Dear Anne,
I was given your email by my Aunt, Rosemarie Watson, who told me that you are looking for information about the Radar research during the second world war. I am the second son of Keith Watson who was the first son of about whom Rosemarie wrote to you about.
We had a copy of this photo on the wall at home for many years with a note underneath saying “Bill Watson meets the King and Queen – either at Worth Matravers or at Malvern”.
Bill had died in 1970 having disclosed very little about his activities during the war to his family.
I was pleasantly surprised a couple of years ago when I was surfing YouTube looking for information about Worth Matravers during the war and I stumbled upon this video clip:
The footage was taken at the same Royal visit depicted in the photo above. For the first part of the video, Her Majesty is without the bouquet of flowers but after leaving the Engineering Unit you can see her carrying the flowers seen in the photo above.
Unfortunately there is no footage inside the Engineering Unit only still photos. I’m guessing the light levels inside the buildings was too low for the new-fangled colour film. This video helped me pin-point not only the location but also the date – 19th July 1944.
I remember a conversation with my dad where he told me he’d been informed by other sources, long after his dad had passed away, of what Bill had worked on at Worth Matravers and later Malvern College.
Apparently Bill, as a metalworker, had been helping to machine the tooling required to perfect the Plastic Injection Moulding process that was necessary to produce parts for the Radar Antennas.
I hope this information is of interest to you.
Good luck with your research. Regards, Mr Alan Watson
`Radar Families' 