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  I immediately came to appreciate the atmosphere of Wadham. Built of soft Cotswold stone, its frontage on Parks Road was trim, its hall and quadrangle beautifully proportioned, and its garden delightful. If incense were needed for Matthew Arnold’s ‘Last Enchantments of the Middle Ages’ it could well be the autumn smell of burning twigs in Wadham garden.

  T. C. Keeley was my tutor; and in addition to physics he offered wisdom. He warned us that if another war broke out there would be a disastrous period for six months while those who had reached high positions on inadequate abilities in peacetime would have to be replaced. He also introduced us to some of the comic achievements of administrators. He had been at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough during the First War, and apart from their unhappily naming their first airship ‘The Mayfly’, which didn’t, they had at one stage changed the method of packing bombs into crates, with the result that a crate arrived at Farnborough bearing the legend ‘Caution! The bombs in this crate are packed in a different manner from that formerly used. Compared with the old methods the bombs are now packed upside down, and the crate must therefore be opened at the bottom. To prevent confusion, the bottom has been labelled “Top”.’

  Keeley had been brought from Farnborough to Oxford by the Professor of Experimental Philosophy, Frederick Alexander Lindemann, who had succeeded to that Chair and to the Headship of the Clarendon Laboratory in 1919. A natural physicist, he was also a champion tennis player, and a man of great courage. At Farnborough during the war he had worked out the method of recovering an aircraft from a spin, which had hitherto been a nearly fatal condition, and despite defective vision in one eye he had learned to fly to put his theory to the test. It developed into a manoeuvre that has been standard ever since.

  I first came to Lindemann’s notice at the end of my first term of physics in 1931, somewhat accidentally. At the Terminal Examination I found that the paper was divided into two parts, the questions in the first part being different and much more challenging than those in the rest of the paper. The rubric advised candidates to spend at least an hour on the first part, and I became so interested in them that I failed to notice that my watch had stopped. Only in the last quarter of an hour of the three hours allocated did I realize that time had passed, and I could only scribble brief answers for the second part. It turned out that the questions that had so interested me had been set by Lindemann himself, and that he was looking much more for physical insight than for the retailing of existing knowledge. A few days later he told me that he had never had his questions answered so effectively; and even though I told him this was partly because I had spent nearly three times as long on them as I ought to have done, he talked of a possible Fellowship after I had taken Finals.

  I was duly awarded a First in 1932, and was granted a Research Studentship to work for a doctorate. Again, the subject of my research was somewhat accidental. There was a spectrometer for examining infrared radiation in the laboratory. It was an extremely tricky instrument, and the man who had been using it previously was now so tired of it that he persuaded Lindemann that someone else ought to take it over. As it seemed to offer a prospect for both theory and experimental work, I agreed to take it on, and found within the first week that its infra-red detector was broken. Lindemann suggested that I should therefore make a new one, and I became involved in designing and making new infrared detectors—an activity which on and off I was to pursue over the next thirty years. This quickly brought me into conflict with Lindemann, who had novel ideas on how infra-red detectors should be made, but after some time I found that he had been leading me up a garden path because he had made some erroneous assumptions he had not troubled to check. When I told him so, he accused me of a defeatist attitude, and, stung by his comments, I began to follow my own ideas.

  At the same time, he continued to talk to me about more general matters, perhaps because he realized that in several directions we had similar interests. I can recall walking back to Wadham one evening in 1933 from the Clarendon, just after Hitler came to power. He pointed out to me that the world was heading towards dictatorships, with Stalin in Russia, Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany; and Roosevelt had just won the Presidential Election in America. He wondered whether we should be able to survive without becoming a dictatorship ourselves.

  Within a few weeks the Oxford Union Society passed its notorious resolution which had been either proposed or supported by C. E. M. Joad, that ‘Under no circumstances will this house fight for King and Country’. I was not a member of the Union, but I was disgusted. The news of the motion reverberated round the world. A. J. P. Taylor in his English History 1914-1945 says that there is no documentary evidence that it had any effect on the dictators; but Churchill in The Gathering Storm said that Lord Lloyd, who was on friendly terms with Mussolini noted how the latter had been struck by the resolution and ‘In Germany, in Russia, in Italy, in Japan, the idea of a decadent, degenerate Britain took deep root and swayed many calculations’. And in the Daily Telegraph of 4th May 1965, Erich von Richthofen wrote, ‘I am an ex-officer of the old Wehrmacht and served on what you would call the German General Staff at the time of the Oxford resolution. I can assure you, from personal knowledge, that no other factor influenced Hitler more and decided him on his course than that “refusal to fight for King and Country”, coming from what was assumed to be the intellectual elite of your country.’

  I wrote my next letter home in the light of a comment that I once heard my mother make to someone else during the First War that much as she would hate me to go, I would not be a son of hers if I were not fighting. I told her not to judge Oxford by the aspiring politicians in the Union, and although most of my colleagues were at that time pacifists, I thought that many of us would fight. I certainly would, although it might not be quite in the front-line way that she and my father would be expecting, because it was quite possible that there would be essential jobs that only physicists could do.

  I must have felt more strongly than most of my contemporaries, none of whom can I recall being particularly worried about the rise of Hitler, or about the need to develop our defences. Lindemann was the only man I can recall talking to me about it, and in that respect we were clearly fellow spirits. Many of my contemporaries thought that a pacifist approach could be effective in resisting dictatorships, and there was much enthusiasm for a silly play that was broadcast more than once which pictured a small buffer state between two much larger states preventing a war by massing unarmed on their frontiers to resist the passage of tanks from the opposing sides. The tank commanders were supposed to have refrained from driving their tanks over the bodies of the unarmed pickets. These were the days of the well-intentioned but unrealistic League of Nations Union.

  I took my doctorate in 1934 at the age of 22. My differences with Lindemann over research work had reached the point where it seemed that I could no longer continue in the Clarendon, and I was awarded a Senior Studentship in Astronomy in Balliol, with the objective of henceforward working in the University Observatory with H. H. Plaskett on the infra-red spectrum of the Sun. To my surprise Lindemann then told me that he regretted that our differences had been so great, and even though I was now formally on the Observatory staff, he would be glad for me to continue working in his laboratory as long as I pleased. My prospects looked good: my doctorate was out of the way, and by the time the Balliol Studentship terminated there was the likelihood of a Commonwealth Fellowship to Mt. Wilson for two years, after which there was to be a Travelling Fellowship with half my time being spent in Oxford and the other in South Africa, to which the Radcliffe Observatory was moving. The money had been provided by Lord Nuffield’s purchase of the Observatory site in Oxford for the new medical school, and the Fellowship had been specially instituted with me in mind.

  At this same time, July 1934, I had one of my greatest strokes of fortune. For a month that summer I became tutor to a Christchurch undergraduate, Mark Meynell, who came from Hoar Cross, a stately home in Sta
ffordshire. His parents were Colonel and Lady Dorothy Meynell. The family very quickly accepted me, starting with the younger daughter, Rachel, followed by her elder sister Dorothy and brother Hugo. These were the last days of the traditional English country house, with weekend parties full of gracious living and good company. Over the years I have been much indebted to the Meynells for this experience of their way of life, and for very warm friendship. I had now, as it were, seen everything of English life from the street market to the stately home, and it left me with none of the class bitterness that has since so bedevilled English politics. My England was that of Rupert Brooke and Robert Falcon Scott who wrote in the last pages of his diary as he was dying in the tent in Antarctica: ‘I do not regret this journey which shows that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another and meet death with as great fortitude as ever in the past.’ If the time came, this England would be worth fighting for.

  So the stage was now set for the events of 1935. But this chapter may properly end with an incident from 1919 which will serve as both paradigm and parable. It was the 22nd of March and the Victory Parade of the Brigade of Guards. My mother and I were standing somewhere in the great crowd near Hyde Park Corner, and I had my first experience of an individual perceiving a truth that was staring the crowd in the face, and yet all the rest failing to see it until it was spelled out for them. As Company after Company came by, the crowd burst into cheer after cheer. And then there came a company that was different—all its men were in civilian clothes. The cheering died away, the crowd was subdued. What were civilians doing in a parade like this? Were they recruits who had joined in time to miss the war? I shared the disappointment that these drab men should interlope among the splendid Guardsmen. And then the hush was broken by the indignant voice of a woman crying ‘Cheer the men in civvies—they were the men who went first’. It was absolutely true, for these were the survivors of the ‘Old Contemptibles’, already demobilized on the rule of ‘first in, first out’.

  The shamed crowd apologized with thundering cheers. Although I have not spoken of it in the fifty years since, I remember because the voice had been my own mother’s. And one of the men in civvies, marching unmistakably as a Guardsman even though, thanks to Festubert, his left arm was three inches short, was my father.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Friends and Rivals

  THE WEEK that I went to Hoar Cross, The Times published on 8th August a letter from Lindemann headed ‘Science and Air Bombing’. This read:

  Sir, In the debate in the House of Commons on Monday on the proposed expansion of our Air Forces, it seemed to be taken for granted on all sides that there is, and can be, no defence against bombing aeroplanes and that we must rely entirely upon counter-attack and reprisals. That there is at present no means of preventing hostile bombers from depositing their loads of explosives, incendiary materials, gases, or bacteria upon their objectives I believe to be true; that no method can be devised to safeguard great centres of population from such a fate appears to me to be profoundly improbable.

  If no protective contrivance can be found and we are reduced to a policy of reprisals, the temptation to be ‘quickest on the draw’ will be tremendous. It seems not too much to say that bombing aeroplanes in the hands of gangster Governments might jeopardize the whole future of our Western civilization.

  To adopt a defeatist attitude in the face of such a threat is inexcusable until it has definitely been shown that all the resources of science and invention have been exhausted. The problem is far too important and too urgent to be left to the casual endeavours of individuals or departments. The whole weight and influence of the Government should be thrown into the scale to endeavour to find a solution. All decent men and all honourable Governments are equally concerned to obtain security against attacks from the air and to achieve it no effort and no sacrifice is too great.

  Once again, he was using his favourite ‘defeatist attitude’ but there was great force to what he said. Baldwin had stated in Parliament on 10th November 1932 that ‘the bomber will always get through’ and the summer air exercises of 1934 had seemed to provide ample confirmation.

  Lindemann was very strongly supported by his friend Winston Churchill, who was some twelve years his senior. They had first met in 1921 when Lindemann had partnered Mrs. Churchill in an exhibition tennis tournament for charity at Eaton Hall, the home of the Duke of Westminster. At first sight so different, the two men quickly saw each other’s qualities. Churchill, who counted eating, drinking, and smoking among his pleasures, valued Lindemann’s keenness of mind and his bravery as a test pilot. Lindemann, the non-smoking and abstaining vegetarian, valued Churchill’s supreme quality of action inspired by warm humanity and lively imagination. The anchor points of their friendship were courage, patriotism and humour; in these each matched the other. Love of good language and prowess in sport, Lindemann in tennis and Churchill in polo, were also matters of common ground.

  Over the ten years following their first meeting, Churchill came to depend on Lindemann for advice ranging from the future of science in warfare to the design of the fountains in his gardens at Chartwell. From 1932 onwards, when Lindemann lost his other political friend, Lord Birkenhead, he and Churchill were drawn much closer together in the alarm they both felt about the rise of Nazi Germany. They did their utmost to awaken the country in general and the politicians in particular. They had even gone to visit Stanley Baldwin during his holiday at Aix les Bains in 1934 and had mooted the idea of forming a special subcommittee of the Committee of Imperial Defence.

  As often happens, someone else had a rather similar idea. He was a scientific civil servant, A. P. Rowe, the Personal Assistant to H. E. Wimperis, the Director of Scientific Research in the Air Ministry. In June 1934 Rowe had warned the Ministry that ‘unless science evolved some new method of aiding our defence, we were likely to lose the next war if it started within ten years’. In the resulting discussions Wimperis in November 1934 proposed the formation of a Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence, and Henry Tizard was selected as Chairman.

  Henceforward both Lindemann and Tizard were to be major factors in my life; and since much has been made of their differences, it is interesting to compare their careers up to this point in the story. Lindemann had been born in 1886 at Baden-Baden, his father being a wealthy engineer of Alsatian origin but who left Alsace after it was ceded to Germany in 1871 and became a British citizen. Tizard had been born in 1885, his father being Captain T. H. Tizard of the Royal Navy and of Huguenot descent; in fact, on hearing the Tizards described as ‘more English than the English’ Henry had remarked, ‘With a name like mine, you have to be!’ Lindemann had been at preparatory school in Scotland, and then went to Darmstadt and thence to university in Berlin, where he became a research student under Walther Nernst and took his Ph.D. in 1910. There he met Tizard as a fellow research student, Tizard having been at Westminster School and at Magdalen College Oxford, where he read Chemistry. While Tizard returned to Oxford, Lindemann stayed in Berlin for further research with Nernst, and produced some very distinguished work. At the outbreak of war in 1914 both men were abroad—Lindemann still in Germany, Tizard with the British Association in Australia. Both hurried home, Lindemann finding his niche in the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough and Tizard in the Royal Flying Corps. Both became test pilots, although each had defective vision in one eye. At the end of the war Tizard returned to Oxford, and successfully canvassed for Lindemann to be elected to the vacant Chair of Experimental Philosophy. So far they had been the best of friends.

  It is difficult to be sure regarding the first rift in their relations. They could always argue vehemently on simple questions of science, such as the most efficient way of packing oranges into a box—whether the oranges in adjacent layers should lie with each orange directly over the one below, or should instead nestle as closely as possible into the spaces between the oranges in the layer below. Retrospectively, Tizard thought that Lindemann may have res
ented not being put onto government committees because Tizard had not given him sufficient support after Tizard himself had become Secretary of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. But whatever real or imaginary grievance Lindemann may have harboured, he now—in 1935—felt that he had plenty. He and Churchill had made all the political running for something drastic to be done about Air Defence; they did not think that the Air Ministry was to be entrusted with it, for the Ministry had given Baldwin the advice that ‘the bomber will always get through’. Lindemann and Churchill therefore wanted the problem to be considered at the higher level of the Committee of Imperial Defence which should form a special Sub-Committee for Air Defence. As recently as 27th November 1934 Lindemann had met Tizard at the Royal Society and solicited his aid in pressing for this Sub-Committee to be formed.

  Whether or not Tizard had already been informally approached by Wimperis is not clear, but on 12th December he was formally asked to Chair the Air Ministry’s own Committee. On 10th January 1935 the Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, agreed with Lindemann and Churchill that a C.I.D. Sub-Committee for Air Defence should be formed, only to find afterwards that the Air Ministry had just set up its own Committee which it was claimed would be sufficient. When Lindemann and Churchill were informed of this fait accompli, it seemed to them that the Ministry had prevaricated so as to gain time to form its own Committee and so forestall any move at a higher level. Lindemann found himself left out and his old friend Tizard preferred, along with A. V. Hill and P. M. S. Blackett. He would have had to be almost superhuman not to feel resentful. So an erstwhile friendship was succeeded by an acrimonious rivalry—I can recall Lindemann parodying Omar Khayyam with something along the lines of ‘The Blackett and the Tizard keep the courts where Trenchard once did sleep’.