BMARC (British Manufacture and Research Company) was a UK-based firm designing and producing defence products, particularly aircraft cannon and naval anti-aircraft cannon. It was based on a 60-acre (24 ha) site on Springfield Road (part of the A607) in Grantham, Lincolnshire.
Lord Brownlow was Chairman.[1] Like R&H and A-B, the site had its own fire brigade. These company fire brigades would hold an inter-company sports competition at the Grantham cricket ground, with other council fire brigades as far as Melton Mowbray, Bourne and Peterborough.[2] It had a rifle club, and would hold inter-department competitions.[3] The company raised money for Grantham Hospital, to buy it a new operating table, costing £330.[4]
The factory had 7,800 employees in the war, with 2,000 women; the women made the bullets. Due to the London Blitz, the socialite Lady Ursula d'Abo returned home to nearby Leicestershire, and her father (the Duke) arranged a job for her at the factory, as women's officer. Ursula would travel the eight miles back to her home, by horse-drawn carriage, in the dark. In the darkness the horse knew the way home to Belvoir Castle.[5] Ursula was having an affair with the managing director, which her brother Charles (the Duke from 1940 to 1999) did not like, who described the managing director as a real whole-hearted cad, of the worst type[6] All of Ursula's three brothers saw operational service in the war.
The horse knew the way home, in the dark, from the factory to Belvoir Castle, each night
The factory was not unknown to Luftwaffe personnel, and also the importance of what it made. The factory was sited next to the railway, which could be followed. German aircraft dropped many bombs in the Vale of Belvoir on the way home from the Midlands, as it was a known thoroughfare for their bomber aircraft
Grantham received 21 raids by the Luftwaffe for precisely this reason, which killed 88 people in 1941-42 (many around the Commercial Road and Norton Street area on 9 January and 4 February in 1941). On 9 January 1941 at around 7pm, 22 people were killed, with 29 high-explosive bombs, on Commercial Road, near number 71.[7]
In mid-October 1944, censorship restrictions were halted, and the first official list of air raids on Grantham was released, once any immediate danger of repeat attacks had disappeared. Grantham had received 197 high-explosive bombs, 500 incendiary bombs, with 71 houses destroyed. 8 people were killed in Lincoln, with 55 injured, Skegness had 36 people killed.[8] Six people were killed in Scunthorpe.[9]
One notable raid was on 24 October 1942 when 32 people were killed when bombs destroyed most of Stuart Street[10] and its air-raid shelter. The Grantham Journal would refer to any attack on Grantham as 'an air raid on a Midlands town'.[11] The October 1942 attack was in lots in moonlight, with 10 people killed in the air raid shelter. Also hit was St Catherine's Road, with 17 high-explosive bombs, and 20 houses destroyed. It is thought that the attack was to hit the nearby RAF Group 5 HQ.[12]
The Ministry of Aircraft Production site on Springfield Road was hit on Monday 27 January 1941 around 2.30pm, when a plane was shot down. The Junkers Ju 88 had taken off from Schiphol.[13] In the raid 16 people at the factory were killed, 4 high-explosive bombs were dropped on the factory with 30 people injured. 4 houses were destroyed.[14][15]
The Ju 88, A-5 4D+CT of 9./KG 30, crashed landed in a field at 3.30pm near Pilley's Lane at Fishtoft. The German crew set the plane on fire, and escaped, but were caught. It was their 100th mission. This was the second time that the crew had been shot down - on 10 May 1940, the crew had been shot down by a Fokker D.XXI, and crashed at Vijfhuizen, and one of the crew was killed, being replaced with Ernst Stiller. One of the propellers of the aircraft ended up in the BMARC social club.[16] The crew was Oberleutnant Friedrich-Karl Rinck the pilot aged around 26 from Stralsund, Obergefreiter Ernst Stiller, Oberfeldwebel Wilhelm Rüther from Salzhausen aged around 27, and Unteroffizier Ferdinand Wissing from Rhede aged around 23.[17]
The factory was also attacked in daylight on 3 December 1940, but the plane was damaged by the 3rd Kesteven (Grantham and Spittlegate) Battalion who had an anti-aircraft battery at the factory. 7 people were killed on 4 February 1941.
The 1942 morale-raising film The Foreman Went to France was based on an employee of the Grantham factory. Melbourne Johns, from Pembrokeshire, was working at the Grantham factory and realised in 1940 that the Hispano-Suiza factory in France had important Deep Hole Boring Machines that could be of immense value to the Germans and set out on a mission with a team to recover the equipment. Finding the French factory and local village deserted, they drove the equipment back to England on a lorry. Melbourne Johns died in Grantham in 1955. The Deep Hole Boring Machine (DHBM), used for drilling the barrels of the guns, in the Grantham factory was very valuable, and was encased in a specially-made bomb-proof shelter.
The company, for morale, had an amateur revue group, called the 'Hot Spots'; a production at the town's Theatre Royal on Thursday 15 February 1940 was attended by the actor Leslie Howard; Howard would be shot down on BOAC Flight 777 on 1 June 1943 by eight Junkers Ju 88 aircraft. The 'Hot Spots' group took part in Wings for Victory Week events.[18][19][20]
By the end of the war, the factory had made 5 million rounds of ammunition, and 100,000 cannon shells. Jim Eade (1905-1983), who worked for Denis Kendall at BMARC, was later the editor of the Grantham Journal from 1945 to 1967.[27]
BMARC was a subsidiary of Hispano-Suiza (Suisse), S.A. in Geneva and then was owned from 1970 to 1987 by Oerlikon, the Swiss defence contractor. It was then sold to British Astra Holdings, which had a head office in Kent, in May 1988.
In the 1990s, the company was investigated for alleged illegal dealings with Iraq. Jonathan Aitken was a non-executive director of the company from September 1988, and in a libel trial in March 1997, BMARC was accused of selling weapons to Iran.[29] On 11 December 1995, an ITV World in Action programme covered the subject and the Scott Report. It was extensively (and exclusively) investigated by the Guardian newspaper, largely motivated by the potential to discredit (and later convict) Jonathan Aitken.
In planning the Vulcan raid, Operation Black Buck, the RAF was most interested in the capabilities of the anti-aircraft twin 35-mm Oerlikon GDF. The station commander of RAF Waddington sent the station intelligence officer, Flt Lt Martin Hallam, to speak to Spike Jones, a former senior RAF officer, now at the Grantham factory. The meeting was arranged by the managing director Werner Loyk (Swiss). The RAF were able to find out capabilities of radar, but the RAF were told that it would be unlikely for the Argentines to have transported the bulky Roland (missile) system.
The Argentines had taken the system to the Falklands, and the system would later shoot down a Sea Harrier on 1 June 1982. The Argentines would also shoot down two of their own aircraft with the Oerlikon 35mm.[31]
After the Falklands War, many Royal Navy vessels had BMARC 20mm cannon added, as many of these ships had had woeful protection in that war, against substantial Argentine air attacks.[32]
Financial collapse
On 4 February 1992, after owing £50 million, Astra went into receivership. In Britain, it also owned the pyrotechnics company Haley & Weller (who made grenades). After the financial collapse of Astra Holdings, in April 1992 BMARC was bought by British Aerospace, briefly becoming part of Royal Ordnance. The company closed the Grantham site later in 1992, and the site was sold in 1994.
The former site's offices are now home to the Springfield Business Park, with the rest of the factory part developed for housing. South Lincolnshire Enterprise Agency was based there.
