Old Photograph Swan Street Brechin Scotland

Old photograph of shops on Swan Street in Brechin in Angus, Scotland. Sir Robert Alexander Watson Watt,was born in Brechin on 13 April 1892. He was a Scottish pioneer of radio direction finding and radar technology. Watt began his career in radio physics with a job at the Met Office, where he began looking for ways to accurately track thunderstorms using the radio signals given off by lightning. This led to the 1920s development of a system later known as huff-duff. Although well publicized at the time, the system's enormous military potential was not developed until the late 1930s. Huff-duff allowed operators to determine the location of an enemy radio in seconds and it became a major part of the network of systems that helped defeat the U-boat threat. It is estimated that huff-duff was used in about a quarter of all attacks on U-boats. In 1935 Watt was asked to comment on reports of a German death ray based on radio. Watt and his assistant Arnold Frederic Wilkins quickly determined it was not possible, but Wilkins suggested using radio signals to locate aircraft at long distances. This led to a February 1935 demonstration where signals from a BBC short-wave transmitter were bounced off a Handley Page Heyford aircraft. Watt led the development of a practical version of this device, which entered service in 1938 under the code name Chain Home. This system provided the vital advance information that helped the Royal Air Force win the Battle of Britain. Watson-Watt was married on 20 July 1916 in Hammersmith, London, England, to Margaret Robertson, the daughter of a draughtsman; they later divorced and he remarried in 1952 in Canada. His second wife was Jean Wilkinson, who died in 1964. He returned to Scotland in the 1960s. In 1966, at the age of 74, he proposed to Dame Katherine Trefusis Forbes, who was 67 years old at the time and had also played a significant role in the Battle of Britain as the founding Air Commander of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, which supplied the radar-room operatives. They lived together in London in the winter, and at their summer home in Pitlochry, Highland Perthshire, during the warmer months. They remained together until her death in 1971. Watson-Watt died in 1973, aged 81, in Inverness. Both are buried in the churchyard of the Episcopal Church of the Holy Trinity at Pitlochry.



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