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DOB 15.09.1919.

Little Haywood, Staffs 1918 to 1944.
Stafford (married) 1944 to present
Electrical Engineer, C.Eng., FIEE(1966)
Consultant Development Engineer, GEC Transmission & Distribution Projects
Retired 1983. Widowed 1995. 4 daughters.
Polymath interests; Physical science, philosophy,religion, politics,writing, poetry,jazz, learning disabilities,aids for disabled, designing, making & mending artifacts of all kinds including electronics, woodwork, metalwork, plastics - you name it.
Workshop-cum-lab.
Play drums badly. Hate opera, musicals.
Now limited by arthritis but still drive.

WW2 Memories:
1. The war in Little Haywood
2. Confidential war work
3. " " " Addendum
4. Poems

JW 10.05.05
Wartime in Little Haywood

I was just 20 when the war started in 1939
Due to the expected threat of air raids in late 1938 early 1939, some of us were asked to volunteer as air raid wardens, in my case in the village of Little Haywood.
We were first issued with a tin hat with a white W for "Warden" on it.
We just had that and a civilian gas mask in a cardboard box with string shoulder strap and a pair of Lotus Veltschoen boots.
My picture shows me in my own clothes and old overcoat.
The rest of the uniform came later as things got better organised and this included a blue battle dress tunic and trousers, blue greatcoat and forces gas mask in a chest pack.
We also had a whistle and a silver badge bearing a crown and the letters "ARP" (air raid precautions) both of which I still have.

Our training included learning to recognise various types of poison gas which the Germans were expected to use and the attached verse is a reminder of this.

A.R.P.
If you get a choking feeling and a smell of musty hay
You can bet your bottom dollar that there's PHOSGENE on the way

But the smell of bleaching powder will inevitably mean
That the enemy you're meeting is a gas we call CHLORINE

When your eyes begin a-twitching and for tears you cannot see
It's not mother peeling onions, but a dose of C.A.P.

If the smell resembles pear drops, then you'd better not delay
It's not father sucking toffee, it's that ruddy K.S.K.

If you catch a pungent odour as you're going home to tea,
You can safely put your shirt on it they're using B.B.C.

D.H., D.A., and D.C., emanate the scent of roses
But despite their pretty perfume, they aren't good for human noses.

If for garlic or for onions you've a cultivated taste,
When in war you meet these odours leave the area in haste;
For it's MUSTARD GAS , the hellish stuff that leaves you one big blister,
And in hospital you'll need the kind attention of the sister.

And lastly, while geraniums look pleasant in a bed,
Beware this smell in wartime - if it's LEWISITE you're DEAD.

[A leaflet handed out to A.R.P. (Air Raid Precautions) Personnel to assist them in recognising poisonous war gases . 1938-39]

Thank goodness gas was never used.

In Little Haywood there were three groups of volunteers, ARP, AFS (Auxiliary Fire Service) and Home Guard.
All three had their weekly meetings at the Lamb & Flag on different evenings.
The AFS had a trailer pump and a tow vehicle in one of the Lamb & Flag lock-up garages.
The Home guard had various guard posts around the area.

Our ARP duties consisted of being ready to respond to an emergency (if we were not away at work) and to have at least two people on night patrol around the village observing and looking out for infringement of the blackout.
On cold nights we found that it was noticeably warmer to hang about under large trees rather than out in the open countryside which was what most of the village was then.
Emergency call-out by bicycle was a problem and few people had telephones. I devised a method of calling out the wardens with signals sent over the electric mains but this was not accepted by the ARP top brass who didn't understand such things.

The weekly meeting always started with a comprehensive order for drinks which came from the bar on two large trays and the meetings were always convivial.
I believe the same applied to the AFS and Home Guard meetings.

As the war progressed we would here the drone of German bombers night after night on their way to Birmingham and Coventry and would see the distant glow in the sky where they had dropped their bombs.
The village AFS team were called to help at Coventry for a short time and were completely shocked by the experience.
The only bombs in Little Haywood were bags of white powder which on one or two occasions were accidentally dropped in the lanes or fields because of the nearby practice range on Cannock Chase.

That is how the war was fought in the village in those early days.
However in 1942 my commitments on confidential war work increased and I had to leave the ARP which had changed its name to Civil Defence with "CD" on the tin hats.

John Weaver

J J L Weaver 27.06.99

CONFIDENTIAL WAR WORK 1942 to 1946

In 1942 having passed my HNC with distinctions in Generation/Transmission/Distribution/Utilisation/Applied Mechanics and having spent over 4 years going the rounds of Instruments, Switchgear, Transformers, Machines and Rectifiers as an apprentice including two years in charge of Instrument Transformer Test, I was directed, together with two other radio amateurs, Ron Bent and Harold Mitchell, to a smaller factory on the corner of Foregate St, and Browning St. Stafford.
This old factory had been the original Dorman Diesel Co's base before it moved to Tixall Rd.
We were to set up and run the test dept. of the Metadyne Amplifier Section.
Since we were not allowed to disclose anything about the work we were doing or take photographs or take paperwork home I have no physical record of what we did and these belated notes are the best I can do from memory.

At first the work consisted of devising means of and carrying out tests on "Metadyne Amplifiers" for the Admiralty which a production team under Don Redhead were assembling.

These amplifiers had been designed by Metropolitan Vickers at TRAFFORD park.
Their function was to take in signals from position sensing magslips (after these had been processed by electromechanical computers to incorporate the positional co-ordinates of approaching aircraft with corrections for roll, pitch and yaw etc of the ship) and to provide an output to the control fields of rotating metadyne generators which in turn provided the power to the elevation and training (vertical and horizontal) motors of the multi-barrel anti-aircraft gun mountings on, mainly, destroyers.

Magslips are based on the three phase alternator /synchronous motor configuration and were first found used as transmitters of gunlaying information on some of the German ships scuppered at Scapa Flow after the 1914/18 war.

The metadyne generator was really Met Vick's version of the American GE Amplidyne.
This is a dc generator in which the normal take-off brushes are shorted together.
The high, design-limited, armature short circuit current causes a large degree of armature reaction (rotational displacement of the effective field flux) to occur producing an output at other brushes placed at electrical right angles to the normal ones.
This output is very sensitive in degree and polarity to small changes in reaction field strength. Auxiliary field windings are placed to take advantage of this so that the output from a relatively small amplifier can control a considerable output from the generator and swing positive or negative with respect to zero.
This power feeds elevation and training motors on a gun mounting, causing the gun to follow either the optical ranging "director" or the radar antenna coupled to it as they track a target aircraft.
The gun mountings can weigh a few tons and to make them respond perkily without instability was a good initiation into the art of servo systems!

During production and testing it became obvious that our electronics was very cumbersome having been designed by electromechanical power engineers.

- 2 -
For instance, one component used was a "mutual coupling" transformer which provided a phase advance component of the signal proportional to rate of change.
It had to have a sine wave response of 12 cycles per minute (0.2Hz), was about 120mm cubed with a large core of expensive mu-metal and 50,000 turns of very fine wire. It weighed several kilos and was prone to going open circuit.
We pointed out that it could be replaced by a small resistor and a capacitor together weighing a few grams whose values could easily be varied.
We persuaded the Admiralty to let us show how we could miniaturise the equipment and won a contract to do so.
Instead of the metre high cabinet with three deep 19" rack chassis' (power supply and two amplifiers) and large external Metalastic shock mountings we designed modular units which were about one sixth the overall volume of the originals and after extensive tests these were accepted as the next generation for production.
One of the key factors was a 120g shock test in each of three directions in turn during which the equipment had to continue to be operative.
The smaller lighter units made achieving this much easier, each little chassis being on its own small shock mountings.

By the end of 1943 (aged 24) I was in charge of the engineering design section, Ron Bent was running our little laboratory and "Mitch" was the manager of our somewhat unofficial empire. My good friend John Williams ran the drawing office.
While production came under Switchgear we technical bods had no home but reported to the Chief Engineer. For security reasons we didn't exist as an "on the books" technical unit.

We made up other modular arrangements for various navy applications including some AGTU's (Automatic Gyro Transmitting Units).
Up till then the various gun systems on board each had their own basic gyro unit which produced ship's motion signals for that particular gun system.
The Admiralty decided to install a central more accurate gyro system amidships (with an emergency back-up elsewhere) and to pipe the same gyro signals to all the gun systems.
Our AGTU's were the means of amplifying and transmitting this information.

By the end of 1944 we had received a huge order for 146 equipments using our modular design for what was called CRS1 (Close Range System One).
This was intended to counteract the threat of Japanese kamikaze bombers.
The AA guns were to be selectable into a number of groups to deal simultaneously with a number of planes attacking from different directions at the same time.
Each of our equipments consisted of a bank of 56 amplifier trays coupled with a similar bank of electro-mechanical computer trays made by Unit Tool and Engineering Co. at Poulton le Fylde near Blackpool. (I became friendly with their test engineer who was another older radio ham and he showed me a letter of thanks he received in 1922 from the British Broadcasting Company for the loan of his equipment which enabled them to put on the first outside broadcast from the Tower Ballroom at Blackpool).
Some of our amplifiers fed metadyne generators, some were grid controlled thyratron units feeding smaller gun mounting motors and some fed small split-field motors in the computer bank.

As it happened our stores were full of the stuff to meet this order when the war with Japan ended on VJ day.

- 3 -
Only the original prototype was completed and this was installed in the battleship KG5 (King George Vth).
I remember VJ night well as I was staying with my wife (we were married in
November 1944) in Dunfermline having been at the Rosyth naval dockyard sorting out some problems with some of our older equipment on a destroyer.
We had settled down in our hotel about midnight and were awakened about 1.00 am by the Abbey bells across the road from us and shouting and cheering in the street outside. We wondered what the hell was going on! The street lights were on too!

There were several other projects under way by that time in our self styled Industrial Electronics Section. One of these was an ignition tester for on-line testing of the firing conditions in tank and aircraft engines.
The idea came from a nice chap who was the engine ignition expert at Napier Aero Engines. I think his name was Ralphs. For years he had used a pair of headphones connected to the low tension side of ignition systems and he could tell by the sound
how the system was performing in a general way. He wondered if we could improve on this by using a CRO (cathode ray oscilloscope).
I spent some happy days in tank factories and at DTD (Dept of Tank Design) at Chobham climbing in and out of tanks to find out how and where to connect our tester.
The first item in this folder is an instruction book I wrote for the first of these instruments.
The Ministry of Supply issued some to both the army and the RAF and so I also had to look at aircraft.
After hostilities British South American Airways under AVM (Pathfinder) Bennet acquired three clapped out Lancaster bombers converted for passenger use and we fitted an ignition tester on one of those in which I had a test flight with AVM Bennet at the controls.
EECo later sold this idea to Cossor who went out of business and passed it to Krypton who incorporated their version into car engine test equipments for garages.

We went on to develop various civilian motor control systems and high frequency heating equipment.
Unfortunately the EECo Chief Engineer, Mr Sloane, was very old fashioned and wanted to disband everything to do with electronics the moment the war ended.
Ron and Mitch left and formed British Electronic Products and took the Admiralty work and goodwill with them. (After years of growth and many changes it became what was Thorn Automation but I think is now Ultra Electronics at Rugeley).
I stayed on hoping to rescue something but fell out with Sloane's deputy, Richard Tabb, over it and left in 1946.
The bits that were left were lumped in with mercury arc ignitron manufacture and moved to Kidsgrove. That is now a Control Gear division of whatever foreign company now runs things.

After a "sabbatical year" doing all sorts of interesting things including lecturing, designing Hi Fi gear for a small firm and working for a mad inventor at LydiateAsh
near Bromsgrove I rejoined EECo in Nelson Research Labs which was run by an even
greater nutter, J K Brown.
After three years of utter frustration there I moved over to the sane and even urbane Rectifier Division and remained with its various re-incarnations until I took my pension in 1983 and finally retired in 1985. I was then Consultant Development Engineer of GEC Transmission and Distribution Projects Ltd.

J J L Weaver 21.06.01

WAR WORK - Addendum

Of course a lot of funny and interesting things happened to add to life's gay tapestry.
On one occasion I was called up to some dockyard - I think it was Denny's at Dumbarton - because the Navy were having trouble with some of our gear which was new to them. As they were accustomed to hydraulic systems and this one was a bit of a hybrid they naturally blamed the electronics.
(The gun mountings had electric motors but the director movement was still powered hydraulically. The later American built directors were electric.)
When I got there of course I found that the hydraulics was in bits all over the bridge decking looking like a dismantled Austin 7 engine. The problem with those hydraulics was that their performance was built into the arrangement of pistons and valves etc all carefully machined with connecting passages into a car engine sized "cylinder block". If the design was at fault there was no way to correct it without a return to the drawing board and machine shop and they had located the snag therein.
While they dabbled with their oily friend I went to Balloch on Loch Lomond for a break and when I came back they had it all sorted out.

I should explain that the director tower was mounted on a rearward extension of the ship's bridge. The brains of the system was two decks down and called theTS or Transmitting Station.

Another time I was struggling with a problem up top in the director (navy term for optical range finder or predictor) when the gunnery officer with whom one normally dealt came up the bridge steps in a little disarray and in a very slurred voice growled "Come on down to the ward room - I've just invented a new cocktail". I said I must stay and get this thing sorted out - they were due out any minute on arctic convoy duty.
However he returned at regular intervals, more slurred each time, with the same request. When I remonstrated again he said ""Leave that b----- thing alone and come on down. I never ever use it anyway - I just wait till I see the whites of their eyes."

I mentioned this to a gunnery artificer and he said this guy was always like that when laid up in port but that at sea he was the best gunnery officer he knew.

On another trip I was having a meeting with the gunnery officer and some of his men in the ward room and there were a couple of similar meetings of naval and civilian contractors going on at other tables.
A steward came quietly round to our table and said to the GO in a quiet voice "I'm afraid the beer barrel has run out sir". "WHAT!" cried the GO and there was instant panic.
Various officers present rushed over to the corner, someone picked up the barrel and shook it violently. "You B F, its just the tap that's bunged up". Peace was restored almost as quickly as it had been broken and we all returned to our discussions.

Apparently all drinks except beer are, or were then, extremely cheap on board but beer had to be purchased ashore at the going rate.
Two colleagues of mine spent one Christmas on board a destroyer at Scapa Flow and stood the wardroom drinks all Christmas Eve and it cost them 18 shillings.

On one destroyer all our equipment worked fine until I rang up the director operator and asked him to switch over to Full Automatic Follow. We had gone through the other options, ranging from complete manual operation of the guns to this final phase of testing.
Everything in the TS went dead. I was plodding round with the Avo trying to locate the cause when an irate artificer burst in with "Who put this b----- bath heater on?"
Someone had decided that it would be a good idea on arctic convoys, where many ships were being sunk, to dunk survivors, clothes and all, into a hot bath.
To this end a smallish hot tank had been installed in an officer's minute bathroom. In the top of this were mounted seven 3 kilowatt immersion heaters.
Now with the advent of all the new electronics etc electric power was hard to come by.
The Metadyne system of which our electronics was part had its own 50 volt, 50 cycle supply from a 30/40 kilowatt motor generator.
Their answer had been to supply the bath heaters from this when the director and gunnery system was not wanted.
So a changeover contactor was installed with the obvious mistake in the wiring - when the gunnery system demanded maximum power it got turned off and the bath heater was turned on!

On one boat we were unable to get any response from our system although everything was live and switched on.
Now each deck of a fighting ship is treated as a complete layer, electrically.
All the many lead-covered multicore cables from the deck above enter junction boxes all over the place and all outgoing cables to the deck below leave from more scattered
boxes.
After many hours of opening boxes and tracing our master signal connections we found that they had travelled all the way down from bridge level to two decks down through a maze of boxes, were connected to and travelled all the way back up again through a different series of boxes and were there paralleled with the downward cables. Unfortunately they did not stop off at our equipment in the TS!
It transpired that an intermediate deck had recently been rewired to an out-of-date issue of the wiring diagram for that deck!
This is not surprising as the custom was, that after initial work had been
inspected and the wiring team returned to correct any errors, a further test and inspection was often waived because of the urgency of getting the destroyer back in service.

Once at Rosyth I was busy sorting something out in the TS with the boat at the dockside when I was told that "the Old Man" ie the Commander of the dockyard
who was an old stickler for discipline, had signalled the skipper that, from his lair, he had seen civilians aboard, unsuitably dressed at that!
It was a hot day and it was suggested that if I did go up top for a breather I should keep to parts of the ship not visible from his watchtower.
On that occasion I was ploughing on below into the evening and came up to find sea all around. For a moment I thought I might be heading for the arctic but I found we were anchored in the Firth of Forth. I finished quickly and literally thumbed a lift ashore on a lighter that had been refuelling the ship.

Such a lot of new hi-tech equipment was added to older ships that things were tucked into any available space.
Nearly all the walls and shelves in officer's berths were occupied by electrical or electronic boxes of some kind.
I opened one steel door labelled "Bo'sun's Locker Room" and found the tiny room fully occupied by a large, possibly spare, radar set.
Aerials proliferated like spring flowers. I was told an apocryphal tale of some of the lads coming from shore leave and bringing a pawnbroker's sign with them which they strung up in the rigging. When some visiting top brass crossly asked "what was that?" he was told it was another new radar aerial.

This proliferation brought other problems too.
The AA gun mountings had limit switches attached underneath and these rode over cam plates placed so that firing was inhibited whenever the moving aim of the guns conflicted with part of the ships superstructure, aerials etc.
The supply of cams did not always keep up with the increase in aerial gadgetry with predictable results.

---------------------------------------------------

Some time after VE day I got a call from Cunliffe Owen Ltd who, pre-war had been making flying boats, mainly for Africa, especially the Congo.
Now they were modifying Spitfires for navy use as Seafires.
They had been issued with one of our Ignition Testers and wanted a bit of help with using it.
On arrival the manager of the EECo Southampton office took me to lunch at the Royal Southampton Yacht Club.
I accepted his offer of a drink and had a half of bitter.
Going in to lunch the normal horizontal floors seemed to have developed rapidly changing slopes as I staggered to my chair.
He explained that the brewers in Southampton were members of the RSYC and vied with each other to produce especially strong brews for the Club.

In the afternoon while describing the workings of the tester someone came in and said " We've got a Seafire on the tarmac outside which has been rejected twice by the test pilot for having a very rough engine. Do you think ……"
You've guessed it - I had to demonstrate the tester and if possible diagnose what was up with this wretched Merlin engine!
Up to then that was the nearest I had been to a Merlin engine with its V12 configuration and two plugs per cylinder and in a real working aeroplane.
Fortunately it was lashed to the ground.
The first thing I found was that in bright daylight one could not see the trace on the CRT screen.
Secondly, when the engine was running on normal (7psi) or full (12psi) boost the slipstream acting on the long extension cables practically made the fairly heavy instrument airborne and I had to cling on to it for dear life.
I managed to pick out 5 or 6 plugs which looked a bit dodgy....
These were changed and then all the others looked dodgy by comparison!
At this stage I made my excuses and bowed out to catch the 4.30 train back to Stafford!

-------------------------------------

In the 1970's I was again involved in a navy problem to do with the interference which was being experienced on submarine sonar equipment due to harmonics from old rectifier gear that Hackbridge Hewittic (which had been acquired by EECo) had supplied.
During one of the meetings with staff at Admiralty, Bath, I made suggestions as to how the problem could be overcome only by fairly extensive re-design of our equipment.

I also asked what had happened to a young chap from there called Watson who had been my contact (and friend) in the 1940's and who accompanied me in some of the trips to dockyards in those days. "Oh" they said with bated breath, "You mean Rear Admiral Watson, Head of Admiralty Research at Haslemere."!

A couple of years later I got a call from Bath from a senior officer who had recently taken charge of that department asking what had been done about this re-design.
He had been looking through the records and found my recommendations.
I said that after the last meeting no more had been heard from Bath.
He was rather cross and the upshot was that we got a large order to replace all the old equipments with a new design.

1.

Poems from the 1940's

By
J J L Weaver

INTRODUCTION

Only when we get old do we realise the luxury we had when young of having the time, energy and spare brain capacity to give spontaneous vent to our feelings. A lot of it was of course all hot air. At the school-leaving age I sometimes had fun rattling off yards of spontaneous nonsense verse - perhaps its a good thing it is not around to embarrass me now!

Later, in that euphoric state of courtship and marriage the muse may spurt out again and while I was embarrassed by it in my middle years I am so glad that Barbara has saved a few of these early and not very good outpourings. The funny thing is that at 71 years I now find pleasure, not embarrassrnent in re-reading them.
Others may also get some pleasure from them.

They were all written in the 1940's, mostly while the war was on yet,, while I was heavily engaged in the engineering aspects of the war ,the references to it seem to me now so slight and indirect.
After all what is more important than Love?

John J L Weaver
18th February
1991

2.

My school friend Leslie, who was then in the Royal Army Medical Corps had been taken prisoner by the Germans on the Greek island of Kos and he was engaged to Connie Armstrong. My fiancée, his sister Barbara, was staying at Pardon Mill for a short time with Connie at her parent's farm which bordered the Tyne between Hexham and Haltwhistle.
Barbara and I had come to love that part of the Tyne valley while courting.

THE TYNE AT PARDON MILL

My love
I have seen the Tyne with its round rubble ripples teasing the water between its banks into a fair laughing stream, winding and swaying, yet one way going -

And the scattered blue of the heavens, dimpled with chaste clouds, overflowing our sweet valley to soar on and on for ever, carrying our gaze further than we can see.

And between -The patchwork fields, bestooked and golden, green and live mottled, heralding Autumn, yet cheerfully clinging to the last days of summer;

The friendly stone-grey farms, islands of life now, yet fortresses of warmth and hope in winter, gathering in their strong grey arms Nature's hard earned gifts.

But you my love must leave this soulful haven, where new life, not death, hangs over each night's rest, and brother-sweethearts love warms heart and mind of you my dearest.

28th August 1943

3.

This was written on a very crowded train when I was lucky enough tohave got a seat. ( I slept on the floor in the corridor a few times).
I was married in 1944 and this was shortly after that because the war was still on. I had been looking into some problems with the radar gun control system on a destroyer at one of the dockyards and was returning to Stafford.

ON THE TRAIN FROM GLASGOW

How marvellous is sight

That I do see the world as ne'er before

The sun's soft light upon the trees

That were before

But now are real.

The mountains, smooth to touch from here with the eye's hand.

I am no poet, know no art save of my heart,

Yet it could pour with love and happiness for ever

And be full

There is one thing - no there is not one thing

That can destroy this happiness once found

And we have found It

And have everlasting life and inward peace.

4.

This is just a few lines written to accompany a small baby coat being sent to my new wife's best friend Elizabeth whose husband, a bomber pilot, had been killed just before Joanna was born. He crashed his Halifax into a hillside in Yorkshire probably due to altimeter error.

TO JOANNA

To Joanna is this

With small coat

Soon to be outgrown

And put aside:

But she may remember

When she embarks on life

And sorts out baby trappings,

Schoolgirl fancies

And womanly hopes -Yes, perhaps she will conceive

With what affection it was chosen

By Barbara and John

5.

This is a mid-war poem. It is difficult today to realise how few cars there were on the road then and one spent hours waiting for the main mode of transport - stea