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The Origins and Establishment of the British Post Office Engineering Research Station at Dollis Hill, 1908-1938

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The Origins and Establishment of the British Post Office Engineering Research Station at Dollis Hill, 1908-1938 ‘To Strive, To Seek, To Find.’ The origins and establishment of the British Post Office Engineering Research Station at Dollis Hill, 1908-1938 Alice Elena Haigh Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science March 2021 ii The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. The right of Alice Elena Haigh to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. © 2020 The University of Leeds and Alice Elena Haigh iii Acknowledgements This project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, as a collaborative doctoral partnership between the University of Leeds and the Science Museum Group in conjunction with BT Archives. Special thanks first and foremost must go to my supervisors Tilly Blyth (Science Museum, London) and Graeme Gooday (University of Leeds) for getting me to this point, as well as David Hay (BT Archives) upon whose initiative this whole project was founded. I am particularly grateful to Graeme Gooday for his seemingly never-ending patience, time and encouragement, and for always fitting in a Wellcome Café meeting whenever he passed through London. Unusually for a history doctorate, this thesis is part one of a larger three-thesis project. My colleagues in the ‘Dollis Hill triptych’, Rachel Boon (University of Manchester) and Jacob Ward (University College London), have been the best companions. I am also grateful to their respective supervisors, Jon Agar and the late Jeff Hughes, for plenty of insightful comments and discussions. I have been fortunate to encounter many wonderfully helpful archivists throughout my research. Firstly, the past and present staff of BT Archives: David Hay, James Elder, Vicky Rea, Dave Shawyer, Keith Lovell and Ayah Al-Rawni. I have been especially privileged to have been on several behind-the-scenes visits ranging from the very top of the BT Tower to the underground Post Office tunnels beneath Kingsway: special thanks to David Hay for organising these trips and his words of encouragement towards the end. I am very grateful to the helpful staff at the Postal Museum and Archive, John Cable at the Institution of Engineering and Technology archives, the staff at Brent Museum and Archives, Peter Belcher for information and photographs of his father’s time working in one of the huts at Dollis Hill, and Colin Whitlum of the BT Retired Staff Society for his interest and assistance in contacting ex-Dollis Hill engineers. At the Science Museum I am grateful to John Liffen for my inspiring behind-the-scenes first day as a research student and the helpful push in the right direction towards the Post Office Electrical Engineer Journal; Robert Bud for his invitation to present at a workshop on British interwar industrial research, which ended up inspiring much of Chapter 6; Stuart Butler for advice on the history of science policy and the press (and general PhD life); and Noeme Santana for her unfailing support. I have been lucky to have such welcoming colleagues of the School of Philosophy, Religion and the History of Science at Leeds. In particular, Coreen McGuire became an immediate friend and a supporter throughout this PhD. I am grateful for the understanding of UCL’s Department of Science and Technology Studies for having an interloper invade their common room on several occasions for reading groups and Christmas parties. iv Lastly thank you to Justin, for whom this project has been as much a part of his life as mine, and to Charlie and Cecily whose 2020 arrival put everything into perspective. v Abstract The Post Office Engineering Research Station at Dollis Hill, or just ‘Dollis Hill’ as it was most often called, was the UK’s principal research centre for its postal and telecommunication systems in the early to mid-twentieth century. This thesis offers the first thorough account of the research station’s origins, establishment and interwar history. At its core is a discussion of the motivations and agendas of the successive Post Office Engineers-in-Chief, Heads of Research, senior government administrators and figureheads, and Treasury officials who influenced the decisions to propose, fund and design a centralised research station. The core questions of the thesis are: What was the British General Post Office (GPO) trying to achieve by building and promoting Dollis Hill, and what or who were the influences behind its establishment? Using archival material and contemporary media sources, I chart and explain the growth of research activity within the GPO’s Engineering Department; from a basement experimenting room to several makeshift wartime laboratories across London, to Dollis Hill’s initial temporary laboratory huts and the opening of the permanent research station. I identify the key personalities, their influences and their motivations for a centralised research facility. The thesis includes an analysis of the design and layout of the site, the reasons behind choosing a suburban “vibration-free” London location and the resulting benefits and limitations of assimilation into the urban landscape. Finally, a section on the public promotion of Dollis Hill in the 1930s shows how the Post Office used newspapers and other media outlets to endorse its services and justify its expense during the post-war recession. Whilst the majority of the research output of Dollis Hill was testing and calibration, the research engineers’ response to the Holborn Gas Explosion (1929) is given as an example of a creative ethos that had been fostered through having to work in challenging circumstances. I argue that the temporary hutment beginnings of the research station as in the 1920s proposed by William Noble both helped it reach its first transitional stage of development, but also hindered the station’s final transition to permanency. Although the scheme enabled the build of a “new wonder house of experiment and invention” that became a useful tool for the GPO’s rebranding as a modern, forward-thinking institution grounded in scientific research, the scheme ultimately delayed the project’s completion so that the Post Office researchers were forced to adapt their building plans to fit the constraints of a fast-changing urban environments that was building up around the emerging research station. Overall, this project adds to the understanding of the history of British state-funded science and technology and shifts the historiographical centre of gravity towards the Post Office and its narratives of innovation in telecommunications. vi Table of Contents Chapter 1. Introduction. .................................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Sources....................................................................................................................................... 7 1.2 Structure .................................................................................................................................... 8 Chapter 2. Dollis Hill: a review of secondary literature ............................................................... 12 2.1 State science and engineering and the Warfare State thesis ................................................... 13 2.2 Histories of the GPO ............................................................................................................... 20 2.3 Engineers, their identity and training...................................................................................... 23 2.4 Openness and public relations ................................................................................................ 25 2.5 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 27 Chapter 3. Cultivating Post Office Research, 1908-1914. ........................................................... 29 3.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 29 3.2 The Post Office Engineering Department, 1870-1908 ............................................................ 30 3.3 The Experiment Book and the self-promotion of William Preece ........................................... 35 3.4 Reporting on research ............................................................................................................. 38 3.5 Major O’Meara and the establishment of the Research Section, 1908. .................................. 40 3.6 William Slingo and the National Telephone Company merger, 1912 ..................................... 46 3.7 Charles Hobhouse and the Committee on Wireless Telegraphy Research ............................. 51 3.8 Sam Pollock and the Dollis Hill proposal ............................................................................... 54 3.9 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 57 Chapter 4. Putting plans on hold. The Post Office at War 1914-1918. ...................................... 60 4.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................................
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