was a competent inventor himself. Commander Sir Charles Goodeve FRS RNVR, the Admiralty’s senior scientist, said he was ‘an inventor of no mean repute’. When First Lord of the Admiralty during the First World War, Churchill was the ‘key figure behind the invention of the tank’, which was originally called a ‘landship’.
When holding that appointment again at the start of the Second World War, he developed and promoted Nellie, a giant trench-digging excavator which would enable troops to advance on enemy positions while protected so as to provide a means of ‘breaking a deadlock on the French front without repetition of the slaughter of the previous war’. He also promoted the development of floating mines for dropping into German rivers.
The conception, research, and development of new weapons and machines were undertaken by the research establishments of the three military ministries; by academia and industry; and by two small specialist departments enthusiastically supported by Churchill. These were the Ministry of Defence 1 (MD1), known colloquially as ‘Winston Churchill’s Toyshop’, and the Admiralty Department of Miscellaneous Weapons Development (DMWD), otherwise known as ‘the Wheezers and Dodgers’. These two departments developed some 50 significant inventions including limpet mines, the Navy’s Hedgehog depth charge launcher, and the infantry’s PIAT anti-tank mortar.
Inside the Toyshop
Shortly before the outbreak of war the War Office had established a new department under the direction of Lieutenant-Colonel (later Major-General) Joe Holland RE. This was called Military Intelligence (Research) (MIR) and was intended to work closely with the Foreign Office on military intelligence matters. Assisting Holland were Major (later Major-General Sir) Millis Jefferis RE and Stuart (later Colonel Stuart) Macrae, the then editor of the magazine Armchair Science.
The organisation became known to Churchill, then the First Lord of the Admiralty, when he came up with his idea for creating floating mines – a task which its boffins successfully achieved and demonstrated to various British and French VIPs. After he became Prime Minister he continued to take a close interest in the department’s activities, and he overrode senior officials who wanted it incorporated into the Ministry of Supply. He ruled in November 1940 that it should become the first subsidiary department of the Ministry of Defence – hence MD1. It was then effectively under the direct control of Churchill and Lindemann, who made weekly visits to the department.
The department’s unofficial history, written by Macrae’s son and entitled Winston Churchill’s Toyshop, states that it designed 26 entirely new weapons which went into quantity production and which ranged from small booby-traps to heavy artillery, aircraft bombs, and naval mines.
Initially housed in a small office in the War Office in Whitehall, the department moved in 1940 to Portland Place, but after that building was damaged by bombing a few months later additional premises were found at The Firs, Whitchurch, near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire. This was a country house large enough to provide offices and accommodation, and had stabling that could be converted into workshops. A telephone network was installed at Portland Place which enabled direct communication from both stations with the War Cabinet and various War Office departments.
In his history of the war, Churchill wrote: ‘This was … no time to proceed by ordinary channels in devising expedients. In order to secure quick action, free from departmental processes, upon any bright idea or gadget, I decided to keep under my own hand as Minister of Defence the experimental establishment formed by Major Jefferis at Whitchurch.
‘While engaged upon the fluvial mines in 1939 I had had useful contacts with this brilliant officer, whose ingenious inventive mind proved, as will be seen, fruitful during the whole war. Lindemann was in close touch with him and me. I used their brains and my power.’
A demonstration range, explosive filling sheds, pools for underwater experiments, and production units for certain weapons were built in the grounds and women were bussed in from a hostel to work the machines. A range at Risborough was also used to demonstrate weapons to the Prime Minister and other VIPs.
Technological Support
Churchill, in addition to being Prime Minister, assumed the title of Minister of Defence – even though there was no Ministry of Defence as such. In addition to leading the Cabinet, he presided over the War Cabinet which comprised himself and four (later six) senior ministers. Among the bodies that reported to the Cabinet was its Scientific Advisory Committee.
As new weapons were produced, Macrae, using his journalistic experience and contacts, oversaw the writing of instruction manuals which included ‘exploded’ diagrams of the weapons. Found to be more understandable than the line diagrams used in conventional War Office manuals, such diagrams came eventually to be used in all manuals.
Although MD1 originated as a War Office department, its fame and reputation were such that both the Royal Navy (RN) and the Royal Air Force (RAF) consulted it on aspects of weapon design amongst other things. As with DMWD, many ideas from would-be inventors were passed to MD1 for appraisal and testing, activities that, in the early days when they were extremely short-staffed, diverted them from their main task.
See Appendix 3 for more details.
The ‘Wheezers and Dodgers’
A remarkable department was established in the summer of 1940 and led by a senior RN officer who reported directly to the Board of Admiralty. Originally established to design better anti-aircraft protection for RN and Merchant Navy ships, its first title was the Admiralty Anti-Aircraft Weapons and Devices Department, but its name was changed to the Department of Miscellaneous Weapons Development (DMWD) after it became involved with the development of devices to attack U-boats. Not having comparable organisations of their own, both the Army and RAF referred problems and ideas to DMWD.
Many recruits to the department were transferred from HMS King Alfred, the training establishment for potential RNVR officers based in Hove, Sussex. Virtually all DMWD staff were appointed RNVR Special Branch officers; as such, they were mostly ignorant of Admiralty procedures for procurement and disbursement and found it easier to circumvent red tape than RN officers would have done. Fortunately, both the Admiralty’s Directorates of Scientific Research and of Naval Accounts adopted a tolerant attitude to DMWD’s unorthodox activities.
Gerald Pawle wrote: ‘It was the complete freedom to experiment, the freedom to tackle unorthodox projects in an unorthodox way, which was the basis of DMWD’s success. And it was greatly to the credit of the Admiralty that they allowed such a free hand to an organisation whose approach to most problems must have seemed revolutionary in the extreme.’
These sentiments were echoed by the Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fraser of North Cape who said, ‘Their job could only have been done if they were unhampered by routine work.’
For the first two years of its existence its senior technical officer was Commander Goodeve FRS RNVR, whose principal deputies were Commander Richardson RNVR, a former scientific colleague of Goodeve’s at Imperial College, and Lieutenant-Commander N. S. Norway RNVR – better known as the author Nevil Shute – an engineer who had worked on airship design pre-war.
A Penny for your Thoughts
Following the precedent set after the First World War, at the end of the Second World War a Royal Commission on Awards to Inventors was established
