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emphatic for social decorum, punctilio, the natural dependence of women and the purity of the family.’ In reality he was, like Wells, an irrepressible philanderer, and two of the children were his by the governess, including Rosamund, whom Wells seduced.
    Among other visitors were a brother and sister, Russell and Sybil Thorndike. They came with their mother, who liked Dymchurch so much she bought a pair of coastguard cottages on the sea. They both became actors, but Russell was eclipsed in fame by his sister, and anyway much preferred writing stories. He loved the village and set a series of popular adventure stories in and around Dymchurch and the marsh behind. His hero was Doctor Syn, a clergyman who somewhat loses his moral bearings when his wife goes off with his best friend, and takes to a life of smuggling and general derring-do.
    The first adventure,
Doctor Syn: a Tale of the Romney Marsh
, appeared in 1915 and ended with the hero’s death, harpooned through the neck by a mute mulatto. Twenty years later, his acting career in abeyance, Russell Thorndike returned to the errant cleric and provided him with an incident-packed earlierlife spread over six more tales. Bestsellers in their day, they have long since gone the way of other swashbuckling literature in the Scarlet Pimpernel genre. But the character is still celebrated every other year in Dymchurch’s Day of Syn when villagers dress up in eighteenth-century costume to re-enact skirmishes between smugglers and revenue men and parade to the church for evensong and a good old-fashioned sermon.
    Present-day Dymchurch’s attractions include a small amusement park, a storm-battered Martello Tower with a glass-covered viewing platform and the beach below the concrete wall. On that basis it advertises itself as a Children’s Paradise, which might be pushing it. The wall continues as far as Littlestone, where I had to divert onto the A259 coast road, which passes an interminable line of bungalows and villas comprising the seaward side of Littlestone, Greatstone and Lydd-on-Sea, all indistinguishable one from another. Ahead is Dungeness, the skyline ruled by the brooding bulk of its famous power stations.
    There is a disused gravel pit behind the strip settlement of Greatstone where you can, with considerable difficulty, inspect one of the more curious relics of the coastal defence system patched together in the years before 1939. Sound mirrors, otherwise known as acoustic defences or Listening Ears, were the brainchild of a now-forgotten pioneer in the science of sound waves, William Sansome Tucker. While stationed in Belgium during the 1914–18 war, Tucker noticed that the report of an artillery shell being fired at a distance was followed by a draught of cold air being expelled from a mousehole near his bed. He experimented with a device which registered the pressure waves from artillery fire on a platinum wire stretched across a hole.From this he developed a microphone able to fix the position of enemy guns and determine how big they were and in which direction they were aimed.
    Listening Ears
    After the war Tucker was appointed Director of Acoustical Research at RAF Biggin Hill, where he worked on designing and building concave concrete walls fitted with microphones to detect enemy aircraft approaching over the Channel. These grew from a modest twenty feet in width to the monster 200-feet wall at Greatstone, which was backed up by two circular dishes supported on concrete standings. The Greatstone Listening Ear was in position by 1929. It worked, up to a point, but the operatives experienced difficulty in distinguishing between the sound waves created by aircraft and those of ships, or indeed road traffic.
    While Tucker wrestled with these problems, investigations of a different kind were being carried out at the Radio Research Station at Ditton Park near Slough. These culminated in 1935 in a memorandum to the government from the station’s director, Robert