Hull to London Coast

Facing the Nazis across the North Sea

meant the whole east coast became a fortified line.

This is a radar transmitter tower,

a few miles inland from the Lincolnshire coast near Louth.

The tower here was part of an east-coast early-warning system

against air attack.

During wartime, RAF technicians had to climb these masts

in all weathers and under attack to carry out urgent repairs,

and now it's my turn.

OK, don't look down.

Look straight ahead.

That's not any better!

-How high is this, Paul?

-Oh, it's just about 50 feet now.

Might be just 50 feet to you, climbs like 100 to me.

I've got the RAF watching my back,

but I can't forget this radar tower was built in 1940.

I've got it easy compared to the men and women

who had to clamber up here back then.

Oh, it's horrible, Paul. I hate it.

-Hate every minute of it.

-Think how much exercise you're getting!

Oh, my hands are like budgies' claws!

'During the war, radar technicians had to climb the towers

'on a daily basis to carry out vital maintenance.'

Oh, dear. So wrong up here.

Oh, look at that, will you?

That's a heck of a thing.

Right. Finally.

Finally here.

That is quite a sensation.

Exhausted and scared - what a combination.

And the thing is, when you stand here, this is a nice day -

it's a sunny day with just a light wind -

and you can feel the whole thing's gently moving and vibrating.

Wobbly they may be, but these were war-winning towers.

In the 1930s, a desperate race was on at Orford Ness.

Alice is off there to discover more about radar.

In the First World War, the Germans used zeppelins to bomb Britain.

In the 1930s, the aerial threat escalated to terrifying new heights,

as the Nazis assembled a formidable air force,

whose bombers might win the next war.

Without a way of detecting incoming enemy planes, we were helpless.

So, in the mid-1930s,

an extraordinary scientific struggle started,

to shield Britain from the bombers.

On the 12th of February, 1935,

scientist Robert Watson-Watt sent this memo to the Air Ministry.

It's been called the birth certificate of radar.

"I enclose herewith a memorandum

"on the detection of aircraft by radio methods.

"It turns out so favourably

"that I'm still nervous as to whether we've not got a power of ten wrong,

"but I thought it desirable to send you the memorandum immediately

"rather than to wait for close re-checking."

It was this memo that started the race for radar.

Watson-Watt could barely believe his calculations.

In theory, by measuring radio waves bouncing off a plane,

they might be able to detect enemy bombers over 100 miles away,

day and night, and in any weather.

It seemed too good to be true,

so they had to find out if it would really work, and quick.

On the 26th February, 1935,

just two weeks after that memo was sent

about the theoretical detection of planes using radio waves,

its author was trying it out

using a real bomber and a BBC radio transmitter.

Now, some 75 years later,

we're about to try to re-create that original war-winning experiment.

The first plane they tried to detect was a Heyford bomber.

Ours is a bit more modern.

Radar pioneer Watson-Watt had help from Arnold Wilkins.

I've got radio boffin Steve Randall to mastermind our experiment.

The original transmitter they used was a BBC radio mast.

Technology's moved on, so our signal's

coming from a television transmitter nearby at Sudbury.

Steve knows the plan.

Here's a little example of what we're going to try and do today.

So this is a model.

Yeah, it's trying to show how this is going to work.

Here, we've got the Sudbury TV transmitter.

It's sending signals out in all directions,

and we'll try and bounce those signals off of an aircraft.

And I presume that this is the building we're actually in.

That's our little hut, yeah.

And this is the plane -

rather more glamorous, I have to say, than the one we're using.

So this is coming in from the sea,

and you're hoping that we're going to be able to receive

the reflected waves being bounced off that.

That's right. What we're going to try and do

is to get the radio waves to bounce off of the aircraft

and be received by our receiving station.

How optimistic are you that we'll pick up the signal from the aircraft?

Quite optimistic.

I'm visual with you now.

'With the plane on its way, like the radar pioneers of the 1930s,

'we'll watch the signal on an oscilloscope screen.

'Now it's just showing output from the TV tower.'

John, can you see him?

Yes, he's about one-and-a-half, two miles

more or less straight ahead of us,

so about 1,500 feet.

-Oh, yes, I've got him.

-Yeah?

-Yeah.

Map position south east.

Yeah, that looks pretty good, Phil.

Phil reckons that the plane is about a mile away now,

so are we seeing anything?

Yes. Not a huge amount, to be honest.

We heard the drone of the bomber in the distance,

and we looked anxiously at our cathode ray tube

to see whether the expected phenomenon was taking place.

It's still difficult to see anything on the raw data.

It wasn't and we became rather concerned.

'I'm slightly concerned too, as the plane is getting rather close.'

Is that OUR plane I can hear?

'Surely we should be seeing some change on the oscilloscope.'

As the noise of the bomber increased,

we began to see slight fluctuations in the line on the tube.

Oh, there's some wider pulses coming through, some wider waves.

These increased as the bomber got nearer to us.

We can see these big waves

coming through on the oscilloscope, very clearly. Look at that.

When the noise of the bomber was fairly loud

and it was fairly close to us,

we were getting quite a marked deflection of this line.

We then realised that the experiment was successful

and there was something in our arithmetic

that we'd done some days previously.

I can hear him now, he must be really close.

Yeah, there he is.

PLANE ENGINE RUMBLES

It's suddenly gone much wider. The aptitude has increased...

OSCILLOSCOPE WHINES ..and you can hear it.

You can really hear it.

That's fantastic! Amazing concept, that you can use radio waves

to detect a moving object in the sky.

It must have been so exciting

for these scientists in the 1940s... '30s, in fact!

To see that for the first time, yeah, it must have been.

The next challenge was to turn waves on a screen

into a long-range early-warning system,

to detect enemy aircraft approaching our coast.

To tackle this daunting task, the engineers moved down the east coast

to a Victorian manor house at Bawdsey to build the first radar station.

What went on here was top-secret.

I'm going to meet two of the people drafted to Bawdsey

on a clandestine war-time assignment.

Back then, Gwen Reading and Peggy Haynes

were two young women sworn to silence,

because Gwen and Peggy worked on radar.

The ferry that runs the short distance from Felixstowe to Bawdsey

transported these raw recruits to an adventure of a lifetime.

It's a lovely calm day today.

I don't expect it was always calm making this crossing.

No, occasionally the ferry couldn't run because it was so rough.

-So how does it feel coming back to Bawdsey?

-Amazing.

We won't know till we see the manor.

Well, I think we've got a car waiting for us.

-Oh, that will be good.

-We certainly didn't have that. A bike, maybe.

I can see our windows from here.

Gwen and Peggy were part of a secret service -

radar operators called to the coast to scan the skies.

I came in April '43. Yes, it was my first posting after Cranwell.

And if it's not a terribly rude question,

how old were you when you arrived here?

-20.

-20, and how about you, Peggy?

She was old. I was 19.

How did you feel when you first arrived here?

Did you know what you were coming to?

Well, most people got posted to camps and lived in Nissen huts,

and when we found we were going to live in the manor house,

we thought we'd done pretty well, really!

It must have been quite exciting to be posted here.

Yes, well, it was for me,

cos I bullied them to get here

because my fiance-to-be

was just up the road, at Dunwich, on another station.

Did you know what it would involve before you arrived here?

No, not really, because it was so secret.

-We had to sign the Secrets Act.

-You did?

We weren't allowed to say anything,

-and they thought we were all very stuck-up.

-Really?

-Whereas, actually, you just had to keep it secret.

-Yes.

The Germans thought these towers were for radio messages.

In reality, they were designed to transmit and receive radar signals.

The technology was perfected at Bawdsey,

but one site on its own would be useless,

so the design was replicated along the coast.

By the start of the war,

there were 20 so-called Chain Home radar stations,

but the chain would break

without operators to interpret the incoming signals.

That was Gwen's job.

-So how many people would have been in here?

-About eight.

About eight, and lots of equipment.

There would be a console across here,

where people sat and the map where they plotted.

Get me control, please.

And if you had 1,900 planes on your screen,

that was quite an undertaking.

1,900?!

Yes, but they would be in blocks of 200 here,

100 there, a single one there.

Zero, 5,000.

'Gwen has brought along a photograph taken in this room in 1945.'

That's lovely. Now, are you in this photo?

-Yes, that's me.

-Wearing the headphones.

It must have been a job

which required an enormous amount of concentration.

It did, it could be very stressful at times.

If we were very busy,

we'd try to get someone who was fairly expert on the tube.

How does it feel coming back to this room that you spent so many hours in?

Well, it's very strange because those three-and-a-half years

seem a major part of my long life.

Without the development of radar

and the crucial contribution of operators like Gwen and Peggy,

we wouldn't have won the Battle Of Britain.

During their years at Bawdsey,

the women had to keep mum to the wider world

about what they were up to.

While you were working here,

you were very aware that what you were doing was incredibly important,

but it's not until articles like this appear in the papers after the War

that most other people must have realised how important radar was.

I was very pleased that, at last, we could say something about it.

You found people sending you newspapers, both local and national,

and in fact the chap I eventually married

sent me a picture from the Picture Post. He said, "Is that you?"

THEY LAUGH

Is that how he found you again?

No, no, that's another long story.

It's humbling to think that revolutionary radar experiments

conducted 70 years ago at this manor house on the coast of Suffolk,

would touch so many lives.

We all owe a debt of thanks to people once sworn to secrecy,

but now happy and proud to tell their stories.