HMS DRYAD is a 1970s recruiting film produced by International Cine for the British Royal Navy. The short film features a former student of the naval school in Hampshire, England, who trained there to become a Royal Navy Radar Operator. The film opens with a shot of a battleship at sea (00:16), as the narrator says that defense at sea in the 1970s has progressed a long way since the early days of naval warfare. One of the biggest advances is radar. The narrator, John Fox, says he went to H.M.S. Dryad (00:53), the naval shore station, to become a radar operator. In the classroom (01:08), students learn about radar display. When a student starts training, they are called a radar plot basic, and they learn the fundamentals of radar and operations run technique. After understanding the theory of range and bearing, students train to assist in the movement of ships and aircraft—such as helping a helicopter (02:53) see far beyond the pilot’s actual vision. The school’s training network is computerized (03:32), and women write programs for training mock exercises that are conducted in the school’s simulated ops rooms (04:11). Anytime someone in navigation and radar joins a new ship, they will go to HMS Dryad to train, as there they can simulate the ops room of almost every ship in the royal fleet. The film concludes by showing the battleship (05:4) from the opening scene, where radar operators in the ship’s ops room (05:49) coordinate the shooting down of what appears to be a missile or rocket (06:17).
HMS Dryad is a former stone frigate (shore establishment). It was the home of the Royal Navy’s Maritime Warfare School from the Second World War until it moved to HMS Collingwood at Fareham in 2004. The site was handed over to the Ministry of Defense in 2005 and is now occupied by the Defense College of Policing and Guarding.
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This film is part of the Periscope Film LLC archive, one of the largest historic military, transportation, and aviation stock footage collections in the USA. Entirely film backed, this material is available for licensing in 24p HD, 2k and 4k. For more information visit http://www.PeriscopeFilm.com
