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Old 28th Jan 2022, 1:44 pm   #1
Peter G4OIM
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Default WWll equipment dump in Orpington Kent

I was living in Orpington in the early 1970s. Near where I lived, in the grounds of Goddington house there were old barns full of abandoned WWll equipment. Rxs, Txs and boxes of valves etc. I liberated a few items including a roller-coaster atu with silver plated wire but the items were lost years ago. I was told that the equipment was dumped in the early 1980s (no idea where) and now the site is a small housing estate.
Does anyone else who lived in the area remember this?
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Old 28th Jan 2022, 7:02 pm   #2
Cruisin Marine
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Default Re: WWll equipment dump in Orpington Kent

I remember this, had a mate used to get bucket loads of resistors and other components, good quality 5 watt or so.
I think I went there once from distant memory.
Haaa haaar, happy days.
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Old 29th Jan 2022, 1:45 pm   #3
dave walsh
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Default Re: WWll equipment dump in Orpington Kent

Definite evidence to support Peter's recollections there CM. This particular site at Orpington is new to me but the overall theme has always been of great interest. I think there may have been something similar in the Newhaven area [near me here in Bexhill] which had a Radar Station at one time but I've not been able to confirm that. The Lend Lease arrangements during WW2 [and subsequently] seemed to be a sort of urban myth for a long time and many people were very sceptical about stories re brand new equipment being destroyed! I first read something substantial in the Radiophile Magazine [1980's?] when the late Chas Miller wrote about electronics dumped down mine shafts, in the Stoke area I believe?
There has been a great deal of discussion about this matter on the Forum Peter. Putting "Mineshafts/Radios" in the search box brings up a number of threads. Some of them refer to "above ground" storage as you have done.

There's an extensive one started by G6Tanuki "The Death of Surplus" [11/12/15] pointing out things had now changed in that area but it morphs into very interesting discussion about the post war situation from p 22* onwards [Skywave] Al and particularly his post at 35* [a hole in the ground full of brand new AR88's]. I'm going on about the shop in Oxford [at p13*] and then [p41*] Radar Units/Mine shafts/Chas and Ken Russell [the Film Director] who spent a part of his National Service "Breaking Bad" ie smashing brand new electricals and vehicles on Salibury Plain.

He was a very imaginative man but spoke openly and truthfully about his life in his Autobiography. Also, he's very funny describing the "old School" Sargent explaining a connection between the equipment and the crowbars/ hammers they had all been issued with [think of the very first Carry On in the Army film]. I don't think any of us would have been laughing though!
There are different views but the crux of Land Lease seems to have been that the Americans didn't want to flood their home market after the war, so the surplus had to be destroyed. How this worked alongside the many British surplus sales outlets though, I don't know!

Dave W

There was a similar system with books sold to libraries [on contract] up until the 1980's. All redundant volumes had to be pulped regardless of their [often very good] condition-a sad sight in the bin. [It took me a while to find out why but as I lived with a Librarian, I was able to circumvent this sad waste on occasion]. When Local Government was strapped for cash however, they removed the so called "strict" rule and began selling them off. I was a top customer.

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Old 29th Jan 2022, 5:24 pm   #4
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Default Re: WWll equipment dump in Orpington Kent

Only humans could come up with such an utterly inane and wasteful way to deal with a problem.
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Old 29th Jan 2022, 5:44 pm   #5
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Default Re: WWll equipment dump in Orpington Kent

Odd things like that do turn up sometimes: a friend used to work for the Property Service Agency [part of the Government that managed the 'estate' - things like prisons, Civil Defence stores, Government offices, driving-test-centres, the Houses of Parliament, ancient monuments] - once he was tasked with disposing of a disused psychiatric hospital. In the basement, amongst miles of spooky corridors, boiler-rooms, generators, patient-lifts, autoclaves, restraint-chairs, filing-cabinets full of patient-records and laundry-machinery they found a room stacked floor-to-ceiling with 1950s IBM golfball-typewriters, old hand-cranked spirit-duplicators, prehistoric telephones/intercoms and suchlike which had been mouldering there for at least 30 years.

[And yes there were padded cells. As well as a room of coffins!]

When organisations move-out of buildings, there's often nobody charged with 'officially' disposing of the stuff-left-behind, so it just gets abandoned and becomes the property's next tenant/owner's problem.
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Old 29th Jan 2022, 7:33 pm   #6
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Default Re: WWll equipment dump in Orpington Kent

My father told me stories from his time in the navy at the end of WW2 as they returned to the UK heaving large quantities of unwanted equipment over the sides from the ships stores, he was trained as an accountant and worked in the Pursers office. I understand in the UK and the US surplus sales were constrained as not to flood the domestic market and wipe out the local manufacturing industries as they readjusted to peacetime. This particularly affected valve makers and according to the Setmakers the BVA worked with the government to control the flow of surplus and return profits from the sales to government.
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Old 30th Jan 2022, 1:28 am   #7
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Default Re: WWll equipment dump in Orpington Kent

Quote:
Originally Posted by Uncle Bulgaria View Post
Only humans could come up with such an utterly inane and wasteful way to deal with a problem.
Many years ago I worked for a company assembling body scanners. At the time they where moving over to the new type. A guy in the company wanted to turn the old ones into things like breast scanners for third world countries.

I was given the job of pulling all the copper out the water cooling plates and scrapping the body. All the gaffer wanted was the scrap money (because it didn't go on the books) so he could gamble it. This pissed so many people off at the time
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Old 30th Jan 2022, 10:27 am   #8
Peter.N.
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Default Re: WWll equipment dump in Orpington Kent

I used to go to Charterhouse Road school near there - that's not there now either.

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Old 30th Jan 2022, 11:02 am   #9
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Default Re: WWll equipment dump in Orpington Kent

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Originally Posted by G6Tanuki View Post
Odd things like that do turn up sometimes: a friend used to work for the Property Service Agency [part of the Government that managed the 'estate' - things like prisons, Civil Defence stores, Government offices, driving-test-centres, the Houses of Parliament, ancient monuments] - once he was tasked with disposing of a disused psychiatric hospital. In the basement, amongst miles of spooky corridors, boiler-rooms, generators, patient-lifts, autoclaves, restraint-chairs, filing-cabinets full of patient-records and laundry-machinery they found a room stacked floor-to-ceiling with 1950s IBM golfball-typewriters, old hand-cranked spirit-duplicators, prehistoric telephones/intercoms and suchlike which had been mouldering there for at least 30 years.

[And yes there were padded cells. As well as a room of coffins!]

When organisations move-out of buildings, there's often nobody charged with 'officially' disposing of the stuff-left-behind, so it just gets abandoned and becomes the property's next tenant/owner's problem.
I sometimes visit the 'urban exploration' sites where they show pictures of perfectly sound machinery such as lathes & milling machines just left to quietly rust - it makes me want to cry.
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Old 30th Jan 2022, 11:59 am   #10
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Default Re: WWll equipment dump in Orpington Kent

My now deceased neighbour, was in the Fleet Air Arm during WW11 in and out of Australia. Trevor showed us an Australian news paper cutting with pictures of an aircraft carrier on which he had served, about to depart harbour. The the article said the ship was venturing off the coast of Queensland dumping Corsair plane over board. Trevor said they removed the magnetos, everything else went into the sea. He also said the planes were made in USA.
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Old 30th Jan 2022, 1:07 pm   #11
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Default Re: WWll equipment dump in Orpington Kent

I was born on the site of the Festival of Britain site on the South bank of the River Thames, we had to move out in 1949, just up from there was the main buildings of the LCC and around the corner was/is (not sure if it is still there) a public house called the Rising Sun, next to it was a bomb site that was used as a car parking area, one time a lorry parked on it and went through into what apparently looked like a large cellar area and it was full of crates, these crates so my dad told me disappeared very quickly once the lorry was moved, he managed to get his hands on one of the smaller crates, when he opened it he did not have a clue what it was but I recognised it straight away as a BC221 and he gave it to me, I subsequently gave it to a work colleague, apart from very slight surface rust it looked like it had just been made, I often wondered what was in the other crates and is there are other "cellars undiscovered"
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Old 30th Jan 2022, 2:19 pm   #12
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Default Re: WWll equipment dump in Orpington Kent

Quote:
Originally Posted by dave walsh View Post
There's an extensive one started by G6Tanuki "The Death of Surplus" [11/12/15] ...
It's here https://www.vintage-radio.net/forum/...d.php?t=121814
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Old 4th Feb 2022, 12:56 pm   #13
ted_ntsx
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Default Re: WWll equipment dump in Orpington Kent

A story told to me by my (late) father.

During the war, my father was a RAF "radio operator". Mostly sending messages in Morse code on the HF bands from his UK RAF base. However, he had a rudimentary technical knowledge of radios, and one day got posted to Libya. There was a "portable" camp on the edge of the desert that was equipped for basic radio repairs and he was assigned to it.

It was full of supposedly faulty radio equipment, mostly things like R1155, T1154, and similar gear. He (and others) had the job of doing minor repairs and then testing them. The good ones were then shipped out, and the really faulty ones just stacked in a big pile. One day they received a shipment of American VHF sets. The “powers that be” didn’t realise they had never seen one before, and had no way of repairing or testing VHF gear!

Then they got the call to quickly relocate the camp to somewhere else (sound a bit like a M.A.S.H. episode…) They used a bulldozer/JCB (or something like one) to dig a huge deep hole out in the desert sand, bulldozed all the accumulated radios (hundreds of them) into it, and covered it up again before leaving the camp.

The are probably all still there, preserved by the dry desert sand.
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Old 4th Feb 2022, 5:51 pm   #14
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Default Re: WWll equipment dump in Orpington Kent

I have a list compiled for the Minister of Supply in the late 1940s on what surplus stores were dumped in the UK and where, although I would guess it was a paper exercise for a parliamentary statement and didn't cover everything by a long way. Most sites were mineshafts and seem to be in Staffordshire and similar coal-mining areas.

Apart from radio equipment, things like magnesium flare cases, motor tyres and balloon fabric were dumped. Camouflage nets were also given to farmers, presumably they had some organic content which could fertilise the soil? The biggest cache of radios would seem to be many thousands of R1335 receivers which were "liberated" by a farmer who bought a shaft full for about £30 from the newly formed National Coal Board. The radios (IFF sets?) were sold off to the ham radio market.

Cheers

Roger
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