Sweet Factory Disguised: Location in watime England?

One night, I sat up talking WW2 to a friend of mine, Dennis, who told me about a strange story that I hope someone here can enlighten.

I asked Dennis exactly what hhis mother did in WW2, and he told me that she used to work in a "sweet factory".....but....she never brought home any sweets for Dennis to eat, and as a wartime kid, he always felt a little ripped off, what with the rationing and all that.

Dennis then laughed and said, "Sweet factory? My arse! I found out later that this particular factory turned out GLASS VALVES, night and day.

Dennis theorised that there could not have been a demand for glass valves on this scale....except for one possibility....

THE COLOSSUS COMPUTER at Bletchley Park required glass valves, tens of thousands of them. Each one of these valves had to be changed EVERY DAY, because their was no 'back-up' programme, and if even a single one of these valves had failed for some reason, the entire computer would have 'wiped' it's memory, setting back Bletchley Park and the national war effort in a manner that would have been irreversable. The consequences for the Battle of the Atlantic were too frightening to behold, so this factory, he thought, serviced 'Colussus' almost exclusively. To all intents and purposes from the outside, it was described, even in the rationing of wartime Britain, as a 'sweet factory'.


Does anyone know anything at all about this facility, or know any other workers in this factory? Incidently, Dennis father was an engineer for Rolls Royce, working on none other than the Merlin V12. Dennis had in his keep a manual for the Merlin with engineering notes all the way through the margins of this book. It would seem natural that a man working for this type of super important war work would also have a wife doing something for the war effort that required a proven 'closed mouth' attitude.

Any illumination from the more informed elements of this site would be most appreciated.....

Regards

Volga

 

You may get some hits on the BBC pepoples war site search engine on there. Many stories from those that served, and lived the days.

 

was there a location/area for the factory?

 

Not sure sniper.....I'm going to have to find Dennis again. somewhere in the South, and quite close to Bletchley...within a days driving distance.

Dennis was on the level about this one, and he's the only person/book Ive ever run across thats mentioned it, so it must have been a fairly closely guarded secret, as all things associated with Bletchley were in this period. Dennis's accent was Kent I think, not so far south as Wiltshire or Southampton. I'm not even sure where Bletchley Park is on a map of England. But his story is quite on the level, and it would be interesting to find another worker at this same facility, if they aren't dead already, as Dennis's mum and dad are.

 

any info,would give a starting point vb..ray..

 

While it might be the case, it should be noted that glass valves were used on WW2 Radar and Radio sets as well.

 

You can travel the whole of UK in a days driving distance Volga....I worked at Hanslope the new Bletchley, a few miles away only a few years ago.

Bletchley is near the new town or city of Milton Keynes. Close to Midlands, East midlands , and l Home counties. If fact most of England could drive to it within an hour or two...3 at a push unless your in Cornwall or Cumbria etc. The whole of the Bletchley Buckingham area in that place was alive with secret squirriling in ww2 times.

 

An extract from the Bletchley Park website (seemed a good place to start!!) has this:-

Progress with Colossus. Tommy Flowers and his team at the Post Office Research Centre, Dollis Hill, have been struggling to build and test the electronic valve ‘computer’ machine, Colossus. It is finally made to operate on about the 25th November, though using dummy traffic rather than the actual Fish intercept material for which it has been designed. Now they will have to disconnect the wiring between the individual ‘P.O. racks’ for the journey to BP. Bill Tutte in the Research Section at BP had proposed, in late 1942, that using a statistical approach it should be possible to find, for an intercepted message, some of the wheel start positions set up by the German cypher clerk on his Lorenz machine. This would be based on the supposition that a particular function of the character stream would be less random when the correct start position is used, because of the number of letter repeats in the German language and the properties of the teletype code. Because of the vast number of possible wheel start combinations that had to be tested, this could only be done using a machine; the Testery was using cryptographic methods, taking advantage of German operator errors and cribs for both wheel breaking, (that is find the positions of the teeth on the code wheels that were changed once a month at this time) and wheel setting (that is finding the start position of each of the 12 code wheels for each message). Max Newman and his small team had started work early in 1943 and the first machine to use a statistical approach to wheel setting had been completed by about May 1943. It was called Heath Robinson and the chief designer was probably Frank Morrell of Dollis Hill, with the high-speed electronic valve counters designed by Charles Wynne-Williams, a circuit expert from TRE, the radar research establishment by then at Malvern. (Charles was seconded to BP and established his own small team for constructing electronic circuits for BP ‘one-off’ equipment). Heath Robinson used two tapes that had to be kept running in synchronism, and was difficult to keep in operation. But it did demonstrate that, as the machine ran through the possible wheel-start positions, the correct start position would be shown up by a higher repeated character count. It was Tommy Flowers who realised that it should be possible to replace the key tape by storing the information it contained within the machine, leaving one tape whose content depended upon the particular intercepted message. And by building in five counters in place of the one in Heath Robinson, the time to find the settings would be considerably reduced. Using the tape sprocket holes to provide clock pulses for the whole machine, and replacing the sprocket drive with a set of friction wheels, reduced the wear on the remaining tape and enabled it to speed up to provide some 5,000 characters per second using an optical tape-hole reading system. (Jack Good, a member of the Newmanry, said that one of the greatest secrets of the war was that normal teletype tape would run at thirty miles an hour without tearing). But the problem was that the Mark I Colossus would use perhaps 1,500 valves. However Tommy Flowers was an inspired choice for designer (said to have been proposed by Alan Turing with whom he had discussed such machine building) because he was probably the one man in the country with considerable experience of obtaining long life from electronic valves in his earlier work at Dollis Hill. Flowers ran the valve heaters up slowly, and never switched them off once they were in service. He designed an extremely flexible machine that proved ready to accommodate the large variety of algorithms that would be tried in the Newmanry. Now Max Newman, who had provided the leadership and specification for the building of Colossus, knew the machine would work in principle. But would it be able to perform usefully on Fish intercepts under real service conditions at BP?

That would seem to indicate either the Post Office Centre at Dollis Hill or the Radar Research Establishment near Malvern. Given that a radar establishment would also need valves, I would suspect they were manufactured elsewhere, probably Dollis Hill. I think the valves were the same as used in Post Office Telephone Exchanges...

 

Thanks to all....if you'all know anything else, please feel free. I'm going to try to track Dennis down to narrow the search.

Regards
VB

 

This is a tough one to narrow down : Rolls Royce Merlin production also was quite widespread. Factories produced the Merlin at Derby, Crewe, Manchester and Glasgow.

 

Hi Wolga ..
tried to check out what type of tubes the colossus was build from ..and these look an awfull lot like the pre war Dutch miniwatt Philips tubes with the red and silver skincoatings ..
This would narrow the search a lot already ,as Philips only had two 'partners'in the UK , namely Mullard and PYE . PYE made radios and transmitters mostly , so my 2 cents worth is that the tube factory must have been a Mullard plant .

The next info I got out of a wiki article :
Mullard had factories in Southport and Simonstone, Burnley both in Lancashire. The latter was closed in 2004. There was also a sister factory in Durham. Other factories included those at Fleetwood (closed in 1979) and Lytham St. Annes (closed in 1972). A feeder factory at Haydock closed in 1981.

Valves for Colossus:

EF36, EF37, EF37A,(all pentodes) , 6J5(triode), 6V6, 6K8, 807, GT1C
From these tubecodes can say already that EF36,EF37,EF37A are a 100% Philips design ,and can say from stuff out of my HAM shack that Mullard made batches of 807's and 6V6 amplifier tubes too . GT1C was a thyratron wich is an uncommon tube type used for a timebase in radar equipment .6k8 was a doubletube triode-hexode wich was used for frequency stepping/changing ,a not too common type either .
6V6 and 807 are both pentode amplifier tubes still used today in amps , have a peek in your guitar amp , chances are big you'll see 4 6v6 or 6l6 as amplifier endtubes ,many ww2 transmitters used 807's as the main transmitter tube ,(WS19), and is also used for audio amps today ..great sounding tube and old batch Mullards are well sought after today.

Tubes rock !! Real audiogear from the days people still bought a soundsystem to listen to with their ears open and their eyes closed ,instead of looking at it with eyes open and ears closed with the transistorized crap of today lol ..

 

Nice work from all of you! Gosh, you buggers put me to shame with your research...but I'm too old fashioned for "Googling", (to my detriment I suppose)...I'll have to change my ways if I want to keep up with the Jones....or Heinrich's in this case!

Regards
VB

 

None of which gets us closer to the location of this "sweet factory". If Dennis's Mum met his father who was working for Rolls Royce, there must have been somewhere that this occurred!!
Dollis Hill is West London, near the start of the present day M1 motorway. Bletchley Park, too is not far from the M1 motorway. The old A5 would have been the wartime route and is about 42 miles in distance (OK, 70 km for those of you too young for Imperial measures!!).

IF it is Dollis Hill, then we need to make a link to Rolls Royce round there.... perhaps Hendon or RAF Northolt?

Anyone got other ideas?

 

To be honest if we are going to do the Sherlock thing then we need to work out if sweets were rationed officially and if is at that time then the Germans would have know that and known any sweet factory should be making things that go bang not gob stoppers so the whole thing may be a little errr....love hearty....

 

Well, if she worked at a tube factory it has nothing to do with a RAF base or Rolls Royce ..RAF did never make any tubes ,only contractors did . Just look at the tubes colossus used to see it can only be one brand Mullards

question is more if the list of mullards plants given in the wiki is complete .

Below the original pic is the colossus rebuilt and a link to some more technical info about it :
http://www.ivorcatt.com/47c.htm

 

Dollis Hill was a top-secret Post Office Research establishment ( also the location of 'Paddock', a secret underground HQ intended for War Cabinet use). I'm fairly certain that no manufacturing was done there.....

 

I found an article which speaks of an Ekco valve factory in Malmesbury, Wilts, which
is, what- 60 miles from Bletchley?
Ekco Memories by Jack Leonard

 

Ecko is famous radiobrand , but I never heard of them making commercial or VT contract tubes themselves . I think its more likely to be a radio assembly plant though .

Ecko was definately in the circle of ontractors PYE , Philips ,Murphy and Mullard all belonged to . These brands worked together intensively and made use of each others products in their final products .
Reading the article can see its about radar transmitting equipment wich works in the VHF range ..but that equipment is very different as the tubes the colossus is built from . Radar tubes are for very high freqent use, these are not the glasscontainers people so easily identify with radio tubes but are MuMetal covered cavity's ,looking very different in shape too.

 

In another thread here on the forum by the historian is link to an article wich has something interesting about colossus being called bombe in the article:
Bletchley Park calls for engineers for Bombe rebuild - ZDNet.co.uk

The Bombes were built by the British Tabulating Machine company, based in Letchworth. By the end of the war, Bletchley Park boasted 210 machines, which were subsequently broken up and destroyed to maintain secrecy at the start of the Cold War.

so after a search found this :
The Second World War

Summer of 1940. The first Bombe was called Victory. A year later there were around 6 Bombes in operation at Bletchley Park in Hut 11. The Bombes were large, about 1 metre high, 2 metres long and 1 metre wide and weighed around one ton. They were delivered to their locations on ordinary lorries covered with tarpaulin so as not to arouse suspicion. One machine, designed to interpret the Naval Enigma, was made by linking four Bombes together. Known as the 'Giant' it was too heavy to move and so was operated at the Letchworth factory. When it achieved a result, a special number to Bletchley Park was telephoned with the message 'the giant has caught a whale'.
Production increased and so in Spring 1942 they took over the Ascot Training Centre and a month later took up further space at the Spirella Factory. At Spirella teams of several hundred staff, predominately women, worked day and night assembling unique wired rotors. By 1942 BTM were producing at least one Bombe per week.
Eventually the decoding operation required more space and so in 1943 operations were moved to Stanmore and Eastcote and the Bombes at Bletchley Park remained purely for training purposes. Around 1200 WRNS were housed at Stanmore and Eastcote to operate the machines.
Around 210 Bombes were built in total. Although Colossus had the glamour of being the first computer and decoding Hitler's secret high-command wireless, it was the Bombes that decoded the 'unbreakable' Enigma machine and so heralded the success of many allied missions. All the Bombes were destroyed after the war and many people who lived in Letchworth at the time, including BTM employees, were probably unaware of the important and valuable work they were undertaking.

Still nothing about a 'sweets factory' that hits the nail yet ,but maybe its spirella? ..to be continued

 

Thankyou Heinrich....

I'm going to track down my local source, Dennis, to confirm exactly where his mother worked....kepp posting, the veil is gradually being lifted.