Secret Weapons of World War II, page 27
Herbert went back to Eton to work on the main theory. The problem of tensions in the side-skirting of the Bridge had to be closely studied, and an answer, too, had to be found to the lateral effect of the tide flowing against the floating roadway.
Meanwhile others had joined the manage, Stanley Hunter, a pleasant, shortish, grey-haired man in his forties, was a brilliant designer and draughtsman who had worked with Hamilton on the Tote project years before. In character they were exact opposites, for Hunter was self-effacing to a degree — a humble, very modest man who shrank from the limelight. He worked long hours without ever losing his mental quickness and accuracy under fatigue, and no problem of practical engineering ever seemed to defeat him.
Ralph Jenkins, a friend of Hamilton’s who was working at the Air Ministry, also helped with the making of the models, and Toby Belfield, a lecturer in engineering at Oxford, spent a great deal of his spare time devising and testing mathematical formulae. It was odd, in a way, that Hamilton should have been able to gather round him such a devoted team, for he himself was the complete individualist, who found it difficult and irksome to work with others. Often he resented their criticism, but undeniably it acted as a stimulant. He badly needed, too, friends around him who could share the burden, for the months to come brought little tangible success, and optimism gave way to a sense of acute frustration.
The first crisis developed when a branch of the Admiralty discovered that Petty Officer Hamilton was no longer serving at M.A.P. Pointing out that he had only been loaned from the Navy for special duties there, they directed him to return to the Patrol Service forthwith.
Absorbed in his experiments, Hamilton had completely forgotten about the Patrol Service. The drafting order placed him in a quandary, for although he knew he could gain an immediate discharge from the Navy by revealing his disability, this would, he knew, have unpleasant repercussions for the kindly naval doctor who had passed him as fit, at his urgent request, at the time of Dunkirk. After frantic deliberation he set off for the Patrol Service base at Lowestoft. On the way he thought up an ingenious formula which eliminated any risk of trouble for anyone, and, to his vast relief, he found himself demobilized in a matter of hours. He was now completely free to work on his inventions, but almost immediately the financial situation produced a further crisis. The bombing of London had ceased, and the Grosvenor Hotel began to fill up again. Soon a suggestion came from the management that they might have to reopen part of the damaged wing.
Hamilton compromised by offering to pay a weekly rental of £10, but whenever their total bill dropped below “20 polite inquiries were made as to how soon they would be able to vacate their rooms. “As we have the two boys still at school, and no money coming in, there are moments of extreme financial tension,” Charlotte wrote to a friend. The tension was not alleviated by Ronald Hamilton’s own complete vagueness about money matters in general.
He had a tiny income of his own not more than £150. Charlotte had about the same. When things looked blackest there came a sudden windfall. They inherited £1000 from a relation, but it went straight into the pool and was soon swallowed up. Between May and December they spent £976. Of this, hotel bills and the purchase of materials for their experiments accounted for all but £200. With no sponsors, and the bills for bare necessities mounting steadily, it was an anxious time.
They were convinced that the inventions must succeed. So a small syndicate was formed to raise a few extra hundred pounds in cash. They sold nearly all their wedding presents, and then Charlotte, confined to a sick bed with jaundice, wrestled so successfully with Income Tax Repayment forms that they got back a further £200.
This at last gave them breathing-space.
Early in November a relation of Ronald Hamilton brought a famous figure in the transport world to the hotel to look at the models. He was very influential indeed, but, to Hamilton’s distress, he seemed to understand little of what they tried to explain to him. He prodded the home-made tank somewhat suspiciously with his walking-stick, appeared annoyed that he had got it wet, and left without vouchsafing anything. The Hamiltons were in the depths of despondency.
A well-known professor also called. He showed more sympathetic interest, but he was obviously engrossed in other matters, and, apart from sending them a formula which appeared to disprove the whole principle of Rolling Dynamic Buoyancy in toto, nothing more was heard of him.
In December hopes were raised again. Hamilton gave his largest demonstration so far to a group of very senior officers from the War Office. In the middle of it, however, one of the inspecting party remarked omnisciently that although Hamilton’s theories were most interesting there was nothing new in them. A certain Captain Walker, of the Royal Engineers, had conducted experiments on similar lines in India many years before. They had not led to anything, he recalled. After this reminiscence the War Office delegation looked less impressed, and by the time Hamilton had tracked the suggestion to its source and disproved it the Army had lost interest.
He opened negotiations with a firm in the North of England who hinted that they might finance his projects; approaches were made to a boatbuilding company, the National Physical Laboratory, and Sir John Thorneycroft, who spoke to the Controller of the Navy about Hamilton’s researches. When nothing came of this Thorneycroft did offer some practical help, suggesting that Hamilton might like to transfer his experiments to a small factory which he controlled.
Hamilton gratefully declined, preferring the peace and temporary security of the corridor. In spite of his anxieties he was intellectually at his best during this period. Working on the models, on which so much depended, he was, of course, greatly handicapped. He resented the constant need for some one to hold the electric locomotives, or the pieces of the Bridge, while he operated on them; but he had overcome his disablement so fully that once, when Charlotte was asked how her husband had injured his hand, she had to think quite hard before she realized what her questioner was talking about. Nevertheless Hamilton suffered a good deal throughout the model-making phase. He insisted on doing all the intricate conversion work on the standard toy trains himself, and one evening, struggling vainly with a minute coupling, he cried out in exasperation, “Oh, God, how I wish I had two hands!” That was the only time Charlotte ever heard him complain.
Somehow they struggled through the month of January 1942, continually contacting fresh people at the various Ministries without making any appreciable headway. Then, when they were almost at the end of their resources, came the meeting with Goodeve and Purcell.
19
SWISS ROLL AND THE LILY ISLANDS
BEFORE Goodeve set out for America he had a long talk with Purcell. Obviously there were possibilities in several of the inventor’s unusual projects, but the Wheezers and Dodgers had to concentrate on immediate requirements. Any effective link between ship and shore could play a vital part in the coming invasion, and it seemed to him that the floating bridge was a practical proposition, well worth developing. Purcell was therefore instructed to persuade Hamilton to drop his Train Ship researches, and he was taken on to the strength of D.M.W.D. as a consulting engineer, with a directive to concentrate on the bridge alone.
Finding a code name for the project was not difficult. When the prototype of the Bridge was wound up on its spindle and ready for launching it looked just like a monster Swiss Roll.
Hamilton proposed to build his bridge in thousand-foot sections. At each junction of the separate lengths there were to be rafts which would float under the two ends, and on these rafts he planned to mount windlasses for handling the anchor cables. In all, six lengths of Swiss Roll and six rafts would make up one floating roadway.
To lay the roadway on the surface of the sea special barges equipped with cranes would be needed. The sections of Swiss Roll would be carried to their destination in landing-craft; 6000 feet from the shore the crane barge would be anchored, and from this seaward base the floating roadway would be unwound to the beach. While the bridge was in use Hamilton calculated that a tension of some 20 tons would have to be applied at the seaward end by winching on the anchors of the barge.
The first step was to build an experimental, full-scale version of Swiss Roll, and by June 1942 this was taking shape in the dockyard at Portsmouth. There were problems to be overcome with the securing of the Bridge, for if normal anchors were used these would prevent ships from coming alongside. Hamilton got over this difficulty by designing sheerlegs which were flexibly mounted at each end of the runway. He then tackled a more awkward snag.
The Bridge would have to be used at all hours of the day and night and in all weathers. Adequate headlights might well be forbidden, and drivers of trucks trying to make the journey across the narrow, swaying track in pitch darkness, and perhaps heavy rain as well, faced the danger of running their vehicles into the sea. To rely on visual steering was obviously out of the question.
Hamilton then had a brainwave. He went to the L.P.T.B. depot at Chiswick, where all sorts of ingenious stability tests were carried out with London buses. There were kerbs of various heights and widths, and when the buses were run up against these obstacles special instruments measured the force exerted on the wheels as the kerbs turned them.
After discussing his problem with the technicians of the Passenger Transport Board he designed a kerb for Swiss Roll which could be placed in position after the Bridge had been anchored. To his delight he found that this steered the truck perfectly. The driver could, in fact, negotiate the floating roadway blindfold, or with his hands off the steering-wheel, and no amount of skidding caused by the waves placed the vehicle in any peril.
Other experiments were carried out to test the stability of the Bridge in rough seas. An M.T.B. was brought into the tidal basin where Swiss Roll lay, and while a lorry started down the track in one direction the M.T.B., proceeding at high speed on an opposite course, deliberately raised seven-foot waves which hurled themselves against the frail structure. The lorry rode the waves like the most seaworthy of boats, and Goodeve was able to report jubilantly to Jock Davies, “I am satisfied that the Bridge will be unharmed by storms, and will be usable in all but the worst weather.”
By midsummer they were no longer living permanently at the Grosvenor. Most of the work was done at Portsmouth, but they retained the wing in the hotel, and frequently stayed odd nights there. Peter Hamilton spent much of the summer with them at Portsmouth, and proved a tower of strength. He would work all day on the development of the Bridge, and then study until late into the night, preparing for the two scholarship examinations he faced at Cambridge. He won both of them.
Although work on Swiss Roll was proceeding satisfactorily enough at this stage, Hamilton himself now began to have doubts about its development. Never a calm man, he was living on his nerves. He drove himself at such a pace that the strain inevitably told on him and on those around him. When he was tired and on edge he lost — his self-control, making slighting, bitter criticisms of his closest friends and helpers. They, in their turn, would react violently at times, so that each side was unfair to the other.
His greatest handicap, however, was his inordinate passion for inventing, which, oddly enough, surpassed his interest in the successful completion of any of his projects. With Swiss Roll this tendency of his grew to a positive mania, and as the summer of 1942 wore on the trials at Portsmouth produced continual rows, culminating in a violent scene on the eve of the first full-scale demonstration of the Bridge to a host of senior officers from the Admiralty, the War Office, and the headquarters of Combined Operations.
For several weeks Hamilton had been in a particularly temperamental and exasperating mood, and Goodeve had found increasing difficulty in keeping a firm grip on his ideas. He was hysterical and emotional — and he could not stop inventing. One design would prove perfectly satisfactory. Then Hamilton would go away and think up a series of complicated snags, a whole chain of new mishaps which might befall the Bridge unless he embodied counter-devices in its construction. To him the Bridge was never really ready for demonstration; there was always some ‘improvement’ to be made, and on the evening of Thursday, September 24, this led to a dramatic impasse.
During the day the M.T.B. had been brought back into the basin again, and it had charged backward and forward between the wall of the jetty and the long strip of floating roadway, while Belfield, suspended from a crane, took photographs of the effect of the waves.
Hamilton then decided that further modifications must be made before Swiss Roll was shown to the V.I.P.’s next day, and on his own initiative he gave orders for the Bridge to be dismantled. His intention was to incorporate an additional form of stabilizer which had just occurred to him, and he asked for a special night shift of dockyard workers to carry out the job.
When Goodeve arrived from London that evening, and found out what was happening, he was furious. He went to the dockyard, ordered the dismantled part of the Bridge to be reassembled, and left it under armed guard. He then warned Hamilton that he was not to re-enter the dockyard that night.
Hamilton was in a frenzy. Bitterly he accused Goodeve of sabotaging his plans, and he threatened to sue him. Reasoned argument was impossible with Hamilton in this hysterical mood, and Goodeve went to bed.
The demonstration next day was, in fact, a complete success, but for some time afterwards Hamilton refused to be consoled. There were several further trials to be staged, and Goodeve, disturbed at the prospect of what Hamilton might still try to do, telephoned Charlotte and asked her to calm her husband down.
“I’ve seen so many projects ruined because the inventor has refused to stop tampering with them,” he said earnestly. Charlotte, to whom her husband’s modifications seemed, at the time, so simple to carry out, disagreed with him. But Goodeve had seen the red light.
By the end of the month the trials of Mark I had been completed. Hamilton, however, had had yet another new idea, and he was so obsessed with the belief that Swiss Roll could not work without its incorporation that he refused — for the time being, at least — to have anything more to do with D.M.W.D.’s plans for the Bridge.
The Wheezers and Dodgers had to go ahead without him, and an additional trials programme was drawn up to cover such points as the drag produced by cross-tides, the rolling up and retrieving of the sections of Swiss Roll from the water, and the resistance of the floating roadway to cannon and machine-gun fire.
Tests made by experts at H.M.S. Excellent proved that the planks of the Bridge, being awash, were very difficult to damage by gunfire. The water cushioned and reduced the blast, and only six hits were scored in 180 cannon rounds. Excellent also reported that Swiss Roll would be immune from torpedo attack and an unprofitable target for dive-bombing.
In his attempts to justify the modifications which Goodeve had condemned as impracticable Hamilton continued to experiment on lines of his own. After toiling for several weeks he himself came to the same conclusion. And by this time he was having second thoughts about his attitude to the department employing him.
Swallowing his pride, he wrote to Jock Davies, apologizing for the “differences and difficulties” and attempting to explain the reason for his actions.
“During the Small Wave trials I saw that a cross sea caused the lorry to swing across the roadway, and the kerb arms, at a tension of 24 tons, rose to a height which allowed too great an eccentricity of the wheels from the centre of the wires. I therefore added two more tension wires on each side, and this alleviated the trouble for small waves.”
He went on to raise other problems which had come out of the Large Wave trials — mainly the anchoring down of the kerb arms to strengthen the automatic steering under difficult tide and wave conditions, and the reduction of a bending moment in the bridge. One day shortly before he wrote to Davies he had journeyed to London to report how these faults could be put right, but he was incensed to find that a conference on these very points had been held without him. Whereupon he had again lost his temper with Goodeve.
He accused D.M.W.D. of wasting time by working on the wrong lines, and when Goodeve passed the ball to him, listing several points which still demanded an answer, Hamilton had attempted to provide snap solutions without sufficient thought. His extemporary answers were quickly faulted by various people present, and Hamilton, trying to improvise still further, had got himself into a worse tangle than ever.
Jock Davies replied to his apologia pleasantly but firmly, pointing out in conclusion that he was directing the development of Swiss Roll by instructions from the Board of Admiralty:
“While giving yourself and other consultant engineers as free a hand as possible I have got to criticize as well as listen, in order that my decisions and recommendations to the Board and other high authorities may be the correct ones in the light of all available information.”
After that Hamilton calmed down. It had been an agonizing period, particularly for his family, but on October 8 Charlotte was able to record in her diary the single, thankful phrase “Kiss and be friends!” The storm had spent itself at last.
Early in 1943 construction of Swiss Roll began in Bute West Dock at Cardiff, under Urwin’s supervision. When the first full-scale sections were ready sea trials were carried out at Appledore.
There were destined to be further vicissitudes before Swiss Roll played its part in the invasion of Normandy, but reference to the Bridge at Arromanches belongs to a later chapter. It is fitting here, however, to follow the strange story of Ronald Marsden Hamilton to its end.
With the production of Swiss Roll now going ahead, Hamilton’s inventive mind began to range out in new directions. He drew up preliminary designs of cross-Channel bridges, assault bridges, and aircraft runways. And he began to ponder the problem of the pier-heads which would be needed for unloading cargo from ships at sea during the invasion.
