Rocketry

March 1962

Big brother Patrick had started studying Chemistry at school, and I was fascinated. I was interested in Space Travel, and rockets – and here was how to make rockets! Well, I couldn’t get normal rocket fuels, but reading Patrick’s chemistry textbook I could see that there would be lots of alternative combinations of things that would do. I could get hold of something that would be a good second best.

Patrick’s book wasn’t enough. I scoured the public library. I found a couple of secondhand bookshops on Charing Cross Road, and pored over old books there, too. I didn’t buy any, but the proprietors were kindly old men who seemed inclined to indulge a polite little girl – I was thirteen, but looked about eleven – who came alone to find and take notes from undergraduate level textbooks.

Fuel was no problem. Sugar would do very nicely. I needed an oxidizing agent.

In those days, you could buy pure sodium chlorate as a weedkiller. (These days it’s always mixed with a fire retardant.) The ironmongers in Mile End Road knew me. I was the little girl who bought all kinds of odd things in very small quantities. I don’t think he’d have sold sodium chlorate in quantity to just any child, and he did impress upon me the need to “be careful”, and questioned whether I really did want so much. But he sold it to me. Three times in total.

Incidentally, the chemist knew me too. This isn’t connected with the rocketry story, but now seems a good moment to mention that I bought half a kilogram of sodium metal in the chemists on Mile End Road at about the same time, for a different project. I didn’t really want as much as half a kilogram, but that was the minimum quantity he could get from his suppliers. It came as chunks an inch square by about an inch and a half long, in paraffin oil in a plastic jar. It was a special order, not the kind of thing a high street pharmacist normally stocks!

I don’t think even an adult would be able to buy sodium quite so easily nowadays. The anti-terrorist squad would be down on you like a ton of bricks for just asking about it.

It cost me eight shillings and threepence, an absolute fortune in those days. Four week’s pocket money and a bit – mine and Pippa’s, bless her.

Back to rocketry!

Dad had a shed on the allotments, not far from our tenement. He’d made a nice, solid workbench out of timber he’d salvaged from a bomb site – old joists, I think. He’d picked up an old metalworking vice from an army surplus shop in Aldgate, and mounted that on the bench.

This was the ideal place for my experiments. Dad knew I did all kinds of things in his shed, and generally didn’t inquire too deeply into exactly what I was doing.

I had plans to make two rockets. One was to fire upwards, just to see how well it performed; the other was to attach to my bicycle, to see what it was like riding a rocket-propelled bicycle.

I wanted to bench test one of my rockets before actually firing one. I’d even managed to rig up a test device to measure the thrust. The test device was mounted in Dad’s vice, and the exhaust from the rocket was supposed to go out of the open door.

I made the rockets in some thick cardboard tubing I scavenged from the rubbish at one of the local businesses. The first one was about two and a half inches in diameter and fifteen inches long.

I was a bit worried about being close to it when I ignited it, so I did it remotely with a battery and a bit of resistance wire. I’m glad I did.

Dad’s beautiful bench with the vice on the end just stood there unperturbed. Bits of the shed were scattered all over the allotments.

Dad was amazingly good about it. He spent his days off over the next few weeks building a new, bigger and stronger shed. He didn’t ban me from using the new shed, not for a single day. He asked me please to be careful, and complimented me on my wisdom in not having been too close!

He didn’t tell a soul outside the family. Anyone who asked was told that he’d “had a bit of an accident”. He swore Mum and Patrick and Pippa to secrecy. Little Michael didn’t know until years later what had happened.

That’s the kind of Dad you need.

Maybe I wasn’t the kind of daughter Dad needed though, but if that’s the case he never let it show.

Just two months later I bench tested my second attempt, and fortunately that went smoothly. The rocket fired for twelve seconds, and the peak thrust was fifty-five pounds. My thrust meter only recorded the peak. I’d no means of knowing whether the thrust was reasonably steady, or just a brief peak and much weaker before and after it.

I was ready to fire a rocket. Upwards. Where would the burnt out bit of cardboard tube and the stick end up? I’d not even thought about that, but the stick was heavy enough to do someone an injury if they were unlucky enough to be in the way of its descent.

I’ve still no idea where it landed. I don’t know how high it went, but it was pretty high. I’m not sure whether I lost sight of it because it stopped firing, or because it was simply too high to see the tiny bright speck against a blue sky.

While I’m thinking about allotments, here’s a little observation for the pot. A lot of people think it’s a modern middle-class affectation to be growing fancy vegetables on the allotments, and that the old working-class allotment holders only grew potatoes and carrots and parsnips and onions and beetroot and peas and beans and cabbages and sprouts and cauliflowers and tomatoes and marrows and pumpkins and cucumbers and raspberries and strawberries and currants and gooseberries.

Don’t you believe it. Those Whitechapel allotments were a hundred percent working class. There wasn’t a toff in sight. Toffs didn’t do allotments in those days. Sure, there were all those regular vegetables and fruit. But there were aubergines and courgettes and garlic and capsicums and artichokes (both sorts) and chillies...and things the toffs still haven’t heard of, like scorzonera and cardoon and...

And it wasn’t just my Dad. It was lots of the chaps, and yes, a few ladies too. They were growing all sorts long before Dad arrived – it wasn’t that he brought fancy ideas from India or anything.

I do not recommend the rocket propelled bicycle. I tried that twice.

The first time, the bicycle shot out from under me, and the exhaust from the rocket gave me a burn on my bare right shin whose scar I still bear to this day. I landed hard on my backside on the road. My bicycle skidded down the road on its side, and ended up spinning round and round like a horizontal Catherine wheel. One pedal lost its end cap, but otherwise the bike was, remarkably, pretty much unscathed.

I kept my burn secret for three weeks, from everyone except Pippa. Whether anyone else wondered why I took to wearing jeans all the time, I don’t know. Jeans aren’t the most comfortable thing to wear over an amateurish dressing on a bad burn, but they do hide it nicely.

Nothing daunted, three weeks later I tried again. I made sure that this time I was well attached to the bicycle, with a strap round my back attached to the handlebars. The rocket was mounted rather higher than before, behind the saddle rather than alongside the chain. I did indeed stay aboard.

It’s not easy to control an ordinary pushbike at that speed, though. Maybe it’s not possible at all. Certainly I didn’t manage it.

The initial acceleration was terrific. I was ecstatic. It worked!

But steering gets jolly hard, and then begins to wobble rapidly from side to side, before the front wheel finally swings uncontrollably right over to one side and you fall off.

That much I remember very clearly. It can only have taken a couple of seconds, but the whole sequence of events is indelibly imprinted in my memory. But if you’re still strapped to the bike, and the rocket’s still pushing the bike, that’s not the end of it.

I really don’t remember what happened after I hit the road. Witnesses said I skidded down the road on my side for quite a distance, and then spun round and round in the middle of the road for a bit.

My bike didn’t survive the excitement this time. Luckily I did, without even a single broken bone. But I lost an awful lot of skin, and completely wrecked all my clothes.

Mum wasn’t quite as forgiving as Dad had been, and told Dad off in no uncertain terms “for encouraging her”, which I never thought was fair at all. He’d never really encouraged me, unless not discouraging me amounted to encouraging me.

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On to Bill and Ben