When Doctor Who was first made it was something entirely new for the BBC.
Never before had it attempted to make a continuing series of science fiction stories.
Filmed throughout the year, week in, week out, designers would need to create new and
fantastical surroundings and equally fantastical monsters.
Contributing such props and models during the show's early years was Shawcroft Models
of Uxbridge.
Shawcroft Models who made the special props and effects for at least the first three years
of Doctor Who were a freelance company that operated from a couple of sheds just west
of London Airport.
Shawcraft Models first began trading in 1947.
The brains behind the little company was Bill Roberts.
He ran Shawcraft Models.
Well my father started his business off in a garage in our garden in Southall in 1947.
I think within the few years after that, two or three years, he set up business, a partnership
with two other men.
With the company established, this three-way partnership was soon amicably dissolved.
Reg, the eldest one, wanted to retire and the other gentleman followed suit a year or
two later.
In the early 1950s, Shawcraft relocated to Iver and then to a larger premises on Rockingham
Road, Uxbridge in 1958.
Now the sole owner, Roberts, an experienced craftsman, looked to expand the capabilities
of Shawcraft.
He loved working with his hands.
He liked to carve things and make things.
As soon as I went along there as the designer, I suppose like any good firm, the managing
director comes along and has a chat to you and I got to know him quite well.
He was a very nice guy, very, quite bright and inventive.
I remember him saying to me one day, I'm 44 today and when you get to 40, it's like driving
into gravel.
Whenever I went out there, it was always a welcome and you look forward to going out
there because it was always a break from the usual routine of what else you were doing.
He was very good from the point of view that he intimated lots of ideas of his own which
came onto it.
He was a very useful person to have.
Employing up to 20 men all year round and with talents ranging from arc welding to needlework,
Shawcraft specialised in models for all kinds of industry.
They were brilliant model makers.
One of their main contracts was making models of aircraft for companies to show in their
showrooms.
The sort of thing you see a jumbo jet cut in half with all the seats, the engines shown
and so on and so forth.
He did a lot of exhibition work.
It's possible that's where his models were first spotted.
With such a breadth of abilities, it was only a short time until Shawcraft came to the attention
of the British film industry.
I think it's through word and mouth that his work was exceptional.
There's lots of letters saying, thanking him for achieving what they'd asked for in such
a short time.
Did a terrific amount of work for Pinewood Studios.
As the company expanded, film models, special effects and props became an increasing part
of its turnover.
Shawcraft provided some distinguished work on many films during the 1950s, including
a 40-foot Titanic for Night to Remember, a 33-foot craft for Battle of the River Plate
and all the ships in Sink the Bismarck.
The company's growing reputation inevitably caught the attention of the BBC and soon Shawcraft
found themselves in continuous demand for various programmes.
There were no facilities at BBC for this particular type of work.
These are early days, 1963, that sort of four era.
There were no facilities of that nature in-house.
I mean there was a special effects department but they were more interested in little comedy
programmes and other things.
They were doing small stuff.
Vision effects consisted of just two people in those days and that was Bernard Wilkie
and Jack Kyne.
And when Verity Lambert asked to have the department do all the Doctor Who stuff, they
said they wanted 4,000 square feet of working space and four more men.
And the establishment said, no way.
If you did have this sort of requirement, it was put outside to various contractors
and they were nominated or put forward by the construction crew.
I sent sketches and sections of things and they came up with the goods.
He'd quite often didn't know how to tackle a job if he was asked for something.
Someone had rung, say we need something that does this and does that and doesn't collapse
and but it's got to be blown up and then reused again and all that.
And he would be awake nearly all night trying to work out how to do something.
He didn't like to be beaten.
They would have taken on anything in any case because they just wanted to work and so on
naturally.
But they seemed to be able to cope with most things across the board.
Many a time he and his men worked all through the night to get jobs done.
Although they were model makers, they weren't visual effects designers.
This was the reason that I had to design all the visual effects as well because they were
going to make things for me and they made them very well.
Very good, very competent, very reliable.
And they were very receptive.
There weren't many programmes that required their sort of work as it happens.
Doctor Who was probably one of the principal ones I would think.
There wasn't that much time because the turnaround on Doctor Who was very demanding.
One of Shawcraft's earliest and most notable jobs on Doctor Who was the TARDIS console,
providing the working control panels for the crew to operate.
An iconic element of the programme, but it was their major involvement on the subsequent
serial that brought Shawcraft their greatest recognition.
The first Dalek story.
The drawing was made and was sent to Bill Roberts.
Before that I took him to lunch and explained the whole idea of the series and the Daleks
and what they were and so on.
At the time I was actually working as an assistant to Ray when he first started drawing them.
So I mean his drawings and my little details I think were pretty good, well detailed.
But they were the guys that said right we'll make it this way and this is the most sensible
way to do it.
I think you rely always, you rely on their expertise to add to yours.
And I think in this case they added quite a considerable amount.
I was wondering about fiberglass.
I'd never worked with fiberglass before.
So I took my sort of provisional design along to who I thought was an expert, Jack Kine,
then head of visual effects.
The original design was curved.
He said it won't work, you won't be able to make a mould to reproduce that in fiberglass.
I redesigned the base, suggested it was constructed in plywood.
And I had a call from Uxbridge to visit Shawcraft, they'd done the first mould for the Dalek.
And I said oh you've made the whole thing in fiberglass.
Bill Roberts said well quite honestly Ray, we don't have carpenters.
It would have pushed up the price.
I would have had to have employed carpenters and it's easier to make it in fiberglass.
They worked a lot with fiberglass and plastic tubing.
So all of those aspects that they had been doing with their model making before obviously
came into light when we started working on Daleks and other bits and pieces.
You know, bubbles on the front of the Daleks and other things were very easily made.
And very early vacuum forming, which obviously was essential to do that.
There were very few people that were doing vacuum forming at that time.
A lot of the refinements I left to Bill Roberts.
Workmen like structure details.
It was his responsibility really.
I offered suggestions and he worked on this.
He was a big man.
I do know he said make it to fit me and then that should be a suitable size for whoever's
going to work it from the inside.
The Dalek guy, he said I found in a cardboard box an iris from an old camera.
How about if I built that in to the eye?
So it will iris in and iris out.
I said that's good.
So I've only got one so I can only do it for one Dalek.
All these things will give them a false sense of security.
There was a scene where a Dalek had to cut through one of the metal doors with an oxy
settling welder.
And this was devised up by Shawcraft Models.
It is nearly completed.
The fact that they produced these animals from Ray's designs and these things, you
know, it was quite exciting.
They have become a very national sort of figure and thing.
So that all belies, I suppose, back to Shawcraft and the original work they did on them.
They never believed that the Daleks would take off like they did.
I think he was proud of all that he and his workmen achieved.
Not only did Shawcraft build and refine the Dalek props, they also provided the bizarre
creatures inhabiting the swamps of Skaro.
Bill Roberts built this thing that looked a bit crossed between an octopus and a sort
of a crab on a rubber bed ring with a hose that went off with air.
So when the air was let in, the thing rose out of the water and it had two eyes that
lit up.
And it was very scary.
Shawcraft continued to be utilised by Doctor Who as the programme became more and more
successful, including creating the model voodoo ships for the Keys of Marinus.
Shawcraft were also generally responsible for maintaining and renovating the Dalek props
for subsequent appearances in the series.
For the Dalek Invasion of Earth, designer Spencer Chapman liaised with Roberts to make
some notable changes to the design.
Quite a few alterations to the Daleks, you know, from the original.
Not a great deal, but we changed the character, the shape of them quite a bit.
And the major thing I think I did was to bung them up onto what I then called, which nobody
believes I did, a hovercraft base so that we could actually get them flying because
I knew that we were going to take them out into location work in London.
And there was no way these chaps could sort of pedal along like they could in the studio
floor.
They had to move quite large distances.
So I also made little tiny tricycles so that they actually steered them with their feet,
but actually it was their hands on a sort of upside down cycle that kept them going.
I had these strange gentlemen called Robomen.
An important fact of those was their helmet, which they were, which obviously changed their
whole aspect and sort of nullified their brains.
Again, Shawcraft, although I did a drawing of it in bits and pieces, they were always
coming up with saying, well, if you did that with this, it'd be much easier and it would
look better and we can make it look like solid metal or gold, you know.
They also made the unit that flops over their head eventually when they're laid down and
they're turned into Robomen.
They were a really reliable outfit.
They were very good.
I can't think of any problem I had.
Every time I went there, bits that I'd roughly sketched out, designed, were well ahead of
my expectations most of the time.
I really knew what they were doing.
Shawcraft's model experience shone through on the rescue, creating the crashed spaceship
on the planet Dido.
For the web planet, the company were again called on to construct the main monsters,
the ant-like Zarbi.
I did a sketch of what I thought was a suitable costume shape because of it having to fit
onto a human.
This had to be built up full size, clay, first of all, on an armature.
They weren't great visualists.
You had to give them the work and illustrate it as best you could to help them along whichever
direction they were going.
This clay model in sections, because it had to be put on like, say, a suit of armour,
would be cast in bits and then the moulds would have been filled with fibreglass like
a shell.
Soon after, Shawcraft were building the spherical mechanoids.
Large enough to house two operators and utilising a working flamethrower, the robotic creatures
battled the Daleks at the conclusion of The Chase.
The Daleks' master plan had the pyramid, which was large, covered an area of 30 by
20 feet with a cycloth all the way around it.
They made that.
Four days shooting that at Ealing.
We also shot a volcano, which they made for me.
The operatives who worked it with the belching magma was done by two of their men.
The guy underneath the volcano, because the volcano was about four feet above the ground,
had a big polythene bag full of jelly, illuminated with red light, and he had to keep squirting
this so that it shot up into the air.
Having also built the dome-like chumblies for Galaxy 4, Shawcraft were again employed
by John Wood for the Season 3 serial, The Celestial Toymaker.
Shawcraft would have really enjoyed that one because of the association with toys.
One of the toys which became giant toys was a robot, which was virtually a copy of a toy
product robot.
So they were able to see that right away, how it worked and everything else.
They loved, they liked all that sort of thing.
They also made a pedestal desk that moved around by itself, which was great fun.
And also it sparked.
A lot of toys used to spark at that time, so therefore this desk used to spark when
it was called towards The Celestial Toymaker.
Elements such as the light guns from The Savages, control panels from The Underwater Menace,
and the Gravitron from The Moonbase all originated from Shawcraft's workshops.
However, as the television industry developed throughout the decade, the company found themselves
in strong competition from other contractors, as well as the BBC's own internal departments.
Gradually our own special effects and our plaster workshops were starting to be much
more involved with this sort of work.
Before I'd finished doing Doctor Who, they'd already thought about getting sort of vacuum
forming going.
And I suppose really, obviously, the BBC, because of costs, would keep it in-house.
The eponymous monster from The Macra Terror was deemed to be overly expensive.
The chameleon space plane on The Faceless Ones fell off its wire and was damaged.
Whilst they still provided occasional work on the series, the company's association with
Doctor Who effectively ended with The Evil of the Daleks in 1967.
Eventually drifting away from television and the film industry during the 1970s, Shawcraft's
engineering side became more prominent, and expanded once more to include a totally new
line of business, aircraft and commercial refrigeration work.
After 40 years, in 1987, Bill Roberts decided to retire.
Shawcraft came to an end a few years later.
But for Bill, his retirement would be an active one.
He had a double garage at home.
He had his pillar drill there, and he had all sorts of equipment.
And he still did bits and pieces for people.
He did some fantastic work.
It's nice to know there's some recognition there for him.