Herne Hill #127 (Summer 2014)

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A HERNE HILL the man who the bloody

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eginald Victor Jones, physicist and secret hero of WW2, was a scientific mastermind who confused the enemy and saved thousands of lives. He was born in Herne Hill on 29 September 1911. His father, Harold Victor (1880–1953) was from Tooting; his mother, Alice Margaret, née May (1890–1979), was from Brixton. They lived at 188 Railton Road. Jones went to St Jude’s School and Sussex Road elementary school, Brixton. In 1922 he won a scholarship to Alleyn’s School where his final school report read: “Erratic and mercurial. Seems unable to get down to solid work. Has ability.” He graduated with first-class honours in natural sciences from Oxford before taking a doctorate in physics. In 1936 he joined the Air Ministry, and soon after met and married Vera Cain. When war broke out, Jones was one of the few British scientists with a good understanding of the new technology of radar. He joined MI6, keeping his Air Ministry post for cover. In 1940 he was summoned to a meeting with Churchill to discuss how the Germans were guiding their bombers so accurately. Jones, the most junior person in the room, gave his deductions and proposed counter-measures. Churchill later said that when he realised Jones was right about German radar capabilities it was one of his blackest moments of the war. In the so-called Battle of the Beams, Jones began tricking the Luftwaffe into harmlessly bombing fields or lakes. R James Woolsey Jr, a former Director of the CIA, believed “his contribution was unmatched. Without the battle of the beams, it could have gone the other way. And he did it single-handedly”. Churchill called him “the man who broke the bloody beam”.

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Sharon Connor looks back on the life of RV Jones, eminent scientist and the saviour of thousands in World War Two Jones helped develop Window or ‘chaff ’, a stratagem to overwhelm German radar screens with false echoes. In 1943 British pilots dropped 40 tons of shredded tinfoil into the night sky, turning German screens into a kaleidoscope of confusion as baffled radar operators saw not tinfoil but thousands of bombers. n 1943, a 23-year-old called Jeannie Rousseau, the Viscomtesse de Clarens, codenamed Amniarix and Jones’s ‘favourite spy’, passed him vital information about V1 and V2 weapons. Rousseau’s information and Jones’s deductions meant Bomber Command could cause enough damage to delay the

attacks by a critical few months. Despite being captured twice, she survived the war and went on to work for the United Nations. Once the V weapons were in use, Jones saw that they tended to fall short, “the centre of gravity being in south-east London, near Dulwich. In a flash I saw that we might be able to keep the bombs falling short, which would mean fewer casualties in London as a whole.” Jones’s disinformation led the Germans to continue dropping the bombs in southeast London “where my own parents lived and where, of course, my old school was. But I knew that neither my parents nor the school would have had it otherwise”.

Jeannie Rousseau, a French spy who helped Jones in the war

ones and Vera had a son, Robert, and two daughters, Susan and Rosemary. After the war, he was appointed Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. He retired in 1981 but continued to write and lecture. He died on 17 December 1997, aged 86. The New York Times called him “a master practical joker, puzzle-solver, hoaxer and harmonica player”. His value to the war effort was such that secret orders had been issued for him to be shot if he were about to fall into German hands. Winston Churchill said “he did more to save us from disaster than many who are glittering with trinkets”.

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Herne Hill-Summer 2014


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