War work
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Official portrait of Elizabeth Alexander as Head of Operations, Radio Development Laboratory, New Zealand, c.1943. (LDGSL/38).
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Known to the Head of New Zealand’s Radio Development Laboratory (RDL) from her Cambridge days, Elizabeth Alexander was invited to set up and run RDL’s Operations Research Section. Her work covered all of New Zealand’s contribution to World War II radars in the South Pacific.
Most notably, her interpretation that an anomalous signal (picked up by New Zealand Air Force operators on Norfolk Island in March 1945) was caused by the sun became the beginning of solar radio astronomy in Australia.
Alexander had begun to keep a personal diary as a record for her husband Norman to catch up on her and their children's activities whilst they were separated.
However, she was wrongly informed in 1942 that Norman had been killed when a ship sank, so destroyed the first version. When she heard that he was in fact alive and a POW at the notorious Changi Prison Camp in Singapore, she restarted it and rewrote the first entries from memory.
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Pages from Alexander's second personal diary, kept between March 1944 and August 1945. (LDGSL/38). The image on the left is the telegram informing Alexander that her husband is in fact alive and is a POW at Changi Prison Camp. The image on the right is an extract from 15 July 1944 on the current situation of the war. Click to enlarge.
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