I'd be grateful if anyone could post locations of the visible remains if any WWII bombing decoys, be these docks, cities, Starfish or other sites.

For those unaware of these, they were sites built as decoys to attract German bombers away from their true targets, and fool them into dropping them bombs (relatively) harmlessly in deserted areas away from their intended targets or populated areas.

They are also reputed to owe muchof their existence to the magician Maskelyn, and experts from the film industry's special effects units.

In operation, the site would have lights strung up to look like recognisable patterns of streets lights in the target area, have pools of water to reflect star/moonlight like dock areas, be fitted with pyrotechnics to look like flashes from the power poles of electric trams, and odd lights to look like building or vehicles. During a raid, the lights would be occasionally allowed to go on just long enough to tempt the navigators, then extinguished. Remember, naviation in WWII was rough, especially at night, no GPS and only rudimentary radio location, so any visual cue was a gift.

Once a raid started, the ground operators would trigger preset fires, fuel dumps and explosions to simulate the effects of the bombs striking their intended target, to encourage the remainder of the bombers to drop their load in the same area.

The Kilpatrick hills houses such a site that protected the docks at Clydebank, but I've yet to come across any remains or evidence of their existence there, although I suppose a helicopter flight would do the trick, if I happened to have one.

There is a further site I have details for on north Bute, which is also designated a SSSI. This is only accessible on foot, so I plan to have a go at it late winter or spring, as there's no point in doing this when there's any lush vegetation about.

The name's right, QL Starfish was the classification given to primarily naval decoys. There were obvioulsy others, but little detailed detail appears on the web yet.

I don't understand how the structure shown could be part of such a feature though (and I'm only thinking out loud now):

All the elements were intended to provide visual/illuminated features to decoy night bombers from thier intended targets. By defintion, nothing underground would therefore be of any value to that aim.

It can't be a shelter. No-one's going to deliberately sit under an area where bombs are being attracted to, even if they've got a nice shelter, as it's completely pointless as they couldn't do anything.

Starfish sites etc. were remotely controlled electrically, from a safe distance, where the fires, flares and other diversions could be set off as required in response to observation of the enemy bombers flight.

Be interesting to see if the paper reveals more detail, and grid refs are handy. Kilsth hills not an area I know well, although I've been around there fair few times, (yes, the inevitable ROC post lies there) I really do just pass through the area. Even visiting customers was a pain, as they're hard to find, even with directions.

Forget their name now, there's a world famous label company there, does the graphic for car instruments. Couldn't believe the day I rolled into their car park, and there was a trashed Aston Martin Lagonda (the 200 mph modern square saloon) just lying there, ruined, having been used for developing the digital dasboard. Give us a clue if you know the name, it's irritating me now.

The missus was shopping and I dived into the local studies room of the library for a quiet half hour. The paper consists of about 10 pages, is very detailed with precise measurements, sketches and descriptions of construction etc. The info was passed onto other authorities - one which was a decoy recording place I think. I'll get back over there tomorrow morning if I can and copy it.

Remembering some of the info through your query about the structures being 'underground'  I'm sure the investigation of the pupils said the bunker complex was a considerable distance away from lights etc. In the case of the Drumnessie one in the hills it could be that the actual decoys were on the other side of the hills - in the area where the Carron Vallley Resevoir is now. The title of the report is 'Drumnessie Decoy Station' so I assume it is the remote control centre for the actul decoy apparatus.
The one in the photo above has an adjacent underground structure about 8m away from it. Both could be linked by an underground passage. Needs to be looked at again.

Label/graphic company was McGavigans.

Opposite hillside would make sense, let them keep an eye on things.

Once a raid was underway, they would fire things off to reinforce the illusion.

Some areas had simulated runway lights that could be flashed on and off, giving just enough of a taster to make the bombers think they were near their target and go for it.

In civil areas, they'd fire off flares and arc to look like the arcing of electric trams, again the pattern would be reconisable as streets in the real target area.

The worrying thing about these operations is that after the war, the British bombers admitted that night navigation was pretty much a guessing game, and when they used their aircraft's navigation when they were static on the ground i.e. not at 10,000 feet trying to avoid flak and fighters, they reckoned they were doing well if they could fix their postion within about 5 miles!

That was what made radio navigation and the various location beams such deadly secrets at the time, although the public had no idea of them then.

Amazing what a good rummage about in the cobweb shrouded corners of the memory can do, and one of the web's latest search tools.

I know I'd come across some references to local info somewhere, even though the site it was on had nothing to do with Scotland as such.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~rwbarnes/defence/decoys.htm

This site is about Cumbria, but the author had been up here in 1984, and the pics on the site seem to tie in with what you've got.

You've seen it in the flesh, so will be better able to judge, but to me, the overground construction looks pretty much the same as the site you photographed, so I'd say you do have a control room.

You might be referring to this site:

http://www.britarch.ac.uk/projects/dob/

Which leads to this one:

http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/specColl/dob/

Funnily enough, I was having a root around it this morning, but abandoned it. Although it refers to The Defence of Britain, and the first site has a pic of tank defences in Angus, I couldn't dig a single item from Scotland out of it.

That didn't bode well, as it also says the project is compelete, and there won't be any more updates being fed into the database, as it's now closed.

Maybe you want to give it a kick in case I was doing something fundamentally wrong, and that's why I couldn't get anything Scottish out of it.

However, yes, the pics look basically the same. They're also very similar to photo's that appeared elsewhere, and were accounted for as water board sites, which had antennas fitted to them, whch we decided were data links.

Too much greenery at this time of year.

I do find the positionng of the decoy site and control room most alarming and peculiar, unless they were playing on the fact that most night bombing tended to be less than accurate. Maybe they were playing the numbers on the basis that the one thing least likely to be hit was what was actually being aimed at.

That why the original ROC (Royal Observer Corp), post Cold War, was so important.

When an air raid was in progress, the factories etc. had to shut down, or they were sitting ducks.

According to the Starfish stories, one of the key elements to their success was to have the intended target absolutely blacked out when a raid was in progress, and why the glimpses that the Starfish decoy provided were effective, being believed to be the 'unavoidable' lapses in blackout preparations expected at the real site.

Try firing up the getmapping.com aerial photo site, start at Kilsyth and work your way north. Follow the road north to site, and there appears to be visible parallel lines to the west of the spot marked as the Site.

I'd give you link, but the url doesn't change to reflect the displayed location when you roam to a point (I thought it used to, maybe they changed the way it works).

I know you won't be able to see this quote Captain, so I'm passing it on complete for your benefit:

Quoted Text

From "The Clydebank Blitz" by IMM MacPhail:

The mission of the German pathfinder force was to start fires which would serve as markers for the follow - up aircraft was accomplished with a considerable degree of success from the German point of view; and the fires which began then determined the pattern of the later bombing.

The effectiveness of the incendiaries was largely, if not entirely, dependant on the accident of where they fell. Generally at industrial sites where the structures were of brick, concrete and metal, incendiaries caused very little damage.

But in the Clydebank area two of the first fires that started were at industrial sites full of inflammable material - Singer's timber yard and Yoker Distillery, just over the boundary with Glasgow.

In the forty acres of the timber yard belonging to the Singer Manufacturing Company, engaged during the war in the manufacture not only of sewing machines but also of armaments, including the Sten machune guns, a vast store of wood, estimated as worth at least 500,000 pounds, and, in addition, Goverment stocks of timber of unknown value stored there, were completely destroyed by fire.

Yoker Distillery, one of the oldest in Scotland, was on the other side of the Yoker Burn from Clydebank, but the flames and smoke were to attract to the eastern portion of Clydebank the later German bombers, who were not looking for specific targets but just dropped their bombs on or near the fires.

In the eastern parts of Clydebank, even as far west as Radnor Park, the aroma of whisky from the Distillery was already evident in the small hours of Friday morning.

Quoted from Apollo

Try firing up the getmapping.com aerial photo site, start at Kilsyth and work your way north. Follow the road north to site, and there appears to be visible parallel lines to the west of the spot marked as the Site.

I don't really see anything but enclosures/dykes. Lots of tufty type grass in the area which sort of hides ground features froma distance. A closer inspection would be required because they will still be there, the school surveyed it in 1997.

Norhing to do with the decoys as such, but this account gives a feel for the severity of the attacks on Scottish targets. Even though I do know better, because the media ignores these events in Scotland, I always think of England almost as being the sole recipient of such intense raids.

The report is useful in that it does establish a timeline for the raids, which could be helpful in trying to track down more detailed info of the decoys.

It would be interesting to gain enough info to get some sort of estimate of just how much ordnance the decoys prevented reaching their intended target, and whether or not they were effective. This is relative, since successfuly diverting even one attack would be worthwhile, had it had the potential to wreak serious damage or a serious death toll.

Just shows how you can miss things, even when you're looking.

I was doing a quick 'check run' over a site with a forum I have a tiny involvement with, Isle of Bute V-Day, and I noticed that a reference to the decoy had been added while I wasn't looking  :)

Worth a visit to read the items on Bute's War, and the related book written by one of the surviving residents of the time.

Quoted Text

At the north end of the Isle of Bute a decoy village was constructed and maintained by the Royal Navy. The village was illuminated at night (using generators) in an attempt to confuse enemy bombers, and hopefully to draw them away from Greenock or Clydebank. No bombs fell on Rhubodach, although a German plane returning from the Greenock blitz jettisoned 2 bombs near the Greenan Loch.

There must have been a decoy site in the hills above Greenock somewhere as I remember copious stories about fires being lit on the hills to fox(!) the german bombers. There are certainly plenty of bomb craters on these hills and the ones above Gourock.

Possibly not, with the Observer Posts and gun sites in the area, they wouldn't want to attract bombs. The decoys proper seem to have been in the Kilpatrick hills, on the other side of the water, and away from any guns etc.

The confirmed sites I know about are generally in areas remote from any other interesting features. There's one that's all but lost on the northern end of Bute. The grid ref's rubbish, so it would need a field walk to find and confirm, and earlier reports say it's overgrown and no longer to be found. I'd like to prove that wrong one day (shhh)

After all, I did manage to go find the ROC Post there after it was forgotten ;)

I am not suggesting it would have been that close to Greenock, I rather think it might have been south of Loch Thom and the Gryffe reservoirs as the shape of the water resembles that of the Clyde at Gourock.  

I have found the Mathernock AA site on the aerial photos ( 55* 54' 10.4" N  4* 41' 9.1" W)  Shows up quite clearly!  I am sure I have seen in on the site listed as Matternock but I cannot find it. The site was used by The Mount School, Greenock as an outdoor education venue in the late 60s / 70s.

All the known gun sites are listed on the AA Batteries Clyde page, mostly with direct links to aeriel imagery to make life a bit easier if hunting for them.

I reckon any open and unpopulated area away from potential targets would have been fair game for a decoy, provided it also qualified as being reasonalby close to fool the navigators.

I'm guessing you've all seen the documentaries where they (navigators) have revealed that they could barely plot their positions to better than 5 miles of their true postition, and that was using their instruments on the ground at their airfield, not in flight while avoiding defenders.

As regards the number of decoy sites, I ferreted this quote away some time ago:

Quoted Text

Masterminded by Colonel Sir John F Turner, Royal Engineers, Day Decoys (K Sites) and Night Decoys (Q Sites) were established throughout Britain early in the war to deceive enemy bombers and reconnaissance aircraft. Much of the design and building of these sites and the dummy aircraft was done by Sound City Films at Shepperton Studios whose General Manager was Campbeltown born Scot Norman Louden. Simulating factories, railway yards, docks, urban layouts, airfields and the effect of incendiaries, the K sites, QF (Q Fire), QL (Q Lighting) and SF (Special Fire or “Starfish”) sites were built in many parts of Scotland. There were for example four Starfish sites around Edinburgh and nine in the Glasgow and Lanarkshire area. Specifically for the purposes of the D-Day deception plan dummy Boston and Spitfire aircraft were displayed at Peterhead, Fraserburgh and Fordoun.

Haven't come across anything that details any other areas unfortunately.

I think the filing system has crashed as far as AA sites are concerened. Mathernock is not on the list but is shown on the attached map.  When you click on the pin it gives you a reference no. that appears to be that of Linwood.  When you click on the Linwood one it refers you to Bishopton.

Or am I having a senior moment?

Matternock (or Mathernock, one must be wrong :o ) is on Line 33 of the table, and seems fine on the map too, so I'm at a bit of a loss as to what's wrong for you with link and pin  :(

Unfortunately, there is a small bug in the code that handles the text (and no fix apparent yet), and as you should see there is an anomaly in the formatting of certain links that involve certain combinations of upper case characters at the start of the name, and you'll see them as having a sort of 'double entry' with an apostrophe and right arrow (that's '> and dashed too) stuck in the link and wasting it a bit.

Hmmm... You're having a senior moment (shhh) Mat(t/h)ernock is AS6, Linwood is S6.

Though I'd also add that the page is very much a scratchpad, just pulling the assorted sources of info into one spot, rather than having to jump around between individual pages and sites.

Need to get a fix on the spelling of the place now ::)

The Linwood jump back from the pin is fine (programatically, it has to be as it's automatic). If you hover your mouse over it, your browser status line should show the link leads back to an anchor that ends with #Linwood.

Do you mean Drumcross/Bishopton (S7)? The jump back tries to put the original line in the text at the top of the page. If your page size and browser window size don't allow it reach that bit of the page, then the 'wrong' line will be there, and there's no sort of feedback  from the browser that it couldn't reach the anchor cleanly.

I have found a reference to two Naval decoy sites south of Greenock. I think I can see something interesting on one of them. Try 55* 55' 17.7 N    04* 46' 28.4 W ( Yes I know it is not decimal !) Have a search around on a reasonable magnification.

Has nobody else noticed a number of boat shapes on the ground all orientated north south?

Gave it a good try, but no luck (55.9215833333333,-4.77455555555556) :)

The land and roads are a bit bland for markers, but if there are any that that might point to the outlines, it's worth a try.

I'd have to say that all the decoys I've come across were bigger than boats, generally being laid out to be geographically similar to a target area, with 'identifiable' features marked out by pits or areas that could be filled with fuel and set alight.

That said, even with the knowledge of reasonably accurate locations, the Drumnessie Decoy shows very little that can be recognised from the aerial pics. The bunker is reasonable, but the fire baskets located a short way away are next to invisible. Probably have better luck on foot with the Mk I eyeball :D

I definitely plan to transport a couple of Mk 1 eyeballs to the site when the weather is a bit more clement!  I am surprised to hear you say that the land and roads are a bit bland as using my favourite flashearth.com the topography comes up quite clear and the Lat/long I quoted should transport you to the centre of one of the boat shapes.  The other site listed is further to the SE on the north shore of the bigger of the Gryffe reservoirs but I cannot see anything on the aerial shots.

I visited the AA Battery on the shore at Cardross yesterday, it is very different from Larkfield although interestingly it has the same strange trenchlike structure outside one of the command post doors.  The site is not in very good condition now.  I found a listing site lastnight that suggested that it had a role in the protection of " The Cardross Boom".  Might be worth some more digging. The shore between the site and the timber yard is littered with old bricks and concrete and it appears that some shoreline buildings have been bulldozed onto the beach at some time.  It could have been quite a big complex.

This is as much as I can make out, only in VE though, there's nothing in the alternative Google, these being what flashearth mashes its images from. I'd say it's just a natural feature (if I'm in the right spot).



I've found that even the best of the hi-res imagery can provide views that appear to conflict, or at least can be misleading if taken at face value without studying the surrounding area for clues in shadow detail. Worse still, the post-processing applied by Google and MS can add/obscure visual clues. They stretch the images to match edges, manipulate brightness/contrast to match them, and remove artefacts and 'holes. There are some famous pics of airports where there are shadows of planes on the ground, but no no planes. You can maybe get an idea of the sort of thing I have in mind if you have a look at the views of the building on the ROF Bishopton site. Some building/areas look quite different in shape/height depending which view you're looking at Flashearth as you switch between the two providers http://www.flashearth.com/?lat=55.897039&lon=-4.510594&z=18.7&r=0&src=msl

Cardross is odd, I think, as it's seldom referred to in listings of gun sites. I only found in an obscure reference and then by looking at the aerial view - of course, I found a grid ref shortly after. When I think of the number of times I've driven past it over the years...

Good luck on the Cardross Boom. There's even less info there than the one that ran from Otter Ferry

Spot on for position.  It still seems to me that there are a number of boat shapes showing up around that area and I have not come across these sort of shapes anywhere else.  What would a  "Naval Decoy site " look like if not a collection of boat shapes. I assume that they were lit in some way to look like an assembled convoy.  The shape of the water in Loch Tom and the Gryffe reservoirs mimics that of the Clyde at Gourock ( as does that of the West & East Kyles) .  This area is exactly where the list of Naval Decoys said one was.

I look forward to a closer inspection but I do know that some of the land in the area has been extensively worked recently by the dreaded Scottish Water so I hope this area has been spared.

I'd have expected a Naval Decoy to look like a dockyard at night ;) :), since that kind of decoy isn't going work in daylight.

Boats wouldn't be discernible to bombers at altitude, and a convoy pattern would only exist as 'a convoy' when underway at sea, if you see what I mean. Blackout would have been the order of the day too.

The decoy towns depended on plausibility, and the difficulty of night navigation for bombers and pathfinders. The could navigate to the right area, but were still dependent on landmarks for their final fix. In the case  of docks and factories, this would be the unavoidable highlights that would result from the machinery or facilities that couldn't be shut down at short notice. The aim of the decoys was to play on that, and give the spotters something to aim for. This was the purpose of things like fire baskets and fuel pools, which were deliberately ignited after the pathfinders passed, to simulate their incendiaries and attract the following bombers.

I've never even come across any references, but it would be interesting to know if the toll taken by the Clydebank Blitz would have been the same or greater if the decoy towns in the hills had not existed, or even if they were in play at the time. I'm beginning to suspect that they either weren't in play at the time, so no-one wants to bring them up lest there be a scandal, or there is simply no record remaining in that detail, due to the secrecy that would have been in place at the time.

If you've seen any of the English historical documentaries, the the problem with tracking these decoys down is that nature has reclaimed most of the sites. They tended to be fairly shallow surface features, and it doesn't take much natural growth to hide them. A handy helicopter, able to provide a low altitude view, and radio directions to ground walkers seems to be the necessary solution to cover an area.

Cobbled a quick page together for the nearby known decoy:

Whitelees Naval Decoy

A classic example of the difference between Google and VE images and post processing. Nothing evident in Google, but the same spot in VE shows the bunkers and surrounding features in detail.

Well done Appollo!  The next question is which of the two quoted decoy sites did this generator house feed? Possibly both I suppose as it is inbetween the stated sites of both. Definitley one for a visit!

I imagine that the boat shaped features were lit in some way to resemble the shadows cast on the water by a ships at anchor at the Tail of the Bank.

Just been perusing your Flatterton entry and digging about on the Canmore files. Has anyone any idea what this GL Mat radar system looks like when it is at home?

Good luck ;D

I think you're on a hopeless quest, online at least.

As far as I can see, GL radar refers to the horns and dishes (and the associated hardware of course) that can be seen attached to many guns and searchlights in period pics. With a narrow band beam, these would have provided a radar return on invisible (to the eye) targets, and allowed the gun crews to have targeted items they couldn't actually sight.

From articles I've read, there were radar-guided searchlight that would lock on to, and track, target aircraft. This wouldn't work for AA guns, as their aiming position is not the same as the visual target, with altitude, windage, shell and charge size, and time to target all needing to be computed before firing commenced. I don't think that computing technology existed at the time, although  I believe the Cold War guns that were sited on some of the earlier emplacements were radar guided, thanks to the increased computing power available, and more advanced ordnance available.

I've never found any operational details, only lots and lots of references similar to what you've seen. Bit depressing, but there's lot's of specialised items that still haven't made it 'here'.

I'd always expected more detail to turn up here http://www.radarpages.co.uk/mob/chl/chl.htm but this seems to be the only reference.

Also http://histru.bournemouth.ac.uk/Oral_History/Talking_About_Technology/radar_research/gun_laying_radar.html

Update (just sticking thing here as I find them):

New searches are always worthwhile, as new stuff is added

I just found this http://userweb.suscom.net/%7Ewoudyet/RAF.html which I thought was interesting as it combined a GL reference and the ROC:

ROC post There's an unknown plane coming

HQ It's ok, it's friendly

The planes still coming

It's ok, it's friendly

The plane's still coming... and it just shot up our generator!

Actually, the writer's whole site is worthy of a read http://userweb.suscom.net/%7Ewoudyet/

Maybe there is more stuff around now http://www.infoage.org/sigcww2-test-p265-scr584.html

DEFLATING BRITISH RADAR MYTHS OF WORLD WAR II http://www.uk-us.org/stinet/radar.pdf makes for some interesting reading. I haven't read too much into the 'politics' if the content, but as far as I can see, the technical content is correct, and there is no doubt today that Germany and Britain were working in parallel, and that Britain was sending 'recovery' missions to bring their technology back. The article is also clearly correct when it identifies the two side's ideologies as the reason that Britain got it working and used it successfully.

Thanks Appollo. I did an extensive web search on GLmat radar and came upon a couple of interesting itmes. One was an RAF oblique aerial photo of the battery in Blantyre.  The GL mat receiver covered the whole of the field behind the site.  Seems they involved a large area of horizantal wire mesh ( up to an acre) although the later ones were smaller. There is no way such a large net structure could have been built at Larkfield for instance. Apparently the octagonal shape was important in some way too.  The transmitter was mounted a short distance away from the receiver too which set me wondering if the strange trench pattern found was the transmitter site or was it a base for a machine gun for shortrange defence of the sites. It must have had some purpose.

I also tripped upon another Decoy site in the Greenock area and have started a page. Actually this has resolved a niggle I have had for a while. When I found the pics of the starfish control bunker I knew I had seen one somewhere in my travels but could not remember where. It was the Larkfield one. My pals and I got brave one day and strayed into the area of the Greenock boys to have a look at it. It was demolisehed shortly afterwards. Didn't look inside it I am affraid - the Greenock boys might have been in it!

Good stuff, GL mats haven't given up any of their secrets to me yet. Is the oblique pic online?

I don't understand the mat references yet, as the ground meshes mean frequencies that would be too low to pinpoint aerial targets (and antenna arrays weren't even thought of then), but the mesh may have been used to improve the efficiency of the fairly new (and therefore inefficient) transmit/receive electronics and antennae in use at the time. That's why I was trying to track down more technical info. The octagonal shape was probably just efficiency again, a circle is best, and a square's corners are just wasted.

I'd tend to discount ideas of site defences - based on the info found regarding those at airfields - and would reckon that they were undefended in that sense, as it would be pointless. I'd reckon the order would be to detonate the magazine to deny the enemy in the worst case, while airfields would be heavily defended as resources, until overwhelmed in an invasion. But, I'm sure I could argue the converse too, if there were Nissen hits and camps near most guns, rather than airfields.

I'll have to catch up - no fun having been knocked off the web for almost 2 days ::)

Yes the pic of Blantyre was on line. I think it is one of the photos held by Historic Scotland or whatever they are called although that is nor where I found it.  Don't ask I don't know where it was.

As I understand it the mesh netting boosted the accuracy by producing an artificial horizon.  What I found no trace of at all is the ramps mentioned as GL Mat radar features by Mr. Guy.  Happy searching!

To find the Blantyre Aerial Photo ( the idiots way) Google F309,3648

That's a revealing pic http://www.rcahms.gov.uk/scotland_screenres_800/1020790.jpg A nuisance that RCAHMS pics aren't always easy to get to, or are generally just listed by index, but not actually online. To be honest, I've given up on them as I've followed so many links that end up with a message that the pic is in the library, but not online.

Interestingly, that search only works with Google (at this time). 4 other searches didn't find it, although 2 linked here, and the post's only been here a day! At least proves it's a waste of money, paying even a penny to those that claim they can get you listed fast and high, though no-one believes me.

I'd initially thought the pan/tilt/zoom toys in Virtual Earth would have made it easy to match the oblique view with the present day aerial imagery, but the controls are too coarse, and the perspective too false (since it's effectively pretending and overhead shot is a perspective view) to allow it to be done accurately, although the view can be quickly configured to provide a general match. The images would need to be manipulated in a proper image editor to get some sort of match. The most irritating thing is the new track, running parallel to the original road on the east - it keeps pulling your eye to it an making you think it's the road, and the reworking of the land will have destroyed quite a bit of the original remains.

Intriguing to see just how much is obscured/lost today, and that the spoil tip or hill to the north west isn't hiding anything, or at least wasn't part of the original structure. The Nissen hut bases are clearly lost in the undergrowth, but there are some objects still poking through the grass in the area between their site and the gun site, though that may just be discarded remnants.

I'd reckon that after 50+ years, there won't be any of those mats discoverable, unless they're in places with no undergrowth or vegetation. So, at least theory 2 was correct now that the true size of the mat is revealed :) and other sites can be compared for their layout.

Yes the GL mat covers a huge area at Blantyre.  There is a pic somewhere of an even larger one in Orkney. I assume these large mats must have been early versions and that the later ones were much smaller. An acre of horizontal wire mesh would have been impossible at Larkfield for instance because of the contours of the land round about and I read that they could be upto an acre!

I still cannot find any info on the ramps as mentioned by Mr. Guy

I see you are having a bit of a Blitz on the AA Batteries Appollo. I have been trying to find out about the Glenacre site which appears to be a real mystery. No one seems to know of its existence!

The Glasgow and Clyde AA Batteries deserves a bit of a tidy.

There's more sites with confirmed names and location now, compared to when it was cobbled together, so it seems right to try and collate it there.

It's also filling in some of the blanks that some of the original entries had, and tying up loose ends on others.

There will always be inconsistencies, as the info is coming from different sources, but that can be appended to the table as a note or comment, and be chased later.

There should probably be a page for the various decoys, as there are a number of sites beginning to appear with info.

I'm still trying to adapt my thought processes to the best way to manage the info though. While the web is clearly the best way to disperse it, and maybe catch info from anyone that may offer it, I'm frustrated in the poor or awkward means available for managing the data. Web methods are (to me) atrocious, and I've written database systems that can control a small business, and automatically generate its accounts, invoicing and related documentation, so I must have at least some limited ability. I admit that I'm part of the problem, I think in stand-alone application terms rather than web developments, but that's not wholly down to me, as I'd happily use a web-based tool if I had it (and it didn't cost an arm and a leg).

That's why I use the wiki. It may not be optimal, but it lets things proceed without locking the contents into some weird structure, so the info can be collected and moved around as needed, and has the advantage of being searchable.

Interesting on Glenacre (I spotted your question :) ) It's last on the list, and I haven't looked at it at all, so maybe something will turn up.

Forgive the worn and fading memory, but does it tie in with the question I think you asked about a sighting point, and its visibility from Toward?

Well it would make sense of the statement from a local that he could see the Perch from the battery. The only problems being that the Perch would be to the right from Glenacre and to the left at Toward, the second being they are 3 miles appart and in different villages.

It is strange that the Curator knew nothing of the site as he seems to know everything about the history of the area.  I have joined the weekly off season working party at the museum which might bear fruit eventually.

Another local has emailed me to say he knows nothing of the site either which is strange as the given position is not at all remote.

I have put in a link to a picture of the Gleniffer Braes Starfish site and some I have found of AA Batteries. I hope this meets with everybody's approval.

Indeed, it's handy to stick that sort of thing in if it turns up.

I'm sure the RCAHMS database has changed at some point. I'm (almost) sure that months ago, if there were images, then they showed up on the report page, under the icon of the camera where it says images, I haven't seen anything there for ages, yet I know some of the reports I've been looking at have got images if you look them up separately. Or I've just got a good imagination ::)

If you're new to the database, then it did (together with the mapping side) get fair bit of a shakeup and update a few months ago - it was terrible at one point, as there were days you could try and login in for some info and it would just not be there, but it seem to be more or less ok now. The only problem is if you look for report around 1 am, then the server seem to go offline for a few hours, and you have to remember what you were wanting until the next day.

I have been through all the AA Batteries and entered the photos.

On two of them I opted to put the info on the Discusssion page as I was not sure where to put it on the real page.

Have a look at the pic for Woodend (Hellensburgh) as it is particularly good and shows both the real and dummy batteries.

Sorry to hear that you vampires have trouble with servers at 1A.M. . I have no such problems as I am usually somewhere else at that time.

I guess we have moved on a bit since this thread was started in 2005!

I am still mulling over the reason for some decoys sites to have single roomed control bunkers and others 2 roomed ones. (Beware that John Guy in RCAHMS reports calls the single roomed ones as two room, presumably counting the corridor as a room.)

Having re-read the info on line and noted that the fire decoys were lit remotely by electricity it occurs to me that the power demands of such a site would greatly exceed that of a lighting decoy.  I assume some kind of element having to be heated to incandescence to light the fuel.  

Would lighting decoys not have required only a few hundred watts as nothing was well lit during the war and as I understand it they were largely pretending to be dull sources such as blackout failures at windows and doors.

All the 2 roomed ones so far viz. Drumnessie, Craigmaddie, Blairskaith and Auchenreoch could be described as quite remote in WWII terms.  The 2 single roomed ones viz. Foxbar and Whitelees moor seem somewhat less remote.  I wondered if they had a more handy source of mains power?   I cannot believe that the single roomed ones had their own generators as the room is quite small and generating equipment of that era was usually powered by a car engine.  Also there is no sign of any exhaust vent.

Think you're right; the standard set up for a'skylight' was a plywood box with a bulb in it, and just enough of an aperture to suggest a poorly blacked-out loft window. In a totally dark environment even the flare from a match would be seen at a great distance, so I think power requirements would have relatively low.
Feel free to correct me though; I've got a collection of ARP books I've been collecting for years, but I can't get into the book cupboard just now.

Don't confuse wartime propaganda with fact (remember, the wartime story of carrots being good for your eyes is one such story that has lasted even to today, and is still a favourite misquoted urban myth of the vegetarian foody brigade)- if lights were so visible, then why do lighthouses have such huge lens and mirror systems to get their beams visible at "great distances". Based on propaganda of the time, all they should need is a candle and the bottom of a glass bottle to get anywhere up to 5 miles and beyond.

If you imagine a QL dummy town or airfield set up with lamps of only 60 W, then using just 100 of those to make a reasonably decent pattern to fool a bomber into identifying the pattern as a town, city, airfield or dock would have needed a 6 kW generator driven by a 12 kW motor. As that would need them to run flat out, in reality they would be at least twice that size. That's over 30 bhp, and wartime engines were probably throwing out less than half what a modern engine can, so double that again in those days.

Double it again for the losses in the cable runs and their considerable lengths too (even though a decoy was only about 70% of the size of the place it was supposed to impersonate), and you soon need some decent motor generator sets of the time to run a proper decoy. Add another set of my fictitious 100 lamps, and you've just doubled the requirement again. The length of the cables would really preclude running at low voltage, eg 12 V car batteries, or even 24 V truck types, due to the increased losses in the cable.

I imagine electrically ignited QF fire deoys used very little power, as the electricity would surely have been used to trigger electrical detonators, and starts the fires using incendiary devices.

Unfortunately...

I've never come across any proper write-ups, so I'm guessing the above purely on engineering numbers, and throwing it in for discussion in relation to large-scale, organised decoys only, so as the_historian says...

Quoted Text

Feel free to corretc me thoug;

:)

They also needed power to remotely operate devices apart from just igniting them there would be solenoids and motors as well as the uniselectors that selected them.

I'd no idea they had that level of control - told you I hadn't found much detail.

All I'd been aware of was some switchboard in the bunker to turn the electrical bits on and off, and valves an plumbing to control the flow - by gravity as far as I could see - of the fuel, oil, and water to the fire pools, but this was all based in the bunker, with no hint of remote control in the sense of having distant device that would control other things out in the field. I had imagined everything just running to/from the bunker from what I'd read.

Anything else :)

I will have a look in Fields of Deception later but sure that I have that they used a Strowger type system so they could dial up for a particular thing to be activated.

Another good book is Royal Air Force Beam Benders: 80 (Signals) Wing 1940-1945.  There is one good story, which I think is in that book, about a couple of the crew of one decoy site going into somewhere like Norwich which was their nearest big town.  They tended to be left to themselves and just had a supply lorry every week and wore overalls because it was a dirty job.  They were stopped by a RAF policeman and taken to the RAF police station (or whatever they are called).  The very smart officer demanded to know where they were from because they were improperly dressed.  They refused to tell him.  He asked them to just show the area on a map but they still refused.  They gave him an Air Ministry number to call where the officer was given a severe telling off and told to mind his own business.  They were sent on their way.

MB

I don't think gravity from the bunker to the decoy played any part at all as all the sites seem to have the bunker at a lower altitude than the site itself.

From what I have read the technique was to wait until the pathfinders had dropped their relatively small number of flares or incendiaries, extinguish these as quickly as possible meanwhile lighting the decoy fires.  Some of these had water cisterns above them and a device to discharge water into the burning oil from time to time to give an explosion of flame.   I assume these were operated remotely and not on a timer but I don't really know.

I understand that the Morris 10 car engine was often used to power the generating sets.  Probably less than 30 BHP.   I would imagine that dynamos rather than alternators would have been the order of the day and that the system ran on DC rather then involve the complications of correct phasing of AC supplies.   I do not know how they dealt with the heat from the engines but this might explain the 12" pipes on both sides of the bunkers.  A through draught might have been a good help.  

Lighthing decoys would not have required much power as on a clear dark night a small light shows up for miles.  Lighthouse are a poor analogy as their characteristic flash is required to be visible from distance under much less than perfect conditions.  Ships are also much slower to answer their helms, take the example of the Akka, and need searoom to manouvre safely.  Under clear conditions a lighthouse is clearly visible from the horizon.

I had another look through the pics of the vaious decoys.  The pipe stub found at Auchenreoch is duplicated at Drumnessie.  I wonder what it was for?   It cannot be chance.

Your message arrived while I was typing this.  You will have to explain Strowger.

STROWGER is the old clockwork telephone exchange system.

A uniselector stepped around each time it received a dialling pulse so with a simple telephone dial you could select 10 outputs.  Hang another uniselector on each of those lines and you can select 100 outputs with the same simple dial.

Normally powered from 50v in a telephone exchange but probably could run from other voltages.

There is a diagram in Beam Benders - 8hp engine and dynamo for electricity.  There were also dimmers so they could turn the lights down.

I was trying to remember where it was all controlled from - RAF Radlett.

MB

Lighthouse may be visible to the horizon under ideal conditions, but in the real world have ranges associated with their beams, and can be around 15 miles, but this of course varies with the light, how it is designed, and the weather and environmental conditions.

The analogy is good because it shows how far the light can be seen reliably when it is concentrated by whatever lenses and reflectors are used. These collect a fairly small light (15 -30 W so they can run from batteries in a power fail scenario and run for a decent time) and focus it to achieve that range. By comparison, the light from a bare bulb is distributed such that rather than illuminate a narrow cone of a few degrees width, its light (for the sake of argument) is distributed over a spherical area.

If you imagine how many of those lighthouse beam cone bases would fit onto the spherical surface at the same distance from the light, you can see that the light from a bare bulb, through an open skylight for example, is next to nothing compared to the lighthouse.

We could run numbers, but the much repeated warnings about the visibility for miles of a match, lit cigarette, crack in a blackout curtain etc were just propaganda, and well intended, as it was much safer to drill the public into showing NO lights at all, rather than trying to educate them about what level of light would be visible at what distance. Much easier to send the police and ARP wardens out with instructions to charge anyone showing a light - end of story, and no arguments.

The bomb aimers would need binoculars to see any such lights, and would also have had to be looking at a very, very narrow cone of illumination, which they would have had difficulty to spot from a less than stable platform. Add to that some cloud, and maybe some smoke, and the propaganda fiction become even more apparent.

Oh, incandescent lamps would, of course, have had no care as to whether they were fed DC or AC power, so dynamos would have been fine.

ok, had a look in Fields of Deception and came up with the following; the original sunken bunkers of 1940 had a t-shaped entrance and connecting passage, with a room on either end. These were built to AM drawing 339/40. These were prone to flooding and were replaced in early 1941 by the single room surface-built bunkers of AM drawing CTD557/41. These only needed one room because all they held was a telephone and the switchgear to illuminate the decoy.
The two-roomed surface bunkers are to AM drawing CTD151/41 and were built later in 1941. The power room held three generators, and there were external expansion tanks about 20 feet away.
On the subject of skylights, the book gives a schematic diagram of a real-life decoy near Derby; part of the layout includes 25w lamps and 60w ones.

I can't remember which one, but that ties in nicely, as The Fox has pics that show the three concrete generator bases together.

Hopefully it will ring a bell, and he can say which one so it can be referred to.

This reminds of a recent documentary which featured staff at airfield decoys, and their account of simulating taxiing aircraft on the field. They had to remember not to merely simulate the taxiing route of the aircraft on the field using a hand-held spotlight to replace the aircraft light, but also to make sure they shone the beam in the correct direction on the ground, and shook it to simulate the shaking the aircraft experienced as it rumbled across the runway.

They knew the Luftwaffe was not crewed by idiots, and steady or smoothly moving lights would immediately have been recognised as false targets.

I think my favourite deception was the trams, which required the operators to strike random arcs on wires along the decoy streets, to simulate their travel along the road and add to the effect of a populated place.

All the two roomed bunkers I have seen so far have the 3 engine beds.  One of these days I am going to have to clean up the floor of one of the single roomed version to see if there was an engine bed there.  I suspect not.

Reading the historian,s post above the concrete slabs and brick foundations I assumed were part of the fuel supply must have been for the expansion tanks for the engines.   This brings a further assumption that 2 of the usually 3 pipes in the wall carry the supply and return to/from these tanks.  What was the 3rd one for?  Only one such bunker has only 2 (I forget which one ).   This begs another question - where was the fuel supply?   Given that the engine were probably idle more than in use, was there a small tank in the room which was kept topped up with jerricans?

Looks like a bit of a page revision is already required.

Just including this quote as it mentions Glasgow, and some of the controls in the bunker...

LMORESBY MOSS DECOY SITE, DISTINGTON

A national decoy authority headed by Colonel John Fisher Turner was set up in July 1940, and following earlier experiments in Glasgow and Sheffield.
A system of urban lighting decoys was set up similar to those used for military installations. These urban decoys were to be known as "Civil" sites; Civil QL for urban lighting simulation, and Civil QF for dummy fires.
"Q" - sites (which took their title from the Royal Navy's use of "Q" - ships; warships disguised as merchant vessels) were equipped with assorted electrical and pyrotechnical apparatus to simulate the flare given from furnace doors, steel-making, railway marshalling yards, and light given off by inefficient blackout precautions.

Ultimately, the civil decoy sites were staffed largely by civilian personnel from the works they were covering for. This was not always the case, though, and some sites were staffed by such diverse bodies as the police, the RAF Barrage Balloon Detachment, anti-aircraft ops. rooms, and the Civil Defence department. Navy and Army decoys were staffed by sailors and soldiers, and the RAF decoys were staffed by selected RAF ground-crew.

This site, which stands on Moresby Moss, was used to simulate "permitted lighting" given off by the Moss Bay Ironworks and Bessemer Converter five miles north of here. Permitted lighting was that which could not successfully be blacked out during air-raids, such as sparks from furnaces, coke-ovens, and loco firebox doors, etc. Banks of red and yellow lamps suspended from a canopy would cast their light onto trays of sand beneath, the whole operation being supplied via a rheostat in the control bunker. The brightness of the lamps would then be suitably adjusted to correspond to the variations in light observed when a real firebox door - for example - was opened.

Foxy-
According to the book, there were no engines in the single-room bunkers, just switchgear. There's no power supply shown at all.
The double-room bunker has three pipes exiting from the generator room into a large, 3 section external expansion tank and then converging into a smaller, single-section expansion tank behind that. A large diameter exhaust pipe is shown exiting the same wall, with another one in each side wall.

That makes sense, 3 engines 3 exhaust ducts.  However, Auchengreoch has wooden battens on the walls to accomodate a sliding board to shut off the duct, now this could have been retro fitted by the farmer, but pics of the same area of wall in other bunkers seem to show holes in the plaster that could have been fixings for similar battens.

On the subject of power, only one bunker, Drumnessie, shows signs of a duct from the engine room to the control room.  The others make do with standard  conduit.  In one there is a rag of cable still in the pipe and it looks domestic in size.

Anyone have any thoughts on the myriad of concrete bases on the decoy site?   They appear to be a jumble of different sizes and different orientations.  RCAHMS suggests that they held fire baskets and certainly the smaller square ones all show signs on some kind of steelwork having once been on them.  The others seem to have no fixings at all.  The broadest bases always seem to come in pairs with one about 9" above the lower one.

As a decoy it must have worked well judging by the proximity of that huge bomb crater and the nearest surviving bases.  I am inclined to agree with the Historian's assessment that it might have been caused by a landmine as it is double the diameter of ones I have seen before on the Renfrewshire hills although it might just be that the soft peat was very deep and it did not explode until it hit the rocky substrate.

As we've just mentioned Strowger systems, I happened across this example of a working system reconstructed by a museum:

Read More... from Internal Fire Museum of Power

Don't forget to click on the pics in the story, they will expand and are quite large so you can see the detail of the racks.

Nearer home, though not sure if he has any exchange equipment running, is the Darvel Telephone Museum.

Max Flemmich's  DARVEL TELEPHONE MUSEUM

Unfortunately, an empty web site at the moment...

The Darvel Telephone Museum contains a unique display of telephone memorabilia dating from 1900's to the present day.

At the moment there are no regular opening times.

Please phone 01560 320780 prior to visiting to ensure access. According to the site, access is free.

Darvel Telephone Museum
1b Burn Road
Darvel, Ayrshire
Scotland
KA17 0AJ
Scotland

Location

After 44 years employment with G.P.O. Telephones & B.T. and with duties covering the installation of telephones & switchboards, from the single householder to large business customers, it was only natural that Max Flemmich should carry on his interest in telephone memorabilia by putting together a collection of "100 years of the Telephone".

This is housed in a former bakery adjacent to his home in Darvel Ayrshire and it is the only one of its kind in Scotland. The museum is very "hands on".

The manual switchboards are operational; phones will dial through the automatic mechanical Strowger equipment, and semi digital systems. There are many examples of early wooden and metal magneto phones from the first half of the last century, as well as more modern switchboards and telephone equipment. There are opportunities to operate an old A & B coin box with its old style 2p's & 10p's, an earlier coin box using pennies, sixpences and shillings. Climb an old style shortened telephone pole and see how the wires connected up to the insulators or try out the morse code key.

East Ayrshire Council's Education Department have been approached regarding visits by school children. Along with electricity & magnetism, communications are to be shortly added to the school curriculum.

A visit to the museum gives an insight to the world of communications in the days gone by.

The Darvel Telephone Museum always seems to be open during Open Doors Day (programme not published yet, just the dates).

Quoted from The Fox

I am inclined to agree with the Historian's assessment that it might have been caused by a landmine as it is double the diameter of ones I have seen before on the Renfrewshire hills although it might just be that the soft peat was very deep and it did not explode until it hit the rocky substrate.

Not a landmine, but an aerial mine. They were big ****ers dropped on a parachute.

I recall reading somewhere that they were identical to the mines used in the sea but as you say dropped on a parachute.  Whatever it was it left a darned great hole in the ground especially considering it was more than 60 years ago.  I was impressed with the accuracy.

I think the large mines operated on time fuses so they did maximum blast damage from inside a building.  It means that they would explode even if dropped into soft ground unlike one with a contact fuse.  There is a post-war 1000lb bomb on one of the bombing ranges that never went off.  The RAF EOD teams used to have a look for it every year but never found it.

Darvel Telephone Museum managed to get a little publicity on Thursday, November 12, 2009, on STV's Greatest Scots, as part of the Bell presentation.