The Suffolk coast is a land of mysteries and secrets, smugglers and ghosts, myths and legends. The drowned city of Dunwich and the tale of the Merman of Orford, the terrifying visits of the fierce hound, Black Shuck, and the legend of the Margaret Catchpole are all just part of this tradition. It inspired the greatest of all ghost-story writers, M.R.James. When painting his Suffolk coastal scenes, Turner could not avoid depicting tempest and shipwreck. Even Benjamin Britten’s interpretation of George Crabbe’s grim tale of Peter Grimes is threatening, stormy, tragic and mysterious. In 1992, the atmospheric and scholarly writer W.G.Sebald paid a visit of dubious legality to the ruins that still stood on the site of what had for decades been totally out of bounds to the general public. In his famous travel book Rings of Saturn, he gloomily compounds the atmosphere of threat and sinister mystery, quoting Shelley’s Ozymandias: ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair’. It is obvious that like most people, he had no idea what he was looking at. He could form no informed opinion of the significance of the place.
In this context, curiosity over Orford Ness was aroused throughout most of the last century. Who knew what was going on at the government’s most secret of military research stations? As a location, Orford Ness is the most remote and obscure corner of the county. It comprises grazing marshland and an 11-mile stretch of vegetated shingle, the most extensive example of this phenomenon in Europe. In 1913, the War Office purchased its 2,000 acres from local landowner, Mackenzie Clark (father of Kenneth, Lord Clark of Civilisation fame), to set up its first experimental air station for the newly formed Royal Flying Corps.
Its attraction was, as they defined it, its ‘privacy’. This privacy served it well to the day it was sold on to the National Trust in 1993. Orford itself is just a large village and communications with the rest of the county are little better than they were in Tudor times, when it was a noted rotten borough, sending two members to parliament. Indeed, since the Ness is now defined primarily as National Nature Reserve, the National Trust’s policy is to avoid advertising it and so restrict visitor numbers as is appropriate for managing its wild life. This just adds to its unique remote atmosphere.
For a historian, such a place creates the most exciting of challenges, both rewarding and at times, frustrating. For all but 80 years, Orford Ness was a highly restricted location, governed by the Official Secrets Act. To this day, many who served there however long ago and in whatever capacity, feel they must abide by its terms. They remain unwilling to accept that they have some obligation to posterity to reveal what they were doing. For I take the view that activity rightly kept a tight secret for so long, and governed by the restricting principle of ‘need to know’, is ultimately part of our national heritage.
People ‘ought to know’ so they can understand the debt owed to the people, chiefly, men but women also, who played such a vital part in the successful outcome of the three great world conflicts of the past century. They did so in circumstances that were often inhospitable (the place is indeed remote and the weather can be diabolical) and sometimes dangerous. Moreover, the secrecy surrounding this work was largely unrecognised and unrewarded. There is no monument to the hundreds of boffins of Orford Ness. This description of a practical scientist with hands on skills was first coined in 1941, to describe an ex-Orford Ness radar expert, Robert Hanbury Brown.
Happily, material is now becoming available from the National Archive at Kew. This includes documents relating to the 18 years from 1953 when the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, Aldermaston , took over the property to test the firing mechanisms of the weapons that constituted Britain’s nuclear deterrent. That it would work, if, as and when required, was due to bomb testing over the Ness. Even more significant were the tests in six great research laboratories to ensure that accidental or premature detonation was impossible.
Many research and trials reports however have disappeared, particularly relating to work undertaken during World War II. I have had to rely on that most uncertain source of information, the remote corner of a long forgotten attic. Another source of information has been the happy willingness of those that have spotted my mistakes or omissions to point them out. Indeed, written and verbal comments from those who served on the Ness, or from their relatives, has been an invaluable and often most rewarding means of ‘getting the story right’.
Acknowledgement too is due to the foresight of the National Trust which from its acquisition of the property in 1993, adopted a policy of accumulating archive material. This has added enormously to the quality of the information available to me. This is especially the case in respect of early photographs relating to World War I. Indeed, the whole story of the research undertaken at the Orford Ness station for the Royal Flying Corps is fascinating and important. This and much else, by what might seem almost a conspiracy of silence, has been hitherto widely unappreciated. One of the most puzzling and frustrating discoveries my study has revealed is the lack of awareness by professional historians of the very existence of Orford Ness and certainly of the significance of the work conducted there. Perhaps the most notable example here is Professor R.V.Jones, principal research scientist for the RAF during World War II. This omission of any mention of Orford Ness in his autobiography, Most Secret War, is particularly startling in respect of his failure to make any reference to the work at Orford between 1935 and 1937 by Watson Watt’s team in confirming the feasibility of radar. Bawdsey Manor is recognised as the pioneering research station. But it all began at Orford.
I turn to the last great research – and would-be operational – project set up at Orford between 1967 and 1973. Cobra Mist was a highly ambitious radar station designed to bounce a long distance signal off the ionosphere and reflect it back to the source of transmission. It was a venture sponsored by the United States and the target was the Soviet Union. It was a gigantic construction, the aerial alone spanning 135 acres. For a host of reasons, it failed to operate satisfactorily and the U.S. Government decided to terminate its operation. Research on the saga of its building and its failure was facilitated by plenty of documentary material at Kew and by the oral archive of many who worked there. One conclusion to be drawn however is that the truth is seldom as it seems. I have some reason to suspect that official sources are not totally to be trusted and that there are aspects to the Cobra Mist episode that are yet to be revealed. One feature of all work done on the Ness has been ‘the cover story’. The true purpose of projects was obfuscated in a cloak of half-truth and plain dishonesty, with investigative journalists fobbed off. This was never more so than with Cobra Mist. The historian may speculate, but in a case like the Cobra Mist story, the truth of its real purpose has not been fully revealed, nor the real reasons for its summary abandonment, following it apparent failure, properly explained. Cobra Mystery indeed!
It is perhaps just another attraction that secrets remain at Orford Ness. And most certainly, there is much more to the place than just the intriguing fascination of unresolved mysteries. The place’s role as part of the heritage coast of Suffolk and its string of international designations as a nature reserve, and the extraordinary display of plant-life growing up through the shingle ridges, quite apart from the ghosts and shadows of the people who worked on cloak and dagger military experiments, all lend weight to an unmatched and fascinating atmosphere. Which all makes it a privilege to have been able to research its history - and record those bits of it so far revealed.
Paddy Heazell is the author of Most Secret: The Hidden History of Orford Ness which is available to buy now.