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Worth Matravers

Dorset Home to the Development of Radar

Mar 5th, 2011
by Dorset Ancestors.
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It would not be an exaggeration to say that Dorset played an irreplaceable part in overcoming the Nazi threat in the 1940’s, and in the preservation of freedom for the world. Not far from Corfe Castle, where for centuries events were played out which are part of our history, on the seaward side of the Isle of Purbeck is where for two years the sciences behind electronic defence, attack and navigation were worked out.

Today, through radio technology we can watch events on the other side of the world as they happen, and view missions to the moon or Mars, and it can all be traced back to Worth Matravers and St.Aldhelm’s Head, on the Dorset coast, not forgetting earlier as well as later research locations elsewhere. Four miles from Swanage, in the early days of the Second World War, a vast radar experimental complex was set up, which was to draw Service and scientific personnel and leading electronic engineers from all parts of Britain. The inventors moved in, academics mixed with mechanics – and it was all hushed up.

From their researches came, perhaps most notably, blind bombing by an amazing new system code-named ‘H2S.’ Later, the Aircraft to Surface Vessel technique was developed to pinpoint U-boats as they hunted in packs for shipping from North America carrying the vital supplies which kept Britain going – one of the greatest threats to our survival – as well as armaments for D-Day and the conquest of continental Europe.

Even the microwave oven owes much to the Isle of Purbeck, although the idea of the cavity magnetron, which was to be used in wartime as a transmitting valve creating echoes, came from two research workers at Birmingham University – John Randall and Harry Boot. Fundamentally, they were the ones who made Worth Matravers famous. Some would say the magnetron won the war.

Microwave links for telecommunications and television have much to thank Dorset for. So have weather forecasting by radar, and navigational aids. Computers came later. Long before the war, though, with Hitler seeking world domination, defence strategies involving radar began to be developed from the mid-1930’s and a chain of early warning stations with tall masts was built all down the east coast and as far west as the Isle of Wight.

With the research station established, the small airfield at Christchurch further along the coast towards Southampton was in use for 18 months by aircraft testing the devices. The aim was to create equipment that would show echoes from the ground or from the sea aboard Allied ‘planes. Sometimes a target aircraft would fly above Swanage Bay, towards or in line with the coast so that its image could be picked up on a screen on the shore.

Reg Batt, in his book ‘The Radar Army,’ relates how echoes were first received at Worth Matravers from a coastguard hut and the chapel of St.Aldhelm, on the headland. The old chapel is now the only vestige of the research station that still exists.

But a moving target was required, so one day he set out along the headland on his bicycle, apparently on his own initiative, with a sheet of metal wired to his machine. This was to lead to exciting results on the screen. They were getting somewhere. But their big task was to reduce the wavelength they used to a few centimetres for clarity, which had never been done before, and to site the equipment they invented aboard an aircraft.

The best brains from the universities, including (Sir) Bernard Lovell, later the inventor of the Jodrell Bank radio telescope, were brought in to get the best results. All this led to the perfection of radio beams and blind bombing with the use of the magnetron valve, so that darkness or poor visibility presented no problem at all in marking the target.
 
Not only ‘H2S.’ but other techniques such as OBOE and GEE were developed in Dorset too. All were vital to defence, navigation and attack. Secret experiments were made with crystal and klystron, where Britain co-operated with the United States, and which was a pulse transmitter of less power than the magnetron. High-powered parties from London and abroad visited the site.

Eventually 17th century Leeson House in Swanage was to be taken over by the research station, which was an easy target with its high masts that could be sighted far out to sea. The position was very advantageous, however, and there was great excitement when distant points such as the Needles and St.Catherine’s Head, 32 miles away, were picked up.

Meanwhile, manufacturers across the country were ready to put the new creations into large-scale production for installation. Giant aerial systems involving dishes looked out on Swanage Bay, a factory production unit sprouted in north Bournemouth, and then came the day when Telecommunications Flying Unit at Christchurch was promoted and moved to a new airfield at Hurn, which was one day to become Bournemouth Airport.

In early 1942 the whole of the Worth Matravers complex moved in to Malvern College, as it was assumed to be under possible threat from commando attack. Defford Airfield in Worcestershire became the associated flying unit housing a large number of test aircraft.

It meant an upheaval for 800 personnel and in some cases their families. The seaside town of Swanage, where many of them had lived, became a quiet Dorset community once again. Masts had to be dismantled and crates packed and as many as 90 removal vans and flatbed trucks would be on the move out of the Isle of Purbeck in one day. As for the workers, they packed their things and left in fleets of coaches brought from all over the area. The move was accomplished in three weeks.

Some of the aircraft flying out of Defford, which included heavy bombers such as Lancasters, Halifaxes and Super-Fortresses, were quick to pick up echoes from the shores of the Bristol Channel, Chepstow and the River Wye. The nearest large towns of Gloucester and Cheltenham were seen almost as on a map. Meanwhile, down below, as in Dorset, the people went about their business completely ignorant of the experiments being conducted in the skies above them.

A terrible tragedy struck in June 1942, when a Halifax heavy bomber crashed in flames in the Forest of Dean, carrying all 11 RAF and scientific personnel on board to their deaths, including A.D. Blumlein, who has been called the foremost electronic engineer in Britain at that time, and who advised the type of television system adopted by the BBC in 1936 rather than the Baird system.

Prime Minister (Sir) Winston Churchill immediately ordered a redoubling of efforts on ‘H2S’ research, and some three years after the principle was discovered the cavity magnetron was installed in many of the RAF’s aircraft by the following year, as well as in U.S. Air Force aircraft. The national radar memorial window was erected in Goodrich Castle, two miles from the Halifax crash scene, in the 1990’s.

While it functioned in close association with Worth Matravers, the airfield at Christchurch, whose runway was only just long enough for the Boeing airliner shipped over from the United States, and which had been adapted as a flying test bed, was Top Secret and had its own uniformed Air Ministry police force.

What a change, and what an upheaval, came over these sedate Dorset towns (although Christchurch was then in Hampshire,) in the early years of the war; then the busy scene changed and the action moved elsewhere. Working conditions were often primitive and without heating.

Yet everyone pulled together, no secrets appear to have been divulged, and in a few years the war had been won, on the Continent, in the Atlantic, in Africa and the Far East. It is difficult to see how it could have been without radar, in which Britain took the world lead. Without that, and the part that Dorset played, world history would be very different from what we know today.

St. Aldhelm’s Chapel

Feb 18th, 2011
by Dorset Ancestors.
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St. Aldhelm's Chapel in the parish of Worth Matravers. Photo used under a Common Licence.

St. Aldhelm's Chapel in the parish of Worth Matravers. Photo used under a Common Licence.

St. Aldhelm’s Chapel

Feb 18th, 2011
by Dorset Ancestors.
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St. Aldhelm’s Chapel sits high above the sea, a short distance from the edge of the promontory that has taken its name. This lonely wind battered little place of worship has been here for centuries; its priests would have stood and watched proud ships sail majestically by to take their place in history and those same men of God will have prayed for the souls of those aboard vessels caught by the storms that often rage here disturbing the sea some three hundred feet below.

Dedicated to a man who was born in the Wessex area around 640, he was likely the son of a high and noble family who would have been new converts to Christianity, probably only a few years before his birth. It is known he studied at Malmesbury, later visiting Canterbury before travelling to Rome.

On his return he established a monastery at Malmesbury. A leading scholar of his day, he was a charismatic man who went about his business with an evangelical zeal. In 705 AD, four years before his death, he departed from Malmesbury and was consecrated the first Bishop of Sherborne.

The cross on top of this ancient monument announces its Christian purpose; without that there is nothing easily visible outside to suggest this is a house of God. The plan and orientation – the corners equal the points of the compass – do nothing to suggest ecclesiastical use and it is known to be the only chapel in England with no east wall. It is likely that its construction was as a defensive lookout post for Corfe Castle as much as a spiritual home for the small Christian community who had been here before the 12th century. This is evidenced by earthen mounds that surround the chapel, which is thought by experts to have been built over an earlier timber building.

The Chapel was built in the 12th century and is of coursed rubble, its pyramid-shaped roof covered with stone slates. Entered through the round-arched Norman doorway the interior is a single room with a single central pier from which spring arches under a vaulted roof, the bare unplastered walls dribbling on to a stone flagged floor. Just enough light dances through the slim single-lancet window in the south-east wall to make out a 19th century font and an altar placed across the east corner.

As is so often the case we turn to John Hutchins to fill the gaps. He tells us  the first mention of St. Aldhelm is in the reign of Henry III, when the Chapel of St. Mary at Corfe Castle and the Chapel of St. Aldhelm’s in Purbeck were each served by a chaplain paid fifty shillings per annum by the Crown. During the reign of Edward I it was rated at twenty shillings and later in 1428 St. Aldhelm’s continued to be taxed at twenty shillings but there were no inhabitants. John Aylworth sold to Bernard Gould the Manor of Renscombe including the advowson of the chapel of Renscombe – but is this a reference to St. Aldhelm’s? The chapel is clearly shown in a map dated 1737 as belonging to the Manor of Renscombe.

St. Aldhelm’s falls within the parish of Worth Matravers and the church guide says this about the chapel: “…It was believed that the chapel was originally a chantry, where a priest would celebrate mass for the safety of sailors; and it might well have been used for rest and prayer by kings, who often hunted in Purbeck…”

At the reformation the chapel would have become redundant and abandoned, the records appearing to confirm this. Chantries were suppressed by Edward VI. Another historian tells us that in 1625 this place served as a sea mark. Their has been some speculation that in earlier times a fire-beacon  to aid sailors sat atop the chapel but the RCHM thinks this idea “untenable”.

Graffiti cut into the central column including dates show people continued to come here in the 17th century, even though the place was almost derelict. It was for some time used as a wishing chapel. Turning again to Hutchins (where would we be without him?) we learn that the roof had collapsed in places. Work started on repairs when the Scott family purchased Renscombe in 1811. A descendant, the 3rd Earl of Eldon, completed the restoration in 1873 paying all the costs and he provided a font and added the cross. More recently, on 4th of July 2005, The Most Reverend Dr. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, came here and consecrated the new altar table as part of the celebrations marking the 1300th anniversary of St. Aldhelm’s consecration as Bishop of Sherborne.

St. Aldhelm’s was fit for purpose again. H.J.Moule wrote in 1893: “On Whit Thursday, Worth Fair Day and club day, the people went with music to St. Aldhelm’s. decked the grey sombre interior with flowers and danced there.” Moule also said it was used at that time as a storehouse for the coastguards.

To this day people come from near and far to the chapel, some for the history and setting others come as pilgrim’s their purpose more spiritual. Legends, mysteries and superstitions run freely throughout the Isle of Purbeck and about this place there are tales to be told and examined, but we will keep them for another day.

There is a photo of the chapel in the photo section.

Purbeck – Into the Quarries

Feb 7th, 2011
by Dorset Ancestors.
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“Carved by time out of a single stone” was how Thomas Hardy described Portland. Yet all of Purbeck can be regarded as a geologist’s bonanza, a chronicle of millions of years of the earth’s history set in stone. Small wonder then, that this “county within a county” should have become one of the country’s major centres for the quarrying and mining of aggregate and building stone.

The stone industry of Purbeck has been the economic mainstay of the ‘Isle’ for over 500 years. For Britain, and for the Empire through export, it has been a font of supply for several kinds of rock belonging to the Portland and Purbeck Beds. All these are part of the two uppermost-and youngest-formations of the Jurassic period, deposited between about 150 and 135 million years ago, when Dorset was sub-equatorial. The Portlandian was laid down in shallow, warm sea, which then regressed to leave a lagoon environment in which the Purbeck beds were then formed.

Although prehistoric man probably carried out very local quarrying for the stone, it was the Romans, particularly favouring the use of the decorative Purbeck Marble for their villas and tomb slabs, who first began quarrying on any significant scale. In ‘modern’ times the industry really took off during the Middle Ages; in the 17th century, too, stone was shipped from Swanage to London, where Wren employed it in re-building the capital after the Great Fire in 1666.

During the 18th and 19th centuries the Purbeck quarries reached their peak in manpower and production. It was at this time when a variety of stone used to build many of Dorset’s older cottages and homes was extracted from small local quarries now long since abandoned and overgrown. Sine transporting the stone overland was difficult and costly, the major quarries and mines were concentrated upon the coastal outcrops, where the stone could be transported away by sea.

As a focus for quarrying, nowhere else in Purbeck was more central or important than Swanage. This town became a centre for the mediaeval trade in limestone, where serious quarrying began in about 1700 and continued until the mid 19th century. This was the heyday of great stone barons, the businessmen who made their fortunes from the industry, George Burt, and John Mowlem being probably the prime movers. Swanage was built from stone in more ways than one; exports from the quarries secured its location and the prosperity of the Burt and Mowlem families. It was during this period too, that the quarry platforms in the cliff outcrops at Tilly Whim, Dancing Ledge, Winspit and Seacombe were cut.

Tilly Whim, Dancing Ledge and Winspit are all coastal quarry sites for Purbeck stone which has been used in a number of Buildings including Durlston Castle, Lulworth Castle and Swanage Town Hall.  The Tilly Whim Caves at Anvil Point are the most easterly of the coastal quarries and are thought to have originally been open-cast working which later shifted towards adit or drift-mining from galleries cut into the cliffside. A capping rock was blasted away so that the high-grade building stone, the Under Freestone, could be quarried out using wedges called “gads.” Galleries of about 3 metres by 8 metres were cut into the hillside, sometimes as far as 60 metres. To support the roof, quarrymen left pillars in the in-situ limestone or else built pillars from stone wasters. Blocks were lowered from the caves using timber derricks (whims) that loaded the stone onto lighters or barges which then trans-shipped the stone to an offshore cargo vessel in calm weather.

Similarly at Dancing Ledge Quarry, the stone was lowered to a large sloping ledge, and carried to a shipment point at the very edge. Here the trammels or ruts made by the carts or wagons, which moved the stone, can still be seen. Quarrying at Dancing Ledge ceased in 1914. Winspit is an area just below Worth Matravers on the south coast where large cliffside quarries have been opened on both sides of the valley. Stone working at Winspit began in 1719. The west quarry has a very large underground gallery, which was worked until 1953; the east quarry has square cut holes for crane positions still to be seen on the cliff top.

Seacombe is a large quarry excavated where Seacombe Bottom meets the coast. This was worked from the 18th century until 1923-31, when much investment in mechanisation took place. Stone was shipped from below the west end, and the foundations of the steam-derrick remain. Other quarries were opened between Durlstone Head and St. Aldhelm’s Head, from where the stone for the harbour walling at Ramsgate was shipped. At Durlstone, deeper beds were worked from underground “quarrs,” the stone being brought to the surface by a horse drawn capstan. There are also shallow quarrs in the country-park. In 1897 197 men were working in 58 quarrs. The last timber derrick to survive anywhere in Dorset can be seen at St. Aldhelm’s Quarry.

Away from the coast there have been extensive quarries in other Purbeck Beds outcropping over the high ground between Swanage and Worth Matravers, though Lychett Matravers to Acton. Purbeck Limestone is worked for aggregate in Swanworth Quarry (due for imminent closure) and Purbeck stone is still quarried in the Acton area west of Swanage, where the rock was formerly mined from underground shafts. Today good decorative stone is being extracted at Acton from open cast pits down to 10 metres. Corfe was formerly the centre for the quarrying of Purbeck Marble (which is not true marble but shelly limestone able to take a hard polish), but the trade no longer exists today.

While the stone native to the mainland has been of considerable commercial value, Portland’s limestone has probably been even more so, and not wholly for its infra-structural applications. This oolithic limestone has encased the gargantuan shells of Titanities, the largest ammonite to have inhabited British Jurassic waters, and which today is to be seen displayed in many of Portland’s garden walls. For centuries, man and nature have contributed to the island’s landscape, and there are features marking where the original landscape once stood.

Wren used Portland stone in the re-building of London, notably the new St. Paul’s, but it has also been applied in the re-construction of the capital after the destruction left by the last war. The old quarry gangs and their methods have almost entirely disappeared. The piers and jetties of the old quarries, from where stone has been shipped around the world, also have largely vanished, and some of the excavations have been infield; no derrick or crane now remains in the Portland Quarry. In Jordan Quarry the succession in the Portland Beds can be traced up to the overlying Purbeck in a sequence which the geologist can read like a book, and which reveals the climatic changes in the region 150 million years ago.

But today some of the Portland quarries have been given a new lease of life. Through a 1983 initiative begun by the specially formed Portland Sculpture Quarry Trust (PSQT) artists and sculptors have been coming to Portland to work creatively in response to the quarry environment. The Trust aims to forge links between the artists and the lives of the masons working in stone, enabling them to share and exchange knowledge and skills, rather than undertaking public commissions for works. This project has fostered much working collaboration over the years, including the creation of Britain’s first Sculpture Quarry in the now regenerated Tout Quarry. Works produced here include Anthony Gormley’s ‘Still Falling.’ and ‘Falling Fossil’ by Stephen Marsden. PSQT is further extending access through workshops. Since 1983 the experience of the Trust has been as appreciation of the importance of the personal aspects of people’s lives and their relationship to the landscape.

Happily, after decades of decline in Portland and Purbeck, something of the old landscape is making a comeback. Abandoned quarries and older sites are being restored to their pre-extractive agricultural state, often with no trace of the former activity in evidence. While the industrial landscape on Portland is being revitalised, in Purbeck nature is re-claiming the traces of an industry, which ranged from prehistoric bell-pits, through opencast excavations and thence gallery mining, to mechanisation and decline.

Benjamin Jesty

Feb 11th, 2010
by Dorset Ancestors.
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The graves of Benjamin and Elizabeth Jesty in the churchyard of St. Nicholas Church, Worth Matravers.

The graves of Benjamin and Elizabeth Jesty in the churchyard of St. Nicholas Church, Worth Matravers.

Benjamin Jesty

Feb 11th, 2010
by Dorset Ancestors.
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In 1805 Benjamin Jesty travelled from Dorset to London where he was the guest of Dr. Pearson of the Vaccine Pock Institute, who recognised Benjamin as the first person to vaccinate against smallpox – some 20 years before Edward Jenner.

The society had arranged for the artist Mr. Sharp to paint a portrait of Benjamin while he was in London, something he found very irksome; being a farmer he was not at all used to sitting still for hours on end. Before leaving for London he had turned a deaf ear to his wife Elizabeth when she suggested he invest in a new suit of modern clothes. He was viewed by some in London with a mild curiosity a situation not helped by his rich Dorset accent. He was glad to return to Dorset bringing with him a pair of gold mounted lancets and a testimonial to recognise his services to the cause of vaccination. He is reported to have said the best thing about the trip was being able to get a shave each day instead of having to wait until market day.

The portrait, the original of which is believed to be with descendants now living and farming in South Africa, tells us, as it should, quite a lot about the man. He had a friendly open face displaying a hint of amusement at all the attention he was receiving. He was probably a straightforward person who would speak his mind. We know he was an honest man because he was an assessor and collector of land taxes. His portly build confirmed his comfortable life style and the portrait belied his 69 years.

This medical pioneer was in fact a yeoman farmer born in Dorset. He was baptised on the 19th of August 1736 at St.Andrew’s church, Yetminster and was given his father’s name. His grandfather John Jesty of Leigh, which is close to Yetminster, appears, from the inventory of goods made when he died, to have been a farmer of some substance. We may assume Benjamin had a good start in life and was probably educated at Boyles School, Yetminster.

In 1770 he married at St. Andrew’s church a girl from the village, Elizabeth. Three children arrived in quick succession: Robert in 1771, Benjamin in 1772 and Elizabeth in 1773. They lived at the farmhouse named Upbury. This was the family of Benjamin Jesty when smallpox hit the village of Yetminster in 1774.

Benjamin was confident he was safe from the disease, having had smallpox when he was a young child, but he was concerned about the wellbeing of Elizabeth and their children. Two dairymaids were employed on his farm and he knew both of these girls had earlier had cowpox and both had nursed members of their family suffering from smallpox without catching the disease. It was well known that dairymaids rarely caught smallpox. He reasoned that if dairymaids who caught cowpox accidentally were immune then it followed that someone who caught the disease deliberately would be similarly immune from the more serious smallpox.

It came to his ear that a Mr Elford who farmed at Chetnole had an outbreak of cowpox amongst his herd. It was this timely news that almost certainly decided Benjamin on the course of action he was to take and he hurried to Chetnole, only about four miles away, with Elizabeth and the boys.

How much Benjamin had told his wife in advance about his intentions we will never know but she would certainly have been frightened when she realised the full implication of what he had in mind. This was a hugely risky undertaking, a matter of life over death for the people he loved most. If he were wrong the consequences for his wife and children would almost certainly be fatal.

He proceeded to move amongst farmer Elford’s cows looking for a mature pox that would be certain to ‘take.’ When he had found what he was looking for he took out a needle and with it he scratched his wife’s arm just below the elbow and inserted the matter from the pox. It was the boys’ turn next: first Robert and then Benjamin. The first authenticated vaccinations had taken place in a field in the Dorset countryside amongst a herd of cows. The next few days were to be crucial.

When word of what he had done reached his neighbours he was ridiculed but when it was learnt that Elizabeth was very ill sentiment turned to anger and indignation. Benjamin found that his friends and neighbours had taken against him for being so foolhardy and reckless with the lives of his family. However he remained undaunted and continued about his business stoically putting up with being “hooted at, reviled and pelted whenever he attended markets in his neighbourhood.”

In the boys the cowpox ran its normal course and they were soon out of danger. Elizabeth became very ill, her arm became inflamed and she had a high fever. This was a testing time for Benjamin and he called in a doctor who when told of the cause of the illness is recorded to have said “You have done a bold thing, Mr. Jesty, but I will get you through if I can.” And he did. After a while Elizabeth improved and before long the Jesty family was able to return to their usual routine. The family increased and in all the couple had four sons and three daughters.

Benjamin Jesty died on the 16th of April 1816, aged 79, and is buried in the churchyard at Worth Matravers. Elizabeth survived a further eight years and passed away on the 8th of January 1824 aged 84 years and is buried beside her husband.

Benjamin and his family had moved from Yetminster to Downshay manor, in the parish of Worth Matravers in the Isle of Purbeck. It was here that Benjamin Jesty met Dr. Bell who became vicar of Swanage in 1801 and is well known as the founder of Free Schools. He was an enthusiastic supporter of vaccination. Dr. Bell came to hear of Benjamin and how he had vaccinated his family 22 years before Jenner. He wrote to his friends in London and as a result of this correspondence Benjamin received his invitation to London and acknowledgement of his work but it was Jenner who received all the acclaim for the procedure and some £30,000 from the government to develop and encourage vaccination.