My grandfather, Norman Angier,
worked at Churchill’s Toyshop (M.D.1) as the head civilian engineer during WWII.
On VE day
“Norman Angier felt it was an occasion for fireworks. He therefore acquired a large batch of quite big rockets and proceeded to poop them off, selecting as his firing site a point at the summit of a concrete road which led down to the ranges and the CMP’s camp. Unlike the Guy Fawkes day rockets, these were not provided with sticks for poking into the ground to keep the bodies upright ; but Norman had fixed up some sort of stand for doing this. All went well for a while and the show was most spectacular. Then Norman got careless. A rocket he had just initiated was not properly secured. It fell over, and instead of going up vertically proceeded at speed in the near horizontal plane. A weary CMP was walking along this road on his way back to the camp. The rocket struck him right on target. Luckily, he was not seriously hurt and we soon whipped him off to hospital . The trouble was to make him believe that the attack was not intentional. He had been the victim of a 1000 to 1 chance.”
