A Wanstead Flats WW2 mystery solved

Frequent contributor, Peter Williams, takes us on a detective hunt to discover the origins of a piece of WW2 debris he discovered on Wanstead Flats, in 2018, with colleague Mark Gorman.

During WW2, Wanstead Flats was heavily militarised with anti-aircraft guns, searchlights, and PoW camps.  Later in the war, prefabs were built as temporary housing for families displaced by bombing.

In 2018, a particularly extensive grass fire covered many acres. In the days after the fire in the City of London, on the advice of the fire brigade, called in an agricultural contractor to harrow some of the ground to open it up so the brigade’s water would penetrate the soil surface and extinguish the fires that had burned for about a week.

Once the fire was out, Dr Mark Gorman and I walked over the burnt areas to see what was revealed, as the vegetation had been destroyed and the soil surface turned over. We made some interesting finds, which were carefully noted and mapped by the City GIS team under the guidance of their heritage manager.

We found World War II shrapnel, concrete remains of emplacements, and even remnants of Victorian picnics in the form of shards from stoneware lemonade bottles. On one walkover, Mark found a particularly intriguing small object, shown below. It was a German object, marked ADTY NUERNBER:

 

The German object marked ‘ADTY NUERNBER’ found by Mark Gorman on Wanstead Flats, August 2018 after the large grass fires.

Our initial thoughts were that it appeared to be made of some form of plastic, not metal. We speculated that its purpose may have been to penetrate barrage balloons, which were flown over the Flats. The object was clearly broken, as the German stamp was incomplete, and one end appeared to have been sharpened but was also damaged.

Internet searches of “ADTY NUERNBERG”  produced no clues as to its identity. The mystery remained.

In 2023 we were leading a guided walk on the Flats about its history. We took the object along and it got wet in very heavy rain. I then realised for the first time that it was made of graphite, as it behaved like a pencil in the rain. But the internet still yielded no clues.

In 2024, I remembered that my wife had a close German friend who, for many years, edited the most popular German history magazine, comparable to the BBC's history magazine.

I sent details to him, Dr. Franz Metzger, who forwarded the query to a military technical museum run by volunteers near Nuremberg (http://www.wehrtechnikmuseum.de/Info/english/english.html) and at last the mystery was solved.

A few months after the initial enquiry, an answer came back in German from one of the museum volunteers, Herr Sunkel. Using Google Translate this is what we discovered:

‘Your "bullet" is the remains of a presumably burned-out electrode for an anti-aircraft searchlight - in German searchlights with a diameter of 1.5 m, the negative electrode had a diameter of 13 mm (length 540 mm) - the positive electrode measured 16 mm diameter x 800 mm. The minus coal is made of pure graphite and burns to a point, the plus coal has a wick made of mineral salts to increase the light output (so-called Beck coal) and has a so-called crater when it burns.

Your electrode has a different diameter, and the tip could also be mechanically made.

Unfortunately, we don't have any English headlight regulations and the former manufacturer stopped production after it was sold to its Indian competitors and the company's staff was radically reduced. The old documents must have been destroyed long ago.

The manufacturer was the Conradty company in Röthenbach/Pegnitz - headquarters in Nuremberg . Conradty was one of the largest pencil manufacturers in Nuremberg and moved the production of the new graphite electrodes to a new factory in Röthenbach. With the introduction of arc lamps for street lighting and the electrodes for Siemens-Martin furnaces for steel production, Conradty experienced a boom..........

The Conradty company certainly exported graphite rods to England before 1939. The stub is either a discarded remnant after use in a searchlight position, or someone carved a pencil from a found object... ‘

The graphite company’s website is https://www.graphitecova.com/company.html

Screengrab of the "history" section of graphitecova's website

It is ironic that in the 1930s, the German firm of Condraty must have been supplying the British military with graphite components for searchlights, which were later to be used against German bombers during WW2 in East London.

It is an added twist that a soldier stationed on Wanstead Flats probably found this object, sharpened it, and used it as a pencil before discarding it, for it to emerge from burnt ground in 2018.

Footnotes:

1. You can contact us at pows.wanstead@gmail.com

2. We are authors of Wanstead Flats - a short illustrated history (2023) and other booklets on the Flats published by Leyton History Society, http://www.leytonhistorysociety.org.uk/wanstead_flats_publications.html