The Monday Photo

This is the grave of Geoffrey Daintree Pearson, who died on active service at Whaddon. He was 42.

A signalman in the Royal Corps of Signals, he fell when doing maintenance work on a tall radio mast at their station on Church Hill, known to the men as Windy Ridge.

It was September 1943. About eight months later this radio station would play an important part in D-Day and the invasion of occupied Europe; Operation Overlord.

Geoffrey is buried in the graveyard of St Mary’s church in Whaddon, and the men of the Royal Signals had to walk through that graveyard to reach their posts.  Although he was not killed through enemy action, this signalman still died in the service of his country.

I‘m showing you this photo today because this is War Graves Week. This commemorative week runs until next Saturday, the 28th May. There are a few events for the week in North Bucks, though the next one is on Tuesday 24th, perhaps to late to get to now.

But here’s a group photo of the Royal Signals personnel at Windy Ridge, in 1945. There are far more of them than I imagined; I counted about 160 men in the photo.

I wrote about what’s left of windy Ridge and its part in Operation Overlord last year, and the post gives you directions to the station’s remains.

Now I’ve seen the photo at the link above, I wonder if there may be some evidence of radio bases out in the field, far away from where the buildings had been. I’ll have to visit Church hill again for another look…

This photo was taken with a Pentax camera and lens.

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Here are just a few Second World War buildings you might not know about, in North Bucks.

Sticky Bombs

In 1940 this house in Whitchurch was requisitioned by a new department knows as MD1, Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.

It was ideal for their purposes. Tucked away in the country, it had plenty of outbuildings and a nice secluded garden they thought would be handy for “experimental demolition work” Lathes, workbenches and equipment were installed, and work began.

Here they invented and manufactured devices for both conventional and irregular warfare. The limpet mine, the PIAT (Projectile Infantry Anti Tank) and the sticky bomb, designed to be used against German tanks in the event of invasion were just some of them.

These devices for defeating German tanks might have something to do with stories I’ve heard about tanks being seen in the fields just down the hill from The Firs, by the big bend on the Aylesbury road.

The Monday Photo

Why am I showing you some old concrete slabs in a field? Aren’t they just the remains of old farm buildings?

They weren’t farm buildings at all, but the site of an important WW2 military radio station.

The hill top station was called Windy Ridge by the soldiers that manned it, but the field is known as Church Hill and it’s in Whaddon. The station played an important part in Operation Overlord, the invasion of German-held Western Europe that began with D-Day.

There were two huts at the station and the radio hut’s foundation is in the foreground. From there, morse code messages were sent to radio lorries on the battlefield, that kept close to commanders like General Montgomery and the US Army’s General Patton.

The radio lorries were known as SLUs, or Special Liason Units, and were manned by members of the Royal Corps of Signals.

In England, RCS radio operators at Windy Ridge had to cover each day from morning to late evening, working a two shift system. The first shift was 08:00 to 16:00, the second 16:00 to 22:00. Windy ridge also sent messages to agents in occupied Europe.

The second hut held teleprinters that received intelligence from Bletchley Park, which they’d gained from decrypting German military communications. The teleprinter hut’s foundation slab is just in front of those nettles in the middle distance, on the right of the photo.

Just to the left of that slab is another slab, set at a different level. I found iron studs in two of the corners, so I think this might have been an aerial base.

The huts were simply built, with low brick walls and corrugated iron roofs. Some time after the war they were given to the farmer, but some genius set fire to them and now only the bases remain.

The Monday Photo

This is a twenty feet long guided missile, but what is it doing in a business park at Westcott?

This business park used to be the Rocket Propulsion Establishment. As a boy I could sometimes hear rocket motors being trialed at night, miles across the fields in Winslow.

Everything that happened there, apart from the very obvious noise of testing, was extremely hush-hush.

The English Electric Thunderbird guided missile, and this is one of them, was in service with the British army from 1959 to 1977. It could shoot down aircraft up to 30 miles away and get to the target at Mach 2.7, and at least some of its development was done at Westcott.

I can’t say for sure how much, because people still aren’t talking.

The Rocket Propulsion Establishment was set up in April 1946, and ran until the mid 1990s. Before that is had been RAF Westcott.

Like every other RAF airfield in North Bucks, it had been an Operational Training Unit. Here, Wellington bomber crews were trained in navigation and leaflet dropping (often over enemy territory) and in night bombing.

In the last few days of the war in Europe and just after, RAF Westcott was part of Operation Exodus, where former Allied prisoners of war were brought home from prison camps in Europe.

RAF Westcott received 50,000 ex POWs, part of a total of over 354,000 men returned by plane, some after four or five years of captivity and isolation from their loved ones. Some men wept when they got back to England.

I think this is the first version of the missile. An improved missile, introduced in 1966, was known as Thunderbird 2. But I always thought that was a big green aircraft flown by International Rescue…

The Monday Photo

There are 58 airworthy Spitfires left in the World, and this is one of them. Built in 1944 without guns it’s a Mark XI, made for the dangerous art of photo reconnaissance.

It served in Europe in the last months of the war against Germany, and it’s more than just a Spitfire with cameras instead of guns.

Speed was its only defence, so it had a more powerful engine. Armour and armament were left out to save weight.

The three piece flat sided armoured glass front screen was replaced by a single aerodynamically shaped perspex one. The tail wheel was retractable, not fixed; this alone added 5 mph to the top speed. 

For long range operations the Mark XI had greater fuel capacity, and if needed a drop tank could fitted underneath. The engine oil tank was also more than doubled to 14.5 gallons, and this is why the ‘chin’ of the aircraft is more pronounced. 

Without the drop tank, this aircraft, PL983, had a range of 1,360 miles. It could cruise at 395 mph, with a top speed of 417 mph. The all over blue paint job is for high altitude camouflage; the Mark XI could fly at 40,000 feet.

I pictured this Spitfire when it overflew Milton Keynes hospital recently. I happened to find out about the flight just six minutes before it was due at Milton Keynes, so I rushed out into my front garden with a long lens; I live about a mile from the hospital.

I was in luck; a couple of minutes later I heard the Merlin engine, and looked up to see the plane approaching from the South.

I had two chances to get my shot. The Spitfire flew over the hospital twice, and banked around for the second run where I could see it, so I got quite a few good photos. But I like this one best, with the plane standing on its wing tip.

John Romain is the pilot and owner. Here's a YouTube video of him flying PL983 at Old Warden Aerodrome on the same day as I saw it.

Cold War concrete.

Overlooked by houses and just next to a bus stop in Whitchurch is this strange piece of concrete. It’s a remnant of the Cold War.

Built in 1957, it’s the entrance to an underground observation post, to be used if we ever came under atomic attack. Under the locked hatch is a shaft and a fixed ladder that leads down to the three man post.

Over 1,500 posts were built across the UK, all spaced around eight miles apart. Some still remain. In the event of the Soviet Union attacking, volunteers of the Royal Observer Corps would man each post and report the direction and intensity of atomic blasts.

When the Soviet Union finally collapsed in 1991 there was no more need for these posts, and they were all closed.

What’s There Now?