Virtual Lecture – Dam Buster: Barnes Wallis, An Engineer’s Life

Barnes Wallis has been claimed as Britain’s greatest engineer of the twentieth century. Richard Morris’s new biography rests on sources that include company, public and technical records, the private papers of individuals, the archive of Wallis’s first biographer, and thousands of letters.

Focusing on four areas – the lasting influence of Wallis’s mother, the emergence of the R100 airship, Wallis’s friendship with the shadowy banker Leo d’Erlanger, and tensions across government and the aero industry in the 1950s and 60s – Richard Morris will explore opportunities, challenges and questions that arise from the letters.