From the outside the building looked like a collection of very large Nissen huts. The Design Department lay parallel with Richmond Road with the workshops at ninety degrees to it. Offset was a canteen and an administration block. The canteen had pigeons up in the roof timbers. These were cleared out at regular intervals but were always a possibility at lunch time. There was a Robin hangar, a relic from the war (these were small hangars disguised as houses and set up on dispersed airfields.) The whole site was enclosed by a corrugated iron fence. This ran parallel to the Richmond Road but was set back with a wide swathe of grass planted with a line of trees outside. In the next few years all of this was to change. A very large office block was built at the Richmond Road end to accommodate the Design Dept and administration and later the works was re-roofed and another office block built at the rear of the site.

As a fitter in the Experimental Dept on the shop floor I had to do three months probation in the Detail Section (this was obligatory) and then on to the main Experimental Section where I worked on a Seahawk that was being fitted for mattress deck landings. This was a system where the aircraft took off from a trolley which was released when airborne. The landing was achieved by the arrester hook picking up an arrester cable pulling the aircraft down onto an air-filled, sea-water lubricated mattress. It was an attempt to rid carrier borne aircraft of the weight of the undercart and associated hydraulics, allowing increased fuel capacity and range. In time this scheme was abandoned. The next aircraft I worked on were the Hunter prototypes.

After five years I was made redundant (no redundancy pay then) and got a job at the Decca Radar Research Labs. at Hersham as an instrument maker. After two years Hawkers wrote and asked if I would go back to Experimental - with the same pay and conditions as when I left! This was "instead of starting back at square one of the pay structure." I agreed to go back to Hawkers and worked on the prototype P.1127s.

In 1965 I applied for and joined the Structural Test Department, within the Design Department, and had to go back to school at Kingston Tech. in the evenings. Our work was concerned mainly with the structural integrity of the aircraft. At some time later the name was changed to Ground Test Services (GTS), still within the Design Dept but our area of interest increased so that we were involved with other aspects of aircraft testing as well as structures. In 1982 a grading system was started and later the Company started flextime which was very welcome as it meant that as long as we worked the total hours for the week, any extra hours we did could be saved and be taken as time off the following month.

As a test engineer I worked on Harrier, Hawk, miniature detonating cord at RAE Farnborough and Woolwich Arsenal, bird strike at BAe Hatfield and RAE Farnborough, the Ski Jump at RAE Bedford, gun firing at Dunsfold and Enfield, fatigue investigations using our scanning electron microscope, static and dynamic fatigue testing and rig design, sound level investigations and cryogenics; so I had plenty to do. It was a fascinating job with lots of toys to play with; and they even paid me at the end of each month! One of my achievements at work, after working hours and at lunch time, was the making of a film of our test work. I did quite a lot of film editing for John Fozard, the Harrier Chief Designer, and would 'nick' bits of his films that he did not use, and as I did the high speed filming I also gleaned material from these films. The medium has now changed from film to video tape but it is quite gratifying that my work was still being shown to new arrivals and visitors until site closure.

My total time in test engineering was 23 years and with the Company 34 years. The Ham factory no longer exists and the site is now a housing development. This year (2000) Dunsfold will cease to be a BAe site and some kind of development will take place there. It is a real shame that both Kingston and Dunsfold will have closed down and been sold off, considering the fascinating history of both sites, especially Ham which goes back to World War I.