Learning about the cutting-edge scientific discoveries in Datchet

The Station, a government-run civilian organisation, was located there in 1920 because its Board’s first chairman was Sir Henry Jackson, Admiral of the Fleet, and the Admiralty Compass Observatory was already established at Ditton House and Park.

Robert Watson-Watt at the installation of his equipment at the Science Museum

During the 1920s, Edward Appleton and Robert Watson-Watt led research into the Earth’s upper atmosphere. Using a transmitter in Windsor Great Park to send radio waves to Ditton, they proved the existence of radio-wave reflecting layers at a height of about 100kms which they referred to as the ‘ionosphere’. This was the beginning of a scientifically-important series of ionospheric frequency measurements. Understanding of these phenomena also improved radio direction-finding, navigation aids and locating of thunderstorms.

Watson-Watt is particularly remembered for the wartime development of radar. In 1935 he had been approached by the Air Ministry which had the impractical notion that some sort of death-ray might be invented to disable pilots in enemy planes. Watson-Watt replied that ‘attention is being turned to the still difficult but less unpromising problem of radio detection’. His memorandum titled Detection and Location of Aircraft by Radio Methods has been described as one of the most prophetic scientific documents ever produced. It suggested using reflected radio energy and proposed the use of rotating beams to show range and direction on a cathode-ray oscilloscope.

He proved his theory near Daventry, when apparatus from Ditton transmitted a beam which ‘illuminated’ the presence of an aircraft passing through it. (In 1958, the apparatus was rescued from a store hut in Ditton Park and presented to the Science Museum.) A strict security blanket was immediately imposed and several Ditton staff were moved to Bawdsey on the Suffolk coast where they formed the nucleus of what became the vast complex of Britain’s wartime radar system. This was, of course, a decisive factor in the eventual defeat of the Luftwaffe.

A Datchet Village Society visit to Ditton House and Park, 2015. Photo credit : Adrian Giddins

During the International Geophysical Year of 1957, the RRS was one of four World Data Centres for the collection and exchange of ionospheric information. In the same year the first artificial satellite, Sputnik One, began to orbit Earth and provided a new tool for investigating the upper atmosphere.

From this time on, the Station’s work was largely bound up with space science and although rockets were not launched from Ditton Park, many of the scientific experiments they carried were developed and controlled from there. The Station gained international recognition for its expertise in data observation, prediction and calculation.

In 1973 the RRS was renamed Appleton Laboratory and its major function was to support the growing British space programme. Investigations included the measurement of the Sun’s corona and the Northern Lights. A few years later, the Ditton facilities and many of its staff were merged with the larger Rutherford Laboratory at Chilton, Oxfordshire, where technical resources were greater. This move was completed in 1981.

Appleton Laboratory. Ditton Park, Slough. 1978

With thanks to the late Professor Henry Rishbeth, a former Deputy Director of the RSS, on whose talk to Datchet Village Society this article is based; and the Ditton Park Archive at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. Local historian Janet Kennish is president of Datchet Village Society and author of several books about the village and www.datchethistory.org.uk.