Thwarted by my attempt today to get #ByTheSea (or at least the Thames estuary) by train failure, here’s something inland for #wildflowerhour Field Scabious (Knautia arvensis) amongst the grass at Walthamstow Marshes

Clouded Yellow, yesterday at Walthamstow Wetlands Took lots of pics and finally caught one when it was opening wings

In 2008, during the last crisis when Jodrell Bank was threatened with closure, the campaign, as we can see from this still from a charming protest song by "The Astronomers", was to keep the LOVELL open

By then (since 1987) the Radio Telescope was known as the 'Lovell Telescope'. It is named for the scientist (Lovell) and not for the engineer (Husband), even though it was the creation of both In this small but significant way, Jodrell Bank stands for science and not engineering

Jodrell Bank's meaning to politicians has also changed. For Tony Blair, in his big 'Science Matters' speech of 2002 to the Royal Society, Jodrell Bank was a symbol international cooperation and competition, and of Britain's place as an 'innovative, forward-looking nation' in a globalised world

More mundanely (or for me EXCITINGLY) to combat interference with the Radio Telescope there were zones around Jodrell Bank where radio transmission and even building planning were restricted For neighbours, Jodrell Bank could mean planning blight

Meanings of Jodrell Bank mutate, especially as it enters the cultural realm In 1961, TV watchers goggled at A for Andromeda, starring Julie Christie Co-scripted by Fred Hoyle (a Yorkshireman) it centred around alien radio signals received at a massive fictional radio telescope (in Yorkshire)

It was Lord Nuffield who finally cleared the debt in the late 1950s. This was end of the Jodrell Bank Radio Telescope's first crisis, government funding ended and private funding had stepped in

This interpretation of the Radio Telescope was reached for only when its funding was in trouble. Half the money had come from Lord Nuffield, auto maker, philanthropist ... and Cold Warrior Nuffield hoped that “the radio telescope might one day be directed, if need be, on the steppes of Russia”

Here's another meaning for the Radio Telescope: it is a military tracker of satellites and by implication ballistic missiles (the capacity to launch is the same) A Lovell ally tells prime minister Harold Macmillan : 'the country is very lucky to have had ready a radar instrument which is capable'

The Radio Telescope becomes operational days before the great shock of the launch of the Soviet artificial satellite Sputnik Lovell's team, and Husband, work around the clock to make sure the Telescope tracks Sputnik, and also to make sure the world knows about it

Bernard Lovell is worried, but he has a new pitch ...

But compare this design drawing (1955) by Husband with the earlier one. The steel support to the bowl is now massive. The bowl is also now continuous steel plate not wire. What has happened? Partly structural worries (hence massive support), partly astronomical choice (shorter wavelengths)

... but after the war there is rebirth, as the storyboard shows The film treatment stipulated: “We end with the most impressive shot that can be obtained of the whole telescope” So: a third, very public meaning is made: the Radio Telescope stands for NATIONAL prestige and leadership

The DSIR commissioned (and the Foreign Office funded) a film, The Inquisitive Giant (1958) In it a sequence, as we can see from the storyboard, of ever larger British (and Irish) telescopes from 17th to 19th centuries ends abruptly with even bigger US ones. Oh no! leadership has been lost!

Radio telescopes were already associated with Britain moving out of austerity. At the 'tonic to the nation', the Festival of Britain in 1951, a radio antenna was installed on the Shot Tower. Visitors could hear radar echoes from the moon. Afterwards, the small antenna was gifted to Jodrell Bank

To build the Radio Telescope (as it was called), Lovell needs allies Lovell charms and lobbies the trad Royal Astronomical Society. He's a physicist, not an astronomer, so it's tricky The argument for them is that Britain can regain astronomical leadership lost to nations with clearer skies

Manchester chooses a single, big, steerable radio telescope. (That's the first meaning: it's NOT Cambridge's style) But to do that requires serious engineering. So Lovell brings in H. Charles Husband (the unsung hero). It is Husband's design Look at the scale of the thing. Those are lorries.

A technical point. There's two choices of kinds of design. Outside Cambridge, they're linking lots of small radio antennas together, and cleverly combining signals. These are interferometers. They are actually the future of radio astronomy That niche will be taken. Manchester chooses differently

In the late 1940s the Jodrell Bank team build a new telescope. A 218 foot parabola of wire and steel poles that sits on the ground. The wire bowl focuses the radio waves, so it can detect only what is passing overhead in the radio sky Good research is done. But what if it could point anywhere?

In 1945, Bernard Lovell returns to Manchester University physics department. He has spent the war working on radar. Through his wartime contacts he brings war surplus radar equipment, and sets them up in a university botanical station in Cheshire: Jodrell Bank His small team study meteor echoes

As a historian of Jodrell Bank, I agree! And the reason it is important is that it has been made to mean different things to different people at different times. Who's up for a mega thread on how and why? (I'm off for lunch now, but I'll do it after. I'll need the energy...)

That’s enough from me. A Fuchs specialist should definitely take a proper look at these files that, at one stage, were not meant to be released until 2089

Alex @wellerstein.bsky.social asks about about what Fuchs knew about evidence against him. Not exactly that, but this primary source tells us why Fuchs thought he should confess: MI5 led him to believe if he admitted charges he would not be prosecuted and could even remain at Harwell (!)

The latest documents are reports of his death in East Germany in 1988

The earliest documents are from 1934, when Fuchs arrived ‘as a German refugee’ and became a ‘student of the University of Bristol’

Occasional words from Fuchs In 1977, he spoke out against the neutron bomb (as everyone did in 1977) Ironic coda: “In Bucharest, President Ceausescu said what mining needed was not a new means of mass destruction but … a better and juster world”

The files contain plenty of odd snippets. Why, for example, did the Mayor of Greenwich visit atom spy Fuchs in 1961? “We didn’t mention the past”. What? How?

After he arrives Moscow Radio report that “living as a free man in the GDR has enabled Dr Klaus Fuchs to completely become his old self again” The physicist “in the Einstein class” would, says Moscow, soon be working on Soviet atom bombs. Thanks Britain! (Did he? File contains outrage at home)

When Fuchs is released (early, from a 14 year sentence) he leaves to where his parents lived, East Germany His travel document photograph is in the file, witnessed on the reverse by the Governor of Wakefield Prison