Bawdsey – Birthplace of Radar
Where Robert Watson-Watt Developed Radar, First Chain Home Station
Bawdsey Manor in Suffolk, England. This historic site offers a pleasant walk along the shingle beach, and is part of the Suffolk Area of Natural Beauty.
Bawdsey Manor is where radar was developed against the urgent background of the Second World War. This historic site is worth a visit for its wartime history, and offers a pleasant walk along part of the Suffolk Coast and Heaths Path. From here you can see Felixstowe Ferry across the river Deben.
Bawdsey Manor
The manor house was constructed in the late 1800s for Sir Cuthbert Quilter. It was requisitioned for the military in the First World war, returned to the Quilter family but was sold to the Air Ministry in 1936. The military finally left Bawdsey Manor in 1994. It is now operated as a hotel and leisure centre. You can get bed and breakfast accommodation and holiday cottages there, and the leisure centre run a number of arts and sports courses.
Radar and the Second World War
The development of faster aircraft in the Second World War meant that new methods of detecting incoming enemy aircraft were needed. At the speeds of the time, anywhere in Britain was within 20 minutes flying time from the coast. Since Britain did not have the resources to maintain enough fighter aircraft ready to intercept German bomber aircraft, the country needed a method of detecting the position of enemy aircraft sufficiently ahead of time to allow defending fighters to get into the air and to travel to intercept the raiders. Previous methods or detecting aircraft out of visual range had used large concrete sound mirrors to listen for the engines, but radio waves carried further and travelled much faster.
Robert Watson-Watt had been director of radio research at the National Physics Laboratory. The Air Ministry were looking for a way to damage incoming aircraft using radio waves and asked Watson-Watt to look at this in January 1935. He told them this would be impractical, but that radio detection and location was a possibility, and demonstrated this using a BBC transmitter to locate a Heyford bomber in February 1935, and the British development of radar had begun. After some initial work at Orfordness it was decided that this was too exposed a location for the scientists, so the research was moved to Bawdsey.
Bawdsey was the site of the first British Chain Home radar station; the 60-foot cliffs helped raise the radar antennas. Although the British used low frequencies, making for unwieldy radar stations and poor positional accuracy, the results from a series of stations were correlated, improving accuracy to the extent that the desired intercept times were achieved. Eventually 22 chain home stations were built. The advantage of radar helped the smaller British RAF to punch above their weight – in the Battle of Britain there were 640 RAF planes against 2600 Luftwaffe.
Although the last of the large 360ft transmitter towers was demolished in 2000, the transmitter block and underground bunkers remain and for the exhibition of the Bawdsey Radar Group. Consult their website for their occasional opening times. The current mast visitors can see is not one of the Chain Home aerials, it belongs to the Maritime and Coastguard Agency.
Bawdsey Quay and the Beach
There is a small car park at Bawdsey quay. From there you can walk along the shingle beach, which brings you a closer view of Bawdsey Manor. A passenger ferry operates in the summer months between Bawdsey Quay and Felixstowe Ferry.
Because of its location at the end of a peninsula, Bawdsey never gets really crowded even in summer, it is a tranquil location to spend some time and look over the sea and the birds. As you look across the water you will see evidence of an even older defensive technology – the round Martello towers which were to defend against a Napoleonic invasion that never came.
