I recently received a telephone call from a gentleman asking about the experimental rocket launching which was performed around the Naze Tower area during WW2.
He asked if I could tell him whether the residents of Walton at that time realised that the work being done there was highly secret.
As I personally was not even born then, I could not offer an authentic answer. It was then that he revealed that he had been one of the military personnel, stationed here in Walton working at the site.
Derick Collison, an 18-year-old serving with Royal Artillery Survey Regiment, had been sent to Walton in 1946 to assist the REME personnel and rocket boffins in the building and test launching one rocket each week. The rockets were fired out to sea, but as Derick joked, sometimes they went straight up in the air landing only a few feet from the anti-landing construction at the base of the cliffs. 
The rocket’s progress was recorded on 35mm film with the filming being done by commercial cine cameras fixed to adapted aeroplane gun mountings, and the firing was focused through a large wired grid that had lights at each intersection. There were also lights on the rocket.
Derick and his colleagues operated the cameras, sent the exposed film to Kodak for processing and then on its return, using a microscope, they examined each individual frame of the film and recorded the horizontal and vertical movements of the rocket. This then enabled the boffins to perfect the rockets’ trajectories.
Derick also sent me these very rare photos of the rockets and the test site. I think the fact that I have only seen one similar picture up to now does prove just how secret the test site was.
Soon after 1946 this rocket testing was relocated to Woomera in South Australia.
The final twist to this story is that Derick admitted to me that he had known Mr Putman, my old boss, as sometimes the odd reel of film fell off a shelf and was transported to Putmans shop in the High Street where it was cut into short lengths and loaded into 35mm cassettes for use in still cameras. I remember Frank Putman telling me of this when I was a lad. I’m sure no money was ever involved 
Hi PeteThis is really spooky. I was talking to someone recently (probably on a dog walk) who said they had a small instruction manual which came from the secret test area. I\’m racking my brain to think who it was I was talking to, and where they got the book from. If it comes to me, I\’ll let you know.Gerald from the Walton Network