'To strive, to seek, to find': the origins and establishment of the British Post Office Engineering Research Station at Dollis Hill, 1908-1938

Haigh, Alice Elena

'To strive, to seek, to find': the origins and establishment of the British Post Office Engineering Research Station at Dollis Hill, 1908-1938

Resource type

Doctoral thesis

Creator (person)

Haigh, Alice Elena

Date published

2020

Abstract

The Post Office Engineering Research Station at Dollis Hill, or just ‘Dollis Hill’ as it was most often called, was the UK’s principal research centre for its postal and telecommunication systems in the early to mid-twentieth century. This thesis offers the first thorough account of the research station’s origins, establishment and interwar history. At its core is a discussion of the motivations and agendas of the successive Post Office Engineers-in-Chief, Heads of Research, senior government administrators and figureheads, and Treasury officials who influenced the decisions to propose, fund and design a centralised research station. The core questions of the thesis are: What was the British General Post Office (GPO) trying to achieve by building and promoting Dollis Hill, and what or who were the influences behind its establishment? Using archival material and contemporary media sources, I chart and explain the growth of research activity within the GPO’s Engineering Department; from a basement experimenting room to several makeshift wartime laboratories across London, to Dollis Hill’s initial temporary laboratory huts and the opening of the permanent research station. I identify the key personalities, their influences and their motivations for a centralised research facility. The thesis includes an analysis of the design and layout of the site, the reasons behind choosing a suburban “vibration-free” London location and the resulting benefits and limitations of assimilation into the urban landscape. Finally, a section on the public promotion of Dollis Hill in the 1930s shows how the Post Office used newspapers and other media outlets to endorse its services and justify its expense during the post-war recession. Whilst the majority of the research output of Dollis Hill was testing and calibration, the research engineers’ response to the Holborn Gas Explosion (1929) is given as an example of a creative ethos that had been fostered through having to work in challenging circumstances. I argue that the temporary hutment beginnings of the research station as in the 1920s proposed by William Noble both helped it reach its first transitional stage of development, but also hindered the station’s final transition to permanency. Although the scheme enabled the build of a “new wonder house of experiment and invention” that became a useful tool for the GPO’s rebranding as a modern, forward-thinking institution grounded in scientific research, the scheme ultimately delayed the project’s completion so that the Post Office researchers were forced to adapt their building plans to fit the constraints of a fast-changing urban environments that was building up around the emerging research station. Overall, this project adds to the understanding of the history of British state-funded science and technology and shifts the historiographical centre of gravity towards the Post Office and its narratives of innovation in telecommunications.