BABINGTON-SMITH, Constance (#180)

30 August 2020

#180

Flight Officer Constance BABINGTON-SMITH MBE Legion of Merit FRSL

Royal Air Force

15 October 1912 – 31 July 2000

“some sort of tube out of which a rocket could be squirted”

Aeroplane Hat at Aero Garden Party on Drome.
A fashionably dressed crowd saw some of Britain’s latest war planes side by side with fast civil liners and pioneer machines at the Royal Aeronautical Society’s garden party on the Great West Aerodrome at Hammondsworth, Middlesex. Flying displays were given.
Photo shows: A unique and appropriate hat fashion, with aeroplane ornament, worn by Miss Constance Babbinton-Smith at the aerodrome Garden Party. May 8th 1938.

Constance Babington Smith, wartime photographic interpreter

A V2 Train in a Railway Cutting at Oyle : After it had been attacked by aircraft of the 2nd Tactical Air Force, 1945 by Julius Stafford-Baker © IWM Art.IWM ART LD 5421

Constance Babington Smith made the first identification from a photograph of a German V1 flying bomb at Peenemünde in 1943; as a result, the RAF carried out raids which reduced the damage done to Britain by Germany’s new airborne weapons.

She was working as a photographic interpreter in the Allied Photographic Intelligence Unit, and in April 1943 had been briefed by the Air Ministry to be on the look-out for a long-range gun, remotely controlled rocket aircraft and “some sort of tube out of which a rocket could be squirted”.

Peenemünde was the site of a German research station on the Baltic. Allied photographic reconnaissance from the air had indicated unusual activities there, possibly the construction of earthworks for testing rockets. In June 1943, one of Constance Babington Smith’s fellow interpreters, André Kenny, made the first identification of two V2 long range rockets lying horizontally on road vehicles at Peenemünde.

At the same time, Constance Babington Smith was briefed to look out for “anything queer”. Examining a photograph taken on June 23 she spotted “four little tail-less aeroplanes taking the air” which “looked queer enough to satisfy anybody”. What she had seen, it turned out, were four Me 163 liquid rocket fighters. But V2 long range rockets were identified from photographs of Peenemünde for the first time that month.

On November 13 1943, she was asked to look out for aircraft at Peenemünde which might be pilotless. Her search was under way when on November 28 a de Havilland Mosquito, piloted by Squadron Leader John Merifield returned with a sensational photograph.

Aerial reconnaissance view of the V1 launching ramps at the Luftwaffe Test Installation, Peenemunde West, Usedom Island, Germany, showing a Fiesler Fi 103 flying bomb positioned on its ramp (arrowed). This was the photograph from which Flight Officer Constance Babington-Smith, a photographic interpreter at the Allied Central Interpretation Unit, RAF Medmenham, Buckinghamshire, confirmed the existence of the V1. The sortie was carried out by a Mosquito of No. 540 Squadron flown by Squadron Leader J R H Merifield and his navigator Flying Officer W N Whalley.
CL 1055. Part of AIR MINISTRY SECOND WORLD WAR OFFICIAL COLLECTION Merifield J R H (Sqn Ldr) and Whalley W N (Fg Off): No. 540 Squadron RAF

As Flight Officer Constance Babington Smith studied it through her stereoscope, she identified a ramp holding a tiny cruciform shape on rails. Her discovery, together with the subsequent examination of many thousands of photographs of other possible launch sites and storage depots, indicated that a flying bomb offensive was being prepared on the other side of the Channel.

Launching ramp with flying bomb / doodlebug at the V1 launch site at Ardouval / Val Ygot, Normandy, France

The bombing of the launch sites was given urgent priority, under the codename “Crossbow”. Constance Babington Smith had the task of providing photographic material to assist targeting by Bomber Command and its Pathfinder Force, and at the end of 1943 Allied air forces flattened launch sites in France.

A V2 Rocket Leaving Walcheren by Stephen Bone (1945). Art.IWM ART LD 4691)

But by the spring of 1944 the Germans had built less obvious emplacements in the Pas de Calais and in June Hitler unleashed the V1 assault on London and the south of England. The V2s began to fall on London in September.

V2 Damage at the Chelsea Pensioners’ Hospital, London, SW3 by Randolph Schwabe (1945) Copyright: Art.IWM ART LD 4807

In the meantime, Constance Babington Smith had been pursuing another vital brief – watching out for new types of aircraft, especially jets. “Keeping an eye on Peenemünde,” she said, “was a minor task compared to the everlasting watch for new German aircraft.”

When Group Captain Frank Whittle, inventor of the jet engine, paid her a visit, he was much impressed by what she had found – notably the Me 163, He 280 and Me 262 – and was rather enamoured of this unusual Waaf officer.

Constance Babington Smith learned later that Whittle was subjected to much leg-pulling about the interest he showed in her, especially when he made inquiries about the scent she used – which he learned was Guerlain’s L’Heure Bleue. She wore the scent, she said, to counteract the masculinity of her uniform.

After the war, Constance Babington Smith settled down to the life of a writer. She published an account of her wartime experiences, a book about test pilots, several volumes of letters by her cousin Dame Rose Macaulay, and a clutch of well received biographies.

Target for Tonight (1941), in which Constance makes a charming if uncredited appearance.

Constance Babington Smith was born on October 15 1912, one of the five daughters – and four sons – of Henry (later Sir Henry) Babington Smith and his wife Lady Elizabeth (née Bruce), daughter of the 9th Earl of Elgin – grandson of the Lord Elgin who acquired the Parthenon marbles.

Constance’s father had been private secretary to George Goschen, the Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, in 1891-92. After a further period of work in the Treasury, he was appointed in 1894 private secretary to Lord Elgin, the new Viceroy of India. He married Lord Elgin’s daughter in 1898.

Constance in ‘Target for Tonight’.

Constance was brought up mainly at Chinthurst, a house designed by Edwin Lutyens at Wonersh, near Guildford. There she was educated by governesses and tutors, before being sent to live for a few months with a French family at Versailles. During the 1930s, she led a busy social life in London and worked for the fashionable milliner Aage Thaarup.

Already fascinated by aeronautical matters, she also wrote articles for The Aeroplane magazine. Having been commissioned as a section officer in the Waaf in December 1940, she was asked to set up an aircraft interpretation section for the RAF’s photographic reconnaissance unit at Heston airfield.

Southern England, 1944. Spitfires Attacking Flying-Bombs by Walter Thomas Monnington (1944) Art.IWM ART LD 4589

In 1941 she moved with the unit to Danesfield, a mock Tudor mansion on the Thames between Marlow and Henley which during the war became RAF Medmenham. While her brother Bernard, a mathematician, was working there on the interpretation of night-time photographs, Constance was soon entrusted with responsibility of searching for secret weapons.

Constance Babington Smith was mentioned in despatches in 1942 and was appointed MBE in 1945. In the summer of 1945, she was sent to America to assist in photographic interpretation for the Pacific War, and she was awarded the US Legion of Merit in 1946.

Having been demobilised in America, she stayed on for a time working as a researcher for Life magazine, in particular for their series on Churchill. She returned to Britain in the late 1940s and soon afterwards settled in Cambridge, where in due course she was granted dining rights at Churchill College.

Medmenham

Her first book, Evidence in Camera, a fascinating record of wartime photographic intelligence and her part in it, was published in 1958. No problem, she explained, had been regarded as too difficult to solve; the interpreters had set out to discover every secret a photograph might contain.

Constance being presented with the US Legion of Merit in 1945 by Major General Frederick L Anderson. Photo from Life magazine, 28th October 1957. Harngroup.

Geologists, geographers, archaeologists, mathematicians, explorers, botanists, map-makers and a host of others were drafted in to interpret huge quantities of photographs. During the preparations for the Normandy landings, for instance, as many as seven million prints a month were being turned out for examination.

Constance Babington Smith’s second book, Testing Time: a Study of Man and Machine in the Test Flying Era, appeared in 1961. The book charts the development of the test pilot’s role from the days of Roe and Sopwith, and conveys the excitement and danger of test flying that attracted such adventurers as Sir Henry Tizard and Sir Geoffrey de Havilland – and even Lord Cherwell, who took flying lessons in a dark suit and wing collar.

Next, she turned to editing the letters of her cousin Rose Macaulay, producing three volumes in succession: Letters to a Friend from Rose Macaulay, 1950-52 (1961); Last Letters to a Friend from Rose Macaulay, 1952-58 (1962); and Letters to a Sister from Rose Macaulay (1964).

Having returned to aeronautical matters with Amy Johnson (1967), she published three further biographies: Rose Macaulay (1972); John Masefield: a Life (1976); and Iulia de Beausobre (1983). The last book was an account of the remarkable life of the Russian emigré who married the historian Sir Lewis Namier.

Her last substantial project bore fruit in Champion of Homeopathy: the Life of Margery Blackie (1986). Brought up in the Church of England, Constance Babington Smith became interested in Orthodoxy as a result of her friendship with Iulia de Beausobre, and in 1972 she joined the Greek Orthodox Church. She learned modern Greek and paid regular visits to Greece, making many good friends there.

Never forgetting the part played by the de Havilland Mosquito in wartime photographic reconnaissance, and of the debt owed to the Mosquito crews, Constance Babington Smith was a founder director of the Mosquito Memorial Appeal Fund – now the de Havilland Museum Trust – which preserved the prototype Mosquito at Salisbury Hall, St Albans. She was always modest about her own part in the war. She never married.” (Obituary originally published in and courtesy of The Telegraph)

“Some photos, a stereoscope, plenty of natural light… What else could anyone need? Constance back at Medmenham for the 1977 BBC series ‘The Secret War’ – episode 3: “Terror Weapons”. (Harngroup)”