Anybody who has been to the top of the Gerlizen Alpe — whether to hike, ski, or simply to enjoy the magnificent views — will have seen the two buildings in the photo above, just below the summit to the south.
The building on the left is a solar observatory that used to contain a coronograph, a telescopic attachment that blocks out direct light from the sun so that it’s possible to view the sun’s atmosphere, or corona. The building on the right, a stone tower built by the German Army but not completed before the end of the war, is part of the same observatory system now run by the Astronomical Association of Carinthia.
While reading about the history of the Royal Corps of Engineers in Austria after the war, we were amazed to discover the solar observatory had actually been built by a team of Royal Engineers in 1947, reportedly at the instigation of Dr. Robert d’Escourt Atkinson, the Deputy Astronomer Royal.
Further research in British newspaper archives revealed the full story, one version of which you can read here, courtesy of the Somerset Guardian and Radstock Observer of 2 January 1948. The observatory was handed over to the Austrians for the use of the astronomers of Graz University in a ceremony on 27 November 1947, details of which were also recorded in an Austrian newspaper, Die Neue Zeit, the following day (in German, courtesy of ANNO).
Photo source: Nick Medcalf.
Almost seven years later, on the afternoon of 19 September 1954, there was another ceremony on the Gerlitzen, in which the University of Graz unveiled a marble plaque thanking British Troops Austria for constructing the observatory “in the service of peaceful cooperation among nations”, and naming it henceforth the Atkinson Tower. We haven’t found any reports about the event in the British press, but we did find one detailed German-language report, again, in Die Neue Zeit.
There is no plaque as described above to be found on the building today; apparently it was removed, we don’t know why, some time after the observatory became the responsibility of the Astronomical Association of Carinthia in December 1975. However, thanks to a local historian, Heiner Ludescher, we know what the plaque looked like when it was installed in 1954.
Thanks to British newspaper reports, we have been able to identify the soldier who died, Sapper Raymond Jones Newton, and another ten of the 22 Sappers who were reportedly involved in the construction of the observatory. There’s a list of the Sappers we know of, and more photos, here.
Sapper Jones Newton died on 25 October 1947 and was buried at Klagenfurt War Cemetery on 29 October 1947, one of the last British soldiers to be buried there.