people who were doing it and I was part of the chain that then found its way into the operation.

Do you know what the impact of the modelling actually was?

[laughs] Here we go. [pause] I’ve pretty well answered that already in the sense of saying, we’d better get rid of that threat to us developing our potential to defend the island. If we leave that there, we’re not going to find a… better get rid of that threat. Move it, move it, move it. And in broad terms that was the sort of, had we not done so, that the result could have been very, very different, would have been very, very different. But, yeah. I hadn’t, obviously hadn’t before been directly involved in anything like the frontline operation and you really felt you weren’t actually fighting, other than in your modelling. But it made you feel very real, to be part of it. Now separately from that, and this wasn’t CER, but at Boscombe Down the staff, the CER staff; the boys and the pilots down there were cutting across all the recognised clearance of aircraft and equipment for service use by cutting down the time taken to do things and CA was taking risks in getting stuff down to the Falklands without the full, full clearance that he’d normally expect from Boscombe Down. And Boscombe were clearing

Sir John Charnley Page 351 C1379/30 Track 20 aircraft; Harriers, Sea Harriers and equipment in them, and weaponry to go down there more quickly than the normal course of peacetime clearance by CA. But that wasn’t a CER responsibility, that was CA, Dougie Lowe. I think it was, yes it was Dougie. So there we are. And that went on through the summer of ’82 and I reached sixty on September the fourth ’82. For some reason though, the system… for some reason they said would I stay on until the end of the month, could they regard my retirement as starting from the end of September. No problem to me, so yeah, yeah sure. And then set about setting up a consultancy.

[43:58] How did you feel on retirement? How did you feel at retirement?

I’ve mentioned this to several other people in almost the thirty years since I took retirement. I wasn’t given any option, there was no question of a decision, it was just, there it was. But, I was still young mentally, physically. Health was a bit of – we’ve not talked about my health in all of this, nor is there any real need to, although it’s relevant perhaps, the sort of questions you ask.

You mentioned a rugby accident at some point.

Yeah, that’s right. And all from that, yeah, yeah. But it’s relevant to your question because I still felt young enough to want to go on working. I wasn’t going to fall off the end of a cliff and say right, that’s my working career, that’s my working life. I’m still interested, I’ve still got a lot to offer, I’ve still got a growing family of one sort or another and I’m not interested in making money, I just want something to do. And so set about a consultancy of some sort or another. And see what is on offer. And it happens that there were no shortages. People, would I go and help them. Would I do this, that and the other? That’s why in many ways I needed financial advice, as to go about planning another career really, as a second career, I’d admit that. It wasn’t particularly, again, money that drove me, it was the interest, it was the wish to do something, the feeling that I still had something to offer someone, somewhere. And there were then people who also thought the same way and were willing to take me on board in one form or another, either on their board or as a consultant.

[end of track 20]

Sir John Charnley Page 352 C1379/30 Track 21

[Track 21]

I can’t, I’m not sure now whether it was associated with the Korean, was it the Korean War? There was something going on and it was very active as to the performance of our aircraft in dogfights as they were then, I guess you’d describe it. But therefore we were very keen to understand the performance of enemy aircraft, in particular the MiGs that were now on the scene, the MiG-15 I think it was. And somewhat to our surprise, the MiG-15s which were being operated in Poland by Polish pilots, one of these Polish pilots brought a MiG aircraft out of the Warsaw Pact area and landed it in Denmark. The little island off the east coast of the mainland, I’ve forgotten its name. Anyway, doesn’t matter really. And so there was great excitement in NATO that we now had a live, working aircraft and pilot and therefore how did we address getting to know, or tearing it to pieces if you like, and understanding how it all worked. And a NATO, a very small NATO team was set up to go and take a look at this aircraft in Denmark and it was run, the group was run by a wing commander and I can’t understand now why a NATO team should be almost all from the UK, but we were. And the wing commander was in charge of the little group and it consisted of a structures man, an armaments man, an engine man and an aerodynamics man that happened to be me. And this was all done under the auspices of NATO.

[02:48]

And off we went to Denmark. Landed in Copenhagen and were met there by a Danish military man who put us on a, we all got on a train. Great excitement, press, and off we went out of Copenhagen, allegedly going somewhere, I can’t remember exactly where, allegedly going somewhere so that it would be all known in the press and so on, the world would know we were there, that NATO was there, going to take a look at this MiG aircraft because that had been publicity covered, and off we went. What the world didn’t know was that as soon as we were out of Copenhagen, the train stopped, we all got off and the train went on to wherever it was going, but we were now in a remote bit of countryside and we were met, it had all been organised, we were met and taken to a port and from the port across to this little island where there was this MiG aircraft. Now all of this was done, as I say, with nervous looks from the Danish officer that was taking care of us. He was scared that we were being followed and there’s all sorts of subterfuge to make sure that we were doubling back and this, that and the other, and the reason for this was that the Danish Home Secretary, whatever she – it was a lady – had decided that the pilot had asked for diplomatic immunity and she was going to observe this,

Sir John Charnley Page 353 C1379/30 Track 21 despite the fact that it was all a NATO exercise and was going to make sure that as far as Denmark was concerned, he was looked after properly within the international laws, whatever they were, and therefore there would be a similar sort of restriction on access to the aeroplane. I don’t know what went on then behind, in the diplomatic quarters, but certainly she agreed access to the aeroplane, but still kept access to the pilot from NATO under close wraps. So there we were, a group, and out to an airfield, a hangar, inside the hangar there stood this MiG. Exciting sight for me, seeing a MiG. And we started work, essentially. Arranged a programme of looking at the aeroplane, taking it to pieces, the wings came off. We had some Danish mechanics doing the various jobs that we wanted done and all worked well and I made quite a big, quite a good description of the aeroplane and the aerodynamics of the aeroplane. And it was very obvious right away that in say, the hydraulic system which was within my bailiwick, where the hydraulics had to be accurately machined, constructed, designed, constructed, where it had to be precise it was precise and did its job. Where it didn’t have to be precise, it was crude in contrast to say, our construction where the construction would have been fairly uniform throughout. Here there was a complete contrast between where it needed to be accurate, it was, where it didn’t it could have been done by anyone, pretty well. Big difference. That was one point that struck me, I can remember.

[07:14]

And another one, I was a bit surprised by the profile of the wing. I took… In the West, the emphasis on low drag, great emphasis had been placed on low drag on the profile of the wing and that generally meant that the maximum thickness in terms of thickness/chord was further back along the chord towards the rear end, towards the trailing edge. But on this, rather like our old Spitfires, the maximum thickness/chord was fairly far forward and that was a surprise, so you could see that that was the case when you looked at the profile, when they got the wing off, but then that meant looking at it accurately, so I devised means of getting a template that gave us the precise shape of a chord section, which had – I can’t remember the exact – but the maximum thickness was a bit further forward than we were designing. Anyway, there it was. Now, the next question was well, how does this aeroplane fly? What’s it like? How close to the speed of sound is it getting and when it gets there, does it behave in a way that ours behave? Perhaps becomes a bit of a problem, a lot of a problem, dangerous, and therefore to be avoided. So there’s a real need to have words with the pilot and we had been forbidden to do this by, as I say, by the Danish Home Secretary. So a plan was constructed – and this man was being held in

Sir John Charnley Page 354 C1379/30 Track 21 diplomatic immunity in a prison, not as a prisoner, but within the bounds of a prison. It was arranged that someone would be given permission to go into the prison, spend some time there and talk to the pilot, and who of course should be the lucky man to go and do that, but me. So I have spent some time, including an overnight, in a Danish prison. And talked to the pilot, I’ve forgotten his name now, a young man, pleasant, we needed an interpreter, but yeah, yeah, yeah. Don’t think there’s more to say. The result – sorry there is, isn’t there really – that it did become as an aeroplane a bit of a problem, as it got near the speed of sound, and it wasn’t getting really close to the speed of sound. My memory is we’re talking about point nine, Mach number about point nine, something like that. And it did develop some control oscillations, much the same way that (a) ours did and (b) you would expect from a wing with the sort of profile that it had. So there was nothing of any great surprise in the aerodynamics of the aeroplane that I could see anyway.

[10:50] What was your overall impression of the MiG-15 compared to the aircraft you were used to in Britain?

’52, we were still using Meteors, principally Meteors, and they were across – it was the Korean War wasn’t it, I think?

Yes.

We were using them in Korea because back here at home, another job that… the Americans were using, oh, the nice American swept back aircraft.

F-86 Sabre?

The Sabre, is the F-86, thank you. Yes, yes, yes. And we were still using straight-winged aircraft, Meteors, so that was the big difference. And I think elsewhere I’ve spoken about looking at doing a flight test on a Meteor attacking a target, ground attack on a target, and the reason why we’re losing some as we pull away in high G, and that’s elsewhere. So yeah, the MiG was in the sort of generation ahead of us. The Americans had already got the swept wings in service, ours weren’t yet in service to any great extent. And we’re talking there of Hunters and Swifts of course, our first swept wing military aircraft. Hunters out of Hawker Siddeley and

Sir John Charnley Page 355 C1379/30 Track 21

Swifts out of Supermarines and ’52-ish, they must have been about. It must be that they weren’t in service because we weren’t using them – or maybe, I don’t know. Maybe we were using Hunter Swifts but they weren’t having the trouble that the Meteors were having. Really, bit vague at this point on trying to answer that question. [pause] Doesn’t come easily.

It’s okay. The other thing I was…

Will that do?

Sorry?

Will that do?

[13:23] I have one other, or two other little questions actually. One of them was I was just wondering, after taking the plane to pieces and inspecting all of it in detail, what more do you actually learn from talking to the pilot?

Oh, it’s one thing to build the aeroplane, it’s another thing to fly it with its flying characteristics. As I say, does it… what’s the sort of top speed you get out of it? How close to the speed of sound are you able to take this aeroplane, how close does it go towards the speed of sound? And is it stable? Do the controls get heavy? How manoeuvrable is it? Do you lose control? I was used to working on Spitfires and Mustangs and it must have been Hunters, getting there, must have been. Must have been. Where some aeroplane, the pilots lost control and in our test flying, as again I probably said elsewhere, you say up to 40,000 feet and then start a dive and find, telling the pilot beforehand that you lose control, in some cases you can move the stick backwards and forwards and nothing happens, but just be patient because when you get to lower heights, 15,000 feet, it’ll all come back again, but there’ll be this period in the middle on the way down when you will find that really the aircraft’s out of control, but just be patient, it’ll come back, you know. And they believed me and it staggers me now to think they would. But there it was, we knew from our own results, our own tests, some of them they’d been involved so that made it easier. But you needed to, there’s the point I think that we talked to our own pilots about flying our own aircraft and you tried to match up. Remember that at this stage the… you’d normally in aircraft design, use the wind tunnels as a means of providing a lot of information.

Sir John Charnley Page 356 C1379/30 Track 21

As far as we were concerned in the UK, our wind tunnels were of the sort that – technical term – choked near the speed of sound, so they were not producing the sort of design information that was needed, so we were trying to do that in flight with all the dangers associated with it. And so you were looking at tests done in the tunnel, looking at results that we were getting out of flight tests and trying to match the two until such time as we had wind tunnels with, again, slotted walls which avoided, to some extent, the problems near the speed of sound, because near the speed of sound the tunnel choked. So we were having to do this quite dangerous work, well very dangerous, in flight. And to get some idea of the flying characteristics of the aircraft you needed to talk to the pilots all the time. And so I had a session with this young man. What he’s doing now I’ve no idea.

How did you get on with him? How did you get on with him? You’ve talked about talking to British pilots quite a lot, I’m just wondering.

Oh, well, we established a very nice link in the sense that (a) – how old would I have been then in… I’d have been thirty, born 1922, we’re talking ’52, yeah, I was about thirty so I was still relatively young and he was younger than me, that was for sure. And he could see, from the sort of questions and my reaction to his answers, that I was familiar with the scene and that established a bond between us, that I wasn’t some, almost idiot, that had been there to ask a few questions of him, and he was very helpful. There wasn’t a great reluctance on his part and it did become a bit of a handful, as flying an aeroplane, yeah, yeah. At those sort of speeds. So it was limited in that sense, I can’t remember the figure now. Don’t know. Don’t know. But it was interesting.

[18:44] How secret was this at the time?

Oh, at the time, I’ve got some press cuttings upstairs in my office I think, we may have had them, of what was in our own national newspapers and, oh yes, it was top secret, anything to do with it, without any doubt at all. And I was going to say rightly so, but the way in which that sort of news would be handled today, there’d be outbursts from the press and the media no doubt, saying that it all ought to be cleared and that there was no need for secrecy on these matters. Well, a very different situation then and I would still say that there are some things that do need classification of this sort, and that was one of them. Yeah.

Sir John Charnley Page 357 C1379/30 Track 21

When you mentioned…

There was a [clears throat], there was a nice little letter at the end of – all this was taking place between Christmas and New Year - and I can remember – sorry, Christmas and, or New Year, sorry, New Year and Easter and I can remember spending that Easter in an office in London in the intelligence area writing up my report on all that went on. That was the Easter holiday, I can remember Good Friday for some reason, I don’t know why, being up there, just going up as if it was an ordinary working day, to get this thing over and done with. And there was a nice little letter afterwards to the Director of the RAE, thanking him for my services, which seemed to have gone quite well and done the job fairly well. There we are. A little chapter. The fun part, the amusing part of it was that the head of Aero Flight of the day, a man called Vessey, Hugh Vessey I think, came to see my wife at home, apologising for the fact that I was still away and that the only way in which she could get in touch with me was to write letters to a lady in whatever it was, MoD headquarters. There was no other way of getting in touch with me, but I remember him being very embarrassed at the thought that she had to write to another lady to get in touch with me And she stopped him at one stage, no, Mr Vessey, don’t go any further, my husband’s here in the other room, he’s come home, it’s all over. Oh!

So your boss didn’t even know where you were.

No, my boss didn’t know.

[22:12] Just one other quick question, when you mentioned there was publicity when you got there, was that publicity to do with something else?

No. It was the fact that a Russian built aircraft, flown by a Pole, landed in Denmark. It was this particular incident, that’s what it was all about. They were a NATO country and here was a Warsaw Pact aircraft that they now had and it was, it was the first aircraft that was now in the hands of NATO for a complete stripping down to see what it was. We’d had various intelligence reports of course, but this was the first time that we could get our hands, actual hands dirty on a MiG aircraft. Quite something. Why it should have been, and whether other teams went in from the States for instance, I don’t know, don’t know. Whether we were privileged or whether we

Sir John Charnley Page 358 C1379/30 Track 21 just one of… I’ve no idea. Because it was always classified and kept as tight as that, I don’t know. Don’t know.

So there was no publicity at all about you being there, for instance?

No, no.

[end of track 21]

Sir John Charnley Page 359 C1379/30 Track 22

[Track 22]

In the last session we covered your career up until retirement really and I was wondering how did you actually feel on reaching retirement?

We must have covered this previously, but it was the autumn of 1982 when I got to sixty in the September and the summer of course had been taken up by the Falklands War. So that the summer had been very active and you were in a senior position working with the military as one of them, essentially, with an actual war going on and this made me feel quite, well, completely dedicated to doing the job. That was during the summer. And I was in very close contact in that summer working with the Vice-Chief of the Naval Staff in particular, where we met frequently, like every morning or every other day, where he was feeding me with input from what was happening down in the Falklands, I was feeding this into my team in the gaming – don’t like the word gaming – in the analysis that was going on to feed back to him as to what might be done next and so on. So when September came up and I was due then to retire… for some reason, I don’t know why, I can’t remember now why, but instead of going on the fourth of September or nearby, I think I was asked to extend either until the end of September or the end of October, doesn’t matter, but it didn’t matter, I was happy to. But I was still active, is the point I’m trying to make, and that meant in retirement I didn’t want to fall off the end of a cliff, I still wanted to continue with technical activity. Whether it was military or… certainly I wanted to be involved with aviation, no doubt about that, but I didn’t want to go… I hadn’t got any dedicated other interest like wanting to do painting as another career. With all my defence activity, all my aviation activity, this had stopped me being an artist or something of that sort, no. I had an interest in practical things, therefore I was quite keen to be doing work around the house, certainly, and so a bit more time on that. But, I still needed the stimulus of something technical. I didn’t want to just find another career, or as I say, drop off the aviation cliff and not continue any further, like some people do. Some people feel they’ve had forty years of it and that’s enough. But not me, no, I wanted to carry on. So what happens? I was fortunate, again, as I think I’ve been throughout my career. I had the two-year embargo placed upon me where I wasn’t permitted to continue with work in the private sector that I’d had contracts with when I was in the public sector, so there was certainly an embargo of that sort. I could understand it, it meant that I’d been aware of this through the last ten years of my career so that I knew that in the work that I was doing with some of the major aircraft firms, aerospace firms, I wouldn’t be

Sir John Charnley Page 360 C1379/30 Track 22 allowed for the first two years or so to accept any situation with them. So it was all known, I was happy with it.

[04:40]

And various companies approached me that I had to say no, sorry, sorry. But the, I was rescued if you like, by the Monopolies Commission of the day who had had referred to them a request by the airline operators that they thought that the Civil Aviation Authority was charging excessive fees to the operators for the service they were providing, particularly in relation to air traffic control and air traffic management, the control of our airspace. And this had reached a sort of level where the MMC, Monopolies and Mergers Commission, decided that they would run an exercise to examine this complaint, this reference in formal words, but – and so they set up again a little team to do this, but they didn’t have anyone within the MMC that either knew anything about aviation, aircraft, aeroplanes, air traffic control, that sort of thing and they needed someone, so they hired me. And it was something that I was very happy to do because it kept me in contact, it kept me in an area which was not in conflict with the formal situation at all and it was a six-month exercise, something like six months, which allowed me to sort out in my mind where I wanted to go, what I wanted to do, where I might explore possibilities. And I’ve forgotten the number of the report that was produced by the MMC, I’ve forgotten what its conclusions were as to whether the reference was a valid reference or not, what the eventual… I remember a big thick report and there was a chapter on almost the research and development that the CAA promoted which was covered by some of the fees they charged in some financial arrangement as to the way in which the costs of some R&D, very necessary for air traffic control, air traffic management, got wrapped up in the fees that were being charged. And it meant that there was an element of the final report which essentially I drafted. I drafted something, it was then manipulated by the admin man in MMC, there it was, that was the procedure. And so the report was published. There was then – and I indicated in the R&D chapter if you like, the sort of work that CAA were doing through the National Air Traffic System, NATS, and the way in which I thought it might be improved. They’d got various bits of work going on in places like Malvern, the RSRE and Farnborough, RAE. Both places were familiar to me so I was able to comment on the way in which that work was going and how it might go. And the report was published. And then came the fact that the meeting when CAA came back on the various conclusions in the report and as part of the ongoing debate, the chairman of the CAA of the day happened to be John Dent… [pause] and he and I knew each other because years and years ago,

Sir John Charnley Page 361 C1379/30 Track 22 prior to this, he had been at the NPL playing rugby, and I had been at the RAE playing rugby and it so happened that he was the NPL hooker and I was the RAE hooker, so we had stared at each other before fighting with each other, and so we knew each other. He had been, he went from NPL to Shorts, I think, and then became chairman of the CAA. And so he took me aside and said, essentially, I can’t remember exactly how now, now you’ve made these comments on NATS John, would you now like to come as a consultant to NATS to help them sort out the sort of problems you’ve identified in your remarks. And so I was only too happy to say yes, and I got a consultancy to CAA which started somewhere round ’83 and went on until about ’97. Is it ’97? Something like that I think. It went on for a long time.

[11:15] Consulting on what sort of matters?

I… the… [pause] My chief point of contact to start with, well it went on for quite some time, was the Chief Scientist to the CAA and I’m trying to think of whether – and that was Joe Morall whom I knew, I had known from the MoD period and I’m quite certain that Dent, before asking me to join them would have spoken with Morall to see whether Charnley was still, almost, a reputable bloke to have around. And before very long I found myself as the chairman of CAARDBoard and CAARDBoard was the CAA R&D Programme Board. So I was chairman of the – the Chief Scientist did all the work, obviously, he was the executive, but I was the chairman of the board that looked after the R&D, the CAA’s R&D programme. And on the board there was, oh, the various government departments associated with civil operation. If you remember, I’d had some experience of the civil world from BLEU activities, so it wasn’t unknown to me at all and Morall knew that because he’d been with me in BLEU, so it wasn’t a new area to me although it wasn’t something I’d had direct contact with for some time. But on the CAA R&D Board, well the CAA itself, in its several forms, then there’s the Air Registration Board, the ARB, the people who essentially write the specs for safety in our own airspace, separate body altogether, the ARB. There were the… there was a representative from the SBAC as the aircraft constructors and there was certainly a representative from the airline operators and I think the Met Office were on it as well because CAA made a contribution, the Met Office was jointly run, funded by the air force and NATS as people who were primarily concerned in weather for our aerospace activities. So we’d got the airlines, you’d got the aircraft manufacturer. It was a very useful board and I was only too pleased to be party to. And I ran that for, oh, almost for ten years or thereabouts, would it be? What did I say? Mid ’83,

Sir John Charnley Page 362 C1379/30 Track 22 something like that. The Monopolies Commission was, yeah, ‘83/’84 I was chairman of… this’ll tell me. ’84 to ’92, chairman of the Civil Aviation R&D Programme Board, known by everyone as ‘CAARDBoard’.

[15:10] Were there any particularly big issues and topics that came up over that period?

There… there were a whole range of topics, big ones.

Or any that stick in your mind in particular?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it was, within our… well… There was a debate going on at the time as to the extent to which – and with Mrs Thatcher Prime Minister at the time? – but certainly there were major issues associated with our airspace and European airspace and whether in saying how we should run our airspace this should be part of a bigger picture of European airspace and how much we knew better than Europe and therefore we wanted to stay aside. And that was a debate with Europe and we talked about that at CAARDBoard, trying to get a British view with Europe. Separately from that there was the, not the semantics, but the difference between air traffic control, on the one hand, and air traffic management, because the technical facilities were becoming available to make it possible to have more information coming back from aircraft in the air to the ground for the ground to make use of it, but not necessarily to control it as tightly as had been done in the past. More information was becoming available, not just from… there was a data [link]. There were now lots – let’s take the Atlantic – there were now lots of aeroplanes over the Atlantic at any one time, I could almost say hundreds of them, and they were now getting data links which enabled them to feed back various bits of information automatically without the pilot being involved, that the data links could be organised, for instance to send back information, almost, you could say every half hour or when they crossed a particular geographic longitude line so that there were regular bits of information coming back. And as I say, from the vast number of aircraft you could now build up a picture of what was happening at different heights over the Atlantic, you had the Met forecast coming in as well, and all this was now providing a vast amount of information which then needed to be handled on the ground and translated into a form which assisted the management of the total air traffic scene and how did you do that on the ground and what were the programmes that you needed to establish with simulators, with computers, with simulating on the ground that pattern that was happening up

Sir John Charnley Page 363 C1379/30 Track 22 there which was being updated, how frequently. And so there was a big exercise that we ran as to how one compiled this information, what were the things that you needed, then how did you organise it and how did you get this back into the system where you were safely handling air traffic and perhaps arranging for them to arrive at their terminal airport, say LAP, if they were coming east from New York, from La Guardia, whatever, so that you could avoid them stacking and just start earlier on to start spacing them systematically rather better, in all weathers again. And so you can imagine that CAARDBoard, with its, as I say, the sort of representation we had, used to have a pretty good debate on that sort of air traffic management of the information and, you know, speed, height, bit of weather, all of these things, how many channels did you want coming back, and so on and so on. It was a new area, it was opening up with the data link, the facility of regularly reporting information back to wherever. That’s the main thing which we spent a lot of time on and that influenced the design of the data link. And that, you know, how did you produce a link for data of this sort from the mid Atlantic? You were out of range of radars, but there were things now beginning to appear in space that enabled you to transmit up and down again, so that a whole new field there, particularly in relation as we were concerned with the North Atlantic – South Atlantic as well for that matter – how did you use these technical facilities which were now becoming available to best advantage in managing the air traffic control scene. To what extent did you want, how did you respond to the pressure from the airlines who wanted to do more of this themselves and therefore manage it rather than be controlled by a government agency to do as they were told.

[22:24] So the airlines essentially wanted to use this sort of thing to have more control over their activities then?

That’s right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. They wanted more freedom to use the information to best advantage to themselves. From the government point of view, from CAA’s point of view, they could understand this certainly, but they weren’t concerned with making a profit necessarily, but they were concerned making it all safe and satisfying all that had to be looked after in terms of safety of the travelling public and providing the best service for all the airlines, not just British Airways or whatever, whatever; all the aircraft operating in our airspace. And there we are. And I found it very, very interesting, I have to say, I thoroughly enjoyed it. And it went on, oh, for a long time until there were structural changes in the CAA because… I’ve touched upon the Met Office being there on CAARDBoard. I’ve mentioned, I think when I was Chief Scientist to the

Sir John Charnley Page 364 C1379/30 Track 22

Air Force that the RAF, the air force, had an interest in the funding of the Met Office and I now knew that CAA had an interest for the same sort of reason as the air force, providing information for safely arranging aircraft operations, whether they were military or civil. And so there was an Air Traffic Control Board, which met every six months, something of that sort, which looked after our own airspace again, the United Kingdom airspace, which had to handle both military and civil traffic, so there was this Control Board, which was set up, oh, historically after the war I guess, don’t know, because the responsibility was joint between military flying and civil flying. And for instance, negotiations were ongoing all the time about the air force wanting low flying routes for flight testing, the military operations of… and those low flying had to be integrated in to the commercial flying. So that sort of thing was going on all the time but above it there needed to be a formal responsibility and there were meeting… I think they were every six months. No more frequent than that. May even have been once a year. Think it was every six months, don’t know. Alternately, one time chaired by an airman, Air Vice-Marshal or Air Marshal, and the other time by, the next time by the Controller of NATS, National Air Traffic. And I was on that board, is the point I’m getting to and so were the Met Office again, because of the joint interest by everyone flying in better performance of what the weather was, the forecasting was likely to be, and so on. So the whole thing, it was an interest that I had for a long time, that CAA activity.

[26:30]

And then of course, right throughout that period, and then I’ll stop on this particular point, there was always this fundamental problem that the CAA in its formal responsibility was both the judge and the jury in that it was laying down the requirements and then it was also, as the CAA and the airworthiness side, it was laying down the requirements for safe operation in our airspace, but then it also was through NATS was the people who were policing it. So it was at about this time I think where it was decided that the two things should be separated and the NATS should be run separately and CAA from the CAA. And now you can see the line of thinking that once NATS was separate, it now, well let’s privatise it if you like and let’s go down that particular, it’s now separate so let’s do something different with it. And so there was quite a lot in the late eighties, nineties, restructuring that went on. And now I’m getting lost. However, it was a very interesting time.

[28::00]

Sir John Charnley Page 365 C1379/30 Track 22

Now let me, as an offshoot from that, in my time at CAA and CAARDBoard, and I mentioned the issue between our airspace and European airspace, so I was involved in the European scene and that took me in the direction of a body called EUROCAE, the European – it’ll be in here. [pause] The European Organisation for Civil Aviation Equipment. EUROCAE – the European Organisation for Civil Aviation Equipment. And this again was a European body that handled the sort of requirements for equipment that went into civil aircraft; autopilots to make an obvious example, but things that went into an aeroplane, the autopilot, how they should perform, what their operation limits they should be designed to, and so on, on a European basis. And this was all part of the European civil aviation body in Paris. I represented the UK on that and it wasn’t very long; a year, two years maybe, I can’t remember, before I was chairman of it. So I became chairman of EUROCAE and that then obviously, whether it was the UK or whether it was Europe, you’re now needing to talk to the other side of the Atlantic, to the FAA and the similar sort of organisations they had there. So I now find myself, through EUROCAE more than the UK, on the equivalent FAA outfit that looked after the requirements for electronic equipment in the States, the design features that they set for their industry to work to in the way in which EUROCAE and then the UK set the requirement on our side of the Atlantic. So now I was in London, I was in Paris and I was in the States, regularly is too strong a word, but yeah, did quite a bit of hopping around at that stage.

[31:39] Sounds like quite a busy retirement.

Well that was it. When… now, at this stage, and that’s all my CAA involvement, I’d served my two years through the Monopolies Commission and CAA, come and join us, but now I could take an interest with those people who’d been asking me to go and help them. Shorts in Northern Ireland on their guided missiles, Fairey’s, Fairey Aviation. Or Fairey’s, not just aviation, Fairey’s, to mention two. Windsdale Investments, there’s a funny name, who were an investment company, as they say. I don’t think they exist any longer, I think they were bought out by someone much later on. Oh, and of course once I started working with the CAA, I’d set up myself as a consultancy, so I was now Charnley Consultants and that meant that [laughs] I was a member of a bunch of people who also operated as consultants in the aviation world and who were determined that this new boy entering the scene shouldn’t ruin everything for them. [laughs] One way and another. So it’s a bit of a joke maybe, but they made sure that the fees I charged were not going to ruin the fees that they charged. And for instance they didn’t want me

Sir John Charnley Page 366 C1379/30 Track 22 undercutting them; I had no previous experience, I was doing this for the first time, had no previous experience, and they certainly made it very clear to me that John, you know, we don’t have quite a professional body representing us, but don’t come in and spoil the, ruin the game for us.

What’s this group called?

It didn’t have a name, it didn’t have a name, no. They just operated, I can name, and I won’t, a number of people who were in it. And they were people I’d known, like myself who might have retired from government or been consultants for quite some years when I was in government, so knew them. One, two, three, yeah. And no.

It’s people from a similar sort of background to yourself then?

In some respects, yes. Yes, one certainly, yeah. And another one was someone who had retired from the aerospace industry in that sense and I’d known him when he was in that position and now he had retired and was operating in the same sort of way and he had more experience than me, he was helpful to me in fact, as well as, as I say, making sure that I didn’t misbehave myself. [laughs]

Is this actually a formal group that meets now and again, or is it just a bunch of people working in the same area?

Just that, just that. Just that. I suppose that if I put everything into the timescale here, I got my ‘K’, my Sir John in the New Year list in ’81, so that now that I’d retired I’d got a label that meant something to some people. Didn’t mean a lot to me personally, but both to companies to some extent, to have an adviser, a consultant that was helping them and had got this sort of background, who’s also got a… you know, there was some bit of aura associated with it which might have made me attractive to people and certainly there was no shortage of work, because at that stage I’d still, in the early, right through in the eighties and the nineties, certainly in the eighties, still able to contribute to the technical scene as a consultant.

[36:38]

Sir John Charnley Page 367 C1379/30 Track 22

If I go to Shorts, and I was with Shorts for quite a long time going backwards and forwards to Northern Ireland, again, not on the board of Shorts, I was a consultant to them. In fact the MD, Phil Foreman – gosh, that’s right, there’s a thought – in that… yeah. Gosh, I hadn’t thought of this before. When I got my award, my honour, my knighthood, two other people who were honoured at the same time, one was Sir Philip Foreman, MD of Shorts, and the other was Sir George… another was Sir George Jefferson who was from BAC guided missiles area, and Phil Foreman in Northern Ireland was guided missiles, but was also little executive aircraft as well, Phil. And to some extent I was able to start working with Shorts before I’d served my full two years because he could occupy me as helping them on the civil aircraft side, which I’d never had responsibility with them. My responsibility with Shorts had been on guided missiles and short range guided missiles and so on. That he could satisfy the rules to have me working with them on the little aeroplanes side because they were doing a lot of work on composites for Boeing and I had a bit of a background of composites from my, way, way back, my aerodynamics and structures down at RAE. So there was a tenuous sort of argument there in which he was able to satisfy the system that I could work for them. Once I was working for him of course, it became somewhat difficult to separate out the civil side from the guided missile side. [laughs] But it wasn’t very long after that that I was able to do that anyway. And so I became… And he it was, Phil said I’d rather have you as a consultant to the company, rather than on the board. I think he said that because I might be too difficult for him on the board, I don’t know. However, again, he and I enjoyed each other and, you know, we still send Christmas cards to each other, he and his wife. So there’s then a long story with Shorts until the time that Shorts were taken over by Embraer – not Embraer – by the Canadian company.

Bombardier?

Bombardier. Bombardier, yeah. And in that period I was helping with the short range guided missiles and the work that they were doing on the aircraft with Boeing in moving from using composites for flaps and parts of an aircraft that were not structure in the sense of design loading. In other words, the flap or the aileron or whatever, the fin or the tailplane – not the tailplane – but the elevator weren’t loaded, yeah, there were design requirements for them but they weren’t part of, if they failed they didn’t immediately result in the loss of the aircraft. So they could be designed not quite so rigidly as if it was structure. But Shorts had built up sufficient background with Boeing for Boeing to be asking them to move from, to designing composite materials into the main structure of the aeroplane.

Sir John Charnley Page 368 C1379/30 Track 22

[41:42] What sort of materials are composite materials?

What sort of… fibreglass is almost the common non-aviation, but it’s where you are, you’re making, you’re replacing the aluminium material with a resin which has got elements of glass fibres in it and you arrange the glass fibres, if you like, in such a way that they do the same job as the elements in a metal. You get into the matrix composition of the material and it was… and it’s, you know, it is commonly used now. I’m talking about the early days of the late seventies, even before that in RAE.

Is this stuff like carbon fibre and…

Yes, carbon fibre is the sort of thing, yes. Yes, yes, that’s right. That’s better than fibreglass. Carbon fibre, yeah. And in using it in primary structure, then you arrange layers of it, you can make it in thin strips and arrange layers of it so that you’re transmitting the load, you can arrange it to transmit a load in a particular direction that you want it to go. Not said that very well, but there we are. The point I was getting to was that I was with Shorts until Bombardier took them over and then obviously Bombardier had got ideas of their own, they didn’t need me, so there we were. But, the point I’m going to make is that up to the point where Bombardier moved in, I was trying with Shorts, was trying to persuade the British government, who were responsible for a lot of the funding into Shorts as a result of policies for Northern Ireland, for employment in Northern Ireland, therefore the British government had quite an interest, put it no stronger, in the way in which Shorts functioned. And I was trying to persuade the British government to provide some money for a big autoclave, which essentially is a furnace, a particular sort of furnace for doing the sort of work that Boeing were asking Shorts to do, and so there was a market in Boeing if Shorts could be given this extra facility to help them with the design of primary structure in composites, carbon fibre sort of thing. They’d got the requirements, they’d got the facilities for doing that on non-primary structure, but to take it to the primary structure phase needed a better facility than they had. Of course the government said no, that if Shorts wanted this they should fund it themselves. And just at that moment Bombardier appeared on the scene and as part of the deal that the government did in selling Shorts to Bombardier, included the provision of this facility. And so the British government paid for it in the end, which annoyed me no end. But there it is, it’s one of those things. It was quite an expensive facility which HMG didn’t think

Sir John Charnley Page 369 C1379/30 Track 22

Shorts needed, but Bombardier in their bid included the money for this particular feature, and they got it. But I couldn’t get it. Failed.

[47:01] What are the advantages of composite materials?

Well, really I tried to say that a moment ago, Tom. You could… with, say, a metallic structure you don’t have any control over the way in which the load is transmitted through that structure. In other words, if you like, the load goes in straight lines. With a composite material you can arrange the material so that you can move the loading in different directions. It’s lighter, generally lighter anyway, but you’ve got the flexibility in arranging – I mean technical terms of transmission of load – but you’ve got flexibility over the way that is done and the directions in which you want to do it, which you don’t have with a metallic material. Hm.

Ah. I get it.

You must have talked with other people about this, but you’ll find…

Material science is actually the section I’m coming up to next year, so it’s…

Oh I see.

…it’s at the top of my mind at the moment, which is…

Well, there’s another lecture that I gave to the Royal Aeronautical Society, oh years and years and years ago, in London. It might have been at the annual Anglo-American Conference, on the way in which materials had influenced almost the way in which aerospace had gone. And I took, I just took three examples. One was in structural materials of the sort we were, metals and non- metals was one, materials in electronics, which was the other, semi-conductors and all that had emerged from semi-conductors into computing and integrated circuits. And the third area was metals into aero engines and the way in which new materials had enabled higher operating temperatures in the turbines and therefore better, greater power, more reliability. And there were those three areas: engines, electronics and structure, all of which had benefited from material advances. And I gave this lecture when I was CER, so that would have been the late seventies

Sir John Charnley Page 370 C1379/30 Track 22 somewhere, for some affair at the Royal Aeronautical Society, I don’t know. I think it was when they gave me a gold medal or something, I don’t know. Can’t remember.

Have to get a copy of that at some point, it sounds like it’s going to be useful. [laughs]

Going to say, you make me think that if you’re going in that direction I’d better think of where there might be access or a reference to that in some way or another. I’ll have a think about that. I’ll have a think about that.

[50:58] One of the things that’s struck me as well in talking about these consultancy jobs is how often you run across people you already know.

Oh yes.

Is that an important part of it, those old contacts? How important are they to the job you’re doing as a consultant?

Very. And that’s why you’re hired, partly why you’re hired. You’re hired, I guess, from your own knowledge, experience, capability – better word for all of that I guess – but also, let’s face it, your contacts and whether those contacts open things up in government because – and I’ll come to that in a moment if you wish – because you’ve got access and contacts from your previous experience that benefit the company you’re now working with. You have to handle that very carefully, obviously, and in many ways that’s the start with the two-year rule, the two-year list. But oh yeah, your own knowledge and contacts are really, those two words I think would summarise why you’ve been hired as a consultant, or even on a board. Now that’s Shorts in a way. Now, I said Fairey’s didn’t I? And there’s another one which lasted a long time, started as Wilkinson Sword, razor blades and materials of that sort, but that’s the other one I mentioned. Wilkinson Sword that became Kidde and Shorts, Fairey’s – leave Windsdale out of it – and Monopolies and Mergers. Those, and they kept me busy, without any doubt at all, and enjoyable. And it wasn’t now a question of falling off the cliff, it was trying to fit it all in. Yeah. Talk Shorts, Northern Ireland, and it enabled me to visit Northern Ireland frequently, they had a very nice house of their own in which – Rosmoyle was its name – in which they put me up and that was a very nice visit. They had facilities outside Belfast so I was taken around the

Sir John Charnley Page 371 C1379/30 Track 22

Northern Ireland area. Interestingly enough, they provided a car to meet me at the airfield, at the airport, but we always went into the plant a different way, from the risk associated with Northern Ireland. We’re talking of a time when it was real, no doubt about it. Blowpipe was the main missile of course, short range, shoulder-fired, Blowpipe. And again, they had a little research committee which I ran and that was, that was the way in which I was used by most of the companies as someone who had an experience in defence research, meeting the requirements and organising how the research would be done, what was the right way to define which research was appropriate to that particular company, that particular project. Again, who the contacts might be in MoD on the one hand on the technical side, on the operational side, the air force, because, you see, I’d got experience both as Chief Scientist Air Force, oh the air force requirements as well as the technical side of the procurement. So, you know, Blowpipe a little different because that was an army weapon as much as anything and I wasn’t as closely concerned with the army as with the air force. But, I had been responsible for the procurement of all guided weapons, so as far as GW were concerned, it didn’t matter much, I’d got that experience and that could lead me on to… [pause]

[56:40]

I’ll go to Fairey’s next because I was on the board of Fairey’s as a non-executive director and again, I was on the board with an oversight of technical innovations, links to the universities, links to the government establishments related to how and where Fairey’s as a general group could best be providing resources to suit their own commercial operations for the future. And as a group there was Fairey Hydraulics, Fairey Nuclear, Fairey Aviation, Fairey Marine, to mention four bits of the company structure. And… I’m trying to think of the name of the chief executive but it’s not… and I’ve met him recently because Lord Gregson was another member of the Fairey board and he died not very long ago and I went to his formal memorial service in the House of Lords and the chief executive of Fairey’s was there, he and I met after all these years. Oh gosh. And we became such good friends. It does annoy me when I can’t remember these names. Anyway, the job he wanted me to do was to satisfy him that if you looked at these operating companies, that I’ve mentioned four of them - there might have been more, can’t remember - that they were all not only taking advantage of what research might be going on in government establishments to which they would have access, but more importantly, to make sure that there wasn’t some research activity going on in one group that was not being made available to another group and that there was sufficient mechanism within the group as a whole for co-

Sir John Charnley Page 372 C1379/30 Track 22 ordinating the future thinking in the separate operating companies. And this of course is a common problem through any big organisation that’s got lots of operating companies within it, and how do you organise that sort of work to make the best of that, those resources, in the interests of the group as a whole.

[1:00:04]

And it’s quite a problem because, as I found at Fairey’s, there’s one of the – did mention, there’s another – there’s Hydraulics, there was Fairey Hydraulics, Fairey Engineering, Fairey Nuclear, Fairey Marine, Fairey Aviation, and one of them in particular – I’m not going to mention which one – made it very clear, I hadn’t met him before and my first visit to him said, you know, John or Sir John, let’s get this clear, you can come and you can say that I’m not behaving in the way the chief executive might wish but, he said, I am judged by my success at the end of the year in the annual review of my performance and whether I’m contributing to the success of the company as a whole. Now, if you want to come in and tell me that there’s something different that I’m not doing properly, or whatever, you of course will take the responsibility for my success. And let’s get that very clear at the moment, that I can be faced with listening to you or you can be faced by going to a chief executive and saying that I am not doing the job I should do. I will be judged on the report, my annual report and my examination on that account and if you wish to inject your thoughts, then let’s be clear that that will go into my report. And that’s the sort of situation which I found more than once. Anyway, rather like, you know, you’d have this sort of job making sure that one government establishment told the other government establishment what they were up to. So yeah, there we go.

[1:02:02]

But it was particularly the case in Fairey’s that one particular operating company was working on things for on a military ticket which they were claiming they couldn’t make available to one of the other companies because they wanted to use it out of the military. And that’s the sort of thing where my own experience, for instance, solved that by knowing the right sort of people to go to in MoD and saying well, how classified is this, does it have to be as tight as this or is it just there because it was tight a while ago but is no longer. That sort of thing. Quite straightforward. Quite, quite straightforward.

Sir John Charnley Page 373 C1379/30 Track 22

[1:02:57] Is that the sort of thing you meant a few minutes ago when you talked about government contacts?

Contacts, exactly, yeah. That’s one way, yeah, sure. Exactly.

Are there others?

Pardon me?

Are there others as well?

Erm… [pause] A little different, a little different. If I go to Wilkinson Sword, they went through various takeovers, mergers, and I can’t remember the sequence of events, but for a while they were Allegheny International, they were bought by an American company, Allegheny International. That didn’t work out and so they came back and were bought by Kidde in this country and they became very involved, which is why they thought I could help them, in fire detect… well they were, fire detection and suppression, that was their main business and became a very good business, fire detection. So they were into some very clever detection materials, like smoke detectors that we’ve got domestically, but detectors in manufacturing plant for fire, for smoke, for chemicals, for toxic – is the word I’m looking for – toxic fumes and sensors for doing all things of that sort. Sensors for temperature rises, for smoke, for heat, for fire, flames, optical. So the sensors for detecting all that, so very hi-tech stuff without a doubt, and then the means of putting them out and the best way, the chemicals that you would use for putting them out without necessarily, or the two sorts of whether it mattered whether there were human beings around or whether you could only use chemicals that were safe with humans around. And both in the military side and on the civil side there are strict requirements for this, that or the other, for safety point of view. And they, whatever they were at the time I don’t know, whatever the company name was, doesn’t matter, but they wanted to move in to the area of, because of their knowledge of quite clever technology related to fire detection and suppression and explosive detection and suppression – and there was an issue at the time, and could still be, I don’t know, there was an issue, and when am I talking about now, late eighties and I suppose nineties – the Americans in their armour, in their tanks, always had a sensor, for an explosive sensor, a fire sensor to protect the crew. Our own army decided that from the analysis they did, they didn’t

Sir John Charnley Page 374 C1379/30 Track 22 need this sort of thing. That it didn’t do anything to give added protection to these three or four chaps that were contained in this package, the tank, and that if some missile penetrated the armour, then there wasn’t a lot of hope for those inside and there was not a lot to be gained by having sensors inside which would tell the three or four crew and put out whatever, because the damage had already been done. So there was a big difference of view between ourselves and the States in army terms. And Kidde, or whatever they were called at the time, believed they had the sort of technology (a) to help our own tank crew and through that also therefore to open up into the American market.

[1:08:47]

So they needed access to wherever in the government system, government laboratories, government establishments, wherever the knowledge went that they could almost lean on, work through, to join in this argument and so they needed access to places like Fort Halstead and the explosives place up at Walton Abbey, and to some extent the rocket propulsion establishment at Westcott. Don’t know why that, but I then found myself taking their head of research to these places to meet people that he’d never had access to before, and I was able to ease his way in with my own background into these places. Getting in at quite a high level because I’d been running, been responsible for these places before. So it was quite a difficult period with… but got them started and again, the individual, now retired, had a Christmas card from him only recently, same thing, same sort of thing. And he was, at the time he was responsible for Kidde’s research activities and they were moving into this new field of sensors that they had for commercial work into military applications and leading on from that into, again, having got them establishment, they then branched out into safety in arming devices and other sensors and fusing, sensors, sensors for fusing. You know, how did you detect, how did you operate a fuse to set an explosion off in a missile, in a warhead, in a shell, what sort of fusing, what sort of technology did you use. They’d got a lot of technology here which they felt could be better used in the military area than they were currently doing so and I was part of that attack on a new market, a new area.

[1:11:53] Who do you actually have to talk to to get access to the research establishments in that sort of way? Is there a formal structure there at all?

Sir John Charnley Page 375 C1379/30 Track 22

…Very much the ongoing CER, because I’d had this approach from industry when I was there as CER, that industry would come along and ask that they were, that you need, yeah, it was done through the CER organisation initially, who would then open up avenues in the relevant establishment if he was convinced that there’s some gain to either side, in particular our own side as government. So yeah, that would be the formal approach. And indeed, with Bob Farquhar who was the man that I was taking, I cleared the ground with my successor as CER so that I could go to the director of the establishment, either with him being primed to expect a contact from me, so yeah, the CER organisation would be the starting point then. What it is now, I’ve no idea.

That’s given a nice overview of an assortment of different activities within the consultancy world. I’ve one or two sort of overarching consultancy questions, if I may?

I’m sure you have.

[1:13:54] One of them was you talked about sometimes you got involved with the technical issues as well; I was wondering how much sway you got over technical issues as an external consultant? Are you just there for, you know, advice, giving it a once over or are you deciding on things as well?

I… the answer to that is very clear. You weren’t… unless you’d been made specifically online in your position within the company and you’d got that sorted with the chief executive or the MD or whatever, you really, you were generally more almost offline and therefore advising rather than deciding. As I say, in talking with this MD in one of the Fairey companies, he made it very clear that he was the chap that took the decisions and his job was on the line for running that particular outfit and if I wanted to interfere by telling him how to do his job, then he would be making that clear to the chief executive, that as such he was not responsible for that, that I was. But generally, I don’t know if this is the way it works more generally, but as far as I was concerned, it was generally advising. It might be running something, as I’ve said, like the CAA, running CAARDBoard, and in Shorts, Shorts, Phil Foreman, the chief executive, asked me to set up a research committee to pull together the different elements of his operation that he didn’t think were working sufficiently well together. And much the same sort of thing happened at Fairey’s, but they didn’t have a committee, they used me to go round and satisfy myself that there was a cross-link within the company, or if not, to refer to the chief executive. But he

Sir John Charnley Page 376 C1379/30 Track 22 wanted to be satisfied – oh, the name nearly came to me; Dennis, Dennis, Dennis, Desmond, Dennis – he wanted to be satisfied that there was sufficient information moving between the different operation divisions rather than just being kept with the blinkers on. And to that extent you needed a knowledge of what they were doing in the technical world. And I found that difficult sometimes because some of the work, yeah, very advanced.

[1:17:22] How much sway does your opinion carry in that sort of – let’s take the Fairey example, looking over that organisation, how it fits together – at the end do you produce a report or something and it goes higher up, or a recommendation and if so…

There was a recommendation, in one particular case, a recommendation between Fairey Hydraulics down at Bristol and Fairey Engineering in Manchester that they were both working, they’d both got effort going into solving the same sort of problem without talking to each other, without confiding in each other and they were using as the defence the fact that it was classified from the different areas of defence that they were talking to, whereas there was no need in the sense it was defence, but it could be cleared and it was cleared. It was no – I want to use the word defence – it was no, not restriction, it was no reason why they shouldn’t talk to each other. There wasn’t a security limit that prevented them from talking with each other. And very seldom, Thomas, was it a question of you, or the way I played it now, of you making the decision. It was, in that case there were two operating sub-divisions and the only way in which they could be made to talk was by someone up above them says, you know, John Charnley has made this comment, made this report, made this remark and he’s satisfied me, and then there was a meeting between the two of them with he and me. And, yeah. We all stayed fairly friendly after that. [laughs]

[1:19:57] As well as these in particular consultancy jobs, were there any other ones?

Say again, sorry?

As well as Fairey, Windscale and Shorts and the CAA were there any other consultancies?

And Kidde.

Sir John Charnley Page 377 C1379/30 Track 22

And Kidde, sorry, yes.

I think that’s about it. That kept me going fairly well for ten… yeah. CAA was a major operation because things came out of it in Europe and in America.

That’s one thing I did mean to ask about actually.

I would just leave it at that for the moment, nothing else comes to mind and I’ve got nothing on here, I know. Go on, yeah?

[1:20:48] I was just wondering, before when you were talking about buying landing equipment, you pointed out this complete difference in approach between the American systems and the British systems – I was wondering was there any sort of evidence of cross-Atlantic differences over your time at the European Body for Aircraft Equipment? EUROCAE.

[pause] I’m trying to think of the name of the American equivalent to EUROCAE, such as it was, it wasn’t quite the same. I’m trying to think of it. And there was a… there was one of their annual review meetings that I went to, to deliver a speech on the way in which we were handling it in Europe and it was being held down in Dallas, Fort Worth, Dallas, held in Dallas. So I found myself down in Dallas and got there through Washington and in Washington met up with the chairman. I was the chairman of the European body and met up with the chairman of the American body and we flew down Washington to Dallas together. And the answer, trying to think that through, I can’t, there was nothing of any major difference between the two of us, the way in which we were looking at things. No, nothing comes to mind of any… I’ve got a bit of a niggle about something and I can’t think what it is. My talk over there didn’t raise any great points from the floor from their side, so, oh, but I’ve just got some niggle. Can’t think of what it is, Thomas, can’t…

Oh, we can always add it at some later point if needed.

I know. I know. Yeah. Their regulatory authority was the FAA, so that their airborne equipment was, the requirements for airborne equipment was the FAA. Now, as I mentioned we

Sir John Charnley Page 378 C1379/30 Track 22 were not – in Europe – we were not as well organised in that we hadn’t reached – I don’t know what the situation is now – but we hadn’t reached the stage where there was an equivalent to the FAA for Europe. Whatever European organisation did exist, then we, the UK, weren’t part of it. We knew better than this European organisation and we were members of it but we didn’t, we had our own requirements separate from the rest of Europe, if you like. And so there were questions from the floor at this meeting as to how this was likely to be realised. Because the European body, I’ve forgotten its name, was run by a German. Surprise, surprise you might say. And this body was issuing the requirements for the design and the safety features that needed to be built into the equipment being ordered by European airlines, that was, they were the regulators. But we, the UK, had our own regulating body. What the situation is now, I don’t know, but that certainly was the issue that was niggling me. And I was working on that between the UK, as a member of the CAA I was party to the debate that was going on around that topic. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, there was that difference. And I don’t think it meant a lot of difference in the actual design of the equipment, it was just more a case of who rather than the what of it. Who is going to be it over in Europe, and the FAA didn’t know who to talk to, in a way.

That’s a sovereignty issue rather than a technical one?

That’s right. Absolutely that. Sovereignty rather than technical, yeah. It’s a nice way to put it, yes. Yeah.

Is that something…

And that then gets back to this question of how you run the North Atlantic airspace and where the two sides meet and so on… anyway. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Where the two areas of responsibility meet, yes. And I don’t know what the situation… I think we have now agreed on a common European regulatory body. I think so, I don’t know, I don’t know.

[1:27:50] Why this reticence over combining something that does seem very trans-national?

At the time [pause], and what are we doing, we’re talking about the eighties, over twenty-five years ago, certainly over twenty years ago isn’t it? At the time, our view was we knew better. We’d got more experience, it was claimed, and we knew better than the rest of Europe and

Sir John Charnley Page 379 C1379/30 Track 22 therefore we didn’t want to be part of a bunch that we had to persuade before the regulatory requirements were issued rather than going ahead and doing it ourselves. And it was at that time, as I say, back to Thatcher, where she had the same approach about Europe as a whole. And I was and always have been – and we’re into politics here – a confirmed European, I could never really see that we could operate as a separate entity as a little island sitting off, if you like, the north west coast of Europe without being part of it in a full participating way, without recognising the way that global affairs were going to develop as they had and you’ve got the States and you’ve Russia and you’ve got China and you’ve got India, whatever, got big, big bodies and that we as the UK weren’t really in that league but could be part of it as part of Europe. I could see a place for Europe on that sort of scale. Now, that’s been my view since some time in the sixties, but we haven’t gone down that particular path. Or we’ve gone, but we’ve been dragged there, rather than gone down… anyway. And this is the scene on the air traffic side as well. Now what it is now, I don’t know.

Is there much sort of direct political influence to, to keep it British affects, in the 1980s to the CAA?

[pause] What is the ‘it’ in that, I’ve got to ask? ‘Keep it.’

Keep this separate system of British regulation of airspace. Keep it separate from Europe.

Yeah. Oh, at the time there certainly was, yeah. Yes, yes, yes. And we were keen to keep NATS, National Air Traffic control, as a British body rather than part of Euro control. There was a European control and we were very reluctant to nominate any NATS staff to go and serve on Euro control, because that was a waste of our efforts, so to do. Let’s plug on with what we know, because we know better and we can talk ourselves with the FAA in the States, we can establish that direct as a head-to-head, we don’t need the rest of Europe involved. But it couldn’t last as far as I was concerned, it just couldn’t last. But it was very much a reflection of national policy towards the rest of Europe at that stage. Gosh, I’m getting political. I shouldn’t do this.

Shall we take a break?

It’s about lunchtime isn’t it?

Sir John Charnley Page 380 C1379/30 Track 22

I was just thinking that. [end of track 22]

Sir John Charnley Page 381 C1379/30 Track 23

[Track 23]

There are one or two other positions in your alleged retirement I was going to ask you about as well. One of them was on the House of Lords Select Committee for Science and Technology. I was just wondering what you actually, how you actually became involved with that and what you did there?

General procedure of select committees, be they Commons or Lords, there is obviously quite a senior civil servant administrator that looks after them. There’ll be more than one, but this one, the Lords themselves for some reason, I don’t know, decided that they needed to take a look at the totality of government-supported R&D, particularly R, really R. And – when was this, what was the date?

1986.

’86, okay. So I’d been retired four years, yeah, okay. And they themselves, as their lordships decided that this would be run by… a man who had previously been the chairman of Cossor UK, I think chairman, yes it was. And his family estate is near Basingstoke, dear God. But I knew him through Cossor and in the work that I had done with the CAA on civil aviation where Cossor had quite strong activities in Cossor research, and so I knew them through the CARDBoard activities in CAA and knew this man quite well. Name might come to me in due course. He had been selected by their lordships to run this group and he approached me and said that yes, they had the normal administrator that would keep the committee on the right lines, but they didn’t have anyone with any technical background. Would I agree to act as the, whatever it is, the technical adviser, so the answer was, early retirement, not enough to do [laughs], yes I would help. And so that was it. And the interesting thing about it was that in thought processes you surveyed what was going on, you got from the various departments you collected what their funding for research was across the various government departments, totalled it all up, had a look at it and formed some judgements. But then – and it was not your job to provide the answers, obviously, but your job was to provide the questions for their lordships on the committee to ask whoever it was that was giving evidence for them to provide the answers. So you found yourself analysing answers had been – the meetings itself were, say, a month apart, they were as frequent as that and, if not more frequently, but say a month – you find you would be answering – sorry. You’d seen the results that had come from the different government departments so you’d got

Sir John Charnley Page 382 C1379/30 Track 23 yourself in your mind the sort of questions you wanted asked, you’d made a bit of sense out of it and earmarked certain areas. Shouldn’t have said that because you’re only going to ask me what they were.

Just one or two examples would be…

I can’t. Can’t, can’t. It might come as I talk, but I can’t at the moment, no. And from these answers, from what you’d seen on paper you had extracted a list of questions. There were about ten people on the committee and so relative to a particular topic that you were going to address with a couple of chaps sitting there giving evidence from more than one company, whatever, whatever, and the government department involved maybe. You produce then a list, and if there were ten people on the committee you thought of two questions per individual, so you produced a list of about twenty questions. Not easy in itself. Then as time went on you found yourself thinking about twenty questions for the next meeting, but also digesting the answers that had been given to the meeting that had just taken place, so you were thinking both ways. And that was the way you thought you’d plan things. Well of course, didn’t work out like that at all, because in sorting out your two questions, what you were really doing were, you were opening up a particular avenue of questioning on this particular topic – God, I can’t remember the topics – on any particular day. You were opening up, which you then hoped that the individuals on the committee would follow up, one way or another. But instead of that, all they did, I’m afraid, was ask the two questions you’d prepared and then hand it on to the next one.

Who are the people actually on the committee, are these members of the House of Lords then?

House of Lords, these are their lordships, yeah, yeah.

[07:00]

Let me go back to the chairman, ex-Cossor for me, but also… very, he’s a banker, that’s right. He’s a banker and had contact, more than contacts; had activities, jobs, occupation in the States. I’m trying to set the scene for working up to my punchline because – what’s the name of the bank that in the old opening up the West in the States, because his remark to me almost was, I used to ride shotgun on a stage for…

Sir John Charnley Page 383 C1379/30 Track 23

Wells Fargo?

Wells Fargo. That’s right. He was a director of Wells Fargo banks in the States and he and I used to have lunch together and it was great fun because he could talk about this sort of thing, and I always picture him as on the stage of the Wells Fargo. Yeah, great, that was it, yeah. And his name’s almost with me. However, he ran it and he ran it very well, I thought, but he was limited in trying to persuade – he could recognise what I was doing, what I was trying to do – and he had difficulty in persuading members of the committee to follow up this opening that they’d been given to address the witnesses that had come forward. Lord, lord, what was he? And that was the way, it showed me almost a shortcoming of the select committee procedure, compared with the American, completely different procedure, of actually running an outfit of this sort when some particular programmes are in progress. We tend to look after things after the event with our select committee procedure and something’s happened, bit of a disaster maybe. Alright, let’s set up a select committee, better take a look at this. And I was now involved in that machinery and not completely satisfied that it was getting anywhere because the membership of the committee weren’t, if you like, in almost advanced research and so on, weren’t sufficiently knowledgeable to follow up these openings that you’d directly arranged, to open up weaknesses that had come forward as a result of what the different departments were saying. So it never really got anywhere. However, I’ve got a report somewhere that the body produced in the end, which again was rather like MMC, the Monopolies Commission. This particular one was drafted by the drafting, the initial drafting as you’d expect was done largely by the administrator running the committee and me, and he did most of the work, the administrator, I have to admit, the admin man. Very good, I enjoyed him, yeah. Knew his stuff very well indeed, did it very well, drafting very good, better than mine. We put it together, it went, there were some comments when it circulated through them, but it went through fairly well, with various results, you know, the usual sort of thing as a select committee. Something like thirty recommendations of the sort of things that they thought could be improved, and I’ve got it upstairs somewhere. I think I’ve got the MMC report somewhere as well, must have.

[11:21]

But then, my wife had met him, the chairman while he was at Cossor, things we’d been to together or things run by the Electronic Engineering Federation that we both were at and wives had met and so on. And when the time came for this report to be presented to the Lords in the

Sir John Charnley Page 384 C1379/30 Track 23

Chamber, I was invited to go to it and also the invitation included my wife if I wanted to. So we went along and sat there and she was so impressed with the way in which this chap who ran it stood up and delivered the work of the committee, summarised the main recommendations – don’t ask me what they were – without a note, did it just without any written… And she went to him afterwards or some time later and said how impressed she’d been and he just said. Oh, you know, I’ve been doing it for many, many years, it’s a technique you have to get used to if you’re going to stand up and make a speech in the Lords, it behoves you to know what you’re talking about and do it well. So that was that. I can’t remember… You know, it was a six-month exercise, or thereabouts. No, it couldn’t, must be more than six meetings, it was longer than that. Longer than that. And what it did for me was to me made me think about the mechanisms that government has available to look at this sort of thing. I had previously appeared myself when I was Controller Guided Weapons, or Deputy Controller Guided Weapons, whatever, I’d appeared as a witness being questioned at the Public Accounts Committee for the way in which I was spending public money. So I’d been on that side of the table, but now I was on the other side of the table feeding information in to the members of the committee of the sort of thing that they should ask of the witnesses. And it left me bothered because you’d taken a bit of time and you’d deliberately chosen questions to open up particular areas of questioning, which just fell dead and went to the next person, who really didn’t know enough about advanced research to do anything other than repeat the questions. So it was very, very formalised without any real debate taking place on that particular subject. And there was someone on, there was one member of the committee that was very good and I knew him as well from the past. I can’t think of his name either. Academic, he’d been in universities, vice-chancellor, something of the sort. Can’t, no, can’t remember. As you see, the content of it didn’t make much impact on me at all. I don’t think it was going to alter the price of fish at all, but as a piece of government mechanism it didn’t impress me. Now what else might be in its place? Don’t know. Over to you.

[15:30] Do you think the problem was a case that the Lords didn’t understand the issues actually at hand?

Absolutely. Absolutely. That’s right. That’s right. That’s right. Now, whether the Commons would have been different, I don’t know. I don’t know. But the membership of the committee must have been and was, chosen because they were people who apparently either were interested or knew something about it and that’s why they were there on it, on the committee. But no, it

Sir John Charnley Page 385 C1379/30 Track 23 didn’t satisfy me and left me feeling, again, that I’d put quite a lot of effort into it. I think you may know me well enough, wanting to do a good job, determined as far as I was concerned, to do a good job and didn’t really feel that I got the support, and that was something to do with the mechanics of the operation.

[16:35] You talked quite a bit before about your view of the RAE as this governmental body between industry and universities and I was just wondering what you thought about the levels further up from the coalface, as it were, the way that individuals within government had actually thought about science and technology generally? It sounds like you had a very positive impression of what the RAE was doing. As you’ve risen up to that sort of governmental level though and had a look at the inside workings as it were, what was your overall impression of that compared to lower down where you’d been working before?

I can look at it in several ways. I can look at it in the sense that, and again I’ve mentioned the way in which Frank Cooper as the Perm Sec of Defence wanted to see more scientifically qualified people around his department in London, because he wanted to give a better… he wanted to have a better understanding in different areas of his department than existed through the normal mechanics, through the normal machinery for staffing. So he was keen to see more representation at senior levels around London, Westminster, than existed. Secondly perhaps, and it’s common knowledge now, there’s a buzzword, almost associated with the sort of thing I’ve been talking about in individual companies, of different parts of the company not talking with each other. What’s the buzzword about different government departments talking to each other? And I’ve seen it so often, thought my goodness, yes. There’s a buzz phrase, related to the fact that things are going on in one department which ought to be made more generally aware to other departments and they’re not.

Is it bunker thinking?

No, no. Anyway, I’m conscious again that in the way that that happens within industry, it was certainly happening with different government departments. Now the extent to which you think that should be more tightly controlled from the centre like the Cabinet Office and the government’s Chief Scientist or whatever, whatever, whatever is no doubt a debateable point. Cross-linking, cross…

Sir John Charnley Page 386 C1379/30 Track 23

Cross-departmental co-operation?

Well yeah, that’s too long as a buzz phrase, but… doesn’t matter. That sort of thing, not enough of it and I’m almost certain that is the case, but how you handle that I don’t know. It’s way beyond me now. In putting questions like that to me you must remember that I’m thirty years out of date, my dear chap, or twenty-five years out of date now in terms of how it’s being done now.

Not so much…

Something talk, cross talk…

…about how it’s being done now.

Cross talk, whatever.

I’m sort of wondering about your general impressions of it as you saw it at the time.

Yeah, okay. Well, at the time there were things that needed to be done. But I hesitate because then the question comes, oh what sort of things, and so on. No, I can’t go any further. I can’t go any further.

I think I understand the issue.

Say again, sorry?

I think I can understand the issues.

And I don’t know how easy it is for the different departments of government, you see the chap that I knew very well that we played rugby together, he and I, I followed him at Farnborough, at RAE running the Weapons Department and he left after his weapons experience and became the Director of the Road Research Laboratory at Crowthorne. He moved out of defence into civil and from the Road Research Laboratory he went up to London as the Chief Scientist into the

Sir John Charnley Page 387 C1379/30 Track 23

Ministry of Transport. And he and I used to see each other and it was happening at a time when I was in my eighteen months, two years in Mintech. So I was now Mintech, he was Ministry of Transport and you’re thinking, well we two ought to be working more closely together Joe, and he said, what a good idea, but it would be hell to make it work. And there were two people who’d had the same sort of background: Aero Flight, Weapons, he out, me out, in elevated positions in London and yet the structure between the two departments didn’t really make a lot of sense of trying to – although some of the things that I might be prepared to do with Mintech would have been in Transport, like the floating, the ship.

Oh, Maglev.

Maglev, and all those things.

Hovercraft, sorry, yeah.

Hovercraft, hovercraft. They could be Transport. Well, I don’t know how to finish this because I wasn’t really there long enough to pursue and feel I’d made an impact. He stayed. He’s now ninety-three, thereabouts, in a nursing home not too far away from here. In fact I sent him a card saying we must meet. I'll give you a call in January. I’m still driving, I’ll come and collect you if you’re not and we’ll go and have a beer together. Don’t know, don’t know. Getting into woolly areas.

But it puts me in mind about something you said earlier about what you were doing at Fairey, which was making sure the departments were talking to each other.

Yeah, yeah.

Is it the same sort of issue as that?

Yeah, that’s right, it’s the same sort of thing, same sort of thing. Yeah. Oh, I’m trying to think of the buzz phrase which describes just that. Cross-linking, cross-talking, cross-linking. Doesn’t matter. Well it does matter, but I can’t get it. And you’ll know it because it’s… anyway.

[25:10]

Sir John Charnley Page 388 C1379/30 Track 23

Did you actually enjoy your time on the House of Lords Select Committee?

Oh yeah. I felt frustrated, I was learning something from it myself, I didn’t think I was contributing. They needed someone that understood some of the technical issues that the government was funding. And you see… [telephone ringing]

[pause in recording]

[25:50]

Sorry, you were talking about the House of Lords experience.

Yes. It was different for me. It was, a novelty’s too, not the right word, it was different and therefore interesting in the sense that anything new I would find interesting. It was frustrating – yes, watch the clock – it was frustrating and again, I can remember getting to the stage of saying I don’t feel very satisfied with the way in which this is working, but, John, it’s way beyond you, don’t start worrying about that sort of thing, you’re doing this, let it be and don’t start thinking of how you can put the world right, sort of thing. There we are, that’s it. Cross talk? No. Anyway. Talk between departments, not enough of it being done. And in defence you were so conscious of, you know, I think it’s a quote from some wonderful nineteenth century Prime Minister of saying that defence and war is when your foreign policy has failed and it’s a last resort of foreign policy. It’s alright, send the army in.

Bismarck?

Was it? Don’t know.

War is foreign policy by other means, or something.

Oh, something like that, yeah. And that always impressed me because I think that’s right, that’s absolutely right. But that does mean that you then need this close link between your foreign policy department and your defence, together with other government departments, obviously. And so you’re into the machinery of government on a major, major scale which is certainly, I

Sir John Charnley Page 389 C1379/30 Track 23 couldn’t, I wouldn’t wish to think of writing a book on it. [laughs] Go on, throw another one please.

[28:12] I was thinking maybe it’s… the other big job I had, I say big job, I mean there are two parts of it. I was looking at your CV and thinking about your interest in navigation, firstly as…

Haven’t really touched on that have we, other than BLEU, which was my way – oh, and… go on, what’s the question?

I was wondering about how you came to become President of the Institute of Navigation, firstly?

BLEU to start with, that was my move across from the vehicle, in other words the aerodynamics of the aeroplane, into the equipment it carried, whether they were autopilots, navigation systems or even weaponry, communications and weaponry. I’d made that transfer across in a way, at that stage in my career. And that went on. I went from military back to civil through the CAA and navigation again, very much an issue in the CAA and air traffic control, NATS, air navigation again. And so I’d, well I think I’d been given some… I joined the Royal Institute of Navigation as a member and I think, I don’t know, at what stage did I get… I got an award from GAPAN, the Guild of Air Pilots and Air Navigators, for the work done by BLEU. I got that way, way back. Oh, 1960 dear God, that’s right. We had just – yeah, yeah, yeah – we’d just landed the Vulcan automatically, so as far as BLEU were concerned the job was done. Now there was still a lot of tidying up, yes, but now you could move to the civil world. [background noise interruption] Move to the civil world, and out of that I got the bronze medal of the Royal Institute of Navigation for my BLEU work. That introduced me to the RIN. And the RIN interested me because I had been air-minded completely until then, either aircraft or equipment and aircraft carried or helping aircraft, this, that and the other. Now the RIN, the interest was that it covered all three regimes: land, sea and air. And so I was now exposed, if that’s the right word, to the problems of navigation in the other two media. And that was, you know, a novelty. Here am I, 1960, still got time to do myself in MoD, but being exposed now to what’s happening in these other theatres of activity. And so I started taking and playing a part in the RIN on the technical committee, I got on to the council and, you know, lo and behind it if you like, before very long you’re president of the wretched thing. It’s the way in which it seems to happen, like a chess club in Camberley, like this, that and the other that, you take too great an interest perhaps

Sir John Charnley Page 390 C1379/30 Track 23 or you show yourself to be keen to help, I don’t know, but it happens. And so, oh yes. When was I president?

Late 1980s I believe. ’87 rings a bell?

’87, yeah. Retired five years. Okay. Yeah, that… retired. Still do think of ’82 being retired. And, oh I guess something I’ve not spoken of at all, my trusteeship of the Shuttleworth Collection.

I’ve got a question about that as well coming up.

[32:43] Ah, there we go. And that was another, well, oh… Let’s stay with the RIN because… A chum of mine who had lived not very far away from me, and I mean a quarter of a mile, in Liverpool when I was a youngster growing up and his mother had taught me at Sunday school, believe it or not, and he and I had just grown up together. And he went to one grammar school and I went to another in Liverpool and when I had gone on to university, he had started at university but then had decided to go into the services, went into the air force and I then found my way into matters concerned with the air force, so we still had interesting links together. The end of the war came, we’re talking about the forties, late forties now aren’t we, and he went into civil aviation and he became a navigator and a chief navigator for one of the Arab-Israeli, Israel airline, and became their navigation officer that set the scene for how that airline operated its navigation and its navigators. And so he was a member of the RIN through that sort of channel and he became president. And so now, if we update, if we fast forward, all of this had gone on in the fifties and the sixties and the seventies and he was now President of the RIN in the eighties, early eighties, with, and the aviation background and had opened up routes to South America for the airline that it represented and was quite a prominent character in the airline navigation business. And I was on the committee, a council of which he was president. I’m trying to think for his name. [sighs] He wrote a book, I’ve got it upstairs; a book on navigation through the centuries. He was a bit of a historian.

We can add it to the transcript later if…

Sir John Charnley Page 391 C1379/30 Track 23

Okay, okay. Stimulate me on that because the book’s upstairs, for another occasion maybe, just as a question to be answered. Anyway, he then got hold of me and said John, I’m coming to the end of my time, will you take over after me? Now, as well as being a very good navigator, he at that stage – oh lord – he’d, with another man originated an airline in this country, running tours, a tour operator, airline with making a success of this and so, and developed a knowledge of financial affairs, let me just put it like that, and as such had done a very good job straightening out the finances of the Royal Institute of Navigation, the RIN, which until that point could easily have gone broke, completely. Mid eighties, yeah. And he had sorted it out and had more or less said to me, well there you are, the real hard job’s done, I’ve done all that, come on, you take it over, carry on, you’ve been on council, you know what we’re trying to do, it now is just keeping it straight and encouraging more people to join the RIN because it got itself in a bad way because it wasn’t recruiting enough new blood and we’re short really of new members and new annual fees. And so I said yes, okay, I would do it. Derek, Derek, Derek, Derek… Derek White? Anyway. I would do it.

[38:01]

And there we are, that was the way I got into the RIN, it was through the BLEU activity and my navigation work at Farnborough in the bombing and navigation systems, so I was familiar with all of that on the military side. And then I’d been, I was with CAA on the air traffic control and navigation in civil aviation and Derek, Derek, Stevens, Derek Stevens I think. He’s dead now. And my challenge then if you like, I’d been on the technical committee, I think I might also have been on the membership committee, was to pick up this point of attracting new members, how did you do it. And I can fast forward until just recently. I have to say that I failed, I didn’t hit the magic arrangement by which one could encourage new people to take an interest in navigation because the professional navigator, whether it was civil or military, was almost a dying breed. The pilots themselves, with the aids that were now becoming available, were doing the navigating and not having a specialist navigator. And certainly it’s disappeared. I don’t think that function exists in civil aviation, it’s all done by the pilots. What was I going on to say? Oh yes. The one thing I decided was that the chap that should succeed me, I had been round various flying clubs that I thought I could talk to myself and I went to various weekend yachty clubs with the vice-chairman or the vice-president and left him to talk to – he was a sailor, he was actually an oil tanker captain, but privately sailed little boats and so he could talk the right sort of language to the sailing clubs, and I could talk to the flying clubs to try and attract

Sir John Charnley Page 392 C1379/30 Track 23 new members. We obviously hadn’t got the right sort of skill because we failed, we didn’t do it. We had a limited success, it wasn’t a complete failure, but I spent a lot of time trying to persuade people to join the RIN. And you had the same, in these yacht clubs and flying clubs, you had the same sort of response that you had in RAE earlier in the forties and the fifties when you yourself had chosen to join the Royal Aeronautical Society, a professional body, but other people were saying, well what is there in it for us? It was always the question, what’s in it for us? It wasn’t a question of what can we give it, it was what’s in it for us. And this was the case in the flying clubs and the little weekend sailing clubs. What do we get out of it? We pay something, how much a year, what is it, but what do we get out of it? And, you know, I don’t like going down these paths because you’re going to ask me, what do they get out of it?

[42:04] What does the RIN do?

There you go, you see. [pause] It’s at different levels. That’s why I was taking some time to answer. At the top level, navigation is an international topic, it’s an international subject, it spans the globe. You therefore need a global body for looking at navigation internationally and the rules that need to apply to navigation internationally. And, you know, let me say something absurd. It’s an example, it’s not quite navigation - well it is - that the, our maps of England and the United Kingdom, standard maps and certainly… standard maps have a zero, a datum from which heights are based, okay? Now the maps in India also have a datum from which their height, like the height of Everest is based. It happens that their datum and our datum are different, were different. And there’s really, you could argue, no need for them to be anything other than different because you were so many thousand miles apart and they didn’t need a common reference. But, once you got a satellite up there that could look at India and look at the UK and it could say ah, the height that you got for Everest or whatever related to India is not the same as Everest related to the United Kingdom, and you’re going to say what the hell does it matter, other than the fact that it would be nice, and really they all ought to be on the same basis, and they now can be because you can look at them all from the same point. Now, it’s one little, so… And then, so there has to then be a debate between the people in the different places who’ve got responsibility for maps and although, you know, RIN doesn’t have a responsibility for maps, it’s got a great interest in maps and the way in which information is displayed on maps so that navigators can interpret it easily or whatever. So, and RIN is bound, at that sort of level, bound to get involved in that sort of thing.

Sir John Charnley Page 393 C1379/30 Track 23

[45:06]

And I make the point because… another thing you picked up on my CV, Galileo was a sat-based nav system where there is a GPS, Global Positioning System, from the States and the States financed that and they’ve got two elements to it; there’s a military side which is very accurate and there’s a downgraded side which is civilian use. And you can use the downgraded side, civilian use, for free. Great, but if you’re using it for civil aviation, navigation, whatever, then bear in mind that the responsibility for air navigation in the United Kingdom airspace, that can be turned off by the Americans, if they wish, if they’re responsible for setting up the system. So Europe decided that it would be (a) a good thing to have a system that, if you like, did the same thing as GPS, but was under a Europe control rather than American control, and also that to launch a technical subject like a European navigation satellite, that could involve a lot of the new so-called European countries, was a good thing to do anyway because it would bring them together, it would produce a means, an opportunity for getting them together technically anyway. So there’s that dual function of (a) a European controlled satellite navigation system, together with the facility for encouraging closer integration, co-operation in the advanced technology areas for new members of the European Community. So they set up a thing called Galileo which was a European satellite. And the RIN in our country here needed to form a view on what we thought of it all, needed then to have representation on the European body that was running Galileo, and that happened in my day as president. So (a) I ran a satnav group in this country which had all the parties associated with satellite navigation, be they government, in the different departments or the private sector operators, or the industry responsible for the satnav equipment, be it birds up there, be it equipment, receivers, and get together, extract from a UK position and then transmit that by attending meetings or papers and so on into the European body. Now there’s a long, long speech on both a high level involvement of what RIN does, together with a working business of influencing a European satellite and the way in which it should go. Now the problem with it is, and I think still is, that in the end you’d have to charge for it, whereas the Americans make this facility free. Anyway, there we go.

[49:25] What did you actually think the prospects were for civilian use of Galileo GPS style satellite navigation systems at that early point?

Sir John Charnley Page 394 C1379/30 Track 23

Well, we’ve almost reached that. And it’s not… it was semi-political in its objectives, as I’ve said, it was certainly, from a military point of view, a concern in the high precision element, that it could be switched off. It was unlikely to be switched off in the more general data area of it for commercial civil use and it’s not just the American with a GPS and Galileo, you didn’t mention the fact that the Russians are doing something similar themselves and they always have done. So there’s a bit of a battle going on. With the Americans installed; they’ve got, and they provide the service free and they’re updating it and it’s a good service and they’ve got a complete array of satellites, a complete constellation of satellites so that you can see, oh, three, four, five, almost from wherever you are so you get a good fix, and so on. My attitude has been somewhat like, I may not have been wholly trying to answer… I’m not sure that it’s needed with the American system there already and particularly if it’s going to have to charge, and I think it will, then how many people will take advantage of it, I don’t know. When you think of its application to air, sea and land, don’t know, don’t know. But, if there was a going European activity, and this is me again now, with a lot of the new countries involved, then I wanted to make sure that we were involved in it as the UK and that therefore we went along with a sensible approach, argued approach for whatever inputs we were making. And that was my position. I don’t know whether it will go ahead, but to the extent that it will, then we’ve got to be part of it and therefore we need a UK element to decide what we should be saying and doing and so on.

[52:20] You were chairman of the board of Galileo. What’s the organisation called, sorry, it’s…

No, I was over here. It was… Satnav Co-ordination Committee, that was it. The Satnav Co- ordination Committee. The UKSCC.

And is that an RIN group?

And that was, that was, it was agreed that the RIN would chair it, would chair it, yes. It was the usual sort of bunch of… the various government bodies involved, industry. And I can remember the mobile operators were quite prominent in it because again, you were trying to satisfy the different interests of the users in the three fields of land, sea and air. And you could see the land user being a very busy user and the mobile, the designers of land mobiles – and they’re everywhere now aren’t they - but we’re talking of the mid eighties, you know, and you were conscious, was it eighties or ’93, that’s EUROCAE, ’90 to ’91, so it was later than the mid

Sir John Charnley Page 395 C1379/30 Track 23 eighties. But you were having to, I can remember wrestling with this in the middle of the night on one occasion; who is going to be the main user of a European satellite system? Is it likely to be the mobile users, the yacht people or the airmen? The airmen are not very, the airman’s a different… anyway, there we go. Don’t know, don’t know, don’t know. But the way in which it turned out, I don’t know what its status is now. There was not a lot of support from the Ministry of Transport for it, that was certainly true, but they had to be represented on a government side of it. But this Co-ordination Committee just fed into that and that’s when you got the impression… I used to go along to meetings with Transport representing this bunch with Deputy Secretary, who was not at all enthusiastic, so sent me into his Minister, can’t remember who the hell that was, who was a bit more enthusiastic, but not much. So there was no great enthusiasm for it.

Why do you think there was that reticence?

They couldn’t see, you know, America was so firmly dug in that – and was apparently providing all that was needed for nothing, they couldn’t see that there was a need for a second system to be run by Europe. You’d got the Soviet Union also throwing up a few satellites here and there to provide more against the event that some of them don’t work, although the Americans are updating all the time, putting new birds up. No great enthusiasm for another system. And Transport, you know, always with a background that if they said yes they’d have to provide some money, so say no.

Any other big issues in these early days of discussing the European satellite system? Talked a bit about the political aspect, I was wondering…

On the technical side, no, no. You see, you divide it up into the launchers, the birds and then the receivers and so you’re addressing three areas of the total activity. And they were all on my committee. And a big player of course is ESA in Europe itself, both as a launch body and concerned with the satellite design. So it’s, you know, it’s got all the European problems of trying to run or get agreement on a major technical issue, one of which is deciding how tight you describe the requirement, how tightly you describe the requirement for accuracy, as to whether it’s got to meet both civil and military requirements. And that dictates the complexity of the receivers, and indeed the transmission equipment up above, and the old story of the countermeasures protection. And so you can get a different specification for both the equipment

Sir John Charnley Page 396 C1379/30 Track 23 up there and the receivers down here, whether you’re talking just military or just civil. And of course, like as I just said, as far as Transport is concerned, if you say you’ve got a requirement, then you’ll be asked to make a contribute to the programme, financially. So it pays at first sight, people to say no. No, no, no. And hope that someone else will provide the money and then you’ll climb on board. The way of the world.

We’ve got about…

Half an hour?

…twenty minutes. Half an hour, twenty minutes.

Twenty minutes to wrap up or thereabouts.

[59:00] I notice that that’s, the satnav job is the last thing on your CV. Is that a point at which you retired? And if so, why did you decide to retire then? Having already retired some years before.

Oh well, the answer to this one is easy. I’m eighty in 2002. I’m getting a bit tired at eighty and lots of, not other interests particularly, and the answer is very, very, very simple, I have a sick wife that needs looking after, a wife that’s suffering from Parkinson. She was diagnosed in 2000 as having the early symbols of Parkinson, and boy, they then came very quickly. So I was now looking after her at home to the point then for the next four years or so when gradually, not grad… but rapidly deteriorating, physically and mentally, needing a lot of care at home and then having to take decisions of fulltime nursing at home or a nursing home and so on, until death in the middle of 2007. So I had seven years, from 2000 to 2007 looking after, in one way or another, a very sick person I’d loved for sixty years, plus. We celebrated our sixty-fifth, yeah. No, can’t do the sum. My train of thought now has gone in just going down this particular lane. We were married in 1945 so it would be fifty-five years. It was sixty years. We had a big party in 2005, that’s right. That’s right. A big party because – and I think she attended in a wheelchair – and yeah, yeah, yeah, because it was very, she was obviously going into a nursing home, we’d done as much as we could at home here, people living in twenty-four hours a day and the family saying to me it was knocking me up. So the answer to your question is dead easy, that yeah, I’d got to take a decision to pack this lot in, pack these interests in. I was eighty anyway, but I had a

Sir John Charnley Page 397 C1379/30 Track 23 very, very sick wife that needed my attention. And then for the next five years until mid zero seven, one way or another, I was just committed. So now I take an interest in what is done for the elderly and the old people of the country and old people with serious illnesses, illnesses from which there’s no recovery, helping ease the activities. So I joined the local branch of the Parkinson’s Society and work with them. As yet I’ve resisted, they’ve asked me, I’ve resisted going on to the local committee and certainly no interest in the national – and I’m too old for anything now. No, no, no. But that’s the answer to your question, why did I stop there then at that figure. It was demands at home here that were more important to me than any of this. Not that I could do much about it other than ease it, ease the position, make it a little more comfortable, a little more. And not a very happy seven years at all. Long time. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. With lots of falls which became very serious. Lots of muddled thinking, lots of shaking, uncontrollable. Does that answer the question? Yeah. What else?

[1:04:18] You talked before, something that struck me was how supported, you talked about your wife throughout your career, I was just wondering, sixty plus years of marriage is a long time.

Okay, well wonder on. So?

I was just wondering, you know… how do you keep that up for sixty years, it’s…

Come on Thomas, what are you saying?

I don’t know. I’m sorry. I say this as a single thirty year old and I wonder, you know, over sixty years, that’s a long time to…

Yeah.

For anything. I just wonder, you know.

Oh, hell’s bells.

How do you keep something going that long?

Sir John Charnley Page 398 C1379/30 Track 23

Well, let me answer in a sentence. You produce a couple of kids in the process at some stage and they grow and they’ve got interests or problems or whatever, problems of schooling, problems of growing up and that sort of thing within… you’ve got your own parents in the course of that sixty, or her parents, like splendid Dr Pugmire that we didn’t see any more of once we were married, but my parents we did and moved them down from Liverpool down here so that they were closer. So when you say how or why, how does it happen, and over and above that, God’s teeth, you’ve got interests that you share and you develop those interests, you know, we both didn’t think much of opera but we both were very keen dancers and we loved ballet, we loved travelling. We didn’t have a lot of money in the early fifties when – and sixties, early 1960 we would have been eighteen, 1940 I was eighteen when the war started, seventeen just, last year at school, 1960 I was thirty-eight wasn’t I – children, that’s what I was after. The children at that stage were born around 1950; Katrina was born ’49, Richard born ’51. So around ’50 through, 1950 through to 1960ish, they were ten around, three years between them, so at that stage now. And I’d been, I had now been, I was a world traveller. I hadn’t been to Australia in this time, but certainly been a lot of time to the States in the early jet age, early transonic business, done a lot with the States and more recently maybe done a lot in Europe in the guided weapon field. And so was, done quite a bit of travelling. I wanted to introduce and encourage our youngsters to see more of Europe in particular than we had been able to do as youngsters, either of us, Mary or myself. And so, we didn’t have any money, so we camped and I ran either a big Humber or a Ford Zephyr with oh, what was the, not separate front seats but a bench type front seat so we could pack two youngsters in with great comfort, as well as my wife. And we travelled down Spain, south of Italy, Austria, Czechoslovakia, all of that sort of area with the kids, and Switzerland, obviously, with a tent on the top and pans and everything in the boot behind and very little in the way of change of clothing. It was outside, it was scruffy rig, all these places. So when you say what, how, that would keep us going whilst they grew up, into their teens when they left, determined that each of them should have the opportunity of going to university if they wanted to, Trina went, Richard didn’t. Then when they’d left home we ourselves both interested in seeing more of the world so – I’m watching that lot, yeah – so now we started on our own travels to almost anywhere, China, Egypt, oh, more of America and Canada. So, it went quickly. And above it all, above it all, we loved each other. It’s as simple as that. I keep looking at that photograph. Why does that sit there? So that I can look at it, just from sitting here.

Picture of your wedding?

Sir John Charnley Page 399 C1379/30 Track 23

Yeah, it’s our wedding photo, 1945. Yes. Yes, yes. And still very close when she died, I have to say. If you switch this thing off I’ll say something that I wouldn’t want to go on here. Take this off?

Now?

Well, what do you want?

[pause in recording]

[1:10:40] Talk about the Shuttleworth Trust.

Have I mentioned in all that we’ve said over these sessions, a test pilot that, oh gosh… yeah, yeah. Sorry, I’m… yeah, yeah. A test pilot that was a great friend of mine, Dickie Martin, and he had left the Structures Department, was the chief pilot of Aero Department, that’s where he and I became very close, and he then went on and became the chief test pilot for Gloucester aircraft, Gloucester Aviation, down at Gloucester. So that’s something to store for a moment, Dickie Martin by name. Somewhere around 19… soon after the war when aviation was getting back to what might be regarded as normal aviation interests, one of the interests being club, flying club activities, and air racing started again, having been held up during the war. And air racing was conducted under the banner of the Royal Aero Club and the Director-General of the Royal Aero Club, one ‘Mossy’ Preston, came to the RAE and asked, saying they were going to start air racing again and please could the RAE supply a couple of blokes that would act as handicappers for air racing. And the Director of the RAE, who should he turn to of course but Aero Flight and Aero Flight produced three people: Lyons, Charnley and… oh dear, goodness me [Interviewee meant Colin Britland]. He’s dead but his wife is still around. And we three were asked, could we handicap air races throughout the summer, which went on almost every weekend, that’s why we needed three of us so we weren’t all committed. But we said we need a pilot with us who can help with the handicapping from the flying, from the flying point of view. So this name, Dickie Martin came, emerged and Dickie and the three of us went as handicappers. And that went on through the late forties and the fifties and a separate subject in itself as to what air racing, what handicapping is all about. It’s supposed to be to remove the inequalities of the

Sir John Charnley Page 400 C1379/30 Track 23 aeroplane and leave it to the skill of the pilot, if you like, so that you were judging the pilot. Now, of course the pilot with an aircraft can play tunes, so we always insisted that it was assumed that it would be flown at full throttle and we were sufficiently well versed with a pilot and the three of us knowing a bit of aerodynamics, to do a few sums and decide what that aeroplane with that engine you’d expect to be able to go, and so on. So there was a basis there for handicapping. But it all became a bit of a fiddle between the competitor and you as the handicapper, and then in that sense was fun, it was interesting, it was amusing, and the pilot was Dickie Martin. And fast forward now, we went on with this from the late forties until, oh probably the mid sixties, something like that, and then there was a gap. And then we get to my retirement and Dickie Martin now has been down at Gloucester for some time as the chief pilot – oh he’d left Gloster, no, he was flying for Monarch. He was flying for Monarch. Yeah. Quite elderly now and he was a great ball of, great character and I can remember him saying that he put up on the crew room noticeboard, the crew room noticeboard of Monarch, that if anyone finds an old age pensioner’s handbook, it’s mine, would they give it to me, you see. And Dickie at this stage was now the chief pilot for the Shuttleworth Trust. So now you’ve got the link in.

[1:15:51]

And so I retired and he knew me from my background, he knew me from Farnborough, he knew me from air racing, we’d been good friends anyway and he knew that I had an interest in old aeroplanes and said come on, come on, you’ve got to – and also there was a DH88 Comet, de Havilland 88 Comet which won the air race from England to Australia in 1933 and was the forerunner of the Mosquito, the de Havilland Mosquito. And so it was a twin-engined, three of them were built: a black one, a green one I think and a red one. And it was the red one that went into the race. They started being built in the January and they entered the race the following October, so it was nine months, it took them nine months to build these three aircraft. And this red aeroplane, this Comet, DH88, won the race, Mildenhall to Melbourne, lovely. In the thirties bits and pieces had been stored in hangars, in barns through the war and attempts had been made to rebuild them after the war, run out of money, but then Australia had been persuaded to put some money into the rebuilding of this particular, the bits and pieces of this red aeroplane that had been found in some barn or somewhere in this country. And this got to the seventies and the early eighties and as I say, Australia put some money in and the way in which the money had been used didn’t please the Australians very much and we were all a bit embarrassed in this country and there was a need to seriously take on board the finishing of the restoration of this

Sir John Charnley Page 401 C1379/30 Track 23 particular aircraft to at least ease the embarrassment a little with the Australians. And Dickie Martin came to me and said John, you know, you’ve now retired, you’ve got nothing better to do, why don’t you please come and join the Shuttleworth, Shuttleworth Trust, and take on board the rebuilding of this Comet aeroplane. It was a wooden aeroplane and really what they needed was some skilled carpenters, joiners, woodmen, to take on board the rebuilding of some ribs that needed to be rebuilt, and then the skinning, in fabric, of all that went on the wings. And I needed a bit of persuading because I didn’t know, understand the Shuttle… I didn’t understand trusts and what the trustees’ responsibilities were and what my responsibility might be in rebuilding an aeroplane which you’re then going to fly and would have to meet the CAA’s requirements for flight, of which I knew a bit about, and so on. Dickie made a plausible case and persuaded me, so he as chief test pilot and I then took on board, with a great friend that had been an air racing pilot, Ron Paine, but was a graduate qualified engineer that had all the CAA approvals for building and maintaining, ran his own aeroplane, Ron, and had all that was needed and he and I then, the two of us took this job – he already was involved to some extent before I came on board. But there was Dickie as the pilot, there was Ron as the engineer and there was myself as a bit of a, just a bloke who knew how to handle other people, together with a team from Hatfield, from de Havilland’s at Hatfield. But, what they needed, and this is why Dickie had got on to me, was I say some good woodworkers, chippies, chippies, let’s call them. And Dickie had got on to me because he knew that with my previous responsibility as CER responsible for the R&D establishments, in particular Farnborough, and knowing the Director of the RAE then very well, Tom Kerr, and knowing that Farnborough had some very good chippies for working on aeroplanes, that I could persuade the Director of RAE to take on board the rebuilding of the, mainly the wings, but the aeroplane down here at Farnborough. And I leant on the Director, Tom, and said, you know, I’ve just not long ago retired from London and you as a clever director of Farnborough could easily, easily lose in your general accounting sparing a few bodies, for free, to rebuild this wooden aeroplane and you can bill it as an exercise for your apprentices can’t you? And you can have a skilled craftsman running a few apprentices. Your skilled craftsmen might need a bit of help now and again, but you can run this for your apprentices at Farnborough and lose it in your accounts. And that was the way I got into Shuttleworth. And Tom as Director and me here with a very skilled woodworking man, a chippy down here, then did this, built – I didn’t do any of the building but I kept an eye on it.

[1:22:20]

Sir John Charnley Page 402 C1379/30 Track 23

Oh, Dickie I should say, Dickie Martin at this stage had a bit of a problem with the Shuttleworth organisation and decided he was getting too old for flying anyway, these special precious aeroplanes at Shuttleworth, and he pulled out and handed on, I’ve forgotten who the test pilot then became. Doesn’t matter. John Lewis, yeah, and John Lewis I’d known as a test pilot as well so I knew him. So I was now integrated into – the bloke who was within the structure of the trust as a whole. The Shuttleworth Trust was in three areas. It had farms that made money; it had a farming college that trained farmers, there was a college for farmers; and it had the collection of old aeroplanes and cars that were there in memory, they’d been left by Dorothy Shuttleworth in memory of her son, who had been killed in the air force during the war. So the whole of the trust was of a farming family, quite a wealthy farming family, where the mother of the son left the whole thing, and in particular the aeroplanes, in trust as a memory to their son, Richard Shuttleworth. You're now within the deeds of the trust – and this is important – within the deeds of the… the deeds specify, and she had insisted that the old, the aeroplanes, in which her son had an enormous interest, and the old vehicles, and he used to race motorcars on racing tracks, bit of a racing, bit of a harum-scarum, of the sort that went with wealthy families. And… but the deeds of the trust demanded that the aeroplanes and the cars should be described, deployed, demonstrated, should be demonstrated in the media for which they were designed, medium or whatever the phrase might be. And I make that point because when I got more involved, other than when I started, I didn’t really look at this closely enough when I was asking Dickie, well what’s the job? What does the trust do, how do the aircraft and the cars fit into the overall trust? And the answer to that simply at the time was the farm, and all its land makes the money, the college spends it and we spend it. But, you know, that was the organisation. But, the chappie who was on the main trust representing the aeroplanes and cars was a retired Air Chief Marshal, John Grandy, and John had a grace and favour place in Windsor Castle over this period. Sounds terrible doesn’t it, all these connections. And John is dead now, as you might expect. But John handed on to me in the running of, and being the board, on the member, on the main trust responsible for the aircraft and the cars. So that was my job up there in due course, mid eighties or bit later, must have been end eighties, in the nineties. In the nineties, shall we say.

[1:26:35]

And we got the Comet flying, there’s a story in itself in the Comet. We finished all the woodwork, essentially, down at Farnborough, put it on a low loader, took it over to Hatfield and with a team at Hatfield went on to make the aircraft aviation-worthy. Ron Paine looked after

Sir John Charnley Page 403 C1379/30 Track 23 this, CAA sent inspectors down and eventually it – do you know the aeroplane I’m talking about, do you know it at all, the Comet, that I’m speaking of?

I believe it’s on your calendar actually, in the other room.

That’s the one, that’s the one, on the calendar. And it’s like, in the sense of, when you sit in the cockpit, it’s like sitting in the cockpit of a Spitfire because you can’t see over the top, you can’t see out front at all, you have to look either one way or the other, which makes it a very tricky aircraft to land. Take off not so bad, but landing is quite tricky. And so this was recognised that we needed a decent airstrip at Hatfield. And we got it airborne, to cut a long story short. But, George Ellis was the pilot, test pilot that flew it on its first flight, and it behaved well, it was alright. But, as he said, it’s a beast to land John, you know, don’t let anyone get at this that isn’t well informed as to how to handle an aeroplane like this. You need Spitfire experience, sort of thing. And again, even George broke a wingtip on one occasion. Doesn’t matter, it happened.

[1:28:40]

And I then went on running Shuttleworth and all that went with it, sitting on the main trust. And I made the point about the constitution, about the deeds, because with my responsibility, I then became an object of interest for aircraft museums and suchlike who accused Shuttleworth, me, of being irresponsible for flying old aeroplanes that were one-off: a Deperdussin, a Blériot, a one- off that remains and you’re running the risk, you’re flying them. Why don’t you build a replica, fly it and put the original in a museum? You should not be flying the original aircraft of which there’s only one left. And we argued about this at Shuttleworth and fell back really on the deed that demanded that we demonstrated these aircraft in the atmosphere in which they were designed, whatever, whatever. Because we couldn’t see ourselves raising the money to build replicas. There had been one or two replicas built for the film, the battle of the old machines, the…

Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines ?

That’s right, that’s right. And the money by the film company had been found for Shuttleworth to build replicas of two or three of their old vehicles, of their old aircraft, for that film. And so we knew the sorts of money that were involved and knew that we couldn’t face that for other

Sir John Charnley Page 404 C1379/30 Track 23 replicas that the museum fraternity demanded we should find. So there we are. So we never did. But I'd certainly found myself in a completely different area of going to meeting with museum curators defending why we didn’t build replicas of old aeroplanes. Even if you could get engines, you know, another story altogether. However, that went on for a long, long time and kept me occupied during the summer months when I had nothing else to do. As well as during the winter when we were rebuilding the Comet, because that was great fun. It went out to Australia for some celebration in Australia. I got the co-operation of Qantas. We took our low loader out to Germany somewhere and Qantas picked it up and took it over to Australia and brought it back again. And again, another sort of interest. But that’s Shuttleworth.

[1:31:45] As someone who had no interest at all in aircraft at the start of their career as you’ve described, do you actually like the things now?

Do I what?

Do you like aeroplanes now?

Oh yes. Oh goodness me, yes. I go to Shuttleworth once or twice during the summer, I go up there for one of their displays, and this year – sorry – through Shuttleworth, Mary and I went in one of the old vehicles, a 1903 French vehicle in the London to Brighton run. There’s a picture of that upstairs you might have seen. So that was something. And last summer I went up to Shuttleworth for their vintage display and immediately they got hold of me and said, come on, and pushed me into one of the old vehicles again and went along the flying line in front of the crowd in again, an old motorcar, nineteen hundred and something, Panhard. Panhard? Don’t know. So yes, yes, yes, yes. But, and this is where you can tax me about history, because historic aeroplanes and history, really yeah. The way even giving the Cody Lecture, you know, is part of our heritage in aviation and I’m so proud to have been part of it. So pleased, and whatever little part I’ve played, I don’t know. But certainly enjoyed it and been pleased to be part of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Old aeroplanes, racing aeroplanes, club life, transonics, supersonics, aviation, blind landing, missiles.

[1:33:45]

Sir John Charnley Page 405 C1379/30 Track 23

Similar [1:33:46 inaudible], how have you felt about doing this interview, which has been an exercise in historic aviation in itself to some extent, you could argue?

I thought you were almost winding up to this. Thank goodness we haven’t really got time have we? I didn’t want to take it on. When Kit Mitchell more or less said that you’d approached him about it and he’d suggested that I might be a name that was worth consider... I don’t know, I thought no, no, no, no. I’ve enjoyed meeting you, certainly. I’ve found it an effort, tiring, an effort, a mental effort to try to recall these different things as we’ve gone through from 1940 through to 2010, seventy years of it, thereabouts. Well, even before that you took me right back, even before then, to my time as a boy and trying to remember things, and with my background wanting to get them accurate insofar as I was able, in my memory. And this might explain some of the pauses when I’ve been trying to collect together in my mind the way to present this particular point to best effect and to accurate effect, and I’m sure I’ve not got all of it right, I’m quite certain of that, because it is memory. But – and it’s been hard work. We’ve had, I don’t know, if you put eight, we had eight sessions, I know that because I’ve kept a record, and at some stages two hours, three hours, four hours, multiply all that lot up, it’s been an effort. No doubt about that. Now the next question, have I enjoyed it? Enjoyed? Ah, no. I don’t think I can say enjoyed it. Having decided to put something of this sort on the record, I’m conscious that a lot of people have said I ought to have done something of this sort years ago to expand on my CV and my career because there were things in it that were of interest; relations of a government establishment, links into industry, links into universities, running of government in London from a technical, from a scientific point of view, international co-operation, relations with Australia, on the range, you know, so many different aspects of it. And then even things like Shuttleworth, for goodness sake, that I ought to have put it on record. To the extent that I haven’t and there is now something there, that helps, I’m grateful for that. There is something there, but it will not be as well thought through, with the best will in the world, from your efforts. It is said from things that have come off the cuff, out of my head and isn’t always well considered or as accurately done as I would have done it had I chosen to write it and think it and do it carefully. And that’s one reason why, well I hope it’s alright, I hope it satisfies the requirement.

Thank you. It’s been fantastic actually.

It’s been an effort, it’s been hard work, and I’m not really satisfied with the result myself.

Sir John Charnley Page 406 C1379/30 Track 23

I actually am.

Well, this is for you…

But then I’m not an engineer.

This is for you and the body you represent as to whether it’s done the job that you hoped would be done. And so I’ve seen it as a task, as a job to be done and one that I, no Thomas, I haven’t really enjoyed in a fulfilment sense, because I think I ought to have done something like this better, sooner and the fact that I haven’t, I’ve taken the advantage of saying right, having done this with you, with the British Library, thank you very much, giving me this opportunity, I now have something on the record and I’m grateful for that, but I don’t think it’s as good as what I ought to have done.

I think this is one that historians are going to come back to and find interesting for a long time to come.

You do, do you?

That’s my opinion as a historian, not an engineer.

No, exactly.

It’s a different mindset I think.

No, exactly, exactly. And this is why you at times take me into diversions which I’ve thought, why on earth are we going down this particular, why are we going down here, for goodness sake. Then, oh yeah, I know, yes, yes, yes, this is a historian, not an engineer.

I think this is a very good place to stop, don’t you? Thank you very much.

There you go, there you go.

Sir John Charnley Page 407 C1379/30 Track 23

[end of track 23 – end of recording]