Radar Men: A. P. Rowe and John Strath in War and Peace

By Don Sinnott

World War II defined its heroes and villains. There are many books on national leaders like Churchill and Hitler, generals like Montgomery and Rommel. Less has been written about the civilian scientists, engineers, and technicians whose work produced military innovations that drove the direction and outcome of that terrible conflict.

This book is a connected and interlaced narrative of two men who were World War II civilian scientists. It is a non-technical portrait of two twentieth-century life stories against a backdrop of war and peace, which are important in both historical context and as illustrations of the human condition lived in extraordinary circumstances. The lives of A. P. Rowe and John Strath intersected in the British development of radar in the 1930s and 1940s and then diverged into critical roles in Britain and Australia after the war.

Rowe and Strath worked in Britains epic development of radar defences, without which the 1940 aerial Battle of Britain would have been lost. Rowe led what has been termed as one of the most successful research establishments of all time, focussed on the development and deployment of radar; Strath was a junior member of that establishment.

After the war, both men moved to Australia where Rowe, after a short and unhappy involvement as lead scientific adviser on the development of Australia's Woomera rocket range and Australian defence, was for a decade a highly contentious vice chancellor of the University of Adelaide. Strath became involved in development of the British atomic weapon and monitoring of nuclear test effects in Australia and then became the prime mover for development of what is now Australias Jindalee Operational Radar Network, a major component of the countrys long-range defence surveillance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Aug 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524516703

Don Sinnott

Donald (Don) Sinnott has published many professional papers, articles, and book chapters in an extended career as a scientist and engineer. He now turns his hand to writing interlaced biographies of two scientists, one known to him personally, who played significant yet underappreciated roles in World War II and the uneasy peace that followed. As a researcher in radio and radar technologies, Don worked for many years in the science and technology agency, supporting and advising Australia’s Department of Defence. He played a major role in Australia’s development of over-the-horizon radar, embodied in Australia’s world-leading project Jindalee, before moving to senior defence management positions. In 2000 he became CEO of a university-based centre driving collaborative research across academic, business, and government sectors and subsequently became an independent consultant, serving these sectors. He has been and remains as an adjunct professor with the University of Adelaide, Australia, where he has taught and supervised higher-degree students. Don holds degrees in electronic engineering (including a PhD from Syracuse University, New York, USA), is a fellow of both the Australian Institution of Engineers and of the US-based Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. In 2014 he was awarded the Engineers Australia M. A. Sargent Medal, for which the citation refers to his ‘eminence and leadership’ in his field. Don’s previously published work aimed at a general readership includes collaborating in a biography of a Sudanese refugee and contributions to local history.

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Copyright © 2016 by Don Sinnott.

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Units of measurement and currency

Prologue

1. The birth of airborne warfare: The springboard for A. P. Rowe and John Strath

2. John Strath

3. Britain’s air defence

4. Strath’s undergraduate years

5. Early days in radar

6. A. P. Rowe’s rise to power

7. Rowe assumes control of British radar development

8. Strath recruited to the war effort

9. Strath’s first tasking

10. Radar at centimetre wavelengths

11. From Swanage to Malvern

12. The Malvern years

13. The end of the war in sight: What next for Strath?

14. What next for Rowe?

15. Strath’s role in the British nuclear program

16. Rowe becomes vice-chancellor of the University of Adelaide

17. Strath’s move to Australia

18. Vice-Chancellor Rowe’s honeymoon ends

19. Nuclear test monitoring and radar discoveries

20. Rowe’s star begins to wane as Strath’s rises

21. Strath’s new friendships: The US connection

22. Rowe’s disillusionment

23. First steps in an Australian OTHR program

24. Rowe’s final years

25. Strath’s plan is approved

26. The Jindalee OTHR project becomes a reality

27. Dealing with the sceptics

28. Jindalee success and some dissatisfaction

29. Strath’s retirement years

30. Rowe and Strath: An appreciation

Appendix: The ionosphere and over-the-horizon radar (OTHR)

Abbreviations and acronyms

Bibliography

About the Author

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am indebted to Britain’s Imperial War Museum, Lambeth Road, London, for allowing me access to their research room and to the papers of A. P. Rowe that they hold. In addition, I acknowledge the museum’s permission to use a photograph for which they hold the rights, as stated in the photograph’s caption. The sources of other photographs are also acknowledged in their captions.

With permission from Australia’s Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO), now Defence Science and Technology Group, I have drawn extensively from a monograph on Australia’s over-the-horizon radar (OTHR) project that I wrote in 1988 while employed by the Australian Public Service and for which the Commonwealth of Australia holds the copyright. Likewise, I acknowledge their permission to include several photographs and diagrams for which the Commonwealth of Australia holds the copyright.

In addition to those who assisted in compiling the 1988 OTHR monograph, notably the late Robert Steele (Bob) Edgar, whom I have acknowledged in that document, I acknowledge several other former work colleagues who provided amplifying details and proofread sections for this book relating to Strath. These include Warwick Kemp, Alan Padgeham, Fred Earl, Malcolm Golley, Stuart Anderson, and the late Peter Twiss. My US friends Ed Lyon and Charles (Bert) Fowler have also provided valuable details. Prof Chris Baker was helpful in accessing and identifying details from publications held by the Great Malvern, UK, library and in reading the final manuscript. Richard Brabin-Smith, former Australian Chief Defence Scientist, and Prof Hugh Griffiths of University College London have also been very helpful in reading and commenting on the manuscript.

John Strath’s daughter, Anne Fletcher, has permitted access to her late father’s personal papers and to her personal notes of conversations with her father at various times. Without this material, I doubt that the record of Strath’s life would have been sufficiently complete to allow this book to be written. Anne has also assisted by proofreading a near-final draft of the chapters covering her late father’s life, offering corrections and contributing several sections of quoted text.

The University of Adelaide’s Archives and Barr Smith Library Rare Books and Special Collections have provided rich sources of unpublished material relating to Rowe, and I acknowledge the university’s permission to publish several photographs. The university’s archives officer, Andrew Cook, has been particularly helpful in advising and assisting my navigation through the archive collection.

I am indebted to my editor, Valerie Williams, and finally, to my ever-patient wife, Wendy, who has tolerated with good grace my withdrawals from our active life together to work on this project. She has also been a valuable and much-appreciated sounding board and proofreader.

UNITS OF MEASUREMENT AND CURRENCY

In this book, SI units (Système international d’unités) are used for lengths and distances (for example, m, km), with the Imperial equivalent shown in parentheses where the figure has historical or other significance. Currency is shown either as pounds (£) without qualifying as sterling or Australian pounds, but relying on the context in which the amount appears, or as Australian dollars ($). Australia’s change of currency from pounds to dollars occurred in 1966 with two dollars being equivalent to one pound.

PROLOGUE

The heroes and villains whose careers were defined by World War II have attracted many historians and biographers. National leaders like Churchill and Hitler, and generals like Montgomery and Rommel, have been lionised or reviled in print. The lives of those in supporting roles in the crucible of war from 1939 to 1945 are less well documented, at least in the general public’s perception. Among those whose stories are worthy of recognition are the civil servants and lesser statesmen, who provided crucial advice for the deliberations of their better-known superiors, and the army colonels, naval captains, air force group captains, and subordinate ranks of all services who determined the outcomes of major military actions. The stories of the scientists, engineers, and technologists who delivered inventions that changed the nature of warfare and possibly its outcome warrant particular attention. Within this last group, which has attracted limited coverage, are the two subjects of this book.

My initial motivation for writing this book was to capture a picture of John Strath, a man who, in his early career, was a junior scientist in the epic development of radar in Britain prior to and during World War II and who subsequently moved to Australia. I worked for Strath from 1972 to 1981 within what was then Australia’s Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO). Some of this book’s material about Strath has been sourced from a 1988 publication that I wrote while employed in a senior research leadership position at the DSTO Laboratory in Salisbury, South Australia.

It had been mooted at that time that the DSTO Laboratory might prepare and publish a series of historical monographs on major elements of its research and development to commemorate Australia’s bicentennial year of European settlement in 1988. I wrote to senior management suggesting that a worthwhile title in the series would be the development of over-the-horizon radar (OTHR), over which Strath had presided. I had been involved in this work in various ways for the preceding fifteen years and felt, when I made my suggestion, that it had been under-reported, owing to the perceived severity of national security constraints. What I had in mind was the assignment of a security-cleared technical writer to research the available records and carry out the writing task under the editorial guidance of professional staff able to make judgements about the boundaries set by security constraints. My suggestion for the title was greeted with enthusiasm by the laboratory director but the option of a technical writer was not. I was commended for the suggestion and told to ‘get to work on it’.

So I did, although I had not sought the task. My security clearances at the time allowed me to access the large collection of official files held on the subject, some of which were highly classified. Over a period of several months, in most weeks, I set aside a slice of time to work on the load of files delivered on a hand truck by a junior clerk on the morning of the assigned weekly ‘history project’ day. Of great assistance in my work was a typescript provided by a former member of my staff, Robert Steele (Bob) Edgar, who worked closely with John Strath in the 1950s and 1960s and who is introduced in the story in that context. Bob also willingly responded to subsequent requests for additional and amplifying details on which I drew in writing the monograph. Oral records from current and past Department of Defence officials are also acknowledged in the text of what emerged as the 1988 monograph, The Development of Over-the-Horizon Radar in Australia.¹

Producing that publication nearly thirty years ago meant that I had a useful trove of material needed for writing about John Strath’s life in Australia. I needed much more, particularly about his life in Britain before his emigration to Australia, and sought to source this directly from Strath in meetings with him during his retirement years. By adding this oral material to that drawn from my monograph, I was able to produce a preliminary written draft that Strath and I reviewed and edited together in the last few years of his life. He anticipated with some pleasure the publication of his story, as I had written it to that point, but I was far from satisfied that the picture I had of a very reticent man was sufficient. His reticence continued to his death and my incomplete manuscript languished.

After Strath’s death in February 2009, I asked his daughter, Anne Fletcher, whether there were further records among her father’s papers that I might see. She assured me that, if such records appeared as she sorted the papers, she would let me know. And she did. Anne was good enough to loan me a shopping bag of notes and papers that included her father’s personal autobiographical notes, a nine-thousand-word record he compiled in his retirement years. In the conversations I had had with Strath in the last decade of his life, while I was attempting to piece together his life story, he spoke of many of the events recorded in his autobiographical notes, but at no stage did he offer me access to this written record. In retrospect, our process was a curious one in which I would listen to him and note what he said then go away and return with my best effort at recording a connected narrative based on what he had told me. He would then review and, in some cases, correct my record. All the time, he was aware that his own written autobiography was stored somewhere in his cluttered home unit, but it was never proffered nor did he use it when I was present as a prompt for his, at times, faltering memory for dates. At one of our meetings, he mentioned that he had written a record ‘for the family’ that contained more personal details, the implication being that the details were far too personal to be revealed to me at the time! Thus, the two of us persevered in a recording task that would have been far easier had he been prepared to share his autobiographical text.

When I was able to access Strath’s very formal, third-person autobiographical text after his death, I discovered that it overlapped with much of the record I had produced from our conversations. It excluded some material that I had prised from him only after intense questioning, offered additional insights into other areas, and in general, complemented rather than replaced my record as it existed at the time of his death. He had been a little more open in speaking with me, particularly on some scientific and technical matters, than he had in his personal notes, but only a little. Frustratingly, the elements of his life that had aroused most of my curiosity remained substantially unrecorded.

There was, however, further gold to be mined in the shopping bag of documents Anne had loaned me: she had jotted down conversations she had had with her father at different times over the years. Through careful sorting and assembly of these snippets, I was able to fill in many of the missing details I was after. Further, Anne responded to my request to review the near-final draft chapters of my manuscript that covered her father’s life and was able to augment and correct a number of areas.

I am well aware that the processes I have been obliged to follow in assembling John Strath’s biography have meant that some of what follows relies to a major extent on what Strath himself passed to me directly or indirectly. Corroborating evidence is often absent or unobtainable, so I lay myself open to potential charges of single-source bias. But in cases where I could compare information with a source other than Strath, I have found any differences to be only in emphasis and not in substance. This gives me some confidence in the general reliability of my record and reassurance that any embroidering of the tales is minimal.

Yet I concluded that my ‘Strath, the radar man story’ stood without adequate context. I needed a broader canvas on which to paint, with the backdrop in which Strath’s life could be situated being Britain’s and Australia’s twentieth-century defence thinking. To fully portray this background, was there another largely unrecorded figure with whom he could be compared and contrasted, a figure with an overlapping story based around the development of radar in these two countries?

I concluded that the figure I sought was A. P. Rowe, a man for whom Strath had worked for some years in wartime Britain in the field of radar development. He was almost always referred to as A. P. Rowe rather than by his forenames, Albert Percival. Rowe’s closest colleagues, and those less close but confident they would not be overheard by him, sometimes referred to him as Jimmy. Strath had referred to Rowe as Jimmy on the rare occasions on which he had mentioned his wartime boss during our meetings.

As I discovered, Rowe was in many ways a heroic but unappreciated figure whose British wartime achievements in the development of radar and whose post-war contributions to Australia’s defence and university sectors warrant a more complete and balanced assessment than has thus far been offered by his cameo appearances in historical treatments. His life and Strath’s life overlapped, and their stories are in many ways complementary. I felt I had found my second man. A joint biography of Strath and Rowe would not only be valuable in recording lives worthy of recognition but would also illuminate a period in Britain and Australia from the 1930s to the early 2000s from the perspective of the scientists who applied their minds to their countries’ defence during tumultuous years and, in Rowe’s case, to the education of their citizens post-war.

Sourcing material for a biography on Rowe then became my challenge. I had never had an opportunity to meet the man, who died in 1976, and details of his life proved far more elusive than those I had been able to access about Strath. Nevertheless, from what records are available, a picture emerged of a complex and highly capable man who, like Strath, lived through some of the twentieth century’s most momentous times. The lives of Rowe and Strath intersected for a few years during World War II, and post-war, both men migrated to Australia. I came to see that their interlaced biographies would sit well in a single volume as illustrations, comparing and contrasting the human condition as played out in times of war and peace and the ways in which countries, old and new, apply science in pursuit of national defence objectives.

Primary sources for my record of Rowe’s life were the collection of his papers held by Britain’s Imperial War Museum, a collection of his late-life correspondence with the late Sir Marcus (Marc) Oliphant and archival records, both these latter collections held by the University of Adelaide. Although there is anecdotal evidence that most of Rowe’s personal wartime documents were inadvertently destroyed immediately after the war, Rowe wrote three books that, with their moderation by independent sources, were an additional source of personal details. Secondary sources were Rowe’s many appearances in books and articles in which aspects of Britain’s World War II technology development have been addressed. In addition, publications covering aspects of Rowe’s life in Australia post-war in the role of defence adviser and university vice-chancellor provided further details. Collectively, the information I gathered about Rowe was comparable in scope and detail to that which I had gathered about Strath so I felt satisfied that their stories could be treated in a balanced way in a joint and interlaced biography.

Rowe achieved high office in Britain’s World War II effort and played a crucial, possibly definitive, role in determining the outcome of the war: Strath played a supporting, but not crucial, role in World War II and in the Cold War that followed. When they moved to Australia post-war, both encountered major obstructions to the dreams they sought to pursue in their new land. Rowe returned to England disillusioned and bitter; Strath stayed in his adopted land and ultimately saw his dream in Australia realised, but with some personal regrets and dissatisfaction. Both men were complex characters, neither totally to be admired nor totally to be condemned. Both paid a price for their success. Both emerge more adequately in a record in which their lives are painted jointly against a backdrop of the times they shared. And both would be profoundly surprised to find their lives described in the same volume.

______________________

1.   Sinnott, D. H., The Development of Over-the-Horizon Radar in Australia, DSTO Bicentennial History Series, Australian Government Publishing Service, 1988 (Available as https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234524230_The_development_of_over-the-horizon_radar_in_Australia.)

1

The birth of airborne warfare: The springboard for A. P. Rowe and John Strath

The armistice of 11 November 1918 that brought World War I to a close ushered in a twenty-year period between World War I and World War II in which A. P. Rowe’s career was launched. In these years, his career direction was defined, he was able to cultivate influential friends and mentors, and he began to assert himself in a leadership role that became a crucial component in Britain’s survival in the perilous early years of World War II. John Strath, eighteen years Rowe’s junior, emerged in the latter years of this period. He too would be profoundly influenced by the events of World War II, finding his career direction defined by his wartime role as a staff member of the radar development organisation led by Rowe.

The professional lives of both men shared common drivers in the emergence of airborne warfare in World War I, further development of military aviation during the interwar years, and as the inevitability of war with Germany loomed in the 1930s, Britain’s realisation that in any war with a European power, it would be at the mercy of cross-channel airborne attack. Up to 1935, Britain had no adequate means of defending itself against such attacks and no process seemed to be in place that would allow air defences to be developed.

Rowe and Strath, among many others, became players in a desperate race to develop radar and other technologies and apply them to the air defence on which Britain’s survival would depend. Subsequently, they turned their focus to the application of radar to offensive operations. This story is well documented as the classic tale of Britain’s development of radar defences in circumstances of near panic and the linking of these defences to a comprehensive national air-situation awareness network in which fighter aircraft deployments were managed. Likewise, many analyses have been undertaken of the political and technical backdrop against which these developments played out, with the bibliography providing a sampling of this literature. The account by historian David Zimmerman¹ is the most comprehensive and credible analysis of the interwar political and technical environment in which radar development took place. In writing joint and interlaced biographies set in these times, my intent is not to replicate these accounts but to draw out and summarise the key elements crucial in determining the destinies of both Rowe and Strath.

The popular image of air warfare during World War I (1914–18) is of swashbuckling pilots throwing frail aircraft, constructed of timber and fabric, through violent manoeuvres in aerial dog fights over Europe. Up to a point, this image conveys an accurate reflection of aircraft development up to 1918. World War I aircraft were made of timber and fabric to minimise weight to match the limited thrust available from the aircraft engines of that time. Many were constructed as biplanes or triplanes so they could generate sufficient lift at the low speeds of which they were capable. Heavier, faster aircraft of greater range came later. Therefore, the early stages of World War I did not feature squadrons of heavy bombers able to inflict serious damage on ground troops, equipment, and infrastructure. Moreover, until 1917, the British Isles were not troubled by aerial attack by aeroplanes: the German bombers developed at that time did not have the range to allow cross-channel strategic bombing so their operations were restricted to the Western Front and other European theatres of war.

To carry out the strategic bombing of London in 1915 and 1916, Germany employed Zeppelin airships. These airships were giant versions of today’s helium-filled ‘blimps’ but were filled with highly inflammable hydrogen. During the interwar years, airship design matured with airships becoming the fastest and most comfortable mode of trans-Atlantic transport for tens of thousands of passengers. The age of airships for mass public transport came to an end with the fiery loss of the Hindenburg in 1937 while landing in New Jersey. With the demise of commercial use of airships, there was also limited subsequent use of hydrogen-filled airships in warfare: in World War II airships played only a minor surveillance role.

However, in World War I, Zeppelin airships had played a significant role as a machine of aerial warfare. Although large, slow, and cumbersome, the Zeppelin airship had ample capacity to carry bomb loads and had sufficient range to launch attacks on London from occupied Belgium. Initially the Zeppelin airships, while highly visible targets, were not easy to bring down as the immense volume of hydrogen gas held within their fabric meant they could stay aloft long enough to return to base, even with many holes shot in their fabric. The Royal Air Force (RAF) eventually discovered that Zeppelin airships could be destroyed by targeting them with incendiary bullets that ignited their hydrogen gas, but in the short term, until that effective countermeasure was implemented, cross-channel Zeppelin bombing raids caused damage and casualties in Britain² that, although relatively minor in scale, were highly damaging to British morale.

Heavy bombers capable of attacking London and returning to German-occupied Europe appeared in the later years of World War I. By mid-1917, Germany had developed the Gotha G.V twin-engine bomber with an operational range of over 800 km, ample for reaching London carrying a 500 kg bomb load from occupied Europe and returning to a base on the European mainland. Daytime Gotha G.V raids on London in June and July of that year were launched with only one German aircraft lost to defending British aircraft. In just two raids, almost 150 bombs were dropped on the capital and over 800 people were killed or injured. This scale of death and destruction visited on the British civilian population, rather than on soldiers on European battlefields, had an immediate and devastating effect on the confidence of the British people. If the Germans could reach their country unopposed and cause havoc from the air, all seemed lost—invasion must be the next step.

Urgent action was demanded by a panicked British public and urgent action was the response. Air defences were established based on the coordination of visual sightings of attacking bombers combined with anti-aircraft artillery and squadrons of radio-equipped fighter aircraft. The radio-linked system that coordinated sightings and managed defensive deployments became, in modern-day terms, an effective air defence command and control structure. The system achieved major success against subsequent daytime raids, with a little help from the weather and, on at least one occasion, somewhat fortuitous offshore sightings that allowed earlier than usual warning of an attack.

It was inevitable that Germany, in a pattern to be repeated in World War II, would next turn to night-time raids on London and strategic British centres, exploiting the extreme difficulty defenders faced in locating and targeting intruding aircraft at night. Initially, Britain could not mount adequate defences against these night-time raids. Under pressure from incessant public agitation, the government directed very significant resources to the London area’s air defences, and in the absence of a ground-based visual warning system that was effective at night, radio-equipped fighters flew standing night-time air combat patrols in often vain hopes of glimpsing German bomber squadrons en route.

The command and control system was further developed to a degree of sophistication that provided a model for what was to be employed in World War II. However, it was always limited by an acute shortfall in knowledge of enemy aircraft positions. As reported by Zimmerman,³ the last and largest German raid on London occurred on 19 May 1918. Of the thirteen aircraft that bombed London, six were destroyed by defences and three crashed on landing at home bases. While this might be regarded as a bare pass in a test of Britain’s air defences, for Germany it was a level of losses not acceptable to the High Command. For the remaining six months of the war, Germany’s strategic bomber force was directed away from cross-channel strategic bombing and to closer-range targets in Europe. In the British public’s assessment, the country’s air defences had delivered the outcome sought—no more bombs rained down on London through to the end of the war, with more pressing matters for public concern being the tragic attrition warfare in Europe.

In the years following World War I, the view that British vulnerability to the threat of strategic bombing seemed to have been countered in a short space of time served to blur public memories of bombing raids on civilian populations. Not so blurred were the memories of key military strategists and planners: the raids had impressed on them the fact that a potent and terrifying new capability had entered warfare. Military planners were acutely aware that, while their World War I air defence measures had achieved a measure of success, they would not be robust in the face of new generation aircraft. The Gotha G.V bomber and the subsequently developed Giant bomber (Zeppelin-Staaken R.VI) had a top speed of around 140 km/h, and it was expected that the next generation of bombers might fly at twice this speed. Such speeds would overwhelm the response time of the marginally successful air defence systems used during World War I. Furthermore, these faster bombers would be escorted by new generations of fast, long-range fighter aircraft, presenting the defending fighter aircraft with a far more challenging task. Then Britain would be vulnerable to a scale and type of air attack that it had never before faced.

Britain had no adequate defences against the emerging strategic bomber and the changes it would bring to warfare. From the mid-1930s, some of Britain’s finest scientists, engineers, military planners, politicians, and administrators focused attention on this critical air defence inadequacy. Among them was one who was to play a major role in building Britain’s air defences to a level that played a pivotal, possibly definitive, part in ensuring Allied victory in World War II. At this time, he was a university student with no notion of the direction his career was to take.

Albert Percival Rowe was born on 23 March 1898 in Launceston, Cornwall, England. His father, also Albert, was a sewing machine agent; his mother’s name was Mary Annie, née Gouge. Albert’s sister, Clara Winifred, five years older than he was, was musically gifted. By the time Albert was of school age, the Rowe family had moved to Barnstaple, Devon. By 1911, they had relocated again to Southsea, Portsmouth, where his father had a job as an insurance agent, his sister was teaching music from the family home, and as was usual with married women at that time, his mother did not have a paid job.

The family’s income was clearly limited, and as a result, young Albert’s education would have been tailored to their circumstances. After his years of compulsory education and despite his very evident intelligence, instead of undertaking higher education aimed at a university course, in 1913 Albert, aged 15, signed on with the Admiralty as an apprentice electrical fitter at the Royal Naval Dockyard, Portsmouth. As an apprentice, he began taking classes at the Portsmouth Naval Dockyard School. This educational option ensured that he would be supported as well as educated, relieving his parents of further financial responsibility in providing for their son.

The Portsmouth Naval Dockyard School, dating from the early nineteenth century, was one of several dockyard schools established in Britain to provide a sound technical education in craft areas important in the Royal Navy. The schools drew most of their students from the working class, so Rowe found himself among boys from backgrounds similar to his own. Apprentices in the Upper School at Portsmouth, which Rowe entered on merit following a challenging entrance examination, were released from their normal duties to attend classes on two afternoons and three evenings a week over a period of four years. Not only was entry to the school highly selective, so too was advancement. At the end of each year, only 50% of each year’s class was advanced to the next year, a selection policy designed to ensure that the Royal Navy ended up with the cream of aspirants for much-sought-after craftsman careers. The quality of teaching was high and those who graduated were assessed as having the equivalent of a third class honours degree in engineering.

Rowe distinguished himself in his work and studies, easily making the top 50% in each year. Towards the end of his four-year apprenticeship, his teachers encouraged him to apply for a scholarship to enter a recognised university and complete a degree. Relatively few options were available, but one scholarship in particular offered a way forward for apprentices of high calibre. The Whitworth scholarship, sourced from a trust fund established in 1868 through the estate of the eminent British engineer Sir Joseph Whitworth (after whom the British standard for screw threads is named), stated its intent as being ‘to bring science and industry closer together’. The scholarship conditions required an applicant to have excellent academic and practical skills, which had been clearly demonstrated by the young Rowe in his school work and apprenticeship. He applied for and was awarded a Whitworth scholarship in 1917, providing funds, albeit modest, to support university studies.⁴

However, Rowe deferred his acceptance of the offer, signing up to join the British armed forces in the closing years of World War I. Demobilised in 1919, he then took up his scholarship at Imperial College London where he was able to claim credits for his pre-enlistment period as an apprentice by being excused from first-year studies.⁵ After three years’ study, he graduated in 1921 as an Associate of the Royal College of Science (ARCS) with first class honours in physics. In 1922 he commenced graduate studies in the Royal College of Science within Imperial College London, under Professor H. L. Callendar, supporting himself through his postgraduate diploma year in the Aeronautical Department by taking on duties as a laboratory demonstrator. His graduate-year studies and research in air navigation resulted in his being awarded a diploma of Imperial College (DIC) and a bachelor of science (BSc) degree.

In an incredibly valuable quirk of fate, early in the course of his graduate project studying aircraft compasses, Rowe fell under the influence of Harry Egerton Wimperis, a distinguished British aeronautical engineer, who largely determined the direction of his future life. Son of an Australian merchant in London, Wimperis was a brilliant graduate of Imperial College London and the University of Cambridge. He was a prolific inventor and developer of innovative military equipment, most particularly for aeronautical applications. He is remembered, firstly, for development of what were, at the time, revolutionary bombsights used by British aircraft in World War I and, secondly and most significantly for Rowe, as the Air Ministry official who was to appoint an eminent academic, Henry Tizard, to survey Britain’s air defences from 1935. Tizard was the second man who played a major role in Rowe’s subsequent career,