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The Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE) was established in Worth Matravers
Worth Matravers

Worth Matravers is a village and civil parish in the England county of Dorset. The village is situated on the cliffs west of Swanage. It comprises limestone cottages and farm houses and is built around a pond, which is a regular feature on postcards of the Isle of Purbeck....
, which is four miles to the west of Swanage
Swanage

Swanage is a small coastal town in the south east of Dorset, England. It is situated at the eastern end of the Isle of Purbeck, approximately 10 kilometre south of Poole and 40 km east of Dorchester, Dorset....
, UK, in May 1940, as the central research group for RAF
Royal Air Force

The Royal Air Force is the United Kingdom's air force, the oldest independent air force in the world. Formed on 1 April 1918, the RAF has taken a significant role in British military history ever since, playing a large part in World War II and in more recent conflicts....
 applications of radar
Radar

Radar is a system that uses electromagnetic radiation waves to identify the range, altitude, direction, or speed of both moving and fixed objects such as aircraft, ships, motor vehicles, weather formations, and terrain....
. It moved to Malvern
Malvern, Worcestershire

Malvern is a town and civil parish in Worcestershire, England . It includes the settlements of Great Malvern, Barnards Green, Malvern Link , Malvern Wells, West Malvern, Little Malvern and North Malvern....
 College
Malvern College

Malvern College is a coeducational British Public School, founded in 1865. It is located in Malvern, Worcestershire, Worcestershire.The Good Schools Guide called the school a "Traditional co-ed rural public school with a surprising number of aces up its sleeve."...
, Worcestershire
Worcestershire

Worcestershire is a county located in the West Midlands of central England. From 1974 to 1998 it was administered as part of Hereford and Worcester....
 in August 1942 because of fears that the Germans might launch their own Biting
Operation Biting

Operation Biting was the codename given to a British Combined Operations raid on a German radar installation in Bruneval, France that occurred between 27–28 February 1942 during World War II....
-like commando raid against it if it had remained by the coast.

Development of radar had been initiated by Sir Henry Tizard
Henry Tizard

Sir Henry Thomas Tizard was an England chemist and inventor and past Rector of Imperial College.Tizard's ambition to join the navy was thwarted by poor eyesight and he instead studied at Westminster School and Magdalen College, Oxford where he concentrated on mathematics and chemistry, doing work on indicators and the motions of ions in ga...
's Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence in 1935 at Orfordness near Ipswich
Ipswich

Ipswich is a non-metropolitan district and the county town of Suffolk, England on the estuary of the River Orwell. Nearby towns are Felixstowe in Suffolk, Harwich in Essex and Colchester also in Essex....
.






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Tre Malvern 1942 1943
The Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE) was established in Worth Matravers
Worth Matravers

Worth Matravers is a village and civil parish in the England county of Dorset. The village is situated on the cliffs west of Swanage. It comprises limestone cottages and farm houses and is built around a pond, which is a regular feature on postcards of the Isle of Purbeck....
, which is four miles to the west of Swanage
Swanage

Swanage is a small coastal town in the south east of Dorset, England. It is situated at the eastern end of the Isle of Purbeck, approximately 10 kilometre south of Poole and 40 km east of Dorchester, Dorset....
, UK, in May 1940, as the central research group for RAF
Royal Air Force

The Royal Air Force is the United Kingdom's air force, the oldest independent air force in the world. Formed on 1 April 1918, the RAF has taken a significant role in British military history ever since, playing a large part in World War II and in more recent conflicts....
 applications of radar
Radar

Radar is a system that uses electromagnetic radiation waves to identify the range, altitude, direction, or speed of both moving and fixed objects such as aircraft, ships, motor vehicles, weather formations, and terrain....
. It moved to Malvern
Malvern, Worcestershire

Malvern is a town and civil parish in Worcestershire, England . It includes the settlements of Great Malvern, Barnards Green, Malvern Link , Malvern Wells, West Malvern, Little Malvern and North Malvern....
 College
Malvern College

Malvern College is a coeducational British Public School, founded in 1865. It is located in Malvern, Worcestershire, Worcestershire.The Good Schools Guide called the school a "Traditional co-ed rural public school with a surprising number of aces up its sleeve."...
, Worcestershire
Worcestershire

Worcestershire is a county located in the West Midlands of central England. From 1974 to 1998 it was administered as part of Hereford and Worcester....
 in August 1942 because of fears that the Germans might launch their own Biting
Operation Biting

Operation Biting was the codename given to a British Combined Operations raid on a German radar installation in Bruneval, France that occurred between 27–28 February 1942 during World War II....
-like commando raid against it if it had remained by the coast.

Development of radar had been initiated by Sir Henry Tizard
Henry Tizard

Sir Henry Thomas Tizard was an England chemist and inventor and past Rector of Imperial College.Tizard's ambition to join the navy was thwarted by poor eyesight and he instead studied at Westminster School and Magdalen College, Oxford where he concentrated on mathematics and chemistry, doing work on indicators and the motions of ions in ga...
's Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence in 1935 at Orfordness near Ipswich
Ipswich

Ipswich is a non-metropolitan district and the county town of Suffolk, England on the estuary of the River Orwell. Nearby towns are Felixstowe in Suffolk, Harwich in Essex and Colchester also in Essex....
. The group moved to the nearby Bawdsey
Bawdsey

Bawdsey is a village in Suffolk, England near Felixstowe, within the Suffolk Coast and Heaths AONB.Bawdsey Manor is notable as the place where radar research took place early in World War II, before moving to Worth Matravers, which is four miles to the west of Swanage, in May 1940, and from there to Malvern, Worcestershire in 1942....
 Research Station in 1936 and from there to Worth Matravers
Worth Matravers

Worth Matravers is a village and civil parish in the England county of Dorset. The village is situated on the cliffs west of Swanage. It comprises limestone cottages and farm houses and is built around a pond, which is a regular feature on postcards of the Isle of Purbeck....
 in early summer 1940.

TRE worked closely with the MI6 science advisor, R. V. Jones
Reginald Victor Jones

Reginald Victor Jones, Order of the Companions of Honour Order of the Bath CBE Royal Society, was an England physicist and scientific military intelligence expert who played an important role in the defence of Britain in World War II....
, in countering the Luftwaffe
Luftwaffe

is a generic German term for an air force. It is also the official name for two of the four historic German air forces, the Wehrmacht air arm founded in 1933 and disbanded in 1946; and the current Bundeswehr air arm founded in 1956....
's navigational beam technology to hamper the enemy's ability to do pinpoint night bombing raids in what has become known as the battle of the beams
Battle of the beams

The Battle of the Beams refers to a period in early World War II when bombers of the German Air Force started using radio navigation for night bombing....
.

Another major wartime development was H2S radar
H2S radar

H2S was a radar system used in various United Kingdom bomber aircraft from 1943 to the 1990s. It was designed to identify targets on the ground for night and all-weather bombing....
 using the newly developed cavity magnetron
Cavity magnetron

A cavity magnetron is a high-powered vacuum tube that generates coherence microwaves. They are commonly found in microwave ovens, as well as various radar applications....
, for use by RAF bomber
RAF Bomber Command

RAF Bomber Command was the organisation that controlled the Royal Air Force's bomber forces from 1936 to 1968. During World War II, the command destroyed a significant proportion of Nazi Germany's industries and many German cities, and in the 1960s, was at the peak of its postwar power with the V bombers and a supplemental force of English E...
s to identify ground targets for night and all-weather bombing.

In 1942 the staffing level was about 2000 people, by 1945 increased electronics production had increased this number to around 3500 staff.

Successor organisations

TRE was combined with the Army Radar Establishment in 1953 to become the Radar Research Establishment - and was renamed the Royal Radar Establishment
Royal Radar Establishment

The Royal Radar Establishment, or RRE, was a renaming of the Radar Research Establishment, which was formed in 1953 from the merger of the Telecommunications Research Establishment and the Radar Research and Development Establishment ....
 in 1957. It became the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment
Royal Signals and Radar Establishment

The Royal Signals and Radar Establishment was a scientific research establishment within the Ministry of Defence of the United Kingdom, located primarily at Malvern, Worcestershire in Worcestershire....
 when the Army Signals Research and Development Establishment
Signals Research and Development Establishment

The Signals Research and Development Establishment was a United Kingdom government military research establishment, based in Christchurch, Dorset from 1948 until it merged with the Royal Radar Establishment in Malvern, Worcestershire to form the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment in 1980....
 (SRDE) moved to Malvern in about 1980. The whole was swallowed by the Defence Research Agency
Defence Research Agency

The Defence Research Agency , was an executive agency of the Ministry of Defence from April 1991 until April 1995. At the time the DRA was United Kingdom's largest science and technology organisation....
 in 1992, later to be split into the private sector company QinetiQ
QinetiQ

QinetiQ is an international Defense contractor, formed from the greater part of the former UK government agency Defence Evaluation and Research Agency when it was split up in June 2001 ....
 and the government DSTL
Dstl

The Defence Science and Technology Laboratory is an Executive Agency of the United Kingdom Ministry of Defence . It operates as a Trading Fund, owned by the Secretary of State for Defence, John Hutton....
.

Leading and notable staff

  • Alan Blumlein
    Alan Blumlein

    Alan Dower Blumlein was an electronics engineer who made many inventions in telecommunications, sound recording, stereophonic sound, television and radar....
  • B. V. Bowden
    B. V. Bowden

    Bertram Vivian Bowden, Baron Bowden was an England scientist and educationist, particularly associated with the development of UMIST as a successful university....
  • Philip Dee
    Philip Dee

    Philip Ivor Dee was a UK physicist. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1941 and won its Hughes Medal in 1952. During World War II, Dee led the team which developed the Village Inn radar system....
  • R. J. Dippy
  • Geoffrey Dummer
    Geoffrey Dummer

    Geoffrey William Arnold Dummer, The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, Civil Engineer, Institution of Electrical Engineers Premium Award, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Institution of Electrical Engineers, Presidential Medal of Fre...
  • Anthony Hewish
  • Alan Hodgkin
    Alan Lloyd Hodgkin

    Sir Alan Lloyd Hodgkin, Order of Merit, Order of the British Empire, Fellow of the Royal Society was a United Kingdom physiology and biophysics, who won the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine....
  • Tom Kilburn
    Tom Kilburn

    Tom Kilburn was an England engineer. With Frederic Calland Williams he worked on the Williams tube and the first stored-program computer in the world, the Small-Scale Experimental Machine , while working at the Victoria University of Manchester....
  • Sir Bernard Lovell
    Bernard Lovell

    Sir Alfred Charles Bernard Lovell OBE PhD Fellow of the Royal Society is an England physicist and radio astronomer. He was the first Director of Jodrell Bank Observatory, from 1945 to 1980....
  • J. A. Ratcliffe
    J. A. Ratcliffe

    John Ashworth Ratcliffe, Fellow of the Royal Society , "JAR or Jack", was an influential British radio physicist. He and his University of Cambridge group did much pioneering work on the ionosphere, immediately prior to World War II....
  • A. H. Reeves
  • Martin Ryle
    Martin Ryle

    Sir Martin Ryle was an England radio astronomy who developed revolutionary radio telescope systems and used them for accurate location and imaging of weak radio sources....
  • F Graham Smith
  • Maurice Wilkes
  • Sir Frederic Calland Williams
    Frederic Calland Williams

    Sir Frederic Calland Williams , known as 'Freddie Williams', was an England engineer.Williams attended the Victoria University of Manchester, and received his doctorate in 1936 after studying at Magdalen College, Oxford....


See also

  • Air Ministry Experimental Station
    Air Ministry Experimental Station

    AMES or Air Ministry Experimental Station was the way of identifying RAF radar types during and after World War II*AMES Type 1, Chain Home - Early warning radar...
  • RAF Defford
    RAF Defford

    RAF Defford was a Royal Air Force RAF Station in Worcestershire, England during the Second World War.Construction of RAF Defford was completed in 1941, and for a few months the airfield was used as a satellite station by the Vickers Wellington bombers of 23 Operational Training Unit , based a few miles away at Pershore....


External links

  • , Penley Radar Archives
  • Origin of TRE in Purbeck, Dorset.
  • , Centre for the History of Defence Electronics, Bournemouth University
    Bournemouth University

    Bournemouth University is a university in and around the large south coast town of Bournemouth, UK . It has several well respected departments including The School of Health and Social Care, The School of Services Management, The Business School, School of Design, Engineering & Computing and the Media School, recognised as the only Centre fo...