The autopilot, autoland, and flight systems were made by S Smith & Son (England) Ltd later Smiths Industries Aviation Division at Bishops Cleeve and Kingsditch Lane near Cheltenham. We actually had a complete system in the lab in CH4 and many people have experience, and may have retained documentation.
I would suggest contacting the company to find how material was disposed of, also you might contact people by writing to their pension scheme and to the Cheltenham Echo. I was a mere apprentice then and am now over seventy, so you may have a chance of contacting those responsible at the time.
Names I can recall are Norman Sigourney, head of Multiplex Lab, Bruce Ward I worked for, and a sea of faces, will try to recall names.
It was a wonderful lab to work in, full of really bright people with the latest test gear and the walls were covered with graphs showing the magnetic characteristics of the various materials our magnetic amplifiers were made from. Our ATR cases were full size with doghouse, and packed with Ledex switches (solenoid actuated rotary switches) micro-relays (we made our own) and magamps (we made those too). Everything ran on 400Hz, the servo motors used R&Q (refence and quadrature), the most used instruments were R&Q meters.
In Test Equipment I worked for John Stark, one of the many Smiths Riley car enthusiasts and we were making a portable tape player called SADIE for Smiths Automatic Diagnostic Inspection Equipment, which contained a four track tape player capable of running to and fro on the various voice tracks as faults were diagnosed.
Around that time Mr Majendie invented the barbers pole director display, a patent search on his name should bring up the full patent.
The general principle of the Smiths autoland was that there were three totally separate channels all the way to the control surfaces, where two good ones could win out over one faulty one. Different from the Elliotts system on VC10 which had much more cross-voting on the way through.
Sorry, rambling a bit, hope there was some help there. All the best with the project.
