Sheep from the Vet school were used, because it was tricky to get a lawnmower around what with all the poles and wires, and goats would have eaten the telescope too.
It really is an amazing place. The array that detected pulsars now looks not dissimilar to an overgrown vineyard, and the hut where the wires from the antennae were terminated still has plastic caps from the connectors scattered over the floor. The control room for one of the telescopes was left open on it's desk, with last observing entries in it from the date of my birth. Operating manuals and old component catalogues lie scattered around. One hurt was full of random matked exam papers.
It's not open to the public often, but if you get a chance to visit you'll see astronomy history frozen in time.
UCL has a space lab named after Mullards, Cambridge has a radio telescope. Was there one person who set up these gifts, there are few other companies who have gifted money to space science. Wellcome is very generous for medical research.
Mullard were taken over by Philips back in 1927, so were these gifts really from Philips?
I'm keenly aware of this since my Dad worked for Mullards for 30 years.
