York Explore Library : Wed 15 Jun : 6.15pm – 7.45pm : £6 each (or £5 with a Yorkcard)

Barnes Wallis (1887-1979) is probably the best-known British engineer of the twentieth century. Remembered as the inventor of the water-skipping mine that broke German dams in 1943, the public’s view of him has been influenced by the 1954 film The Dam Busters wherein Michael Redgrave portrayed a gentle, slightly abstracted genius at odds with bureaucracy.

The real Wallis was a different kind of figure, and for the last eight years Richard Morris has been working on a new account of his life. Morris’s forthcoming biography draws on sources that have not previously been seen, of which earlier historians made no use, or which were still classified when earlier accounts were written.

In this talk Morris will look at a special period in Wallis’s life: the building of the R100 airship at Howden in the later 1920s. The first stages of that project overlapped with Wallis’s courtship of Molly Bloxam, who was seventeen when he first met her in 1921, while the airship’s construction coincided with the early years of their marriage. In the lecture, love, engineering and Yorkshire are found intertwined.

For more information contact York Explore Library on (01904) 552800 or archives@exploreyork.org.uk

To book tickets please visit www.yortime.org.uk