Royal Radar Establishment - Radar, Guided Weapons and Engineering Divisions

Radar, Guided Weapons and Engineering Divisions

Although less conspicuous among academic scientists, these divisions were major players in the defence community, both in policy decision making and as an interface with industry. Development and production contracts brought staff of several companies on site, and extramural contracts strengthened ties with industry still further. "in radar alone: Plessey and Decca for aerials and waveguides, Plessey, Hilger & Watts, Clarke Chapman and Curran for millimetre-wave radar, and Mullard for precision bombing and radar reconnaissance". On returning to RRE as Director in 1962, George Macfarlane reorganized the technical departments into: Military and Civil Systems (comprising Ground Radar and Air Traffic Control, Guided Weapons and Airborne Radar groups), Physics and Electronics (comprising Physics and Electronic Groups) and Engineering. "Despite the policy shift away from fighters ... to guided weapons for UK air defence, ... RRE continued to argue for strike aircraft and kept up the necessary radar research programs."

Senior staff, of the divisions at various times included

• G.W.A (Geoffrey) Dummer, electronics engineer. His early work is described in the TRE article. His oversight of the large contingent of electronics contractors continued, and he was appointed Superintendent of Applied Physics. In 1964 he sponsored a symposium on Electronic Beam Techniques for Microelectronics at R.R.E. He published over 30 books, was responsible for much further publishing on electronics. He was awarded an MBE, the American Medal of Freedom, the Wakefield Gold Medal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, and the Cledo Brunetti Award of the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers
• W. H. (Bill) Penley, physicist. Head of Guided Weapons at time of name change. Later Director of RRE, then Controller of Establishments and Research - responsible for the whole Defence research programme.

More than 50 books were written by members of the establishment under its successive names. Details are included in the list of references below, and in the TRE article. Many more were in series that members of the staff edited.

In 1968, the Minister of Supply assured a member of parliament that the results of research at RRE on infra-red detectors would be made available to British industry.