Alex Moulton (1920-2012) had a long and varied engineering career and is perhaps best known for his pioneering small-wheeled bicycle, which premiered in 1962, and for designing the suspension on the British Motor Corporation’s 1959 Mini. However, Moulton’s early career was not in the motor or bicycle industries, but in aviation at the Bristol Aeroplane Company, and his personal papers include a good amount of material from this part of his career. (Moulton’s interests in both aviation and cycling would later converge onto an interest in human-powered flight.)

Alex Moulton was educated at Marlborough College and the University of Cambridge. He was still at Cambridge at the outbreak of the Second World War and attempted to join the military; his recruiting officer suggested he join the RAF Engineering Officer Branch, however the prospect of a lack of vacancies in the Branch for a further six months prompted him to look for work experience in the aviation industry. He approached Roy Fedden, the Bristol Aeroplane Company’s foremost engineer, who gave him a job in the Research Department. Moulton eventually rose to become Fedden’s assistant and worked on Bristol’s Centaurus engines.

4433/1C/1/13 – Alex Moulton in the research department of the Bristol Aeroplane Company, c1940

Most of the surviving material from this period in the collection focuses on Moulton’s work on BAC’s engines, primarily the Taurus, Centaurus and Hercules, but as I was cataloguing the material my eye was caught by something that looked out of place. At first it looked like a small plane, but on closer inspection it turned out to be a doodle of a V-1 flying bomb, and was part of a small file on the weapon.

4433/1C/1/23 – page from Alex Moulton’s notes on the V1 flying bomb, 1944

Whenever Alex Moulton discussed his wartime work in his autobiography and other writings, he talked primarily about his work on various aero engines, so it was a surprise to me to discover that Moulton also seems to have been involved, tangentially at least, with early investigations into the V-1.

The V-1 (from the German Vergeltungswaffe 1, or “Vengeance Weapon 1”), otherwise known as the doodlebug or buzz bomb, was an early form of cruise missile and was first fired at Britain on 13 June 1944 as a response to the D-Day landings. More than 9,500 V-1s were fired at targets in Britain. Many were shot down by fighter planes or anti-aircraft fire, but around 5,000 struck their targets causing over 6,000 civilian deaths. The British immediately began attempting to reconstruct the device from the remains of downed bombs in order to develop countermeasures against them.

4433/1C/1/23 – early cutaway diagram of the V-1, circa June 1944

In July or August 1944, Moulton appears to have been asked to prepare a briefing analysing the V-1 campaign against Britain to that point, and it is the notes for this briefing that contain his doodle of the bomb. Interestingly, below the drawing of the V-1 Moulton also included a sketch of the launch rail (complete with a V-1 taking off), and it seems reasonable to suppose that he must have been shown at least some of the intelligence about the launch sites. In his notes, Moulton appears to have been very interested not only in the V-1 campaign against Britain, but also the wider significance of what he called “pilotless aircraft”.

Moulton pointed out that despite Allied bombing of the launch sites, interception by fighters, anti-aircraft fire, and barrage balloons, “sufficient numbers [of V-1s] have continued to fall on the London area almost without respite for the last six weeks to have necessitated an official evacuation of children”. However, “in spite of this elaborate demonstration, the significance of the occurrence is almost universally ignored or … not appreciated even amongst intelligent observers”. Moulton, in contrast, appears to have immediately understood that the deployment of the V-1 had fundamentally changed the nature of warfare. He described the development of the weapon as “an event of the utmost significance to the country and to the future safety of the world”.

4433/1C/1/23 – extract from Alex Moulton’s notes on the significance of “pilotless aircraft”

Anticipating the future development of missiles and drones, Moulton argued that “pilotless bombers” were superior to their crewed equivalents in terms of speed, cost, and reduced vulnerability to defensive countermeasures. “The machine”, he wrote “is a radical departure from anything that has been made before”; Alex Moulton appears to have been amongst the first people in Britain to realise this.

Tom Plant, Archivist