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It was great to see Mike Burstow on ‘Bargain Hunt’ today (a repeat, I think) – it was Mike who recruited me to DERA in 1995. I’d like to know of any further Zoom events that you might be planning.
Hello Jim,
Mike is well and doing a sterling ‘chair’ job of keeping the society active and progressing in its objectives in these these difficult times. MRATHS intends to keep in touch with the membership by a continuing series of Zoom meetings. You can keep in touch with future meetings simply by monitoring the MRATHS website. Four meetings extending through to November have been posted very recently. Until we can return to the distantly remembered physical meetings, meetings will be on Zoom.
Regards,
Ron Henry
I am booking secretary for Malvern Civic Society. We have several members who have requested we a include a talk in our forthcoming programme about MRATH’s work on
chrystals, linear accellerators, and such like.
Clearly we are not currently able to meet in a physical sense at this time so we have embarked on holding zoom meetings.
Is there anyone you could suggest who would be prepared to give us a talk either in person or by zoom?
Hello Mr Seddon,
I’ve been asked to reply to your long outstanding question about MRATHS specialist speakers. Firstly, please accept my apologies for the delay.
There is, of course, a huge variety of specialised knowledge and experience spread across those members who worked at RRE/RSRE and its successors; one big problem in disseminating the information is that not all of them welcome the opportunity of being a public speaker! There is also no MRATHS member register of ‘who worked on what?’ so it is not easily known who to approach as a possible speaker.
You specifically mentioned linear accelerators and crystals as possible topics. Way back in the establishment’s history when it was TRE it had one Division which worked on atomic energy, and linear accelerators and synchrotrons were its specialised topics. This work started in 1945. On moving into the postwar era, the government logically decided to centralise all of its civil atomic energy work and established the Atomic Energy Research Establishment (AERE) at Harwell on 1-1-1946. By 1948, Malvern’s atomic work had been relocated to there. A talk on crystals might be a possibility. I will ‘put the word out’.
Regards,
Ron Henry
For Mike Burstow:-
Very pleased to see you on today’s ‘Bargain Hunt’ programme. I would love to meet up with you one day to see all photos and documents you have there at Malvern. This is because my father, Donald Fry, is in that photo of the Sunday Soviet shown on the wall in the room where you were being interviewed with Anita Manning. He was the youngest member of those select people at the meeting for which I possess an original photo and another of a TRE team of a year or two later. I actually met a number of the scientists in the latter photo who went on to become some of the leading scientists in the world – one of whom later was a big cog in setting up the CERN establishment in Geneva where the Hadron Colider is located. After the war TRE was well-known for particle accelerators and synchlotrons. Regards, Peter Fry.
Dear Peter,
Delighted to learn more from you about your father. A scan of any records would also be of great value to us. I believe it might be Sir John Adams that you are thinking of in connection with CERN. He was indeed a TRE man. I will contact you separately by email.
Thank you for getting in touch,
Mike
Re Fred Linsey. He returned to the Cavendish. I have a ‘group photo’ from 1952 which includes him. Experimental Physics classes were then run by Dr Schoenberg and Dr Pippard (notable scientists) with the full-time attention of Fred Linsey, in a white coat, who was probably a ‘demonstrator’ or a ‘laboratory technician’. Let me know if this is of interest.
Hi – doing some research for a family member. Mrs Dorothy Hobbs’ cousin, Fred Linsey, worked on (we think) radar at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge in the 1930’s. During the war, he was posted to the Malvern area so the link with TRE is possible. I’ve looked on the staff list from March 1942 but his posting may have been later. He was allocated a car and petrol ration.
Mrs Hobbs would love to hear anything about her cousin. Many thanks.
Further to the comments on the Taylor / Bradshaw breakthrough mentioned on your website, you might like to hear that the Science Museum have stated that although the US circuit is now on display at the Museum, the UK item is not (they’re still looking for it, I shall add). Bradshaw’s son, Martin, was a former friend of mine – I met buttoned-up George, too – and once showed me an article on the Taylor / Bradshaw events taken from a journal entitled ‘Electron’. Interesting to see, btw, how the UK powers-that-be spectacularly failed our lads, yet again …