I too used to look at them erect while I was flying out of Barkston in 1961-2.
One day I found myself in an RAF Hospital (those were the days) in a bed next to a Thor site RAF engineer who talked to me about fuelling them and how you had to be careful as the fuel was a hypergolic mixture of unsymmetrical di-methyl hydrazine with red fuming nitric acid as the oxidant. His stories impressed the hell out of me so much that I can remember the details of the fuel to this very day.