Author: Johnny. K. Pitts, 8th June 1998

From 1945 to 1950 was a time of transition for the Society. People like Francis Goddard and Rod Pearce, medical students who had been successive secretaries during the war, had moved on to adult life and had less and less time for caving. Professor Dobson, who had been President all through the war, died in 1947 and was succeeded by Trat who had been released from internment in Singapore at the end of the war. He continued working in Singapore until 1950 but visited the U K on many occasions during those years and picked up the threads of his long involvement with the Society. Bertie Crook, who as Treasurer had played the role of elder statesman through the war years, progressively handed over that role to Trat. Bertie had served in the First War but was still actively caving during this period. Desmond Donovan returned from the army, becoming the curator of the museum in 1947. New students appeared, like Arthur ApSimon, who half a century on would become President, and Ralph Stride, who instantly became secretary, and almost as quickly became involved in bitter factional squabbles.

There were some very interesting characters about at this time. Dina Dobson, the widow of the late President was a large lady who swept through the Society like a ship in full sail. She married Martin Hinton, recently retired from the Natural History Museum, and changed her name to Dina Dobson-Hinton. Martin was a dryly humorous man of a sceptical disposition. He jointly edited the proceedings with Dina and appeared at the hut occasionally in her wake. He was a palaeontologist of considerable distinction and is suspected of having been the perpetrator of the Piltdown Man hoax. I can well believe it.

A dynamic Italian physicist, Beppo Ochiallini, with a nose for important research projects came to work at the Royal Fort with Cecil Powell. He was a caving enthusiast and became involved with Max Cosyns and Marcel Loubens in the explor ation of the Pierre St Martin cave in the Pyrenees. Loubens, of course, was later killed in the 300 metre entrance shaft when he fell off the end of the winch cable. Beppo brought the other two to Bristol and we had a few caving trips with them. I remember going down Swildons Hole with them and Trat. It was interesting that Trat, Cosyns and Beppo had one thing in common - they had all been in prison. Cosyns had been in a concentration camp, Beppo had been a political prisoner, and Trat, of course, had been interned in Singapore. My clearest memory of that visit was a film show in the geography lecture theatre. Loubens’s film of the Pyrenees was shown and we retaliated with the Lamb Leer film. Trat operated the projector but could not get the take-up spool to work. We watched with horror as miles of 16mm film festooned itself all over the theatre.

My dear old friend Charles Barker, still reasonably hale and hearty in his eighties I am delighted to say, brought a great advantage to the Society. When he returned from his wartime work on explosives some of these useful chemicals came with him. At that time it was virtually impossible to obtain commercial blasting explosives for amateur use. Charles’s souvenirs seemed like manna from heaven. There was a problem however. Military explosives were not ideal for blasting. They were rigid solids that could not be moulded to the surface of the rock to be demolished. Much of the explosive force was dissipated in the inevitable air gap. They had a much higher detonation velocity than gelignite and were very stable. This made them difficult to set off. A primer explosive had to be used in conjunction with a powerful detonator. This was extremely inconvenient. Charles used to cast the explosives into appropriate shapes after melting them in a saucepan on his mother’s gas stove. He then made up appropriate primers and we had to attempt to find bits of rock of the right shape and size to blow up. After numerous disappointing bangs Charles applied his fertile mind to the wartime developments of ‘hollow’ or ‘focused’ charges. He cast lumps of TNT RDX with a conical recess on the face that was to come in contact with the rock. They were no more successful than the earlier bangs.

His last hurrah was an experiment to cut down one of Trat’s large trees with a cunning device based on this principle. He reasoned that a flexible tube filled with explosive and wrapped twice around the trunk of a tree would create an annular space of roughly triangular cross section surrounded on two sides by explosive and on the third side by the tree. This, he assured us, would act as a circumferential hollow charge and cut the tree trunk in two. It did not. It succeeded in turning three feet of the lower trunk into a curious flexible structure about which the fifty feet of tree above gyrated in a drunken way without falling over.

By this time commercial blasting explosives had became available. To get a licence however we had to have our explosives store inspected by the police. It was therefore a matter of some urgency that we should dispose of Charles’s private munitions. We blew them up in the bottom of a blind swallet not far from the hut, with the secondary objective of digging a new bog. To our surprise, a couple with their clothing in some disarray emerged from the bracken close by. The expressions on their faces combined astonishment, lust and pride in about equal proportions.