“It’s an Etheric Bean Locator; also useful for detecting ion-charged emissions!” – The fourth Doctor’s Etheric Beam Locator: Genesis of the Daleks

  

Security Commander Nyder inspects the Doctor's Ewww.burlingtonandbeyond.co.uk heric Beam Locator

…So said the fourth Doctor to Nyder, in response to a peculiar looking object he was examining (Genesis of the Daleks, episode 2).  The Etheric Bean Locator would reappear briefly in episode 6 of The Talons of Weng Chiang.

For some time, I had wondered whether it was a BBC made prop or a real-world device of some kind.  A quick internet search revealed one or two low quality photographs of the device in a real-world setting, which seemed to indicate that it was a real object and not a BBC-made prop.  Another revelation came when a UK prop maker spotted one sitting on the shelf of a client he was visiting.

I uploaded some images to my Photobucket account and put the word out on various prop-related and geek-related websites and forums, in the hope that somebody somewhere would recognise it.  Within a short space of time, I had received a tip-off that it was a type of microwave transmitter valve.

A quick Internet search revealed it to be a Varian Klystron VA220 oscillator valve, used in microwave relay and transmission equipment.  There is also a similar, later model known as the VA221.  The valves were made to oscillate at different radio frequencies and thus there were different variants (VA220A, VA220B, VA220C, VA221A, VA221B, VA221C, etc).

A Varian Klystron VA220 valve

An advertisement from an industry magazine, circa 1960s

In the middle of the twentieth century, there were great advancements in RADAR and telecommunications technology.  And one of these was transmitting large bandwidths of television and telecommunications transmissions via microwave transmitters.  They had a disadvantage though; each transmitter had to be within direct line of sight of neighbouring transmitters.  The natural curvature of the Earth, as well as built up areas such as towns and cities, meant that the civil engineers who constructed them had the added problem of ensuring direct line of sight between one transmitter and is neighbouring transmitters.

One of the most famous of all the UK microwave radio transmitters was the GPO (General Post Office, now British Telecom) Tower in London.  This iconic tower had its own cameo appearance in Doctor Who, in the first Doctor story “The War Machines”.  In the 1960s United Kingdom, a series of microwave transmission towers were constructed as part of a telecommunications project known as Backbone.

(The Sub Brit website has a detailed article on the topic www.subbrit.org.uk/rsg/features/backbone )

The centre piece of this network was the GPO/BT Tower in London.  On occasions, it was claimed they were for television transmission, but they had a more sinister role to play.

In the early days of the Cold War, the UK Government started to prepare for a possible attack by the Soviet Union or some other aggressor using nuclear weapons.   Many essential telephone cables went through major towns and cities, which were vulnerable to nuclear attack.  Therefore, it was proposed in 1956 to construct a backbone of approximately 14 microwave radio stations, which could be used in peacetime for television and telephone transmissions, but in wartime could be used for defence and government communications.

In the late 1970s, the investigative journalist Duncan Campbell (who wrote a series of articles on civil defence related issues for The New Statesman Magazine in the 1980s and the book “War Plan UK”, as well as produced the BBC series “Secret Society”) was unsuccessfully prosecuted for investigating signals intelligence (UK military, government and intelligence agencies), which included his having photographed Backbone microwave radio stations such as the GPO Tower in London.  The case was known as the ABC case.  He was acquitted.  Tellingly, one Backbone microwave radio station was omitted from the evidence presented at the trail, and that station was Five-Ways.

As Cold War historian, Steve Fox mentions on his website www.burlingtonandbeyond.co.uk 
"...Secrecy was still a priority as shown by the decision in the mid-1970s when Duncan Campbell, previously mentioned as the author of “War Plan UK” was prosecuted for possessing photos of amongst other things photos of Backbone masts, his photos of the Five Ways mast at Corsham were specifically and deliberately left out of the prosecution evidence."

More details about the ABC case can be found on Duncan Campbell's own website http://www.duncancampbell.org/content/abc-case )

Five-Ways was a GPO (later BT) microwave radio station tower of approximately 150 feet tall.  (It has subsequently been truncated and is much smaller than its original height.)  It was erected off the Bradford Road, in Corsham, Wiltshire, sometime in the 1960s.  Westwells Road and Park Lane in Corsham were (and still are) festooned with Government, GPO/BT and military establishments, as well as in the surrounding area.  It was one of the few places in the UK where all three of the armed services (army, navy and air-force) had bases.

Underneath Westwells Road and Park Lane were and are a number of former Limestone quarries (or mines), as well as the famous Brunel Box railway tunnel.  Many were requisitioned by the military during World War Two, for usage as ammunition storage and factories.  When the second world war ended and the Cold War began, many of the quarries/mines were retained by the military.

One former Limestone quarry, known as Spring Quarry, was used by the Royal Navy as a Royal Naval Stores Depot.  But a section of it was surrounded by reinforced concrete walls and metal blast doors fitted with gas-tight rubber seals (air locks).  At ground level, one could see concrete lift and escalator shafts, surrounded by mounds of earth and grass, as well as various concrete protected ventilation shafts.  From the early 1960s to as recently as December 2004, this “special area” was one of the most top secret sites in the UK.  Those few in the know called it “Subterfuge”, “Stockwell”, “Burlington”, “Turnstile”, “Chanticleer”, “Peripheral”, “Eyeglass”, “3 Site”, and the “special area”.  It was the wartime relocation site for the UK Central Government and the mother of all UK nuclear bunkers!  Five-Ways provided the site with vital lines of communication with the outside world, as did a neighbouring RAF telephone exchange (also underground in Tunnel Quarry).

An aerial view of the relocation site at Corsham, Wiltshire (Five-Ways can be seen in the top-left-hand corner).

(c) Copyright, Bing Maps/Microsoft Inc, 2014

(Visit Steve Fox's excellent web site www.burlingtonandbeyond.co.uk  for a detailed history of the relocation site.  Also of an interest is Steve Fox's on-line book "Struggle for Survival" http://www.subbrit.org.uk/rsg/features/sfs/ )

From the early 1960s to 1968, “3 Site” (as it is now known as) would have become the home of the UK Central Government, if the Cold War became a Hot War and NATO found itself at War with the Soviet Union.  However, increasing accuracy of Soviet nuclear missiles made the site vulnerable to aerial attack.  So in 1968, an alternative continuity of central government plan was devised, known as “Acid”, “Python”, “Pebble”, “Rubber”, and “Ruby”.   It even had its own security classification; Top Secret-Claret was one of them.

Based on dispersal, the new plan was to split up Central Government into several smaller groups comprising of approximately 150 government and military personnel, each led by a senior government minister.  They would be supported by at least two supply agencies and two air transport agencies, which would be essential services after a nuclear attack.  The groups would be dispersed to areas of the country considered safer than others, such as away from targets and in remote areas.  They would be given mobile radio communications, food and water provisions, and perhaps basic radiological protection.  The Prime Minister would remain in Whitehall, London, trying to negotiate peace with the Soviet Union.  If all else failed, the Prime Minister would be able to order a retaliatory nuclear strike before he or she were wiped out by an incoming nuclear warhead.

Approximately 14 days after a nuclear attack, the two most senior surviving groups would try to make contact with one another, as well as with any of the surviving air transportation and supplies agencies.  If successful, they would try to meet up and merge to form a larger central government nucleus.  The relocation site in Corsham, had it survived, would become the new Whitehall and the destination of the surviving groups and agencies.

To maintain the pretence that Corsham was still the main relocation site for UK Central Government, a maintenance crew worked at the site, the Catering Corps continued to refresh the ration packs when they passed their best before date, and even fewer people were in the know about the dispersal plan.  In the 1980s, the massive telecommunications suite, which had its very own codename “Woodland”, was updated to include fibre optic cabling.  At the end of the Cold War, the massive telecommunications suite was shut down (around 1992), the fuel tanks emptied, rations disposed of, water tanks and lagoon were drained, and so on, but the site continued to remain a secret for another twelve years.

In December 2004, the central government relocation site at Corsham was finally declassified and a small number of archaeologists, historians, and journalists allowed inside to view what is left of the decaying site.  It has been declared an ancient monument and English Heritage hope to preserve at least some of the surviving areas.  Other areas of the site have succumbed to dry rot, water ingress, spores and fungi growth, risk of rock falls, and exposed asbestos.  Walking through its Limestone corridors, the site is a sinister reminder of the Cold War and makes one feel thankful that war never broke out between East and West!

Apart from a few (censored) documents in the National Archives, details of the central government dispersal plan remain highly top secret.

Today, microwave radio transmission has largely been replaced by fibre optic cabling, which provide a wider and faster bandwidth than microwave radio.

And my little Varian Klystron VA220 and VA221 valves are merely relics of old technology and the Cold War.