Victor Penny’s 'ultimate weapon’ was death... to matchboxes

Press, 29 August 1984, Page 17

Victor Penny’s 'ultimate weapon’ was death... to matchboxes

By

GARRY ARTHUR

When the old digs get together in Wellington on September 4 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the day they joined 6A Wing of the regular army, a select band will have one exclusive topic of conversation — the mysterious case of the exploding matchbox on Takapuna Beach. They will hark back to the days, four years before the outbreak of the Second World War, when they were called on to form a secret guard around one Victor Penny, a shadowy figure who claimed to have invented the ultimate weapon — a death rav.

It all began on Takapuna Beach one day in 1935, when Penny set up his death ray machine, aimed it at a box of matches, and exploded it from a distance. It was reported in the Auckland papers, to the wonderment of all. Then came the news that Mr Penny had been assaulted and injured. He said it was done by agents of a “foreign power” who were after his secret — and he called in the Legion of Frontiersmen to guard his house. Victor Penny’s injuries, however they were received, were treated in hospital, but he was not there long. The Government apparently thought he might be on to something, and it spirited him away from hospital under protective escort and down to Somes Island in Wellington Harbour, where he was installed in his own secret laboratory. Some of the old guard of 6A Wing remember it well. They were young recruits at the time, and

their cloak-and-dagger duty was an exciting introduction to Army life. After their basic training, a group of them were held back at Trentham Camp and divided into two guards to be sent to Somes Island week and week about.

Geoff Aitken, now of Riccarton, remembers being called to headauarters and detailed off for guard uty, but not told where, when, or why. He was warned not to communicate with anyone inside or outside the camp about this new duty. “I know I was too scared to talk,” he says. They were told to change into civvies and pack their uniforms, webbing, rifles, and bayonets and be ready to move. The army was a bit primitive in those days, and had nothing much in the way of military vehicles. All they had at Trentham was an army ambulance, so the disguised guard were driven in that to Shelly Bay for embarkation on a steam tug, the Janie Seddon, for the trip out to Somes Island.

“We could have gone straight from Petone,” says Gunner Len Barnes, who was one of the 10-man guard, “but it was too hush-hush for that.”

Len Barnes, who now lives at Hei Hei, remembers Victor Penny as being some sort of technician in the Post Office. Geoff Aitken thinks he was a taxi-driver. Another member of the Somes Island guard, Eric Autridge of Auckland, believes that the inventor used to drive a bus for the North Shore ferries.

Whatever his background, he arrived at Somes Island with a “business manager” in tow, Mr Bob Spiers. “Penny must have had something to impress the Government,” says Len Barnes. “He didn’t seem to have been badly injured in the assault, but his nerves were shot. He was pale and jumpy — he looked as if he had the breeze up.” Stores for the island hideaway included fuel, ammunition, and barbed wire. A quarantine station,’ Somes Island had only one house, a bungalow that had been a nurses’ home.

“Mr Penny and his off-sider had rooms and a laboratory there, and the rest of us used a bigger room,” says Geoff Aitken. “Our only communication with the outside was a direct line to Army headquarters. “We were very serious about this, you know. We had to ring the house with barbed wire, and at intervals we fastened up kerosene tins with one side cut out into which we fitted hurricane lamps. “So, at night the sentry on duty would be in darkness but he could see for many yards if anyone chose to come up. It was all very thrilling.” Guards did their sentry-duty with fixed bayonets and 10 rounds in the magazine. The soldier personally guarding Victor Penny slept in the same room, and even escorted him to the lavatory. He also had a rifle with fixed bayonet and “one up the spout” ready to shoot.

The direct line to Army H.Q. was vulnerable to sabotage by enemy agents, but the Army had thought of that. Their fall-back signalling system was fiendishly simple. It comprised a huge pile of dry firewood on the side of the hill facing Wellington.

Near at hand were a bottle of

kerosene, a stone to break the bottle, and matches in waterproof wrapping for lighting the fiery beacon.

“It’s unbelievable now,” says Corporal Aitken, “But the idea was that if we were attacked and needed reinforcements, one soldier would creep out, break the bottle, and light the fire.”

They had one scare on the very first day, when a light aircraft “buzzed” the island. “Well, Penny had the breeze up vertical,” says Geoff Aitken. They never did find out whether it was just a curious aviator, a newshound, or some daring agent of a foreign power. Their food was the plain, monotonous Army fare of the day, but as Victor Penny’s physical and mental health improved, he began to assert himself, and demanded a more interesting diet. The army sent anything he cared to order, and the guards added their fancies to the shopping list as well. “Penny must have had something, or else he had great powers of persuasion,” says Geoff Aitken. “He was looked after for months — mollycoddled and paid by the Government.” Relations between inventor and guards seem to have been a little strained at times. Len Barnes remembers that Victor Penny used to dangle a microphone from his windowsill to listen to the sound of Army boots crunching the gravel, and check whether he was being guarded properly. Penny demanded more electric power to conduct his experiments, so the soldiers installed a motor generator for him in a shed. But as far as the guard could see, the inventor never invented anything. They never saw him test a weapon of any kind.

The only thing Len Bames recalls is that Penny and Eric Autridge, who was an amateur radio enthusiast, came up with "a radiodiothermy thing that they used to cut up steak without a knife.” But they learned later that Auckland Hospital had had such an instrument for two years. “He was supposed to try and build a death ray,” says Geoff Aitken. “He showed me with great solemnity one day a simple induction set-up, and held a torch bulb near it and it lit up.”

Len Barnes thinks that the sum total of Victor Penny’s scientific knowledge came from his • Post Office experience. “A bit of wireless stuff mainly was all I saw him do, and Eric Autridge built most of it,” he says. “I never saw him explode anything.” The Government must have been convinced, however, because he was kept on Somes Island for three or four months with his armed guard and every comfort he cared to request. Finally, just before Christmas, 1935, he said he must have still more power to conduct his experiments, and the guard was ordered to escort him to Fort Dorset on the mainland, with all his gear. This included some “peculiar” wireless valves which the Government had obtained specially for his work. Geoff Aitken points out that radio was in its infancy in the years between the wars, and that

the Army had very few specialists. “They were all World War I people and would have been easily hoodwinked.”

The top brass used to come over to see how he was getting along with his death ray, but they must eventually have given up on him because he did not stay long at Fort Dorset.

Eric Autridge, who was an amateur radio man (call sign ZL2CL), had helped to operate station 2ZO in Palmerston North before he joined the Army. “I can’t remember Penny’s ham call-sign,” he says, “but I know that he operated one of the old Auckland ‘B’ class stations. I think it was IZM — ‘Scrim’s’ station — but I’m not sure.”

Victor Penny did not fool Eric Autridge. “Penny’s ‘death ray’ I recognised as a circuit in ‘Q.S.T.’, a monthly publication of the American Radio Relay League, and I purchased a copy for Is 9d on my first leave in Wellington.

“The circuit finished up with two valves not obtainable in New Zealand at the time. But I think the N.Z.B.C. were using them, and the Government procured two for Penny. If I remember correctly they were RK2Os.” The circuit apparently was used to produce the meat-cauterising effect described by the other guards.

“I picked that he was bluffing,” says Mr Autridge. “His ‘death ray' was so secret that even the D.S.I.R. couldn’t work it out. He reckoned the Germans were chasing him. Actually I think he was chasing some bloke’s wife and that bloke knocked him out.”

‘I never saw him explode anything’

Under the tight security on Somes Island, no-one was allowed to take photographs, but Eric Au-

tridge had himself photographed one day with Victor Penny. The picture was taken by Penny’s wife, who had come to stay with the wife of the lighthouse keeper. The photograph got Eric Autridge into a bit of trouble because Victor Penny sold it and his story to “Smith’s Weekly” in Sydney, and it got back to the Army. Not only did the guard break the "no-pictures rule, but he was shown without a bayonet fixed to his rifle. What about the exploding matchbox on Takapuna Beach? Eric Autridge thinks that was about as far as Victor Penny’s “death ray" went. “With an inefficient radio transmission you could do that,” he says. “I used to get a tingle from a razor blade beside my transmitter.”

Fred Knox, of the D.S.I.R.’s atmospheric physics laboratory in Wellington, says it is possible to focus radio waves, especially microwaves, and “bum things up a bit”. The effect depends on the wavelength and the size of the focusing dish. With long wavelength emissions like radio waves, it might take a 500 m diameter dish to focus the waves a kiLometre away.

“To get around it,” he says, “you use something of a smaller wavelength, like the lasers. Then you can use a manageable dish for focusing at some kilometres away. The United States tests of lasers to bring down missiles seem to work.” After a time at Fort Dorset, Victor Penny and his marvellous death ray machine soon dropped out of sight. He was last heard of working for the Post Office in Auckland, and last seen — by Len Barnes — walking along the street with what looked like a telephone under his arm. Or was it?