Wallace John Challens was born in
Peterborough,
Northamptonshire, on 14 May 1915, the son of an engineer. He was educated at
Deacon's School in
Dogsthorpe, Peterborough, and
University College, Nottingham. On graduating in 1936, the
War Office offered him a £225 per annum job in the ballistics department at the
Royal Arsenal in
Woolwich, working on the ballistics of heavy guns. Good jobs were hard to come by during the
Great Depression, and Challens wanted to marry and start a family. He married Joan Stephenson in 1938. They had two sons. During the
Second World War, this moved from Woolwich to
Fort Halstead, and then to
Aberporth in 1940, where it became the Projectile Development Establishment, with Sir
Alwyn Crow as Controller of Projectile Development and
William Cook as his deputy. On 17 April 1945, he was commissioned into the
British Army as a
second lieutenant on the
General List. After the
defeat of Germany, he was sent to Germany, and then to the United States as part of the British Scientific Mission to work on the
V-1 flying bomb and the
V-2 rocket. For his services, he was awarded the U.S.
Medal of Freedom. then known as
High Explosive Research (HER), at the
Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE). There was a tussle between the rocket and atomic bomb projects over who would have Challens' services. Penney won only after appealing to the
permanent secretary of the
Ministry of Supply, Sir
Archibald Rowlands. Challens was placed in charge of the group responsible for the firing circuits that would detonate the 32 pentagonal- and hexagonal-shaped
explosive lenses of the
implosion-type nuclear weapon, based on the American
Fat Man design which Penney had worked on at the
Los Alamos Laboratory as part of the
British Mission to the
Manhattan Project. All 32 lenses had to detonate within a few millionths of a second of each other, something well beyond the state of the art of British electronics in 1947. and a
Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the
1968 New Year Honours. His wife, Joan, died in 1971. In 1973, he married Norma Lane, who shared his passion for golf. He was captain and president of
Basingstoke Golf Club and became a life member. He died suddenly on the Basingstoke golf course on 1 March 2002. == Notes ==