BWF Trustee Dr. Iain Murray will be giving a public talk about the recovery of the Highball bombs from Loch Striven in 2017 as part of the talks programme at Brooklands Museum. The talk will cover the history of Highball (the anti-ship version of the Upkeep “dam busting” bomb), the connection with Loch Striven, and the mission to recover a Highball for Brooklands Museum.
The online talk will be given on Thursday 11th February 2021 at 7.00pm and is free and open to the public.
UPDATE: a recording of the talk was made by Brooklands TV and is available on YouTube
The Barnes Wallis Foundation’s Annual Meeting will be held at Howden School on Thursday 11th July 2019 at 7pm. This meeting is open to all members of the public and admission is free (there will be a collection in aid of Howden School and the Barnes Wallis Foundation).
This year’s presentation is:
Tallboy and Tirpitz by Dr Robert Owen, Official 617 Squadron Historian
Further information, please contact: Gerry Carroll (01757) 638498
Solway Aviation Museum will be hosting the “One Man, Many Ideas” exhibition from 5th April to 27th October 2019. The exhibition showcases the life and work of Sir Barnes Wallis, covering the vast range of his career from designing airships to supersonic airliners, with the Wellington bomber and the “bouncing bomb” in between.
The museum is open 1030-1700 every weekend (Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Bank Holiday Mondays) from 5 April to 27 October 2019. Last entry is at 4:15 pm. Normal museum admission charges apply.
Grantham Museum will be hosting the “One Man, Many Ideas” exhibition from 24th May to 22nd September 2018. The exhibition showcases the life and work of Sir Barnes Wallis, covering the vast range of his career from designing airships to supersonic airliners, with the Wellington bomber and the “bouncing bomb” in between.
Admission to the exhibition is free (donations are requested as the museum is a charity run by volunteers), and it is open 1000-1600 every Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
Brooklands Museum in Surrey has been nominated for world’s biggest museum award, the Art Fund Museum of the Year 2018. Brooklands was home to the Vickers-Armstrongs aircraft factory, and was where Barnes Wallis worked for much of his career. The museum has many Wallis-related exhibits, including the unique Stratosphere Chamber, a Wellington bomber and many examples of his bombs.
Supported by Art Fund, the £100,000 prize is designed to get to the heart of what makes a truly outstanding museum, seeking out innovation and exceptional achievement in museums and galleries all across the UK, and working to encourage more people to visit. The winning museum will be announced before an invited audience of leading figures from the fields of culture and museums, on Thursday 5th July 2018 at the V&A Museum in London.
Brooklands’ nomination marks the culmination of one of the Museum’s most important periods in its 27 year history, with a spectacular transformation of the site in 2017 delivering extraordinary new exhibitions that tell the story of one of the most important sites in British motorsport, aviation and engineering.
In 2017, Brooklands unveiled three outstanding projects: The Brooklands Aircraft Factory, the Flight Shed and the restoration of it historic Finishing Straight.
The Barnes Wallis Foundation’s Annual Meeting will be held at Howden School on Thursday 5th July 2018 at 7pm. This meeting is open to all members of the public and admission is free (there will be a collection in aid of Howden School and the Barnes Wallis Foundation).
This year’s presentation is:
Wallis at Home by Professor Richard Morris (author of biographies of Guy Gibson and Leonard Cheshire)
Further information, please contact: Gerry Carroll (01757) 638498
A trustee of the Barnes Wallis Foundation has helped to successfully raise two World War 2 bombs from the bottom of Loch Striven. Dr. Iain Murray, who works as a Computing lecturer at the University of Dundee, has researched the work of Sir Barnes Wallis, who invented the famous “bouncing bomb” which was tested on the loch in 1943-44. His research revealed that over 200 of the bombs were tested on the loch, and that there was thus a good chance that many were still there. As there were none of the Highball bombs in museums, he thus hoped to recover one to place in a museum. Mary Stopes-Roe, Sir Barnes Wallis’s elder daughter, had given her backing to the project.
Highball is a smaller version of the Upkeep bomb used by the RAF’s 617 Squadron to successfully destroy two German dams in May 1943. Highball was for use against enemy battleships, but operated on the same principle – dropping from an aircraft, it would skip along the water in a series of “bounces” like a skipping stone, then sink beneath the hull of the target ship before exploding.
A preliminary dive in the summer of 2010 found a small number of Highballs, and in July 2017 a team of twelve divers from the East Cheshire Sub-Aqua Club (part of BSAC), aided by a team from the Royal Navy’s Northern Diving Group, explored the site the site and successfully recovered two of the bombs. These will be sent to two museums for preservation – Brooklands Museum in Surrey (home to a collection of Barnes Wallis artifacts) and the de Havilland Aircraft Museum in Hertfordshire (de Havilland Mosquito aircraft carried the Highballs).
A sonar survey of the loch was also carried out, and around 100 Highballs have been located, as well as dummy charges dropped by X-craft midget submarines, which also trained in the loch – although within 30 miles of Glasgow, Loch Striven is very isolated, and so made an excellent secret testing site.
Read the story from BBC News in which Dr. Murray describes how Highball would have worked.
On Thursday, 4th February, 1943, Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, the Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, received a new directive, originally drawn up a couple of weeks earlier during the Joint Chiefs of Staffs’ Casablanca Conference. ‘Your prime objective,’ the Directive instructed, ‘will be the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial and economic system, and the undermining of the morale of the German people to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened.’
This is the transcript of a conversation between Mary Stopes-Roe (MSR) and James Holland (JH) at Mary’s house in Birmingham in 2011, in which they discussed the character, upbringing and home life of Sir Barnes Wallis.
The Barnes Wallis Foundation, the new Charitable Incorporated Organisation established in July 2014, is proud to announce the launch of its new website www.barneswallisfoundation.org. The new website reflects the Foundation’s re-focused key commitments to inspire, inform and advance education in aeronautical and engineering design, drawing upon and in memory of, the life and work of Sir Barnes Wallis.
