Scope and content
Although there is significant material from Hanbury Brown's education and early career,
including wartime service, the bulk dates from the 1960s to the late 1990s and there
is thus a pronounced emphasis on Hanbury Brown's career following his departure for
Australia. His war-time research, the transition to radio astronomy and the intense
collaborations in the Jodrell Bank group are more sketchily documented, as is in fact
his and John Davis's quest for an instrument to succeed the NSII.
There is a wide range of biographical material relating to Hanbury Brown's life and
career. It includes the contents of a boxfile of biographical correspondence from
the 1930s and 1940s documenting his education, wartime service and immediate postwar
career. There are transcripts of interviews, proceedings of conferences to honour
his achievements, and drafts (with correspondence) of his Royal Society/Australian
Academy of Science Biographical Memoir and other tributes and obituaries. There are
also some family papers including letters to his wife Heather before and after their
marriage, certificates of education and of awards, and a run of diaries 1936-1998.
There is also photographic material.
There is documentation of aspects of Hanbury Brown's war work on radar from early
experiments at Martlesham airfield in Sussex to memorabilia (including a poem on the
'radar man'). Hanbury Brown's years with the Combined Research Group at the Naval
Research Laboratory in Washington DC are covered by memoranda and photostats of research
reports. Of particular interest is the material relating to the claim on the part
of the airborne radar team for an award for the design and development of metre-wave
airborne radar. This section further includes reunion activities in the 1990s.
Jodrell Bank material is not extensive. It includes an early letter to J.A. Ratcliffe
in which Hanbury Brown outlined a radio interferometer of high resolution, pen-recorded
inscriptions of signals from Cassiopeia and Sirius, and a notebook with measurements
on Sirius that provided practical vindication of the Hanbury Brown-Twiss effect. There
are memoranda and proposals on instruments, notably the steerable radio telescope
and the interferometer that was eventually built in Narrabri. The development of this
latter instrument is further documented by a notebook containing detailed calculations
and tests of sample equipment for the future NSII. A number of photographs show various
Jodrell Bank individuals and apparatus. There is more Australian material, essentially
covering three astronomical instruments and their genesis. Correspondence, notebooks,
photographs and promotional materials document the NSII. The story of the successor
instrument, the SUSI, is represented chiefly by photographs of an early model showing
a Very Large Stellar Intensity Interferometer, a subsequent proposal of a Michelson
interferometer, and discussions between Hanbury Brown and his long-time collaborator
John Davis. There is also correspondence re the AAT and the future of science and
engineering in the University of Sydney.
Hanbury Brown's 'Research Files' form a substantial component of the archive. They
contain research materials, which Hanbury Brown accumulated over many decades. These
files testify to three foci of enduring interest on his part, the story of radar,
radio astronomy, and reflections about science. The history of radar is documented
by original documents and pamphlets, correspondence with both fellow radar pioneers
and younger radar buffs, memoirs, and drafts of equipment biographies. The radio astronomy
group includes literature on various types of interferometers and on quantum theory,
correspondence and draft publications on the behaviour of photons (these from the
time of the controversy over the Hanbury Brown-Twiss effect), and a special section
on Hanbury Brown's 'dear friend Sirius' (Letter to J.M. Bennett, 1 June 1994). A subgroup
is dedicated to historical topics in radio astronomy. Material on reflections about
science consists of Hanbury Brown's notes on science-historical literature; correspondence,
notes and literature on science's relations with religion; and general articles.
There is extensive documentation of Hanbury Brown's publications and lectures, the
largest component of this collection. A considerable variety of publications are represented
including scientific papers, books, reviews and newspaper articles, starting with
Hanbury Brown's 1935 paper on the cathode-ray oscillograph. Hanbury Brown's speaking
engagements are documented by drafts, outlines and index card notes over almost five
decades, and include his broadcasts. This material is qualitatively heterogeneous,
ranging from expert conference papers to light-hearted dinner toasts. Sound recordings
of some of these can be found with the non-textual media in the archive.
There is documentation of Hanbury Brown's involvements with only a few societies and
organisations. These include the Astronomical Society of Australia, Institution of
Electrical Engineers, National Centre for Basic Sciences in Calcutta, India and Royal
Society. Material includes copies of reports (co-authored by Hanbury Brown) to the
International Scientific Radio Union and to the Royal Commission on Australian Government
Administration.
There are several series of correspondence, which together span six decades. There
are three alphabetical sequences, one dating from the 1940s to the early 1950s, the
second consisting of named correspondents, the third dating chiefly from the 1980s
and 1990s (with a few earlier letters). The first sequence includes family letters
and correspondence about the Sir Robert Watson-Watt & Partners consultancy. Hanbury
Brown's named correspondents in the second sequence are colleagues and friends from
the days of radar and early radio astronomy, and his colleague John Davis. The third
sequence ranges over a multitude of correspondents and topics. It reflects chiefly
Hanbury Brown's activities after his return from Australia in 1991.
Non-textual media spans audiotapes, videotapes, visual material, and computer disks.
The audiotapes date from 1973 to 1999 and include recordings of Hanbury Brown's wife
Heather. Videotapes are principally of Hanbury Brown's contributions to television
documentaries and interviews on his wartime work. The visual material ranges over
photographs, graphs, transparencies and an extensive slide collection, which appears
to have served Hanbury Brown as a store on which to draw for his lecturing activities.
The computer disks reflect both Hanbury Brown's changing word processing equipment
and his diverse activities, from his writings to his correspondence with colleagues,
friends, institutions, businesses and so forth.
Record creators history
Robert Hanbury Brown was born on 31 August 1916 in Aruvankadu, South India, where
his father was in charge of a cordite factory. Hanbury Brown was sent to England to
be educated and attended Cottesmore Preparatory School in Hove, Sussex, from the age
of eight to fourteen. In 1930 he entered Tonbridge School in Kent, switching to Brighton
Technical College after only two years. The decision was partly the product of strained
family finances - but Hanbury Brown had long shown an active interest in technological
matters. His grandfather (the irrigation engineer Sir Robert Hanbury Brown) was one
of the early pioneers of radio, and his legal guardian after his parents' divorce
was a consulting radio engineer. At Brighton Technical College he studied for an external
degree in the University of London, graduating BSc with first class honours in electrical
engineering at the age of nineteen. At this time appeared also his first publication
(with his student friend Vic Tyler), on 'Lamp polar curves on the cathode-ray oscillograph'.
With a grant from East Sussex County Council he then embarked on a postgraduate course
in advanced studies on telegraphy and telephony at City & Guilds of London Institute,
then part of Imperial College. At the time he hoped to complete a doctorate in radio
engineering and to pursue a career that would combine his interest in radio with flying.
Hanbury Brown's involvement both with the new University of London Air Squadron and
with cathode-ray tubes drew the interest of the Rector of Imperial College, Henry
Tizard. Tizard chaired a committee that had recently been set up by the Air Ministry
to find ways of protecting Britain from possible attack from enemy aircraft. Through
Tizard's intervention Hanbury Brown came to be recruited into an experimental project
instigated by Robert Watson-Watt, to develop a system of radio-location using pulse/echo
technique for aircraft detection. In August 1936 Hanbury Brown joined what would grow
into the Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE) and helped develop Chain
Home, an air surveillance system of ground stations along the East and South Coasts
that proved vital in the 1940 Battle of Britain. From the autumn of 1937 he worked
in the airborne radar group under E. G. Bowen, which transferred to the USA in 1942
for a joint British-American mission on air defence. Returning three years later Hanbury
Brown rejoined TRE, helping the Air Historical Branch of the Air Ministry write an
account of airborne radar and working on the application of the pulsed navigational
aid GEE to civil aviation. A research consultancy set up by Watson-Watt in 1947 offered
more interesting prospects for the conversion of wartime developments into peacetime
technologies. He allowed himself to be recruited and worked as a consulting engineer
until Watson-Watt decided to move the firm to Canada. After pondering a number of
career possibilities, Hanbury Brown returned to academia in the autumn of 1949, when
he started as a PhD student in radio astronomy at the University of Manchester.
His impact at Jodrell Bank, where Manchester's radio astronomy group was based, was
instantaneous. The development for which he achieved his greatest distinction lay
in interferometry, indeed in showing how the principle of the intensity interferometer
could be applied to optical interferometry. In 1956, he and the mathematician R.Q.
Twiss showed on the basis of a laboratory experiment that the time of arrival of photons
at two separate detectors was correlated (Hanbury Brown-Twiss effect). Physicists
struggled with the idea, photon correlation being inconceivable from a quantum theoretical
perspective; yet Hanbury Brown and Twiss proceeded to demonstrate on the example of
the star Sirius how the phenomenon could be used in an interferometer to measure the
apparent angular diameter of bright visual stars. Their work earned them a Michelson
Medal for opening up the subject of quantum optics. With the controversy over the
Hanbury Brown-Twiss effect in full swing, Hanbury Brown proposed a large optical interferometer
to measure the diameters of other main sequence stars. The Department of Scientific
and Industrial Research agreed to fund the initial design costs and a large part of
the eventual construction costs for an instrument consisting of two reflectors, mounted
on a circular railway track 188 metres in diameter. The instrument was manufactured
in Britain and Italy, but built in the Australian bush near Narrabri in New South
Wales. The construction of the Narrabri Stellar Intensity Interferometer (NSII) at
a fairly remote site was a heroic task, which kept Hanbury Brown full-time in Australia.
In 1964, two years into the mission, he resigned from the personal chair which the
University of Manchester had created for him in 1960, and accepted an appointment
as Professor of Physics (Astronomy) at the University of Sydney. Despite tempting
offers to go elsewhere after the NSII was decommissioned in 1974, he stayed on to
explore a next generation instrument. This was not to be another intensity interferometer,
but a modernised Michelson interferometer, the Sydney University Stellar Interferometer
(SUSI). The SUSI became the project of his colleague John Davis and it finally opened
in 1991, ten years after Hanbury Brown officially retired.
Hanbury Brown's commitments to science manifested beyond the instruments and institutions
with which he was most visibly affiliated. His involvements in such ventures of the
1970s as the Anglo-Australian-Telescope (AAT) or the Science Task Force both illustrate
in their way how he envisaged future science. For instance, he used a job interview
for the directorship of the new AAT to criticize centralist tendencies in Australian
science funding, pleading for greater equality of the state universities vis-�is the
flagship of Australian academia, the Australian National University. Likewise, as
a member of the Science Task Force, a consultative committee of the Royal Commission
on Australian Government Administration, he expressed his concerns over changes in
the scientific ethos under government funding, which had become the norm after World
War II. The now classic report of the Task Force, Towards Diversity and Adaptability
(1975), was imbued with the ideal of scientific autonomy.
Over the years Hanbury Brown also developed his dimension as a public scientist in
his writings and his lectures. He became an interpreter of science who explained to
non-expert audiences his particular science, interferometry, as well as his views
on the scientific enterprise more broadly. His broadcasts and other public performances
bear this out, as do such monographs as his account of The Intensity Interferometer
(1974) or the more philosophical Man and the Stars (1978) and The Wisdom of Science
(1986). In his last publication, There are no Dinosaurs in the Bible, which he had
written for his grandchildren and which appeared posthumously, Hanbury Brown returned
to a theme that had occupied him over a number of decades, the relations between science
and religion. Another subject close to his heart were his wartime experiences. His
friendships from the radar days lasted a lifetime, and he continued to explore the
history of radar with younger radar buffs, through reunions and celebratory occasions,
and in television programmes and sound recordings.
Hanbury Brown accumulated many honours during his long career. He was elected a Fellow
of the Royal Society in 1960. In 1986, he was made a Companion of the Order of Australia.
He was also rumoured to have been the prototype prompting the expression 'boffin'
(for a technological expert). He married Heather Hilda Chesterman in 1952. They had
one daughter and two sons (twins). He died on 16 January 2002.
Processing information
Compiled by Dr Tim Powell, NCUACS, 3 September 2007
Source of acquisition
The papers were received from Dr Marion Hanbury Brown, daughter of Robert Hanbury
Brown, in August 2003 and August 2006.
System of arrangement
By section as follows: Biographical, Radar, Jodrell Bank, Australia, research files,
Publications, lectures and broadcasts, Societies and organisations, Correspondence,
Non-textual media. Index of correspondents.
Conditions governing access
Papers retain the period of confidentiality agreed at time of the deposit. All new
deposits closed for 30 years except by permission of Officers of the Royal Society
or the person controlling access.
Other finding aids
Printed Catalogue of: NCUACS catalogue no. 151/1/07, 160pp.. Copies available from
NCUACS, University of Bath
Related material
A substantial portion of Hanbury Brown's personal archive was destroyed in 1961 owing
to a misunderstanding (letter to J.P. Wild, 16 January 1974). Some material relating
to his Jodrell Bank period can be found in the papers of A.C.B. Lovell in the Jodrell
Bank Archive at the John Rylands University Library of the University of Manchester.
Hanbury Brown left many of the documents relating to his work in astronomy in Australia
to the University of Sydney, where he thought they belonged. These are in the University
Archives of the University of Sydney and include correspondence regarding the intensity
interferometer at Narrabri, technical papers, funding and general correspondence,
1957-1983. There is also correspondence on the AAT, 1967-1974, and an audio tape interview
on his retirement in 1981. Further material, notably 27 scrapbooks compiled by Hanbury
Brown's wife Heather, are in the hands of the family. It is anticipated that they
will be deposited at the Royal Society to join this collection in due course.
Extent
ca 870 items
Keywords
Subjects:
Radar
Astronomical observatories
Astronomy
Narrabri Stellar Intensity Interferometer
Personal names:Hanbury Brown Robert 1916-2002 astronomer Davis John astronomer
Corporate names: Sir Robert Watson-Watt & Partners
Language of the material
English
Record creator
Content provider
