RICHARDS, SIR BROOKS• 4511940 2,200 miners had dug four shafts into the hillside 30 feet wide
and 760 feet long and fitted them with air vents, blast doors, and two
2-ton cranes to carry the munitions. In addition, a separate facility,
codenamedwoodside, was constructed nearby as an overflow. Those
engaged in building the complex were sworn to secrecy and told that
it was intended to store the nation’s art treasures, whereas in fact
those were actually deposited some distance away at a different
quarry, at Grange, in the same county of Clwyd.
The Rhydymwyn site became operational in June 1940 when ICI
delivered the first consignment of chemicals, accompanied by mas-
sive army and police escorts, with a mobile decontamination unit,
and stored them temporarily in a surface facility codenamedante-
lopewhile the runcol (the blistering agent in mustard gas) was trans-
ferred into massive lead-lined underground tanks. During the last
months of 1941, when there were already 262 workers based in the
compound, the Tube Alloys staff began to arrive, with contingents
from ICI at Randle and Billingham, together with technicians from
Metropolitan-Vickers and the Clarendon Laboratory. At the height of
its activity, there were more than a thousand people on the site, with
120 of them categorized as engaged in atomic research in the surface
laboratories and the remainder assembling millions of smoke shells
and other munitions, as well as processing the acids required for
chemical weapons.
Although the British atomic bomb project was absorbed into the
Anglo-American Manhattan project, Rhydymwyn continued as a
classified research site until the end of the Cold War.RICHARDS, SIR BROOKS. Intelligence coordinator to the Cabi-
netfrom 1978 to 1980, Brooks Richards was director of intelligence,
Northern Ireland, from 1980 to 1981. Educated at Stowe and Magda-
lene College, Cambridge, Richards joined the Royal Navy in 1939
and served inSpecial Operations Executive’s secret navy, headed
byGerald Holdsworth, which ran agents across to Nazi-occupied
France from Cornwall. At the end of the war, he joined the Foreign
Office to serve in Paris, Athens, Bonn, and the Persian Gulf. He was
ambassador in Saigon and Athens before his appointment, after his
official retirement, as intelligence coordinator to the Cabinet, and
then director of security and intelligence inNorthern Ireland. After