BROHP

BROHP is an organisation which began with the intention of recording the experiences of those who worked on the British rocketry programmes of the 50s and 60s. We felt that a valuable source of primary material was in danger of being lost with the passage of time. In 1998,we decided to take this further by organising a conference at Charterhouse where talks and papers on these topics could be presented.

The organisation is run by a mixture of people: some are academics, researching the history of British postwar technology. Others are people who were involved in the work at the time, in Whitehall, in Government establishments, and in the firms building the various projects.

Our remit has broadened out to include other, related areas of postwar research and development. For example, study of missile projects cannot be taken in isolation: they must be considered in the broader context of British defence policy of the time. They may well have been intended to carry nuclear warheads, and the rationale for this and the nature of the warheads themselves must also be discussed.

We are now extending our work to produce, on what we hope will be a regular basis, a refereed journal, PROSPERO, which will contain papers which have been presented at previous conferences.