The Griffin File: an inventory

The archive holds four things by Admiral Sir Anthony Griffin: his Water as Fuel paper of September 1993 in its sixth draft, the extract of the same lecture as delivered, his covering letter to Meyer of 4 July 1993, and his account of the Perkins visit of October 1992, all because Meyer bound them into his 1995 test report. That is a fraction of what Griffin wrote about the work. This page is the inventory of the rest, so far as the record allows, and a note of where it has been looked for.

The index he made himself

When Griffin briefed Perkins Technology at the Institute of Directors on 2 September 1992 he listed the papers behind the briefing as Annex A, and the list went into his account of the October visit, which is page 105 of the test report. It is his own index of his file on Meyer from June 1990 to August 1992: twenty-six items, of which the archive holds none. AG is Griffin, SM Meyer, ML Michael Laughton, KH Keith Hindley, GP G. Purkins of Perkins, TD T. W. E. Downes, CL C. Livett of Livett Launches; the others are as he wrote them. Items he marked with an asterisk were not in the brief.

Three of these would change what is known. Item D is a joint appreciation by the three men who witnessed the October 1990 demonstration, written eight months later and titled for the universal adoption of hydrogen. Item J1 is Professor Laughton's report on Meyer's patents, the only technical assessment of them by a qualified outsider the record mentions. Item M is Griffin's account of his August 1992 visit, the second of the three British visits the Perkins note counts, of which nothing else survives.

What else he wrote

Jim Miller counted "at least three non-classified presentations or papers" by Griffin on the subject. Two can be named: the Warsash paper, and the eyewitness material in Electronics World's "Free energy for ever?" of January 1991, where the photograph of Meyer with a working cell is Griffin's and the account is Hindley's. The Warsash paper was given at the Southampton Institute's Maritime Division conference on the Impact of New Technology on the Marine Industries, 13 to 15 September 1993, and the proceedings were printed: The Impact of New Technology on the Marine Industries: Proceedings of the International Maritime Conference, Southampton Institute, 1993, ISBN 1 874011 50 8, two volumes of various pagings, 32 cm. The British Library holds two copies: shelfmark (B) PP 274 at St Pancras, in the Science, Technology and Industry reading rooms, and f95/0270 and f95/0271 in the Document Supply lending collection at Boston Spa, from which a copy of a single paper can be ordered through any public or university library, or from British Library On Demand. Neither Solent University, which absorbed the Institute, nor the University of Southampton has it on the shelf. That is where Griffin's paper as published, rather than as drafted, is to be had. The Maritime Foundation's memorial notice, by the naval architect Marshall Meek, records that he was "convinced of the possibility of propelling ships with hydrogen as fuel" obtained from seawater, and Meek gave him a chapter in his memoir Crossing the Bar.

The "Griffin Report"

Two things have gone under that name. On the old site it was the extract of the 1993 Warsash lecture. But the German magazine raum&zeit, in its issue 50 of 1991, announced "the so-called Griffin Report, in hand since the end of 1990, until now kept under wraps, whose result may now be published", with the commission's finding that "Stan Meyer's water fuel cell works and can go into series production". That is the report of the October 1990 visit, and raum&zeit did not print it: the article, "Stan Meyer ermöglicht Wasser als Brennstoff", is a report on the commission by Ola Deraker. It is one of three the magazine carried, with "Stan Meyers Wasserzellentechnik" in issue 44 (1990), from Meyer's talk at the SAFE congress at Einsiedeln in October 1989, and "Wasserzellentechnik jetzt für jedes Auto?" in issue 48 (1990), on the gas-cooling system. All three are sold as PDFs from the magazine's archive; none is by Griffin, and a search of its 1990 to 1997 issues finds nothing else under his name or Meyer's.

Whether the 1990 report was ever a document of its own, or was what became item D of the index above, the record does not say.

Where it has been looked for

No repository lists his papers. The Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King's College London, where a Controller of the Navy's papers would be expected, has no collection and no authority record under his name; its one Griffin item is a conference paper of July 1983 on the Soviet Navy, filed among Air Vice-Marshal Menaul's papers, and a search there for Laughton, Hindley, Meyer, the water fuel cell and Perkins Technology finds nothing. The University of Southampton's Special Collections hold nothing under Griffin, Laughton or Meyer, and its library catalogue and Solent's have neither the men nor the 1993 proceedings. The National Archives' Discovery catalogue returns nothing under his name but a registration certificate, HO 334/497/26953, for Anthony Templer Frederick Griffin Griffin, born 24 November 1920, the paperwork of a man born in Peshawar. Wikidata records no archive for him, and the Internet Archive and the Naval Review's own index hold nothing. He was on no company board that touched the work; the one directorship in the register is the management company of his own road in Bosham.

That leaves the places a file like his goes when it is not deposited:

• His family. He died on 16 October 1996; his son followed him into the Navy. The file would have been at Bosham.
• Michael Laughton himself, for item J1 and item D. Born in December 1934, Emeritus Professor of Electrical Engineering at Queen Mary, and as far as the record shows still living: the last of the three witnesses of October 1990 who can be asked.
• Keith Hindley, the third witness of 1990 and the author of the Electronics World account.
• Perkins Engines at Peterborough, whose archive would hold Project TACO's side of items F2, H and the 1993 contract.
• The British Library, for the 1993 proceedings, as above; the one item on this page that can be ordered today.
• Meyer's own estate, since every item on the index that was a fax or letter to SM had a copy in Grove City, and the 1995 report shows he kept Griffin's papers.

If any of it turns up, it belongs on this shelf.