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On Christmas Day 1940 a Royal Air Force mobile unit found a site suitable for a ground control intercept radar station, radio call sign Starlight, in the valley of the Hampshire Avon river, near Sopley village. The first station consisted of a group of mobile caravans and aerials. The aerial's alignment onto a target was originally a manual process with airmen pedalling to operate a mechanical linkage to turn the aerial. The fighter controllers used a bell code and mechanical indicators on a device not dissimilar to a ship's telegraph in order to direct the airmen's efforts. In early 1941, one hundred successful night interceptions were achieved by the fighter controllers at Starlight working in conjunction with Bristol Beaufighter night fighter squadrons. The staff for the station were billeted in the nearby villages of Sopley, Winkton, Bransgore and Ripley. By the end of 1941 the station had been upgraded with a recessed operations room half set into the ground, powered aerial systems and significant anti aircraft defences.

The first radar at Sopley was a Type 15 Mobile Radar designed at the Telecommunications Research Establishment at Worth Matravers but built at Christchurch (presumably by the Air Defence Research and Development Establishment). It arrived at Sopley on Christmas Day 1940 and was in use from January 1941 to 1942.

Its replacment was a Type 7 radar, fully powered and with its own equipment room in an underground room known as the well.

After the war, in 1954, a major re-engineering of the site occurred when it became known formally as Royal Air Force Sopley, the home of Southern Radar and the Joint Air Traffic Control School. The radar station was housed in a deep underground bunker under a field adjacent to the war time radar station, whilst quarters were built in Bransgore for its married personnel and a large domestic site was constructed between Bransgore and Sopley next to the site of Merryfield farm. During the 1960s and 1970s civil and military air traffic control officers worked and trained together at the site which also retained an air defence and special tasks role including that of supporting Research and Development flying programmes from Farnborough and Boscombe Down and the early Concorde flight trials. With the full opening of the London Air Traffic Control Centre, Southern radar was one of several Air Traffic Control units that were surplus to requirements and Royal Air Force Sopley closed in 1974.

John Kirkham remembers...

" I recall going into the operations room of the Air Defence Network at Sopley where the movements of enemy planes were plotted on a big plan of the South of England. Every time the telephone rang with the latest information of German Planes heading for the South coast or flying over Southern England. the cluster of wooden fighters on the model would move as the aircraft were tracked. I remember too visiting some of the houses which had been requisitioned and where air force personnel were billeted, Avon Tyrrell, Sopley Park and Sopley vicarage to mention a few."

In his book "A Glipse of Sopley" the late Sam Morris included a reminiscence by Brindley Boon, one of the first RAF personnel to arrive at the original radar station.

"Sopley was the first ground controlled interception unit. Operations were carried out from a trailer in the middle of a requisitioned field. We soon became the eighth wonder of the world. Everyone who was anyone came down to be entertained by the fascinating new toy. Winston Churchill and Clement Atlee and other cabinet ministers; war lords; foreign diplomats; military brasshats - the lot. The crowning glory was a visit by King George VI. I was the fighter plotter that night. My job was to track the courses and calculate the airspeeds of friendly and hostile planes on a huge perspex grid reference map and to pass such information on to the controller to be included in instructions transmitted to the pilot. The king was given a seat on my right, a curtain separating us.

We had been well briefed. Should the VIP speak to us we were to remember that he was there primarily as an RAF officer and we were to address him as "Sir", never "Your Majesty" ! Imagine my state of panic when, right in the middle of a chase across southern skies, the curtain was drawn aside and a deep guttural voice asked "and what are you doing ?". I sprang to my feet and sent my chinograph crayon hurtling to the floor, and replied in my best open-air voice "plotting your Majesty", as if I were about to plant a bomb under the throne. "Oh are you" commented the king as he stooped down into the darkness to retrieve the crayon which he calmly restored to a ledge in the plotting table."

Despite the King's intervention the record shows that that night, while the King watched, the British night fighter ace John Cunningham, flying a Beaufighter from RAF Middle Wallop, successfully intercepted an enemy aircraft which crashed near Ringwood about six miles north of Sopley. Popular legend has it that the King was able to step outside after the successful interception in time to see the flames of the enemy aircraft as it fell to earth.

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