Jan Hunter talks to Malcolm Bisby about his career in nuclear bombs and his passion for local history

AT 83, Malcolm Bisby – eminent local historian, public speaker, writer, researcher and compiler of archives – is getting ready to be a film star.

Sitting in the front room of his railway cottage in North Yorkshire, with his beloved trains rumbling by, he tells how his famous talks on the industrial landscape and discoveries of the old Rosedale Railway on the North York Moors are going to be recorded for posterity.

His ready wit and engaging smile suggest that he still has a razor sharp brain and a memory which puts people 20 years younger to shame. He has lived an extraordinary life, beginning as a five-year-old evacuee on his first train journey, leaving Leeds in 1939 for the village of Copmanthorpe near York.

“It was like a cattle market,” he says. “Nationally, 600 trains a day were taking evacuees to the country. We were marched from the station to the Women’s Institute building and picked out by the villagers. I remember being the last one.”

After two temporary homes and an unfortunate incident with a whistle, the police and an ARP officials, he was moved to the farm of the Austin family, which had an earth toilet and an outside pump.

“It was primitive,” he says, “but it changed my life. I walked to school along country lanes, seeing cattle and hedgerows. It gave me my enduring love of the countryside.”

Eventually his mother and baby sister joined him and they moved to a council house, where in April 1942 he sat on the back step and saw fires and flashes in the distance. He was watching the bombing of York.

“It was 2.50 in the morning,” he says. “I heard the German bombers flying above me and felt the ground tremors from the bombs. They called it the Baedeker Blitz as the Germans used this tourist guide to select and target our major historical cities. York was devastated. 300 people were killed that night.”

Tadcaster Grammar followed the village school, and while deciding on a career, his call-up papers arrived, and he opted to join the RAF.

“I wanted to be a pilot,” he says, “but they offered me air engineer. As I was interested in explosives, I became an armourer and was trained in bombs, mines, pyrotechnics and demolition. It was dangerous but exciting, and it certainly concentrates your mind when fusing up a thousand pound bomb.”

In the winter of 1952, he was posted to RAF Martlesham Heath. This was an aircraft and armament experimental establishment, near Ipswich in Suffolk. It was an outpost of Farnborough and Boscombe Down, a military facility for top secret aeronautical research, testing and development. Not only was the nature of his work kept secret from him, but also from Parliament.

He was now part of a bomballistics unit, working on the first UK free-fall nuclear fission bomb.

In April 1953, he was moved to RAF Woodbridge, Suffolk, which was linked with the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston, Kent where he was working under the Ministry of Supply alongside top scientists such as Dr Bill Penny, the father of the British nuclear bomb.

After the war, Malcolm became an industrial chemist for ICI, first at Harrogate and then at Wilton. Through a fellow employee he became a member of a pioneering group devoted to industrial archaeological research and preservation. They explored the history of the local ironstone mining industry and discussed the importance of preserving artefacts. It was then he came across the remains of the Rosedale mineral railway branch line.

By 2004, he had amassed a huge amount of information, and determined to bring its fascinating story to light, he started to give illustrated talks, which became hugely popular. He came to the attention of Kirkby, Great Broughton and Ingleby Greenhow Local History Group [KGBIG] and a partnership was formed along with Rosedale Local History Society. The result was a unique heritage trail map, published to celebrate the150th anniversary of the opening of the Rosedale railway in 1861. “It sells like hot cakes,” says Malcolm, proudly. “People travelling along the coast to coast trail will understand more of the history of our landscape.”

In 2012, he was the major consultant for the successful Heritage Lottery Fund bid for the project, This Exploited Land of Iron, by KGBIG and the North Yorkshire Moors National Park, which received more than £2m which, with match funding, has grown to more than £3.5m to protect and preserve some of the most iconic structures on the landscape for future generations.

“Malcolm has been both an inspiration and a support for our group in its work on industrial archaeology, “said Geoff Taylor, vice-chair of This Exploited Land of Iron executive group. “ In our early days we teamed up with him sharing the results of his assiduous research and subsequently nominating him for the annual British Association of Local History award for outstanding contribution to our local history, which he won.”

The list of his achievements is endless; his research meticulous. He has brought to life the history of the industrial age on the North Yorkshire Moors, and his research into the crash of the Hudson bomber on the moors above Kildale in 1941 enabled him to honour the four airmen killed, with a service and memorial.

Despite all that, when asked to name his greatest achievement, he gives a wistful smile and says: “Marrying my dear wife Carole, who died two years ago.”

Once a keen photographer and walker, these hobbies are a little more difficult these days, but his passion for life is as strong as ever.

“I am so interested in everything,” he says. “My advice to the young people of today is to be interested in all things around you. Set targets and don’t chicken out or lose heart.”

He admits that his own life has been fascinating. “I was born in the age of steam trains and valve radios,” he says. “I went through the jet age, and was hands on in the nuclear age.”

And with a twinkle in his eye, he says: “I could still put a bomb together now.”