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- Frederick John Ash O.B.E., M.I.Mech.E., P.S./B.
Frederick John Ash was known as John at home and Fred at work. As a boy, he sang in the church choir at Holy Trinity, Eltham. At the time of his marriage he was a draughtsman in the Royal Arsenal, Woolwich and his wife Edith was a milliner.
By profession, Fred was an engineer who specialised in gun design. He trained at Woolwich Arsenal, became an Associate Member of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (AMIMecE) then worked for the Ministry of Defence at Fort Halstead until he retired. He kept up close contacts with the Institute of Mechanical Engineers well into his retirement and served on a national committee. He was awarded the Order of the British Empire for Government Service in Gun Design in 1961.
On the 1921 Census, Fred, who was 18, gave his occupation as ‘Gauge making (steel). Royal Arsenal manufacture of guns and carriage parts, mountings, etc. part time.’
In private life, Fred was a keen sportsman. He played football in his late teens and twenties and later refereed for the Southern League. He helped to found a Lawn Tennis Club in Danson Park, Bexleyheath during the late 1920s and played there most weekends during the summer. In retirement, he played bowls in Kent county matches and was a co-founder of the local dramatic society in Hildenborough, Kent. He served on Tonbridge District Council and was a school governor for a primary school in Hildenborough.
Transcript of an interview conducted with Fred Ash in 1974
‘Between I should say 12 and 14 I went to school at Plumstead. I went to school when I was 11 and, of course, mother used to set us up sandwiches because we couldn't get home. We had to go by tram car. In the summer time, anyway, we used to go down to Woolwich with the object of going onto the free ferry, having a ride across the free ferry and a slide across the boilers and then back again and going up to school. But in the process of doing this, as we walked down, after a time we saw the difficulties. There was a shop at the top just before you entered Woolwich Square where you could buy pease pudding. It was lovely pease pudding for a halfpenny. You got a pease pudding in a newspaper which, of course, we enjoyed better than our mother's sandwiches! She didn't know, and then you go into the Square and there were all these kiddies with no shoes or stockings on coming up from Spray Street, and if they saw you eating sandwiches, they come up and ask you for some. In the end we used to take our sandwiches and give them to them and eat our pease pudding.
‘There were children running about with no shoes and stockings on until the First World War in 1914. Never saw any after the War. Didn't go back to that stage. Children used to go to school without shoes and stockings on in the poorer schools. We were three and a half miles to go to school from Eltham and you could go to Woolwich or Plumstead for one penny on the tram. We used to get off at Nightingale Place and walk along Bloomfield Road. But lots of days we would walk home the 3½ miles to save our penny so that we could buy some sweets. Because all we had was enough pocket money to pay our fares each day, a penny each way, and a cake in the tuck shop once a week, with which you either bought a cake or some "mixed stamps" when you got interested in stamp collecting. If you wanted some extra you walked home.
‘After the war, mother bought a house because father had a business, a farrier's business before the war, but that broke up because of the war; there wasn't enough work. I think he worked in the dockyard as an inspector, I suppose. He managed to save some money and started his business again after the war at Catford. In the mean time, mother was interested in, and she bought, the house further up the road. That house, when it was finished in 1914, was £250. Mother bought the house in the 1920's for £700. It had gone up that amount, you see! Eventually when she died in 1964, it was worth nearly £3,000. That was the difference between 1920 and 1964. Now it must easily be worth £10,000. It was a fairly large house but semi-detached, there was no garage and no paths through the garden. Although it was considered quite a nice house, you still had to leave the dustbin in the front garden once a week.
‘In Eltham High Street when I was a boy there were three farriers’ businesses. There were rides up at the top. Metcalf’s, that's still working but has turned over to welding and repair of motor cars and things like that, farm machinery; and another one in the middle of the High Street, Blakeney's, but that's disappeared probably because one of the big stores is there now. The doctor had a big house. The High Street was a winding high street, brick blocked, with big houses and a few shops. There were still a few rich people there. We called it the village.
‘And the school. The two village schools are still there. In fact, I went to the little Infant School in what is known as the back lane then. Strangely enough, we didn't know it, when I was at Bloomfield Road School, we used to have to go across to Plumstead Common to a school known as Ancona Road to do woodwork one afternoon a fortnight, or something like that. That school was within a hundred yards of the house in which you were brought up (referring to Tim, his second wife.) I probably saw her running up the fences (?) in her little drawers. Little girls in those days had skirts and their little drawers showed underneath.
(Note: Bloomfield Road School in Eltham was originally known as a Board School for London, part of the wave of schools built in London in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to provide elementary education. It was also known later as Woolwich Secondary School for Boys, or Bloomfield School, with photographic records from around the mid-20th century indicating its continued use as a boys’ secondary school.)
‘When we were six or seven we used to walk to Sunday School on a Sunday morning. All the little boys were in their Norfolk jackets or sailor suits and the little girls down the road in front with their little dresses, and there was just a little bit of lace showing and it had to be just right, right under their skirts. And little puff sleeves and little straw hats. We went to Sunday School at ten and spent an hour there. This was before we were ten. Then we would go into church and have the whole of the church service, come out of church, walk round the fields and go bird nesting or something like that. Home in time for lunch and then go off to Sunday School again in the afternoon while your parents washed up and rested after the large dinner. When I got a bit older at 10 or 11, I joined the choir and used to go and sing at the 8 o’clock service, the 11 o’clock and the evening service and the Sunday School in the afternoon. Every Sunday! I never missed a service. At 16 or 17 you leave the church and you start work.
‘On Sunday evening we used to go to what were known as Sunday League Concerts held at the Woolwich Hippodrome, where they had an orchestra and there used to be a concert, and a comedian, like that chap who used to sing and play on the piano, like Norman & Long and one or two others. But this is where we first heard any touch of classical music. There was no education for classical music. We never heard classical music. You might hear The Unfinished Symphony and one or two overtures.
‘The Hippodrome in Woolwich was packed every Sunday, all by workers in the Woolwich Arsenal; the mechanics and all that sort of thing. That was the only bit of music they got. There was no wireless or anything. That was the first introduction to good class music, apart from dance music. (Tim interjects: "Sunday afternoon or Sunday evening used to be a family occasion with singing around the piano after Sunday tea. I used to love those Sunday evenings.”) That was in the Spring, Autumn and Winter for us on Sunday. In the Summer, it was regular after church to go to one of the bandstands (the Monkey Parades). There was a bandstand in Bostal Woods, there was a bandstand on Plumstead Common, there was a bandstand in Avery Hill. All the young lads and all the young girls used to congregate around there, and the boys would follow the girls. (Tim: “And we listened to the band but having one eye … well I like the look of him! You'd walk round the bandstand hoping he might follow. This was all we had to do in those days. No TV and no wireless. I wasn't allowed to go to the cinema, not on a Sunday! So we went to the bandstand and listened to the music.”)
‘I started work at 14. Normally people left the Central School at 15. We agreed to stay to 15. There was no compulsion about it. It so happened that I entered an examination to go into an apprenticeship at Woolwich Arsenal. My birthday was a few days before the last date for entry. The teacher said, "Go into this for experience and you can take it next year having had the experience when you’re 15.” But I passed, which they didn't expect, so I had to make the choice: Do I leave now or retake it next year? Well, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. So they allowed me to go straight into the apprenticeship. I was the second youngest in the year. I went on the 1st of September and I was 15 in December.
‘But the apprenticeship there … we had an apprenticeship association. To us it was almost like a university. We used to go to evening classes three nights a week and one half day they let us off. And we had this association where we had in-between schools, meetings and debates, then eventually football and cricket. Some of the older chaps were very good and we used to have some very interesting debates. Woolwich Polytechnic was almost like being at University. (Brian, Fred’s son, asks, “Did you go to Woolwich Arsenal with your Eton collar?”) It's true. Mother sent me there when I was 14. I went for a week or two with the same Eton collar I'd been to school with till I got my leg pulled so much, then I went home and said something about it and I had to dress normally after that!
‘One used to get bullied. There were chaps, louts, who weren't apprentices in the workshops. They didn't take kindly to apprentices. You got knocked about a bit. At every opportunity they would push you around, or throw oil over you. It was really hard going for a year or eighteen months. Those sorts of chaps eventually went and it was all tidied up.
‘When I started work, the First World War hadn't finished. I was in Woolwich Arsenal when the Armistice was declared. On November 11th at 11 o'clock everybody disappeared. I left immediately. I joined another chap and we got on a tram and went up to London and joined in the crowds in London until it got a bit too crowded and then I came home again. I didn't know what was going to happen. (Jean, Fred’s daughter-in-law, asks, “Did you have air raids like we had in the last war?”) We did. I saw three Zeppelins come down. Mother got us out of bed. We could just see from our house right over to Cuffley and see these Zeppelins catch on fire and come down. It was shocking. They had reached the stage where night fighters were able to go over the Zeppelins and shoot into them. They always used to raid in September and October. They called it the Harvest Moon and the Hunters Moon, bright as anything. They used to drop a string of bombs, nothing like in the last war. But they dropped a string very close to where Edith (Fred’s first wife) lived. We'd go up and see the house destroyed next morning. But after these three were destroyed they didn't come any more.
‘Towards the end of the war a whole string of planes made a daylight raid on London. We watched these from Eltham as they followed the River Thames right up into London. I think they were Fokkers, they called them. We watched them from Eltham High Street. There was a lot of anti-aircraft fire which never reached them. They dropped their bombs on London and went all the way back. Our airplanes were buzzing round them, but they never lost a plane. This was a daylight raid. We just weren't prepared for that sort of thing. That was just one of the things the Germans did before the end of the war. It didn't do any real damage, just a few bombs dropped in the East End. They were aiming for the docks, actually. (Brian asks, “Is that what made you go into armaments later?”) No, that was quite fortuitous. When I finished my apprenticeship, I was left on what was called the shop floor working on a lathe. I didn't want to be a mechanic; I wanted to go into the drawing office. There were no opportunities just at that moment in the drawing office in Woolwich Arsenal. I got a job, through an uncle of Edith's, with the Western Electric Company in Woolwich. I could start straight away. I went over and had an interview. I think I was earning £4 10s a week on piece work on a lathe in the Arsenal. They said they would give me this job for £2 10s a week. They said if you can start tomorrow you can have the job. So I said, “Alright, I’ll start." So I rang up the foreman and said, “Give me a week's unpaid leave and take a week's notice.” And so I started at this ridiculous figure of £2 10s just to get into the drawing office at the age of 21. (Brian: "I started at only £2 17s 6d a week in the Bank in 1949!)
‘I worked on with the Western Electric Company. They transferred some of the work to Hendon and took over Graham White's air field and converted all the hangers into machine shops. As draughtsmen, we laid out the machine shops. I travelled all the way from Eltham to Hendon every day. I used to catch the 7 a.m. workmen's train and get the tube down to Hendon, come back and go to Woolwich and do the evening classes. Get home at half past ten and do your homework on the train. Get up the next morning and then go back to Hendon and take your Higher National Certificate. I got fed up with that so I left and took a job with Pesetas at Silvertown which made plywood and was making toothpaste tubes.
‘The job in the drawing office there (they called us designers) was to convert what was handwork. Every operation to make a toothpaste tube was carried out by girls. First of all you started with a little pellet of tin, a press came down. The girls carried this to another one that converted into a tube. Other little capsules were made into the caps and then the girls screwed them all on. They were then sent away to a factory to be filled. They were open ended and printed before they were filled. The tubes cost much more than anything that went inside! We were there to convert this into automatic, so that it was all done automatically. After I'd been there for a year, the price of tin completely rocketed, for there was a shortage of tin. The firm lost an awful lot of money. They had to quickly change over to an aluminium alloy and they couldn't afford to go on with this automation so they sacked us all, about 8 or 9 of us. I was out of work. I never wanted to become a Civil Servant. However, you chase around for a job and it was the sort of beginning… (end of tape).’
Royal Armaments Research & Design Establishment (RARDE) News Sheet October 1962
‘The vacancy in the post of PS/P created by the promotion of Mr Chaddock has now been filled by Mr F.J.Ash, formerly Superintendent, P1. Mr Ash's connection with the Establishment extends as far back as 1927, when he joined the old Design Department at Woolwich Arsenal as a draughtsman. He had, however, first entered the government service ten years previously as an Engineering Apprentice at the Royal Arsenal and after completing his training, spent some four years in private industry. In the Design Department and A.D.E. Mr Ash reached the rank of Chief Design Officer and later P.S.O. (Engineering) before entering the Engineers' Pool in 1947 as Engineer 1. He became Superintendent of the Gun Branch in 1952 and retained that post after the amalgamation.
On the formation of L.Division in 1958, he assumed the additional control of P7 for a period, after which P3, the former small-arms branch at Enfield, was also merged with P1 under his charge until its re-absorption by the R.S.A.F. His present post carries the rank of Director (Engineering). Early in the last war Mr Ash played an active part in speeding up armament production by the rationalisation of design and was seconded to a leading firm of manufacturers for that purpose.
In the succeeding years he has borne an ever increasing share of responsibility for the design and development of conventional weapons, and has travelled widely on official business, both at home and abroad. His services in an advisory capacity are also much in demand, notably in connection with engineering appointments to the War Office staff, and he has served on departmental promotion panels for many years.
Mr Ash, who was created O.B.E. in 1961, takes a keen interest in the affairs of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, of which he has been an Associate Member since 1943, and sits on both the Southern Branch Committee and the Kent Advisory Panel of the Institution.
Royal Armaments Research & Design Establishment (RARDE) News Sheet Nov/Dec 1965
Retirement of Mr F.J.Ash, O.B.E., M.I.Mech.E., P.S./B.
The Fort Halstead Conference Hall was filled to capacity on November 29th, on the occasion of the leave-taking ceremony of Mr F.J.Ash, who had held the post of Principal Superintendent, 'B' Division, since 1962.
Mr Ash entered the Royal Arsenal as an engineering apprentice by competitive examination in 1917 and was thus one of the fast-dwindling band of those whose connection with the Ministry goes back to the days of the First World War. In addition, he was almost in at the birth of the old Design Department, having spent a period in its gun office during 1922, the first year of its independent existence. Gun design was in fact one of Mr Ash's main specialities, and after three years with private firms, he returned to the gun design office at Woolwich in 1927. Apart from a brief spell with the Inspectorate of Armaments, he maintained his connection with this branch for 35 years, being for the last ten, from 1952, its Superintendent. He was in fact the first civilian ever to be appointed to this post, which almost from time immemorial, had been the prerogative of either a senior military or naval officer.
During this period he also took over the design of gun carriages and mountings and, later, control of the small-arms design branch at Enfield. During and particularly since the last war Mr Ash bore an ever-increasing burden of responsibility for the design and development of conventional weapons and travelled widely at home and abroad on official business. A.A. guns (Ack Ack guns) with very high rates of fire were one of his special preoccupations, and his outstanding work on the new tank guns, such as the 20-pr., the 105 mm and the 120 mm, gained him the award of the O.B.E. in 1961.
In presenting Mr Ash with a cheque for a substantial amount as well as an album of signatures, the Director, Mr E.W.Chivers, C.B., spoke of the great gap which Mr Ash's departure would leave, not only in the R.A.R.D.E. but also in the whole field of armaments, in view of the immense contribution he had made to the subject and his reputation in this country, the United States and on the Continent. Mrs Ash, who was also present, received a bouquet.
Responding in humorous vein, Mr Ash expressed gratitude for the help he had received not only from his staff, but from outside bodies, including industry, and for the especially pleasant relationships he had enjoyed with his scientific and Service colleagues. His career had brought him a great deal of happiness and he now looked forward to a busy, if less arduous life in a new bungalow at Hildenborough (21, Hilden Avenue). With his many outside interests, including the presidency of the local amateur dramatic society, this seems to be already well assured.
Among a number of other parting functions held in Mr Ash's honour was an informal lunch time meeting of his old branch, B.1., at which he was presented with a model of an antique cannon and a cartoon depicting some of the less serious incidents of his career. These too will no doubt serve to remind him of the good wishes of his many friends and associates for a long and happy retirement.
Fort Halstead
Fort Halstead in Kent is a historically significant site that has served multiple roles since its construction in the late 19th century. Located on the crest of the North Downs near Sevenoaks, it was originally built between 1895 and 1897 as part of a network of forts designed to defend London against invasion. This network, known as the London Defence Positions, consisted of "Mobilisation Centres" meant to support volunteers and provide stores and ammunition in times of crisis. The fort itself featured vaulted barracks, an ammunition magazine, artillery positions, and a defensive ditch, and was usually overseen by a caretaker during peacetime rather than having a permanent garrison.
During the First World War, Fort Halstead functioned as an ammunition store within the anti-invasion stop-line protecting London. After a period of private ownership beginning in 1921—when it was even used for camping by youth groups and as accommodation for refugees—the site was reacquired by the government in the late 1930s. It then became home to the Projectile Development Establishment, a key location for early British rocket and missile research. In 1947, Fort Halstead was designated as the High Explosives Research Headquarters, becoming central to Britain’s initial atomic bomb development, work that continued there until staff and operations moved to Aldermaston in 1955. Despite this move, the site remained important for explosives and defence research throughout much of the 20th century.
The Woolwich Arsenal
The Woolwich Arsenal, formally the Royal Arsenal, is one of Britain's most significant historic military sites located on the south bank of the River Thames in southeast London. Originating as the Woolwich Warren in the late 17th century, it expanded rapidly in the wake of Britain’s military and industrial growth, becoming the central hub for armaments production, proofing, and explosives research for the British armed forces.
The site began as a gun depot in the reign of Elizabeth I, with initial ordnance production linked to Henry VIII's establishment of Woolwich Dockyard in the early 1500s. By the late 1600s, the Office of Ordnance purchased land for expanding operations; specialized buildings were constructed for manufacture and testing of artillery, gunpowder, and ammunition. By 1700, Woolwich Arsenal was the most important armaments facility in England, and manufacture of guns began in the 1720s. The Royal Brass Foundry was established in 1716 and the title "Royal Arsenal" was granted in 1805.
Throughout the Napoleonic and Crimean Wars, the Arsenal expanded further, and by its peak during World War I it covered over 1,285 acres and employed around 80,000 people, playing a crucial role in supplying artillery, munitions, and innovations in warfare. During WWII, production was distributed nationwide but Woolwich remained a key site. Production was gradually diminished after the war, with the site transitioning to focus on civilian manufacturing such as railway wagons and tanks.
External Links
Fort Halstead & RARDE (Wikipedia)
Royal Arsenal History
The Mighty Royal Arsenal
The Royal Arsenal (Wikipedia)
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1902 - 1985 (82 years)
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