NATIONAL LIFE STORIES AN ORAL HISTORY OF BRITISH SCIENCE Roy Dommett Interviewed by Dr Thomas Lean C1379/14 © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk IMPORTANT This interview and transcript is accessible via http://sounds.bl.uk . © The British Library Board. Please refer to the Oral History curators at the British Library prior to any publication or broadcast from this document. Oral History The British Library 96 Euston Road London NW1 2DB United Kingdom +44 (0)20 7412 7404 [email protected] 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. © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk The British Library National Life Stories Interview Summary Sheet Title Page Ref no: C1379/14 Collection title: An Oral History Of British Science Interviewee’s Dommett Title: Mr surname: Interviewee’s Roy Sex: Male forename: Occupation: Rocket scientist, Date and place of birth: 25th June 1933 aeronautical engineer. Mother’s occupation: Father’s occupation: Painter and decorator Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): March 18 (1-3), April 13 (4-5), April 20 (6-10), 20 July (11-14), 16 September (15-19) 2010 Location of interview: Interviewee’s home, Fleet. Name of interviewer: Thomas Lean Type of recorder: Marantz PMD661 on secure digital [tracks 1 - 10] and Marantz PMD660 on compact flash [tracks 11 - 19] Recording format : WAV 24 bit 48 kHz (tracks 1 - 10), WAV 16 bit 48 kHz (Tracks 11-19). Total no. of tracks 19 Mono or stereo: Stereo Total Duration: 22 hr. 48 min, 17 sec. Additional material: Paper outline of projects worked on. Copyright/Clearance: Following sections to be closed; refer to curator for further information: Track 4 [37:24-38:50, 45:34 – 45:55, 47:05 -47:38, 1:23:00 – 1:24:08, 1:35:33-1:36:48] Track 5 [1:02:21-1:02:58] Track 6 [18:48 – 19:09, 1:36:35 – 1:37:02] Track 7 [37:53-38:00] Track 8 [00:36-00:46, 02:22-02:44, 40:51- 44:02, 45:04-45:53] Track 9 [03:58-04:25, 36:19 – 38:10, 42:03-56:59] Track 10 [10:51-13:34, 25:36-25:37, 26:14 - 26:21, 26:50-27:04, 29:20 - 31:21, 35:43 – 36:42] Track 11 [17:15-17:40, 20:25-20:52 Track 15 [23:42-24:02] Track 17 [01:17:35-01:17:42] Interviewer’s Sessions 15-18 include Roy’s wife Marguerite Dommett. comments: © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk Roy Dommett Page 1 C1379/14 Track 1 [Track 1] Right, we are good to go. I’m Roy Leonard Dommett, I’m Leonard after my father, who was Leonard Frank Dommett. I was born on 25 th June in 1933 in Southampton, hmmm, a stone’s throw from the Supermarine works at Woolston, and I mean literally a stone’s throw. We were in Wharncliffe Road, I was born in Wharncliffe Road, which overlooked the railway line, which literally overlooked the Supermarine works. And if you look at any photographs of the Supermarine works, either before the war, or after it was bombed, you can always see the house I was born in. Hmmm, but I have to say that we moved when I was one to a garden city style council estate, about half a mile away, and I lived there until I went to work at Farnborough in 1954. My earliest memories are things – unusual things like I was taken to see the Graf Zeppelin airship, the German airship, fly over Southampton in 1936, I can remember the street party for George V’s silver jubilee. Hmmm, I can remember seeing flying boats, the Empire flying boats, out of Southampton. The arrival of the first Pan-American clipper, 1938 I suppose. And I also saw some of the flights of the Mayo Composite aircraft, which was a large Empire flying boat with a four engine high-wing airplane on top for the long range flights, I remember seeing those. My parents would take – typically on a Sunday we’d go for walks, and we’d walk up to Eastleigh airport and watch the flying, and I can remember seeing an early mark of the Spitfire flying from there, in the days when it was a grass airfield. [02:28] The family involvement with Supermarine was that I had an Uncle Dennis, who has fairly recently died in South Africa, who joined the company in 1924 as a junior office boy. It always irritates him that there was no senior office boy, but he grew up to be a stressman come draughtsman, and work throughout the war for Supermarine, first of all at Hurst Park, and then out near Swindon at the site there, and then 1930 – 1946 he decided to emigrate to Johannesburg. So in that sense aircraft, you know, conditioned me in my earlier … during the war I was very conscious that most aircraft © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk Roy Dommett Page 2 C1379/14 Track 1 firms had a factory in the area, Avros down at Hamble, Follands at Hamble, besides Supermarine there were other companies, Cunliffe-Owen up near Eastleigh. [03:40] So in some ways Southampton was one of the centres of aircraft manufacture in that sort of time, so again it was sort of like that. During the war, hmmm, I was evacuated to places like – initially to Bournemouth, but it was all a phoney war, so we came back to Southampton for a while. And then I was evacuated again to Ringwood, when the Blitz started, and I can remember not only being in the air raid shelter in the garden, you know, where the bombs dropped around us, rushing out to put out an incendiary bomb that was on the road outside, and seeing other houses down the road alight, or blasted. It wasn’t – I won’t say it was frightening at all, it was all, you know, it happened, you were just living through it. But I was able to see a lot of the bomb damage that went around in places there. And where I’d been born, being closed to Supermarine works, that got devastated that particular area, and it became a commando training area, yeah, it was so bad. I also remember from Ringwood seeing the – when they bombed the harbour, they set alight the magazine – the margarine warehouse, and this acted like a candle. The margarine melted is was, I’m told, about three inches deep across the building, and the building burnt because it was wick, like a candle for several days. At night you could see the enormous glow in the sky from ten or fifteen miles away. It was quite impressive, that sort of thing. But I also remember of course the battle, aerial battles, going on, you could stand outside if you were stupid enough, and see the contrast in the sky, certainly because the first bits were not so much in the day light, but they were at dusk, but you could see things. Right. [06:00] I began to be aware of aircraft as types, and things like that, and I can remember having a little notebook where I used to draw silhouettes of the – particularly of the German aircraft, because you’d realise that they were all numbered in sequence, therefore it was possible to start building up a picture of it. And for quite a few years the weekly magazine I bought was called The Airplane Spotter , which I think I have © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk Roy Dommett Page 3 C1379/14 Track 1 my set of things up in a tea chest up in the roof, and so on, from the wartime period, which was just that, The Airplane Spotter , giving you news of what new aircraft were being admitted to exist. Also being at Southampton, and surrounded by aircraft companies, we saw a lot of flying of prototypes around. And I can remember Fairey Barracuda, and planes of that type, Faireys were down at Hamble as well, with seeing quite a few of those airplanes, and getting to know what they were, and so on. Southampton was to have been a target of the V1 as launched – would have been launched from Normandy and Cherbourg, but fortunately D Day happened just in time. If there’d been another delay, a month or two’s delay, they would have started bombarding all the fleet in preparation, you know. So we were very lucky that D Day actually happened when it did, I think, because in fact we could have had a much more difficult time getting in there. The Southampton attacks, of which there were quite a few, were air launched from Heinkel 111, hmmm, they puzzled everybody because they came in from the sea, you know, they obviously weren’t coming over from France, they come in at a funny angle. And again I can remember those, the sort of very distinct chug, chug, chug, of them going, and then the engine would cut, and it would dive in, and so on. And I can remember seeing at least one do that. I know also one of them hit my – the house of my Uncle Tom, who was my mother’s sister’s husband.