Bristol and Avon Family History Society
I get to speak at many Family History Society Events, quite often when they have a major anniversary, and I recently spoke at the 50th Anniversary of the founding of the Bristol and Avon Family History Society.
What was most intriguing was that the event was held in the Concorde Museum in Bristol, and as I’m always interested in putting a local slant on any even I do, I decided that I’d look for some interesting stories associated with the venue.
Travel Chaos
I could have driven to the venue, but generally, I like to travel to venues by train if I can, mainly because it gives me the chance to work on any finishing touches on the presentation or the stories I’ll be telling, on the train whilst travelling.
True to form Trainline, decided to cancel my return train at five minutes past midnight before the even, which was a lovely message to wake up to at 7 o’clock in the morning.
When I parked up and walked into Southampton Central Station, deliberately early to ensure that I had time to talk to the man in the ticket office about my cancelled ticket, little did I know the sad encounter that would ensue. After queuing for ten minutes, which I thought was quite good, whilst a woman in front rambled on and on about different travel options that were available in two weeks time that she could quite easily have looked up at her leisure from home rather than holding up a queue of people eager not to miss their train, I moved into position at the shatter-proof glass fronted ticket desk. The man safely behind it look at me momentarily, before averting his eyes so as not to be burdened with the weight of held eye contact with a paying customer. I showed him my ticket and said;
“It’s been cancelled”
He didn’t react. So I said
“Do I get an automatic refund?”
His dull brown eyes flicked up to mine, almost in surprise. Without a word he plucked a folded form from a rack of folded forms, and pushed it under the glass divide to me.
“Fill that in.”
I temporarily locked his eyes as I lent towards the glass;
“So no automatic refund, even though they can automatically take my money, have automatically issued me with a ticket, and have automatically told me it’s cancelled at five past midnight last night?”
He stared at me, or maybe through me?
“We’re too far down the line to do anything about it; you’ll have to sort it out at Bristol.”
I went to argue, but instead just tilted my head to the side, grimaced and said:
“That’s not good is it?”
He continued to look at me, although he did almost imperceptibly lean back, perhaps a sign of shock, being confronted with sad reproach rather than the anger that he was used to from the rightfully frustrated public. It was then that I really studied his eyes, and could see that there was nothing behind them, what despair, crushed dreams, and utter boredom must that poor man endure working for a train company? Compared to the living hell that he endured every day sitting behind that screen for eight hours, in a job where he could do nothing to give anyone a better day, and probably wouldn’t even if he could, due to his own crushing weight of ennui, compared to that, my life was heaven. I walked away wondering what terrible crime he had committed in a previous life to have to suffer such a punishment in this life? I’d never know. Feeling smug in comparison to that lost soul, I boarded the train and opened up my laptop
The beauty of the system is that you don’t automatically get a refund, you have to work out how to get one online, or, if you haven’t got a whole day to waste doing that, you can get a number that will be answered if you know how to be clever with AI, and then talk directly to a human being where the human being quickly and efficiently arranges for you to get your money back, as opposed to the company’s automated system that seems determined not to give you a refund.
Interestingly the original return ticket only cost £50 whereas a one way ticket bought at the station on the day cost £75. Government – Please renationalise the entire Railway system, and charge all tickets by the number of miles travelled.
Rant over.
The Concorde Museum
I eventually made it to the Concorde Museum in good time. The building itself is interesting, being a massive aircraft hanger housing the museum, various airy lecture theatres, facilities for food and drink, and, best of all, a Concorde jet!
What Were They Thinking
Family History can often be portrayed as a catalogue of miseries, as these are the events that tend to get recorded. Life isn’t like that for the most part. So I make my talks humorous and upbeat, I want to hear people chuckling not sobbing, i try to be an antidote to the long trail of death, famine, child mortality, slavery, pestilence, and imagined self-guilt that tends to dominate history these days. After all nobody gets out of a family tree alive, so let’s try to enjoy the time that we’re living in one.
I had a very light lunch with some of the members there, met up with Andrew Kenyon, a deaf Genealogist who knew me from a programme about several generations of a deaf family called “Echoes of the Past” on Lumo that I had recently worked on, and which he was also featured in, although, as is the way of these things, we hadn’t actually met during filming, fortunately he hand a signer with him, which meant that he wouldn’t have to try to lip read my Cockney accent, which I realise could be a pain for deaf people who hadn’t seen a Cockney accent before with its scattering of dropped of “Ts” “Hs”, all “Phs” “Ths” and “Fs” sounding like “Fs”, and the sudden abyss of glottal stops punctuating our flat vowels.
There was a good turn out, and I went through my usual repertoire of jokes and stories, from my career, personal history, rout – possibly via burglary of a public building – into Family History, and numerous tales of filming, murder, theft, and DNA, culminating in the local interest story. In this case; Concorde.
The Parentage of the Wings of Concorde?
If I were researching a story for DNA Journey with The Concorde as the celebrity involved, I’d be looking for a family story that was unusual, unexpected, and pregnant with sliding doors moments, and in this case I homed in on the mother and father of the Concorde’s Wings, it’s most beautiful features.
Arguably the “Mother” and Father” of the Concorde’s Wings were two German Engineers, Johanna Weber (1910–2014) and Dietrich Küchemann (1911–1976).
Salome Johanna Weber (1910–2014) was a German mathematician and aerodynamicist at the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) in Farnborough. Alongside Küchemann, she developed the theory behind the “slender delta” wing, demonstrating in 1955 that a thin, delta-shaped wing at a high angle of attack could produce sufficient vortex lift for both supersonic and low-speed operations—a groundbreaking shift in aerodynamic thinking. Her models enabled the wing shape to be optimized, leading directly to Concorde’s ogival (ogee) delta planform.
Dietrich Küchemann (1911–1976) was a German aerodynamicist who also worked at RAE. He initially researched wave drag, area rule, and wing sweep. He partnered with Weber to produce multiple seminal papers on delta wing aerodynamics, including a 1956 report that convinced British authorities to pursue slender delta designs for SSTs.
Küchemann advocated these concepts within the RAE and played a leadership role—later heading the Supersonics Division—helping guide Concorde’s wing from theoretical concept to production reality.Küchemann and Weber developed the core aerodynamic theory that made Concorde’s wing possible — the slender delta wing with vortex lift, which allowed a supersonic aircraft to have stable low-speed takeoff and landing performance.
Before their work in the early 1950s, delta wings were considered mostly suitable for high-speed flight but unviable for civil aircraft due to poor low-speed handling. Their breakthrough was that at high angles of attack, the delta wing could generate strong leading-edge vortices, which created additional lift — a phenomenon they modeled and validated mathematically and experimentally.
Johanna Weber remained a key figure behind-the-scenes throughout Concorde’s development. She never sought the spotlight, but colleagues and historians have increasingly acknowledged her influence. Küchemann went on to lead the RAE’s Supersonics Division and was widely respected for his visionary approach to aircraft shape and efficiency.
The Weber Family Story
The Webers were a Walloon Family, The Walloons are a Belgian French speaking ethnic group native to Wallonia, the southern region of Belgium. In the Weber’s case they were Protestant Weavers who fled persecution by the Catholics in the Spanish Netherlands in the 16th and 17th centuries settling in the Protestant German area centered on Dusseldorf.
The Küchemann Family Story
Küchemann’s maternal Family Line the “Stedings” can be traced back to the 12th Century. The name comes from Stedingerland, an area held by the Archbishop of Bremen.
The Stedingers were free Frisian peasants who had moved from the coast into northern Germany and settled in marshlands along the Weser River, they were known as “Hollanders” by the Germans. They had been granted “Ius Hollandicum”—privileges like freehold land and church autonomy—by earlier archbishops, which they fiercely defended.
By the early 13th century, tensions escalated as the Archbishop of Bremen and the Count of Oldenburg tried to impose higher taxes and convert freeholds into feudal leases, violating those privileges.The Stedingers refused to pay tithes, attacked castles, and expelled church officials between 1204 and 1214. In 1229, Archbishop Gerhard II excommunicated them and led a punitive expedition—only to be defeated, with his brother killed in battle. Humiliated, Gerhard began lobbying for a papal crusade, citing not just rebellion but heresy, sacrilege, and demon worship; all trumped up charges.
The crusade culminated in the Battle of Altenesch (1234), where the Stedingers were decisively defeated. Following this defeat their lands lost its autonomous status and was divided between the victorious Archbishopric of Bremen and the Counts of Oldenburg.
The bishop and secular authorities invited new settlers, including colonists from other parts of northern Germany, to occupy the vacated lands. These newcomers were loyal to ecclesiastical and feudal authority, and the land was redistributed as fiefs or church holdings, rather than the freeholds.
Amongst these new settlers were Küchemann’s maternal Family the Stedings. The Family drained and cultivated the land and gave the Archbishop one-tenth of their harvests as tithes.
The Great War and Rise of The Nazis
Webber’s father died in the First World War, which meant that as a War Orphan she was given a scholarship to a convent school where she did well, graduated and went on to University, but having graduated she refused to join the Nazi Party and was barred from becoming a teacher and therefore sought other work to help support her widowed mother and sister, her mathematical abilities gave her the opportunity to work in the Krupp Essen factory as a ballistics researcher. Wisely she also dropped “Salome” as her first name using her middle name of Johanna, this sounded far less biblical and therefore less Jewish, avoiding attracting the attention of the Gestapo, who would have been deeply suspicious of her in any case due to her refusal to join the Nazi Party.
Meanwhile Küchemann’s father, Rudolf, a descendant of a long line of schoolteachers, served as an Infantry Captain and fought on the Western Front, including Verdun.
World War Two
With War on its way, Küchemann joined the German Army in 1938 as an engineer, there is no evidence that I could see that he took part in combat.
By the outbreak of World War Two in 1939 Webber left Krupp Essen and had joined the Aerodynamics Research Institute, working on German Military Aircraft design.
This was lucky for her on two counts; firstly that the Allies would go on to bomb the factory to rubble, and the second reason was that it was at the Aerodynamics Research Institute that she met and began a lifelong collaboration with Dietrich Küchemann, who had been recognised for his engineering skills moved from his Army post to pure research.
In the closing phases of the War, in 1945, Küchemann and Webber were captured by the advancing US Army, luckily, rather than the advancing Russians. The Americans promptly handed them over to the British as the Institute was to become part of the British Occupation Zone.
After The War
The British paid the two of them in exchange for their previous research, and indeed ongoing research. In 1946 Küchemann was invited to join the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, and persuaded Weber to join him there in England. They settled near Farnborough and were still classed as enemy aliens till 1953, when they became naturalised as British citizens. Interestingly Küchemann’s naturalisation file is still closed with the following remarks:
“Contains sensitive personal information which would substantially distress or endanger a living person or his or her descendants. Closed until 2054″.
It would seem that perhaps Küchemann had given information in connection with activities in Germany during the War that could leave a person or persons open to post war Cold War Nazi or Russian retribution.
Webber and Küchemann worked on The Handley Page Victor Nuclear bomber, the premier British Nuclear bomber of the Cold War.
They also worked on the Vickers VC10 airliner, and as already mentioned made a vital contribution to the design of Concorde.
On the home front Weber moved to a bedsit in the Küchemann’s house in Surrey, then in 1961 acquired the house next door where she lived till 2010. Küchemann raised his family in England, and achieved great renown as an engineer, and Weber supported her mother and younger sister financially throughout her life.
No Luftwaffe – No Concorde?
It could be argued that with a Spanish invasion of the Netherlands the Webers would never have gone to Germany, and the mathematical prowess of Salome Johanna Weber would never have happened. If The Archbishop of Bremen had not managed to get a Crusade launched against the Frisian Stedingerlanders the Stedings would never have been given land and we may never have had Dietrich Küchemann.
And without their aerodynamic work for the Luftwaffe in World War Two we may never have had The Concorde!
Travelling Through Time to Trace Your Ancestors 