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A remarkable department was established in the summer of 1940 and led by a senior RN officer who reported directly to the Board of Admiralty. Originally established to design better anti-aircraft protection for RN and Merchant Navy ships, its first title was the Admiralty Anti-Aircraft Weapons and Devices Department, but its name was changed to the Department of Miscellaneous Weapons Development (DMWD) after it became involved with the development of devices to attack U-boats. Not having comparable organisations of their own, both the Army and RAF referred problems and ideas to DMWD.

Many recruits to the department were transferred from HMS King Alfred, the training establishment for potential RNVR officers based in Hove, Sussex. Virtually all DMWD staff were appointed RNVR Special Branch officers; as such, they were mostly ignorant of Admiralty procedures for procurement and disbursement and found it easier to circumvent red tape than RN officers would have done. Fortunately, both the Admiralty’s Directorates of Scientific Research and of Naval Accounts adopted a tolerant attitude to DMWD’s unorthodox activities.

Gerald Pawle wrote: ‘It was the complete freedom to experiment, the freedom to tackle unorthodox projects in an unorthodox way, which was the basis of DMWD’s success. And it was greatly to the credit of the Admiralty that they allowed such a free hand to an organisation whose approach to most problems must have seemed revolutionary in the extreme.’

These sentiments were echoed by the Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fraser of North Cape who said, ‘Their job could only have been done if they were unhampered by routine work.’

For the first two years of its existence its senior technical officer was Commander Goodeve FRS RNVR, whose principal deputies were Commander Richardson RNVR, a former scientific colleague of Goodeve’s at Imperial College, and Lieutenant-Commander N. S. Norway RNVR – better known as the author Nevil Shute – an engineer who had worked on airship design pre-war.