zotero/storage/7H22FNLG/.zotero-ft-cache

PENGUIN BOOKS
MOST SECRET WAR
Reginald Victor Jones was an English physicist and scienti c
military intelligence expert who played an important role in the
defence of Britain in the Second World War. He died in 1997.


Most Secret War
R.V. JONES
PENGUIN BOOKS


PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered O ces: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
www.penguin.com
First published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton 1978
Reissued in Penguin Books 2009
Copyright © R. V. Jones, 1978
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it
shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated
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which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being
imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-195767-8


Contents
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE: The Men Who Went First
CHAPTER TWO: Friends and Rivals
CHAPTER THREE: The Clarendon Laboratory 1936–1938
CHAPTER FOUR: Inferior Red 1936–1938
CHAPTER FIVE: Exile
CHAPTER SIX: The Day Before War Broke Out
CHAPTER SEVEN: The Secret Weapon
CHAPTER EIGHT: The Oslo Report
CHAPTER NINE: A Plan For Intelligence
CHAPTER TEN: The Phoney War
CHAPTER ELEVEN: The Crooked Leg
CHAPTER TWELVE: Re ections
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: The Fortunes of Major Wintle
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: The Fifth Column
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: The Edda Revived
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Knickebein Jammed—And Photographed
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: The X-Apparatus
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Coventry
CHAPTER NINETEEN: Target No. 54
CHAPTER TWENTY: The Atrocious Crime


CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: Wotan’s Other Eye
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: Retrospect and Prospect
PART TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: Freya
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: Beams On The Wane
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: ‘Jay’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: Würzburg
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: The Bruneval Raid
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: The Baedeker Beams
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: El Hatto
CHAPTER THIRTY: Pineapple
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: The Kammhuber Line
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO: Lichtenstein
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE: Window
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR: Hamburg
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE: Heavy Water
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX: Revelations From The Secret Service
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN: Full Stretch
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT: Peenemünde
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE: FZG 76
CHAPTER FORTY: The Americans Convinced
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE: ‘Flames’: Problems Of Bomber Command
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO: The Baby Blitz
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE: D-Day


CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR: V-1
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE: V-2
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX: V-3
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN: Bomber Triumph
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT: Nuclear Energy
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE: A.D.I. (Science) Overseas
CHAPTER FIFTY: The Year Of Madness
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE: German Generals And Sta Colleges
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO: Swords Into Ploughshares, Bombs Into
Saucers
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE: Exeunt
Epilogue
Notes
Glossary of Abbreviations and Code Names
Index




PART ONE


CHAPTER ONE
The Men Who Went First
I
N 1939 I was a Scienti c O cer on the sta of the Air Ministry in
London, and for the past four years I had been involved in problems
of defending Britain from air attack. For reasons that will later
become evident I had been exiled since July 1938 to the Admiralty
Research Laboratory at Teddington; and it was there in May 1939
that I received a telephone call that changed the course of my life,
and perhaps that of many another. It came from the Secretary of Sir
Henry Tizard’s Committee for the Scienti c Survey of Air Defence,
A. E. Woodward-Nutt: he said that he would like to see my work,
and we agreed on a visit a few days later.
As I showed him the work, I sensed that there might be some
deeper reason for his visit, and I told him so. He replied that there
was indeed another reason: Tizard and his colleagues did not know
what the Germans were doing in applying science to air warfare,
and our Intelligence Services were unable to tell them. So it had
been agreed that a scientist should be attached to these Services for
a period to discover why they were producing so little information,
and to recommend what should be done to improve matters. ‘I
thought of you,’ said Woodward-Nutt, ‘and I wondered whether you
would be interested.’ My reply was immediate: ‘A man in that
position could lose the war—I’ll take it!’ We agreed that we ought to
give the Admiralty Research Laboratory time to replace me and so


the date for my move over to Intelligence should be 1st September
1939.
It turned out that we had hit the very day on which the Second
World War started. This book is primarily an account of my part in
that war, which was to attempt to anticipate the German
applications of science to warfare, so that we could counter their
new weapons before they were used. Much of my work had to do
with radio navigation, as in the Battle of the Beams, and with radar,
as in the Allied Bomber O ensive and in the preparations for D-Day
and in the war at sea. There were also our e orts against the V-1
( ying bomb) and V-2 (rocket) Retaliation Weapons and—although
fortunately the Germans were some distance from success—against
their nuclear developments. In all these elds I had the ultimate
responsibility for providing Intelligence, and my main object now is
to describe how we built up our pictures of what the Germans were
doing. But Intelligence is of little use unless it leads to action, and so
I must in some vital instances also describe what went on in
Whitehall before action was nally taken. These episodes brought
me into contact with many of those responsible for the conduct of
the war from Winston Churchill downwards. Also coming naturally
into my narrative will be examples of the heroism of some of our
Serving personnel and of those many helpers who joined the cause
of Allied Intelligence in the Nazi-occupied territories.
As with many others who played a part in 1940, my own
preparation for the Second World War started years earlier; without
the experience that we had gained then, we could have done little


until too late in the war. I must therefore recall some of the
incidents from my earlier days that sensitized me to the work that I
was about to do.
I was born on 29th September 1911; and in a sense, my earliest
background was that of the Grenadier Guards. My father had served
from Guardsman to Sergeant in the South African and First World
Wars, and had been in the King’s Company in the last stages of the
Retreat from Mons. O ered a Commission, he refused to leave his
friends; he survived Neuve Chapelle, where the battalion lost sixteen
out of its twenty-one o cers and 325 of its men, and where he
himself was to have been recommended for the Victoria Cross; two
months later he was very badly wounded at Festubert in May 1915.
In hospital and convalescent home for a year, he became a guard at
M.I.5 headquarters and later a Drill Sergeant at Aldershot. My
childhood was steeped in the Regimental tradition of discipline,
precision, service, endurance, and good temper. It was steeped, too,
in the experiences of the air raids on London, all of which I went
through with my mother and sister. The shattered houses that I saw
then, and the suspense of waiting for the next bomb, remained in
my memory as the Second World War approached.
In 1916 I went to my rst school, St. Jude’s, Herne Hill in South
London. It was a Church school, and religion was of course a
prominent feature: the war had plenty of examples of self-sacri ce
to which our teachers could point, and I particularly remember
being told of an o cer who had saved his men by throwing himself
onto a grenade that was about to explode. From St. Jude’s I went in


1919 to the one elementary school in the neighbourhood to which
my mother prayed I should not be sent, Sussex Road, Brixton,
because it was so rough. It certainly was tough, the future of my
contemporaries encompassing everything from barrow boy to
millionaire scrapmerchant and trade union peer. But I found
genuine friendship and decency, and I can still talk on equal terms
with some of the stallholders in London street markets. And we had
devoted teachers like E. C. Samuel, a great Welshman who had
taught one of my uncles before me; and despite the fact that his
class numbered 55 he found time to give me personal tuition in
algebra, so that I was solving simple simultaneous equations before I
was ten. He told me that he himself had been to college, but that all
his swans had turned out to be geese, and that he would like to see
me go far. Thanks to his help, I won a London Junior County
Scholarship in 1922, and went to Alleyn’s School, Dulwich.
But before I left Sussex Road a trivial incident occurred that
helped to shape the course of my life. It was the rst Boat Race after
the war. However partisan the undergraduates of Oxford and
Cambridge might have felt about the outcome, they were almost as
conscientious objectors compared with the belligerent boys of the
typical London school of the period, which temporarily split into
violently opposed factions. My rst acquaintance with the strife,
having previously never heard of either Oxford or Cambridge, was
when an older boy asked me ‘Which are you, Oxford or Cambridge?’
Perhaps because he had put Oxford rst, I replied ‘Oxford’. It turned
out that he was Cambridge, so he promptly punched me on the nose


and knocked me down. From that moment I swore undying enmity
to Cambridge, and the incident may have been at least as signi cant
as any other in the course of my subsequent career.
For me, the move to Alleyn’s meant a new era of discipline. We
were forbidden to run anywhere in the school except on the playing
elds. Many of our masters had been in the Army, and the O cers’
Training Corps was one of the strongest activities in the school. I
was in it, or its predecessor, the Cadet Corps, for the next seven
years. Even now, we still drink at the annual dinner to the memory
of the Old Boys who fell in the Wars.
As for my own career in the O.T.C., my father expected me to be
turned out as smartly as a Guardsman, with such details as puttees
nishing not more than one half inch beyond the top of the bula.
The incident that probably gave him most satisfaction and most
annoyance was when I was in summer camp and the parade was
inspected without warning by a colonel in the Coldstream Guards. It
happened that I had not had time to clean my brass that day, and I
expected to be in trouble. To my surprise, the colonel complimented
me on the smartness of my turnout and my father was as pleased
with the fact that even with a day’s unpolished brass I had
impressed a Coldstream colonel as he was annoyed by the fact that I
had not cleaned it.
When it came to qualifying for a Commission by taking Certi cate
A in 1928, I decided to put the power of prayer to the test.
Previously I had been taught to pray for anything that I hoped
would come about, and this of course included passing


examinations. By now my doubts were being aroused and since it
did not particularly matter whether I passed Certi cate A or not, I
decided to experiment by not praying. I thought that I had made a
mess of the papers, so it was ‘one up’ for God. When the results
came out I did not even trouble to look at the noticeboard, and was
surprised when one of my contemporaries grasped my hand and told
me that I had broken the school record. It was about the only school
record that I ever held and, although I readily acknowledge my debt
to a most Christian upbringing, I have never prayed since.
Our headmaster, R. B. Henderson, was a strong in uence. After
morning prayers he would address the whole school on any topic of
his choice, but it generally lay either in the direction of service to
the school, community, or country, or in the importance of being
good at cricket. In fact, his instructions ruined my cricket, because
he taught us that by far the most important thing when batting was
to have your bat in the twelve o’clock high position as the ball left
the bowler’s arm, and that you should then bring the bat down in a
vertical swing. The result, as far as I was concerned, was that I could
hardly ever get the bat down before the ball was past my crease and
I had been clean bowled. It was only after I went to Oxford and gave
up the twelve o’clock fetish that I managed to make many runs.
Others of his admonitions were more e ective. On 21st March he
would remind us that this was the anniversary of the Germans’ last
great o ensive in 1918 which had occasioned Haig’s ‘backs to the
wall’ order. He stressed how much we owed to our fathers who had
stood fast at that time, and how the time could come again when we


should have to follow their example. In a sixth form lesson on the
theory of forgiveness he elaborated this theme, arguing that
forgiveness could only take place when a sinner had repented. We
could therefore not forgive the Germans because they had never
expressed regret for the war and, he added, ‘Mark my words, as
soon as they’re strong enough they’ll be at us again!’
He exerted considerable pressure on the brightest boys to get
them to study classics. It turned out that I was rather better at Latin
than I was in science, but I had already decided that science was
what I wanted to do. Fortunately, he did not regard his budding
scientists as completely lost, and he provoked us with a weekly
lesson on anything ranging from Greek tragedy to Gothic
architecture, with Aristotelian philosophy thrown in. The e ect that
he had on us by opening cultural windows—because some of us
looked through them with the hope of proving him wrong—was out
of all proportion to the amount of time that his lessons occupied.
One incident in my rst year of physics at the age of 12 will show
how well taught we were, and indicate one of the factors that
sensitized me, years later, to what was going to happen at Coventry.
We had a new and enthusiastic physics master who set us more
homework than I could manage; and at the end of more than two
hours when the supposed allocation was 45 minutes, I had to solve a
problem in speci c heats. I worked the answer out to thirteen places
of decimals, knowing perfectly well that this was quite unjusti ed,
and in fact getting the answer wrong. The master promptly sent for
me, saying that surely I knew better than to work out an answer to


that degree of meaningless precision. I replied that I did, but that I
thought he would like an answer matching the length of the
homework that he had set us. The result was that he moderated his
demands, but the point of the story in this context is that as fourth
form schoolboys we already well knew how many places of decimals
were justi ed in particular measurements: its signi cance was to be
evident at Coventry in 1940.
Life was not easy. I sometimes felt like giving up, when I
contrasted my situation with that of some of my classmates who
could turn to their parents for help. All that my mother could say,
now that I was beyond her academic attainment, was ‘Stick it!’, and
somehow I stuck. In retrospect, such encouragement was far more
valuable than any detailed help. Too many parents are super cially
solicitous over their children, and I have come to appreciate Edward
III’s restraint over the Black Prince at Crecy: ‘Let the boy win his
spurs!’
My main hobby in my schooldays was, as with many other boys
of my generation, the making of radio receiving sets. There has
never been anything comparable in any other period of history to
the impact of radio on the ordinary individual in the 1920’s. It was
the product of some of the most imaginative developments that
have ever occurred in physics, and it was as near magic as anyone
could conceive, in that with a few mainly home-made components
simply connected together one could conjure speech and music out
of the air. The construction of radio receivers was just within the
competence of the average man, who could thus write himself a


passport to countries he could never hope to visit. And he could
always make modi cations that might improve his aerial or his
receiver and give him something to boast about to his friends. I
acquired much of my manipulative skill through building and
handling receivers: when at last I could a ord a thermionic valve in
1928, I built a receiver that picked up transmissions from
Melbourne, which that station acknowledged by sending me a
postcard carrying the signatures of the English Test Team.
My interest in radio, coupled with an instinct that physics was the
most basic of the sciences, permanently biased me in that direction.
I had originally intended to be a chemist, but by the time I went to
Oxford, my choice had nally settled on physics. Actually, the
school had wanted me to try for a scholarship at Cambridge in
mathematics, but to the astonishment of my masters I refused to
enter, remembering my experience at the rst Boat Race and saying
that I had been Oxford ever since (although we had been defeated
nearly every year) and I was not going to change now. Had someone
pointed out to me that if I got to Cambridge I might have a chance
of working with Rutherford, my blind loyalty to Oxford might have
been sorely tried—if I had believed him, for to work with
Rutherford seemed beyond dreams. As it was, I was happy to be
tutored by a new Oxford graduate in physics who had just joined
the school and who was to do much for it over the next forty years,
‘Inky’ Incledon, and I was awarded an Open Exhibition at Wadham
College in 1929.


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 o ered
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 rst airship ‘The May y’, 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 di erent 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 y to put his theory to the test. It developed into a
manoeuvre that has been standard ever since.
I rst came to Lindemann’s notice at the end of my rst 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 rst part being di erent and much more
challenging than those in the rest of the paper. The rubric advised
candidates to spend at least an hour on the rst 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 e ectively; 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 o er a prospect for both
theory and experimental work, I agreed to take it on, and found
within the rst 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 o I was to pursue over the next thirty
years. This quickly brought me into con ict 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 ght 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 e ect 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-o cer of the old Wehrmacht and
served on what you would call the German General Sta at the time
of the Oxford resolution. I can assure you, from personal knowledge,
that no other factor in uenced Hitler more and decided him on his
course than that “refusal to ght 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 ghting. I told her not to judge Oxford by the aspiring
politicians in the Union, and although most of my colleagues were
at that time paci sts, I thought that many of us would ght. 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 paci st approach could be e ective in resisting dictatorships,
and there was much enthusiasm for a silly play that was broadcast
more than once which pictured a small bu er 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 di erences 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
di erences had been so great, and even though I was now formally
on the Observatory sta , 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 Radcli e
Observatory was moving. The money had been provided by Lord
Nu eld’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 ordshire. 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 ghting 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 rst 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 di erent—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 rst’.
It was absolutely true, for these were the survivors of the ‘Old
Contemptibles’, already demobilized on the rule of ‘ rst in, rst
out’.
The shamed crowd apologized with thundering cheers. Although I
have not spoken of it in the fty 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
T
HE 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 de nitely 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 in uence of the Government should be thrown into
the scale to endeavour to nd 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 e ort
and no sacri ce 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
con rmation.
Lindemann was very strongly supported by his friend Winston
Churchill, who was some twelve years his senior. They had rst 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 rst sight so di erent, 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 rst 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 scienti c civil servant, A. P. Rowe, the Personal Assistant to H. E.
Wimperis, the Director of Scienti c 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 Scienti c 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
di erences, 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 nding 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 di cult to be sure regarding the rst rift in their relations.
They could always argue vehemently on simple questions of science,
such as the most e cient 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 resented
not being put onto government committees because Tizard had not
given him su cient support after Tizard himself had become
Secretary of the Department of Scienti c 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 nd afterwards that the Air
Ministry had just set up its own Committee which it was claimed
would be su cient. 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’.
At the outset, Tizard and his Committee—and Britain—had a
tremendous stroke of luck, for on 18th January 1935 Wimperis saw
R. A. Watson-Watt of the Radio Research Station at Slough, and
asked him to advise ‘on the practicability of proposals of the type
colloquially called “death ray” ’, the idea being the creation of a
su ciently strong beam of electromagnetic waves which would heat
up anything in their path to the point where living tissue would be
destroyed or bombs automatically exploded. Watson-Watt had given
the problem of calculating the amount of power employed to his
assistant A. F. (‘Skip’) Wilkins, and the latter quickly calculated that
the power involved would be far beyond current technology. When
he handed the calculation to Watson-Watt the latter said, ‘Well,
then, if the death ray is not possible, how can we help them?’
Wilkins replied that he knew that Post O ce engineers had noticed
disturbances to radio reception when aircraft ew in the vicinity of
their receivers, and that this phenomenon might be useful for
detecting enemy aircraft.


The Post O ce observations had been made in 1931, and indeed
rather similar observations had been made at H.M. Signal School in
1923. Moreover, Marconi had proposed in 1922 to detect ships by
means of re ected radio waves and in 1931 W. A. S. Butement and
P. E. Pollard of the Signals Experimental Establishment at Woolwich
had devised and made a pulsed radio system on a wavelength of
about 50 centimetres for detecting ships, and a rather similar system
was in course of being installed on the French liner Normandie for
detecting icebergs. As regards air defence in Britain, though, it was
Wilkins’ remark to Watson-Watt that started the serious
development of radar.
A brief note from Watson-Watt was available to the Tizard
Committee at its rst meeting on 28th January 1935 and by 14th
February Tizard had received a more detailed memorandum. On
26th February the rst test was held near Daventry, using radio
waves from one of the transmitters there in the 49 metre band, and
with a Heyford bomber as a target ying at a height of ten thousand
feet and piloted by Squadron Leader R. S. Blucke. The test was
immediately successful, and the British development of radar could
now start in earnest. So from the very rst, the Tizard Committee
had been presented with the basic solution to the greatest of the
problems that it had to face.
On the same day, 14th February, that Tizard had discussed with
Watson-Watt and others over lunch at the Athenaeum the paper
Watson-Watt had produced, Lindemann and Churchill were joined
by Austen Chamberlainin meeting Ramsay MacDonald, who nally


agreed that an air defence sub-committee of the Committee of
Imperial Defence should be formed, notwithstanding the existence
of the Tizard Committee. It appears from Lindemann’s notes that the
Prime Minister even agreed to get the Tizard Committee wound up.
The C.I.D. Sub-Committee met for the rst time on 11th April under
the Chairmanship of Lord Swinton, who suggested that Churchill
should be made a member. Churchill agreed, provided that
Lindemann would be made a member of the ‘Technical Sub
Committee’, which was how Churchill regarded the Tizard
Committee.
I knew very little of all this, and was brought into the eld in a
manner which involved neither Lindemann nor Tizard. It started
with a ring on the bell of my lodgings at 10 St. Michael’s Street on
the morning of Saturday 16th February 1935. My landlady informed
me that I had visitors, and these turned out to be Commander Paul
H. Macneil, a retired o cer of the U.S. Navy, and his wife, Ruth.
They had come to England in the hope of selling to the Air Ministry
a detection system for aircraft based on the infra-red or heat
radiation emitted by aircraft engines. They were due to give a
demonstration at the Royal Aircraft Establishment on the following
Thursday, and at the last moment the vital detecting element in
their apparatus had broken down. Resourcefully, Macneil had
contacted the Institute of Physics in London and asked whether
there was anyone in England who could make him a replacement
detector in a hurry.


It happened that a few months before I had published a paper on
the design of infra-red detectors, and the Institute of Physics
suggested that Macneil should get in touch with me. I was
fascinated with Macneil’s ideas, and told him that I would try. I
thought that at worst I could only waste four days of my life,
because he said that it would be no good unless the detector could
be made by Wednesday evening. I therefore evolved a new design
on Sunday, and spent the next three days and nights with very little
sleep, only to fail. At about 2 a.m. on the day xed for the trial I
telephoned Macneil to tell him that I had failed, but he replied that
this did not matter because the trial had been postponed for a
fortnight, so perhaps I would try again. Over the next few months I
saw a good deal of the Macneils in their at above Prunier’s, from
which we viewed the 1935 Jubilee Procession. I was with Macneil
at Croydon aerodrome at about this time when he undoubtedly
detected the Imperial Airways aircraft as they taxied for take-o .
So at just about the same time that radar was at the nascent stage,
I became involved with infra-red at a similar stage. Lindemann did
not come into my room for a week or two; but when he did, and
asked me what I was doing, I told him that this very interesting job
had come up, and that I was seeing what I could do to detect
aircraft by infra-red. His immediate comment was ‘You ought not to
be doing that for an American inventor, you ought to be doing it for
the Government!’ He went on to say that he had proposed the idea
himself in 1916 but that no one had done anything about it.
Unwittingly, I had presented him with an argument that he could


use against the Tizard Committee, for he could now say that while
Tizard and his friends were sitting around a table talking, he,
Lindemann, had a man in his laboratory actually doing something
about air defence. Towards the end of April I had a long talk with
him, and as a result he may well have begun to press for something
to be done o cially about infra-red, for the minutes of the Tizard
Committee for 16th May contained the following entry: ‘The
Committee considers that the detection of heat radiation from an
aircraft engine or of energy radiated by an aircraft engine magneto
o er no prospect of success; each of these methods has been the
subject of experiments’. Indeed, A. B. Wood, a distinguished
physicist on the Admiralty sta , had made trials with infra-red at
Farnborough in 1927 which indicated that infra-red was
unpromising, and his ndings could be supported by the argument
that the infra-red radiation coming out of an aircraft engine could
easily be screened by an extra cowling, and that even if it did get
out, it would not penetrate cloud. Finally, whereas radar gave an
indication of the range as well as the direction of the target, infra
red could at best give direction only.
As usual when faced by opposition, Lindemann produced a
plausible counter-argument. Although engines could be screened,
there was far more heat energy coming out in the exhaust gases
than that which would be radiated by the engine, and these gases,
too, would radiate and so they should be detectable. To satisfy
Lindemann the Committee then agreed that some trials should be
made at Farnborough. The trials were to be undertaken by an


impartial body, the National Physical Laboratory, but even then
Lindemann said that he would only accept them if I were present as
an expert observer on his behalf. I was therefore surprised when Dr.
J. S. Anderson of the N.P.L. telephoned me and asked if he could
borrow my infra-red aircraft detector. He explained that the N.P.L.
had no suitable equipment but that Mr. Wimperis had told him that
Lindemann had said I had an infra-red detector which ashed lights
whenever an aircraft ew in front of it. I explained that I had no
such thing and Anderson seemed so crestfallen, saying he now had
no hope of doing the trials, that I o ered to help him out by at least
making a detector that should be capable of settling the point about
exhaust gases.
I realized that Lindemann had made what I subsequently came to
recognize as a characteristic overstatement. I had sometime before
told him that, from what I had seen of Macneil’s experiments, it
should be possible to make a much better system by oscillating the
detector mirror so that any hot source in the eld of view was
alternatively focused on and o the detector element, giving rise to
a rhythmic signal which could easily be recognized against its
background. For this a fast detector would be required, and if one
could be made its rhythmic uctuations could be used to generate
an alternating current which could be ampli ed electronically,
rather than detected by a galvanometer. Once we had the possibility
of electronic ampli cation, we could begin to give visual warning of
the presence of an infra-red source, and could even make a pattern
of lights which would indicate the direction of the source. These


were all ideas that I considered feasible but which no one had
pursued, and which Lindemann must in his mind have converted
into a ctitious reality before he told the other members of the
Tizard Committee about them.
There would be no time to build such an apparatus before the
Farnborough trials. So I spent most of October 1935 making
something much simpler that should resolve the question
Lindemann had raised. On 4th November I set the equipment up on
the roof of the Instrument Building at Farnborough to examine
aircraft suitably staked on the ground as their engines were raised to
full revolutions. Whereas Anderson was to have done the trials and I
was to have been the observer, our roles were reversed. It quickly
became evident that although there was ample infra-red radiation
being emitted by a hot engine, this could be easily screened, and by
interposing a movable aircraft spare wing in front of the engine I
showed that there was little infra-red getting out from the hot gases
in the exhaust. After a few days I returned to Oxford and wrote the
report, sending it to Anderson for his agreement before I showed it
to Lindemann. The latter was understandably annoyed that he had
had no chance to question our ndings before they had received the
authority of the National Physical Laboratory, but I thought that this
would be the end of the matter. His argument had been so plausible
that there must be a factor he had overlooked: this turned out to be
the fact that the gases had indeed radiated infra-red as he expected,
but they radiated it in the very bands of wavelength that are
strongly absorbed by the carbon dioxide and water vapour in the


Earth’s atmosphere, and so become almost undetectable at more
than very short ranges. With current technology, as opposed to that
of forty years ago, the small amounts of energy that do get through
can now be detected, and in any event engines are much more
powerful and therefore emit much more, but the exploitation of the
technique lay far in the future.
My report to the Tizard Committee had the opposite e ect to that
which I expected. Instead of the Committee deciding that nothing
further should be done about infra-red, they asked me to see
whether I could develop an airborne infra-red detector so that it
could be mounted on a night ghter and thus detect bombers. Quite
possibly their engines would not be screened, and quite often they
would be ying in clear conditions without cloud; and although
airborne radar was possible, it might not work at short ranges owing
to the fact that the pulse coming back from the bomber would be
swamped by the pulse still emitted by the ghter. There could thus
be an awkward gap in the interception technique over the last
thousand yards or so, which infrared detection might ll. It seemed
that the Tizard Committee had been so surprised by the objectivity
of the report coming out of Lindemann’s laboratory that they were
ready to support further work there.




CHAPTER THREE
The Clarendon Laboratory 1936–1938
M
Y WORK on the airborne infra-red project was to start on 1st
January 1936, and I was to receive an honorarium of £100 for four
months’ work and an extra £50 for equipment. If the latter seems a
paltry sum now, it was large compared with what many of us in
laboratories in the ’30’s were accustomed to. And since these
laboratories were the cradles for most of the scientists who were
later to contribute so substantially to World War II, it may be worth
giving some impression of the Clarendon as a typical laboratory.
When Lindemann took it over in 1919 it had long been moribund.
Perhaps because he had found his activities in World War I so
absorbing, he never again settled down to serious research, although
with F. W. Aston he proposed a method of separating isotopes, and
with G. M. B. Dobson diagnosed the existence of a high temperature
layer in the upper atmosphere, and with T. C. Keeley devised a new
form of electrometer. These were the most successful examples of
the diversity of his mind, and he started o his relatively few
research students over a wide range of projects where they had no
expert help, so it was very much a matter of ‘sink or swim’ for them.
Two or three graduates would start research each year, and roughly


the same number leave after two years; since there were no more
than six Fellowships in physics in the whole university, there was
little chance of one of these becoming vacant for a new worker to
ll. The Cavendish under Rutherford at Cambridge obviously had
much greater attractions for serious physicists, and so for
Lindemann’s rst fteen years he had rather an odd assortment to
choose from. Even so, his was a lively laboratory where not only
was good physics done but also its fteen to twenty members had a
number of other achievements to their credit. Derek Jackson, later
to be Chief Airborne Radar O cer in Fighter Command, for
example rode in the Grand National. James Gri ths, subsequently
President of Magdalen, was a member of Leander. Two others,
‘Snooks’ Gratias and Jack Babbitt, were ice hockey blues, and Hylas
Holbourn was Laird of Foula in the Shetland Islands. And for some
years T. C. Keeley and E. Bolton King made the best photoelectric
cells in the world.
It is not clear how long it would have taken the Clarendon to
establish its reputation unaided, for in 1933 there occurred the
exodus of Jewish and other scientists from Germany, and
Lindemann was among the rst to o er them refuge. We thus had
an invigorating in ux of physicists including Erwin Schrödinger, the
London brothers, Leo Szilard, Franz Simon, Nicholas Kurti and Kurt
Mendelssohn; especially in low temperature research they rapidly
advanced the Clarendon to a world reputation.
By way of technical help, we had just two mechanics in the
workshop, A. H. Bodle and W. Stonard. I owed much to both of


them. Bodle lived with his wife and daughter in a lodge just outside
the laboratory, and I was often invited in for a late night cup of tea.
Frequently in the evenings would come the sounds of trios being
played with Mrs. Bodle at the piano, Marion with the violin and
Bodle with the viola. Physically a little man with Napoleon as his
hero, Bodle had largely taken refuge in books as an escape from the
bu eting of the world. He urged me not to remain as uneducated as
he believed the typical physicist to be, and he recounted with awe
once hearing Lindemann quote Herodotus. I promptly read
Herodotus, and was impressed by his penchant for good stories, and
with his honesty as an historian when he told that, while he himself
found it hard to believe, the Phoenicians who claimed to have sailed
round the south of Africa said that the sun then rose on the other
side. This observation simultaneously established Herodotus as
honest and added to the credibility that the Phoenicians had really
gone as far south as they claimed—a point of narrative technique
that I was later to use in trying to get the Germans to accept some of
our deceptions as genuine. Encouraged by Bodle I went on to read
Plutarch and Thucydides, and even the Icelandic Sagas, all of which
were to be sources of inspiration during the coming war.
Besides the Jewish refugees, we now had a German physicist of
much my own age, Carl Bosch, working in the laboratory. His father
was also Carl Bosch, a very ne man who had shared the Nobel
Prize in 1931 for high-pressure chemistry. He was President of I.G.
Farben Industrie, and his prestige was so great that he was elected
by his fellow scientists as President of the Kaiser Wilhelm


Gesellschaft, as one of the few men big enough to stand up to the
Nazis.
I rst heard about Bosch from some of the others in the
Clarendon, who told me that he was a great practical joker. There
was something challenging about their tone, and I wondered
whether they had said similar things about me to Bosch, with the
object of getting us to play practical jokes on one another.
Fortunately for me, and perhaps unfortunately for the rest of the
Clarendon, he happened to be in the Laboratory a few evenings
later. Since ‘the Prof’ himself tended to set the pattern by not
arriving before 11 a.m., not a great deal of work was done during
our mornings, and it was customary for a few of us to come back
after dinner and work well past midnight, and sometimes all night.
On this particular evening when Bosch and I rst met, we started to
chat and the subject worked round to the tricks that one could do
with a telephone. Bosch told me that he had worked on an upper
oor of a laboratory from which he could see into the windows of a
block of ats, and he had found that the occupant of one of them
was a newspaper reporter. The telephone in the at was visible
through the window, and Bosch telephoned the reporter pretending
to be his own professor. He said that he had just invented a
marvellous instrument that could be attached to any ordinary
telephone, and which would enable the user to see what was going
on at the other end. This was around 1933, when the possibilities of
television were just being mooted. The reporter was, of course,
incredulous, and the supposed professor o ered to give him a


demonstration. He told the reporter to point the telephone towards
the middle of the room and to stand in front of it and assume any
attitude he liked, such as holding one arm up, and when he returned
to the telephone he would be told exactly what he had done. Bosch,
of course, could see perfectly well what he had done simply by
looking through the window. The reporter was appropriately
astonished, with the result that the following morning there
appeared a most enthusiastic article about Bosch’s professor and his
marvellous invention, together with a detailed description of the
demonstration.
Bosch and I then happily discussed variations on the telephone
theme and ultimately I said that it ought to be possible to kid
somebody to put a telephone into a bucket of water. I outlined to
Bosch the various moves, and we were laughing about the prospect
of their success and wondering whom we should select as a victim
when one of my colleagues, Gerald Touch, came into the Laboratory
and asked why we were so amused. He shared our amusement at
the prospect of the bucket of water, and he o ered to return to his
digs, where several research students resided, and to watch while
one or other of them answered the telephone, so as to report
whether my plan had been successful.
We therefore waited about twenty minutes and then I telephoned
Gerald Touch’s digs. Before anyone could answer I rang o again,
and repeated this procedure several times, in order to create the
impression that someone was trying to ring the number but that
something must be wrong. After this spell of induction, I dialled the


number again, and heard a voice which I recognized as belonging to
a very able research student in chemistry—in fact he had won the
Senior Scholarship in Chemistry in the whole University that year.
Reverting to the tongue that was my second language, the Cockney
that came from my early schooling, I explained that I was the
telephone engineer and had just received a complaint from a
subscriber who was trying to dial the number and who had failed to
get through. From the symptoms that he described I would say that
either his dial was running a bit too fast or there was a leak to earth
somewhere at the receiving end. I added that we would send a man
round in the morning to check the insulation, but it was just
possible that the fault could be cleared from the telephone exchange
if only we could be quite sure what it was. A few simple tests would
check whether this were so, and if the victim would be good enough
to help us with these tests, whoever it was who wanted to get
through might be able to do so the same evening. Would the victim
therefore help with the tests? Immediately, of course, he expressed a
readiness to do so, and I explained that I would have to keep him
waiting while I got out the appropriate manual so that we could go
through the correct test sequence.
I realized that he was so rmly ‘hooked’ that I could even a ord
to clown, and I persuaded him to sing loudly into the telephone on
the pretext that its carbon granules had seized up. By this time, of
course, all the residents of the household had now been alerted, and
watched with some amazement the rest of his performance. I told


him that his last e ort had cleared the microphone and that we
were now in a position to trace the leak to earth.
I explained that I would put on a testing signal, and that every
time he heard the signal that particular test had proved okay. The
appropriate signal was very simply generated by applying my own
receiver to its mouthpiece, which resulted in a tremendous squawk.
As I had also asked him to listen very carefully for it, he was nearly
deafened the rst time I did it. I then asked him to place the
receiver on the table beside him and touch it. I could, of course,
hear the noise of his nger making contact, and immediately I
repeated the squawk. When he picked up the receiver I told him
that that test had been satisfactory and that we must now try some
others, and I led him through a series of antics which involved him
holding the receiver by the ex, and as far away from his body as
possible, at the same time standing rst on one leg and then on the
other. When I had given him time to reach each position I duly
transmitted the squawk, and thus got him engrossed in listening for
it. After this series of tests I told him that we were now getting fairly
near the source of the trouble, and that all we now needed was a
good ‘earth’.
When he asked what that would be I said, ‘Well, sir, have you got
such a thing as a bucket of water?’ He said that he would try to nd
one, and within a minute or two he came back with the bucket.
When he said, ‘Well, what do we do now?’ I told him to place the
bucket on the table beside the telephone and to put his hand into
the water to make sure that he was well earthed and then to touch


the telephone again. When he did this, he duly heard the
appropriate squawk; and when he picked up the receiver again I
told him that there was now only one nal test and we would have
it clinched. When he asked what this was I asked him to pick up the
receiver gently by the ex, and hold it over the bucket and then
gently lower it into the water. He was quite ready to do so when
Gerald Touch, who had been rolling on the oor with agonized
laughter, thought the joke had gone far enough, and struggled to his
feet. While not wishing to give the game away, he thought that he
ought to stop our victim from doing any further damage, and he
started to remonstrate, saying that putting the telephone into the
water would irretrievably damage it. Our victim then said to me,
‘I’m very sorry about this but I’m having some di culty. There is a
chap here who is a physicist who says that if I put the telephone
into the water it will ruin it!’ I could not resist saying, ‘Oh,
aphysicist is he, sir. We know his kind—they think they know
everything about electricity. They’re always trying to put telephones
right by themselves and wrecking them. Don’t you worry about him,
sir, it’s all in my book here.’ There was a great gu aw at the other
end of the telephone while the victim said to Gerald Touch, ‘Ha, ha,
you hear that—the engineer said you physicists are always ruining
telephones because you think you know all about them.’ ‘I’m going
to do what he tells me.’ As he tried to put the telephone into the
water Gerald Touch seized his two wrists so as to try to stop him.
They stood, swaying in a trial of strength over the bucket and the
victim being the stronger man was on the point of succeeding. I


heard Touch’s voice saying ‘It’s Jones, you fool!’, and our victim, a
manifest sportsman, collapsed in laughter.
Bosch and I collaborated on several further occasions. On one we
had Leo Szilard go to call on the Daily Express in Fleet Street because
I had faked a telephone call from the editor asking Szilard to
con rm that he had recently invented a radioactive death ray. We
were astonished at the strength of Szilard’s reaction—it was not
until long after World War II that I found that he had just taken out
a secret patent on the possibility of a uranium chain reaction and
had assigned the patent to the British Admiralty. Telephone hoaxes
were easy to play because one had only to produce a convincing
impression in the single communications channel of the telephone: a
hoax which had to appear genuine to the victim’s eye as well as his
ear was much more di cult. Telephone hoaxes were so easy, in
fact, that I ultimately graduated from the practical joke to the
theoretical, being content to work out the various moves without
trying them on the prospective victim, in the near-certainty that he
would have fallen for them. Moreover, it was not very sporting to
play jokes which had no chance of rebounding; and I sometimes
aimed at creating a comic situation from which I could only
extricate myself by thinking more quickly than the victim. Trobridge
Horton, my lodgings mate, once remarked that he could not
understand why I took such risks: my reply was that an academic
life gave us no exercise in quick thinking, and that I had a hunch
that the practice that jokes gave in quick thinking would one day
come in useful.


Arising from my friendship with Carl Bosch, an opportunity for
quick thinking soon arose. He was as much interested in military
matters as I was myself, and he told me that the Maginot Line was
not as impregnable as it was supposed to be because corrupt
contractors had put in considerably less concrete than they had been
paid for. On Friday 1st November 1935 he told me that he was o
to London for the weekend. I was staying in Oxford until Monday,
when I would have to go to Farnborough for the vital infra-red trials
about the exhaust gases, but of course I did not tell him about this.
My Saturday was normal up to teatime, which I spent with others
from the Clarendon, as usual, in Elliston and Cavell’s. On our return
we found a tall stranger, a German, in the Laboratory and he
explained that he was looking for Carl Bosch; he himself was Dr.
Hans W. Thost, the correspondent of the Völkische Beobachter (the
People’s Observer). I said that I was pretty sure that Bosch had gone
to London, but that I would telephone his digs. Returning from the
telephone I found that one of my colleagues had taken Thost into
my room, where my infra-red detecting equipment was assembled
ready for packing. Now a newspaper correspondent might easily be
a cover-occupation for a spy, and here he was in the room along
with equipment which was about to be used in a secret trial. If he
spotted it, and started to ask questions, it could be awkward. I
therefore thought that it would be a good idea to give him
something to think about, and generally distract his attention. So on
the spur of the moment I invented a preposterous story which


seemed harmless enough at the time, but could have had unforeseen
and unhappy consequences if we had lost the coming war.
I told Thost that I had a certain amount of sympathy with Hitler,
and could see why he had pushed out the Jews. Thost almost clicked
his heels together with an ‘Ach, so!’ and said that if it were not for
the Nazis he would not have his present job. But I went on to
wonder whether Hitler had done such a good thing for Germany
after all. ‘What do you mean?’ asked Thost. ‘Well’, I replied, ‘they
are very clever and if they started to plot against Germany there
could be trouble. For example’, I added, ‘I know that there is a great
anti-Nazi organization run by the Jewish refugees in Britain.’ With a
highly sibilant ‘Sso!’ Thost pulled out a pencil, stretched his arm to
expose a sti white cu and started to write notes upon it. ‘Oh yes’,
I went on, ‘I thought everyone knew about it. Why, the headquarters
are here in Oxford!’ ‘So, here in Oxford!’ repeated Thost at the same
time inscribing it on his cu . ‘Not only that’, I added, ‘but here in
this Laboratory. The headquarters is in that room over there, and
Franz Simon is the head of it.’ ‘Franz Simon’ wrote down Thost. I
then said that any friend of Bosch’s was a friend of mine, and since
Bosch was away I would be delighted to o er him dinner. ‘No, no’,
said Thost, ‘I must get back to London at once!’ And o he went.
Three weeks later I read on the placards as I went to dinner
‘R.A.F. SPY SCARE’. Being interested in both spies and the R.A.F., I
bought a paper but the story conveyed nothing to me—it concerned
a Dr. Goertz who had been arrested for making a sketch of the
aerodrome at Manston in Kent. Two days later I had a letter from


my mother, who had the same interest in spies, saying how glad she
was that they had got Dr. Goertz and how sorry she was that Dr.
Thost had got away. I was puzzled because there was no mention of
Thost in my paper, and I could not remember having told her that
he had visited me in Oxford. So I wrote home asking her how she
knew about Thost.
She replied that if only I would read a decent paper like the Daily
Sketch instead of The Times, I should be better informed. She sent me
the article from The Sketch and there undoubtedly was Thost’s
photograph alongside that of Goertz. It turned out that Thost was
one of Goertz’s acquaintances, at the least, and that he had been
made persona non grata by the Home O ce, because the security
authorities were convinced that he was a spy without having
enough evidence to convict him. So this was round No. 2 of the
escapade—I really had had a German spy in the room, and had
distracted him from the infra-red apparatus with this cock-and-bull
story about the anti-Nazi organization.
We thought no more of it for the next two years; but in August
1937 there was a bout of expulsion of newspaper correspondents
between Britain and Germany. We had expelled three
correspondents, the Germans retaliated, and this had raised the
question of whether newspaper correspondents were really spies or
not. As I later heard the story Simon and Nicholas Kurti were over
in Paris doing some low temperature experiments with the big
electro-magnet at Bellevue, when they were astonished by an article
in a paper published by the Jewish emigrés (probably the Pariser


Tageszeitung), which said that the British had been thoroughly
justi ed in their action. One of their own reporters had somehow
obtained a copy of Thost’s report back to his masters on how he had
come to be so unsuccessful as to be expelled from Britain. In it he
said that while he was in London he had obtained evidence of a
great anti-Nazi organization run by the Jewish refugees in Britain,
with its headquarters in Oxford and headed by the Jew Simon.
Thost had gone up to Oxford to investigate the matter and had
succeeded in penetrating the headquarters where he had spoken to
two Englishmen. One had immediately gone to the telephone to
warn the Jew Simon of Thost’s presence, and Simon had clearly
used his in uence with the English police to get Thost thrown out of
the country.
Simon and Kurti came back to Oxford with this astonishing story,
having no idea of the true explanation. At least, this is how I heard
the story at the time, although it must be mentioned that Nicholas
Kurti has no recollection of reading the newspaper in Paris. But
Thost certainly published in 1939 a book A National Socialist in
England 1930-1935 in which he stated that he had reported on the
activities of Jewish emigrés in England. Fortunately, all ended very
well; but when, at the end of the war I was shown a list of all the
men to be rounded up by the Nazis if their invasion was successful,
there was Simon’s name.
Carl Bosch left Oxford on 31st July 1936; as we said goodbye at
Oxford station, I remarked that we might next meet again in our
respective front lines. We were not in fact to see one another again


for forty years, but in a way we were to meet long before that, for
Bosch was to design the radio beam system that guided some of the
V-2 rockets, and he was frequently to be called in by the German Air
Force to help unravel the latest radio devices that we had tted to
our bombers.
The next member of the Clarendon who was subsequently to
a ect my own career in World War II was James Tuck, who joined
the Laboratory from Manchester in October 1937, and who at that
time was a remarkable combination of social naϊveté and technical
astuteness. In the later stages of the war he was to work at Los
Alamos, and one of his American colleagues told me that without
Tuck’s contribution to the fusing mechanism it is doubtful whether
the atomic bombs of 1945 could have been exploded. But in 1937,
he seemed to be an innocent who had unwittingly strayed into a den
of practical jokers. At rst, with his attempts to be ‘more Oxford
than Oxford’ with coloured shirts and corduroy trousers, we did not
know whether he was genuinely sophisticated or not. And then he
almost took our breath away by asking us at tea time whether any
of us had ever made any money at horse racing. We were so taken
aback that we said ‘No’ and he proceeded to tell us why he had
asked. It turned out that he had recently married, and was trying to
keep himself and his wife on a normal research studentship. This
was obviously going to be di cult, but he had been following a
tipster in the Daily Express with some such name as ‘Jubilee’ or
‘Captain Juniper’ and the newspaper from time to time published
details of his score for the season, from which it appeared to Tuck


that all he had to do was to distribute his grant on ‘Jubilee’s’ various
tips and he would make a very useful pro t by the end of the year.
Unfortunately, Tuck said, as soon as he had started to do this, the
tipster’s rate of success had fallen o , and he was rapidly getting out
of pocket.
By now, we realized that he was dead serious, and I told him that
we had said ‘No’ because we knew that this was likely to happen to
any of us who started betting without a deep study of the subject.
However, with the Prof it was di erent. He, too, faced Tuck’s
problem on a larger scale in that the University gave him much too
small a grant on which to run the Clarendon. As a result, the Prof
had taken to betting, and the reason that he was never in the
Laboratory before 11 a.m. was that he was in his rooms in Christ
Church studying the form for the day, and the reason that he was
closeted with Keeley for half an hour or so before noon was that
they were on the telephone to various bookmakers laying out their
bets. To our delight, Tuck swallowed this completely and over the
next two or three days we gradually enlarged the story, each
succeeding detail becoming more outrageous.
Finally, the story spread to the workshop, who overdid it. They
told Tuck that the Prof had made so much money out of the Turf
that he had had a t of conscience, and had decided that he ought
to plough some of the money back, with the result that he had
founded the Linde-mann Stakes of fty guineas with two thousand
added. At that point, Tuck saw that he was having his leg pulled,
and he came into tea this time saying, ‘Ha, ha, you chaps. Jolly


funny! It was a good story while it lasted, but now I have seen
through you, and you’ll never catch me again!’ I now agreed that he
had had his initiation and was therefore one of us from now on, and
that it would be quite useless of us to try and pull his leg again.
However, within a few minutes I had worked the subject round to
what an unusual lot we were. Douglas Roaf was Eastern Counties
Ballroom Champion (which was untrue) and the Prof had been
Tennis Champion of Sweden. Tuck said, ‘Now you are at it again,
but you don’t catch me this time—I am going to call your blu !’
Now Lindemann used to come in to tea, in which he never partook,
but usually stood somewhat aloo y away from the main party. I had
the impression he felt he ought to be there but somehow could not
quite join in. On this occasion, though, he was dragged in by Tuck
who went up to him and said, ‘I say, Professor, these silly asses are
trying to tell me that you were Tennis Champion of Sweden!’ The
Prof was taken aback by Tuck’s familiarity, and more or less froze
him with a restrained, ‘As a matter of fact, I was.’ Tuck thereupon
recoiled, and decided that perhaps some of our tall stories were
true.
So we could now put him through the same cycle until he had
reached a suitable stage of disbelief again, and I then told him that
Derek Jackson owned nearly half of The News of the World and rode
in the Grand National every year. Tuck promptly tackled Jackson. It
was hardly fair, in that it was indeed highly improbable that a
distinguished spectroscopist should also be a Grand National rider,
but it was quite true. I once asked Derek why, with all his money,


he took spectroscopy so seriously. ‘Why, man,’ he replied, ‘you must
have something to do in the summer when you can’t hunt!’ With his
a uence he was accustomed to privileged treatment, one of the
privileges being a rst class corner seat with its back to the engine.
Whenever he failed to nd one he simply pulled the communication
cord. The rst time he did this, at Paddington, he got away with it
by writing a straightforward apology. The second time, he pulled
the cord so violently that it broke. He was then sent up to Oxford in
a specially cleared compartment with a frightened little guard, who
thought he was mad, all to himself. That time he got away with it
by threatening to bring an action on behalf of the public, pointing
out that the train had been sent out of Paddington in a defective
condition, because it had no communication cord, and there might
be some unfortunate woman about to be ravished who would in her
distress tug at the communication cord, to no avail. The third time,
his defence was that the train had been sent out of Paddington one
minute early and, knowing the reputation of the Great Western
Railway for punctuality, he had thought of all those regular
travellers who would have been expecting to catch the train in the
last minute and who would now nd it gone; but this time he was
ned. His response to Tuck’s incredulity that he rode in the Grand
National is better imagined than described.
The atmosphere in the Laboratory was gradually changing, as to
some extent I was myself. The Laboratory boy, Basil, even asked me
what was happening—I seemed so much more serious than I had
been two years before. The reason was simple enough—I was


engrossed in the air defence problem. And despite the fact that
Lindemann himself clearly felt the same way, I had to endure
ragging from my contemporaries as a militarist for switching from
pure research to air defence. They, along with most of our
countrymen, seemed blind to what was happening in Germany; and
yet the sight of a cinema newsreel of a Nazi rally should have been
enough to open their eyes. These were the days when the Socialist
controlled London County Council suppressed the Cadet Corps in
the London schools. While retrospectively we may sympathize with
the anti-war feelings of those who knew the horrors of trench
warfare in World War I, with all the doubts that these threw on the
higher leadership, it should have been obvious that their actions
were encouraging the very danger that they hoped to avoid.
In 1936 and 1937 the predominant feeling in Oxford was still
paci st, as far as the University was concerned. But it was di erent
among working men; I knew a number of them through the City of
Oxford Ri e Club, which I had joined, and they warmly supported
my suggestion that we should try to form an anti-aircraft battalion. I
therefore wrote on 1st November 1937 to the First Anti-Aircraft
Division at Hillingdon:
I can o er to form a committee of representatives of
municipal bodies and local rms, to consider the problem of
raising, say, 1,000 men in Oxford, provided that the War O ce
would provide equipment and instruction. Presumably the way
would be to establish a Territorial battalion here. Before we can


start a recruiting campaign, we must be able to tell people what
obligations they entail by joining, and we must also have some
indication that the War O ce will take the matter seriously. I
believe that we can get the men—perhaps not a thousand
(although Oxford has a population of 80,000), but at any rate
enough to make it worth while. Despite the paci st reputation
of the university, the spirit in the town is good....’
The war broke out before anything was done. Another of my e orts
may have been more fruitful. Shortly before I left Oxford in March
1938 the Germans annexed Austria, and the scales at last fell from
the eyes of my contemporaries. They were now almost anxious to do
something for defence, but there was no organization ready if their
enthusiasm ever materialized to the point of action. I therefore
wrote to D. R. Pye, the new Director of Scienti c Research, at the
Air Ministry on 18th March. After discussing some minor details of
my work, I went on:
The main purpose of this letter is to raise a far more
important question: it seems very obvious, but since I have not
heard it considered perhaps you will forgive me for mentioning
it.
The events of the past week have made the research people
here realize that the position is more serious than they had
thought. Yesterday one of them asked me what he should do in
the event of war: he wanted to do something active, and


pointed out there was nobody to tell him what to do. In the
past, most scientists have tended to be conscientious objectors;
following this spontaneous move, I investigated the feelings of
other members of the laboratory, and found that out of eighteen
people questioned, only two were now conscientious objectors.
Most of the remainder wanted to do scienti c military research,
while one or two of the more pugnacious would prefer to take
more vigorous measures....
The point is this: if war were to break out tomorrow the
scienti c directorates of the services would nd themselves
overwhelmed by volunteers, and much valuable time would be
wasted in nding out what posts they were best suited for, and
the necessary—and as far as I know unforeseen—expansion
would have to be e ected.
I am suggesting therefore that the research workers in the
universities should be asked what they want to do, and to state
their lines of specialization, should they elect to join the
scienti c sta s during wartime. You would then know your
prospective personnel, and could arrange your necessarily
expanded programme accordingly. The men could then be
informed where they were to be stationed, and laboratory
accommodation arranged. They could start practically at the
outbreak of war, and no time would be wasted.
I received an interim reply from Pye saying that he would later
reply more fully, but he never did. Fortunately, Tizard took the


matter up; and by the outbreak of war many university physicists
had been told where their services could best be applied.




CHAPTER FOUR
Inferior Red 1936–1938
T
HE SEQUENCE of events that led to my leaving Oxford in March 1938
had started in January 1936 with my work on infra-red detection of
aircraft for the Tizard Committee. Within two months I had made
some new detecting elements and had designed and built an
electronic ampli er that caused a spot of light to broaden into a
band whenever a faint source of heat came into the eld of view of
the detector, the breadth of the band increasing as the source grew
stronger. Besides serious measurements, the equipment could do
two ‘party tricks’: one was to scan a rack of tools, from which I had
asked a visitor to withdraw one and then replace it, and I could then
tell him which one it had been, because the few seconds’ contact
with his hand had warmed it slightly. The other demonstration was
to shine a torch at a black screen and then switch it o . The
detector could then be made to scan the screen and discover where
the spot of light from the torch had previously fallen, even up to a
minute afterwards, because the light had been converted into heat,
in an amount imperceptible to the senses, and this heat was now
being re-radiated.


The rst visitor to see the demonstration was Watson-Watt, who
came to talk to Lindemann on 24th February 1936. He was looking
for recruits for the Air Ministry Research Establishment that he was
setting up at Bawdsey Manor on the Deben Estuary just north of
Felixstowe. Lindemann had recommended Gerald Touch, who was
just nishing his doctorate, and who had been our reporter for the
telephone-in-the-bucket-of-water incident. He was to be a signi cant
in uence in my career over the next few years, and a lifelong friend.
Although he was not exactly like the research student of whom
Edward Appleton said, ‘He was the kind of man for whom no
experimental di culty was too great to be thought of’, Gerald could
usually see trouble ahead. Even when things were going well he
would say, ‘That’s all very well, Reginald, but, you see, the trouble
is...’ But he was an able experimenter of complete honesty, and
Watson-Watt wisely accepted Lindemann’s recommendation.
Watson-Watt may well have discussed other matters with
Lindemann on this visit; they had known one another since the
Farnborough days of World War I, and it would be natural for them
to discuss the whole air defence problem. Lindemann seemed to
conclude that Watson-Watt needed more support than the Tizard
Committee was giving him, for on 12th June 1936, he arranged to
take Watson-Watt to meet Churchill. As could be expected,
Lindemann had not been an easy member of the Tizard Committee,
and had been pressing some of his own schemes, such as aerial
mines supported on parachutes. His association with politicians was
resented by other members of the Committee, and his introduction


of Watson-Watt to Churchill behind the backs of the Committee was
almost the last straw. Following what Watson-Watt told him,
Churchill was critical of the Tizard Committee at the C.I.D. Sub
Committee meeting on 15th June. The Tizard Committee was due to
write a progress report within a few weeks, and Lindemann insisted
on writing a minority report, which went into the O cial Records
dated 20th July.
Among the conclusions from which Lindemann dissented was one
not to give aerial mines a highest priority. In the event he appears to
have been wrong, for the mines were a failure when tried in 1940,
but they were hardly less realistic than several of the schemes
backed by the Committee, including one to oodlight the whole of
southern England. As for the mines, they were not just a debating
point as far as Lindemann was concerned, for when the work on
mines had been held up because a ‘Queen Bee’ pilotless aircraft
could not be made available by the Air Ministry, Lindemann o ered
to pilot the plane himself to see what happened when planes ran
into wires from which mines could be suspended, just as he had also
done during World War I. As for radar, he agreed with the
Committee that it should have the highest priority, but he made the
sensible point that this would only be e ective if a similar priority
were given to develop the communications system by which the
radar data would be transmitted to ghter controllers and by which
instructions could be sent to our ghters. Such points might have
been listened to in a less charged atmosphere, but by now the other
members of the Tizard Committee were exasperated, partly because


of Lindemann’s communicating his ideas to Churchill when their
defects had already been pointed out at the Tizard Committee, and
partly because he was now standing for Parliament, on the air
defence issue. After the Tizard Committee meeting of 15th July,
Blackett and Hill o ered their resignations. Swinton, the Air
Minister, refused to accept them, and instead dissolved the
Committee in order to reform it again without Lindemann.
Much has been made of the di erences between Lindemann and
the Committee. In retrospect, there was some right on both sides: far
from holding up radar in favour of infra-red, as has sometimes been
suggested, Lindemann earned Watson-Watt’s gratitude, and the
latter afterwards wrote, ‘He gave to the radar team support, at the
highest level, which was indispensable both psychologically and
organizationally.’ Personally, if I had had to discuss with anyone on
the Tizard Committee a problem requiring physical insight, I would
have valued Lindemann’s judgement most. I can recall an incident
from those days when an inventor had put up a proposal to the
Committee of what is now called inertial navigation. It was
dismissed by the Committee because the members said that it was
well known that you could not establish the speed of an aircraft
other than by measuring relative to the air in which the aircraft was
moving and the wind would therefore always cause errors. This is
true enough of a pitot tube but, as Lindemann pointed out to me,
the proposal was perfectly sound if one used, as the inventor
suggested, accelerometers. One could then integrate all the
accelerations to which the aircraft had been subjected since it left


the ground; this would give velocity, and a further integration
would give position relative to the point of take-o .
Tizard had more common sense than Lindemann, but to some
extent he also had luck. Not only was radar presented to him, as it
were, on a plate, but also he was dealing with a body of serving
o cers in Fighter Command who realized they would be in grave
di culty if the Germans attacked. They were therefore prepared in
their predicament to look at any ideas coming from the scientists.
True, Tizard had done as much as anybody, and perhaps more, to
persuade the Royal Air Force to be receptive, but even he could not
succeed if the o cers concerned were complacent. Following the
success of his original committee for surveying air defence, it was
proposed that he should head a similar committee to look into
problems of air o ence. This second committee was set up towards
the end of 1936, and some members were common to both
committees. And yet, despite the brilliant example in defence, the
work for o ence was, as Tizard himself said, a failure. The basic
explanation was that the o cers concerned with bombing
operations were complacent and convinced that they could hit their
targets without scienti c aids, and so they were not prepared to
listen even to Tizard.
Most of the Tizard Committee arguments were of course far above
my head. While it was in turmoil in June 1936 I had been at Farn
borough trying out my infra-red equipment on the ground. It
satisfactorily detected aircraft in ight—the speeds make odd
reading now, a Westland Wapiti ying past at 70 m.p.h. With its


small size the detector seemed worth taking a step further, at least
to the stage of designing an airborne version. I was now in my
second four months of work for the Tizard Committee. Churchill
had commented at the C.I.D. Sub-Committee that he had understood
that a man in Oxford had been paid £100 for four months work, and
was shortly to receive another £100 for another four months, and he
asked whether something more ought not to be done.
My own position was that the Balliol post ran out at the end of
September, and had my astronomical career been continuing I
should have gone to Mount Wilson for the next two years. I applied
for a Commonwealth Fellowship with Mount Wilson in mind, but I
was worried that war might break out within the following two
years, and if this happened I wanted to be in England rather than
America. I told the Commonwealth Committee that there was a
chance that even if I were o ered a Fellowship I would feel that I
had to give air defence the rst priority, if the Air Ministry decided
that it wanted me to continue the work after September 1936. This
in fact happened, and I was appointed as a Scienti c O cer and a
full-time member of the Air Ministry sta from 5th October 1936,
and accredited to the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough
even though I was still to work in Oxford. My salary was £500 per
annum which, low though it may seem now, was higher than that of
any other scientist of my age in Government service.
In the meantime three of my friends had left Oxford. The rst was
Carl Bosch; the second was Gerald Touch, who left to join Watson
Watt at Bawdsey on 8th August. The third was F. C. Frank, my exact


contemporary, in the Chemistry School. I had rst seen Charles
Frank when we tried for Scholarships in December 1928, his
cherubic and intellectual countenance prominent among those at
the top of the Balliol Hall steps, anxious to get at the examination
papers as quickly as possible. In our rst year I had seen him
coming away from Blackwell’s clutching a great textbook of
chemistry with an air of anticipatory delight, and also on the river
as cox of one of the Lincoln torpids. We hardly met until we were
postgraduates, when he shared lodgings with one of my friends, and
we discovered that we had much in common. Although he was a
theorist, he clearly appreciated experimental dexterity, and
although I was an experimenter I found that he could expound
theory in terms that I could understand. We grew closer together
with each year and so, when on 13th July 1936 he left to work with
Peter Debye in Berlin for two years, I could tell him my thoughts
about the prospects of war, and ask him to watch for anything that
might a ect our ideas about defence.
The next stage of the infra-red work was to make a detector
capable of operating in an aircraft. On 16th October I attended a
meeting of the Tizard Committee for the rst time, and outlined
what I saw of the possibilities, including a device for converting
infra-red into visible radiation so that one could form in e ect a
thermal picture of a scene in which the warmer regions would show
up as brighter. The Committee appeared reconciled to the fact that
despite their di erences with Linde-mann I should continue to work
in his Laboratory. He was in the middle of his Election campaign for


Parliament, and on 30th October Winston Churchill came to Oxford
to speak in his support. On the following morning Lindemann
brought him to the Clarendon, and showed him my work. This was
the rst sight that I had of Churchill, and I remember well the
impression that he created on all of us. He looked so tired and orid
that our general verdict was ‘Poor old Winston—he can’t last much
longer!’
During the winter I constructed a new infra-red detector for
mounting in an aircraft, the main di culty being to render it
su ciently immune from the vibration to which all aircraft of that
period were susceptible; besides simple detection, it was capable of
giving an indication of whether the target was to the right or left,
and up or down. I was at this time joined by George Pickard, who
had just completed his doctorate in low temperature physics and
who, like me, now became a member of the Air Ministry sta . We
took the detector to Farnborough in April 1937, and on 27th April I
ew with the equipment, and managed to detect another aircraft in
ight. As far as I know, this was the rst occasion on which one
aircraft was detected from another in ight by infra-red means.
Over the next few months we made good progress. I showed that
even if the engines of an aircraft were screened it could still be
detected because of the heating of its wings and fuselage caused by
the compression of the air in front of it (aerodynamic heating) and I
also started to grow large crystals of materials that would transmit
infra-red radiation. When it seemed that, if we developed the
detector to the operational stage, it would have to be mounted in


single seater ghters (for these were what the Air Sta intended to
use at night) there would obviously be a di cult stage where the
pilot of the trial aircraft would need to know a good deal about
infra-red. I thought that the simplest method of dealing with this
stage would be for me to learn to y ghters, and I therefore
suggested to D. R. Pye that I join the Oxford University Air
Squadron with this in mind. It came to nothing because the
Commanding O cer found that he was up against a regulation that
allowed him to take only undergraduates as cadets; and although I
was still only 24 I was a doctor with two years’ seniority. The Air
Sta were not worried—I was told that they had plenty of men who
could y aeroplanes.
In June 1937 I paid my rst visit to Bawdsey at Gerald Touch’s
invitation and with Watson-Watt’s approval. I had already guessed
what they were doing, since the radar equipment on the liner
Normandie had been described in the press. The technique of
detecting aircraft by echoes arising from re ected radio waves was
obviously much more powerful than the infra-red method that I had
been asked to pursue, although there might be a possible gap at
short range which infra-red would serve to cover. At the same time,
radar had some disadvantages. One was that with its relatively long
wavelength of 1.5 metres it would be di cult to obtain accurate
indications of the direction of the target, and these would certainly
be needed for a satisfactory interception. Another weakness
occurred to me when Gerald Touch said that the method was so
sensitive that it could detect a wire hanging from a balloon at forty


miles. All one might therefore need to do to render the system
useless would be to attach wires to balloons or parachutes at
intervals of half a mile or a mile, and the whole radar screen would
be so full of echoes that it would be impossible to see the extra echo
arising from an aircraft.
The Air Defence Research Sub-Committee had recorded in its
minutes of 2nd July, regarding infra-red: ‘Considerable progress has
been made. Work should continue in view of the possible
application of the results to other problems.’ I was not informed of
this comment and its cryptic signi cance, but a month or two later
Lindemann told me that Churchill had said that he understood from
the Sub-Committee that they were going to shut down my infra-red
work. I replied that infra-red certainly had its limitations of not
being useful through cloud and of not giving an indication of range,
but that radar, too, was vulnerable, especially to a ‘smoke screen’ of
spurious radar re ections which only need be lengths of wire half a
wavelength long. Lindemann told me that he would get Churchill to
raise this point at the Sub-Committee. When I subsequently asked
him what had happened he said that Tizard and Watson-Watt had
rather ‘looked down their noses’ at the suggestion. My conversation
with Lindemann about ‘smoke screen’ re ections was e ectively the
beginning of what came to be known in Britain as ‘Window’ and in
America as ‘Cha ’ but for many years I had no evidence other than
my own memory, which I could not expect others to accept.
However, when Alfred Price was writing Instruments of Darkness he


found a memorandum in Lindemann’s les, dated 8th March 1938,
which ran:
Lest too much reliance be placed upon the R.D.F. methods, it
is perhaps worth pointing out that certain di culties may
easily be encountered in actual use.
Though undoubtedly excellent for detecting single aircraft or
squadrons thereof, ying together, it seems likely that great
di culties may be encountered when large numbers of
aeroplanes attacking and defending are simultaneously in the
air, each sending back its signals.
This di culty may be very materially increased if the enemy
chooses to blind the R.D.F. operator by strewing numbers of
oscillators in the appropriate region. Such oscillators need
consist merely of thin wires fty to a hundred feet long which
could easily be suspended in suitable positions from toy
balloons or even, if only required for half-an-hour or so, from
small parachutes. As far as the R.D.F. detector is concerned,
each one would return an echo just like an aeroplane.
The rst formal indication that I had that our work might close
was when I was summoned to a meeting of the Tizard Committee on
21st October 1937, when the Committee at least seemed anxious
that the work should be removed from Oxford. Tizard invited me to
lunch on 8th November, to discuss the future in more detail, and I
received dire warnings from Lindemann as to the artfulness to


which I might be subjected. To my surprise, Tizard started in the
most friendly manner by saying to me, ‘I don’t suppose that you can
remember the last war!’ I replied that not only could I remember the
war, and its air raids, but that I could remember my father leaving
for France on 11th November 1914, and that I could recall incidents
from 1913 when I could not have been more than eighteen months
old. ‘In that case’, said Tizard, ‘you have the longest memory of any
man I know—except myself. Do you know, I can distinctly
remember having had a bottle!’
There could hardly be much guile in a man starting an
acquaintance in such an informal manner, and we had a very
cordial discussion. He referred to ‘this ridiculous quarrel between
me and Lindemann’ and went on to tell me that Lindemann had
been godfather to his sons. At the same time, he thought that it
would be better if I would break with Lindemann, and come to
Imperial College, of which he was Rector, and continue the infra-red
work there. I was not anxious to leave Oxford for London, and so in
that respect the discussion was fruitless.
On 3rd December I again visited Bawdsey, and this time was put
under pressure by Watson-Watt regarding the relative merits of
infrared and airborne radar. Gerald Touch actually worked in the
Airborne Radar Group whose head was E. G. Bowen and which
included an outstanding young electrical engineer, Robert Hanbury
Brown. They had achieved a tremendous feat in getting airborne
radar to work, and there was no question that it was going to be
superior to infra-red. I had the impression, however, that Watson


Watt was not a good enough physicist to realize how slender a
threat infra-red had always been to him, and something about his
tactics aroused my resentment. Our discussion, which he had
assured me was ‘o the record’, was reported back to the Air
Ministry, and it seemed that somehow he wished to get me under
his direct control. He seemed unwilling to face the fact that radar,
too, had its weak points. This suspicion, which could be attributed
to my highly personal viewpoint, was many years afterwards
con rmed by A. P. Rowe, who succeeded Watson-Watt as
Superintendent at Bawdsey. Writing to me in 1962 of the ‘Window’
episode, Rowe said, ‘When I took over from W-W at Bawdsey, I
found that it was “not done” to suggest that the whole idea would
not work.... What I want to emphasize is that from no one at no
time did I hear a breath of anything like window.’
In the meantime, I continued to work at infra-red, and proposed a
pulsed searchlight in which the range of an aircraft could be directly
measured by optical pulses, and the glare of the light scattered back
by the lower atmosphere could be eliminated. This subsequently
was developed as ‘Lidar’ the optical analogue of radar. But on 28th
January 1938 I received a letter from D. R. Pye saying, ‘I have
decided that in view of the urgency of some of our other defence
problems, the Air Ministry programme as a whole will best be
served by employing yourself and Pickard elsewhere. I have
suggested 31st March as a suitable date for the termination of the
Air Ministry research work at the Clarendon.’


I was very annoyed, not so much at the justice of the decision, but
of the way it had come about. The Tizard Committee had
encouraged me to work on infra-red at the expense of my own
career, and only two months before Tizard himself had been inviting
me to continue the infra-red work at Imperial College. I had burnt
my academic boats, for while my contemporaries had been
continuing with their normal researches, I had been working to my
utmost on developments which could not be published, on security
grounds, even though we ourselves did not intend to use them. I had
lost my chances of an academic appointment and was now a civil
servant. At the same time, convinced that war was almost
inevitable, I did not wish to leave the defence eld, although I
certainly wanted to get well away from Watson-Watt, Tizard and the
rest, where I felt that I had been a pawn in a distinctly unpleasant
game. I had almost made up my mind to join my father’s old
regiment, the Grenadiers.
At that very time, my father lost the sight of one eye, and there
was a danger that the other would go too, and I had to face the
problem of his being unable to work and therefore of my helping
him and my mother. I could not do this on a guardsman’s pay, and
the most sensible thing would be to continue on some work that
would maintain my relatively high salary, even if it meant working
with Watson-Watt. I therefore saw Watson-Watt on 4th February,
and told him frankly my personal position and also my dislike of his
method of approach. On his side I must admit that I must have
seemed an even more problematic ‘handful’ than will have so far


appeared from this account. For, having decided that I was selling
myself, I was determined to get the best price I could, not so much
for myself as for the men who were already working at Bawdsey.
I had, of course, seen Bawdsey mainly through the eyes of Gerald
Touch, who was not given to taking a rosy view of anything.
Undoubtedly, they had had to start in the old manor house at
Bawdsey in very uncomfortable circumstances, and the Air Ministry
had done very little to provide reasonable amenities. I thought that
by drawing attention to all my prospective discomforts, I might help
to get the amenities improved; but it must have made me appear a
very awkward personality to Watson-Watt and Rowe.
However, it was agreed that I should go to Bawdsey, and I
received a formal letter from the Superintendent of Farnborough
instructing me to report for duty at Bawdsey on 1st April. Pickard
was not to go with me, but instead to Farnborough; and I saw our
mechanic, W. S. Driver, into another job. As for my own
preparations, I knew that Bawdsey had a lawn some three hundred
yards long and so I thought that I would take up archery. I would,
perhaps, acquire a rather exotic dog such as a Saluki; and since
there would be plenty of secluded time I would buy many of the
books that I knew I ought to have read. Of all the books that I
acquired, the one which I have valued most was Bartlett’s
Quotations. Years afterwards I found that Churchill at Bangalore had
done exactly the same thing: ‘It is a good thing for an uneducated
man to read books of quotations. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations is an
admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when


engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make
you anxious to read the authors and look for more.’
Just as I was leaving for Bawdsey I received a telegram instructing
me not to report to Bawdsey but instead to Air Ministry
Headquarters in London. Watson-Watt had now been promoted from
being Superintendent at Bawdsey to take charge of a new
Directorate of Communications Development in the Air Ministry,
and as such he would have control of infra-red work as well as of
radar and communications generally. There was therefore no need
for me to be posted to Bawdsey to be under his control, and in any
event both he and Rowe were apprehensive about the disruptive
in uence I would represent. He had therefore arranged a meeting
with the other two Services, and had persuaded them that infra-red
should be continued, after all, on an inter-Service basis. The
Admiralty Research Laboratory at Teddington was suggested as a
suitable establishment, and I was to be posted there as the Air
Ministry representative and placed directly under a Principal
Scienti c O cer in the Admiralty Service. I was thus to be removed
as far as possible from any place where I could cause trouble and to
be disciplined in the tradition of the Senior Service. Actually, the
complete volte face by Watson-Watt took the Admiralty so much by
surprise that they could not be ready for some months, and I was
therefore attached to the new Directorate in Air Ministry to cool my
heels.
In preparation for the move to Bawdsey my car was already
loaded with my books and other possessions and so I drove instead


to my parents’ home in Herne Hill and reported for duty at the Air
Ministry the following morning. I can remember my feelings on
leaving the Clarendon and Oxford for the last time. It would be easy
to be sorry for myself. My prospects, which had appeared so bright
in 1934, with Mount Wilson and South Africa in view, were now,
less than four years later, completely shattered. Instead of a pleasant
academic life I now faced a relatively dull one in a Government
establishment, where I would be subservient to men who knew far
less about infra-red than I did, and only my father’s situation had
stopped me from breaking out of it. This was a rotten reward for
three years of desperate work, from which I could not even recover
the kudos of papers in scienti c journals. I wanted never again to
become involved with Lindemann, Tizard, or Watson-Watt.




CHAPTER FIVE
Exile
M
Y EXILE from active research in air defence did not start exactly as
planned, for instead of being at the Admiralty Research Laboratory I
was attached to Group Captain H. Leedham, the Assistant Director
of Instrument Research and Development in Air Ministry
Headquarters. A Regular o cer of high principles, he was also a lay
preacher; and I had already appreciated his friendly support in my
arguments with Watson-Watt. Although o ce work was not really
to my taste, the experience could be useful—and so it was to prove.
I found myself being given a widening range of jobs. Occasionally,
I had something practical to do such as the acceptance trials of the
rst airborne television equipment for the R.A.F. Sometimes I would
put up ideas myself. One that was to have later importance was a
method by which a bomber could locate itself by receiving radio
pulses sent out simultaneously by three ground stations. From the
time interval between the pulses from any two of the stations being
received by the bomber, it could tell that it was on a particular
hyperbolic curve about the two stations as foci, and from the
intersection of this hyperbola with another similarly determined
from the interval between the pulses from one of the rst two


stations and the third one, the bomber could determine precisely
where it was. The idea was turned down because the radio
engineers said that the radio waves used would have to be short
ones, and that these would not curve su ciently round the earth to
give a useful range. I found this surprising, but was not in a position
to contradict them.
I was, incidentally, astonished by the complacency that existed
regarding our ability to navigate at long range by night. The whole
of our bombing policy depended on this assumption, but I was
assured that by general instrument ying, coupled with navigation
by the stars, Bomber Command was con dent that it could nd
pinpoint targets in Germany at night, and that there was therefore
no need for any such aids as I had proposed. I was not popular for
asking why, if this were true, so many of our bombers on practice
ights in Britain ew into hills.
The job that a orded me most interest was to examine the reports
that occasionally came in from the Air Intelligence branches. These
were usually very slight, but I tried to extract every possible item of
information out of them, and I started to interact with Air
Intelligence. Finally, a report came in that the Germans were
undertaking some very high frequency radio developments on the
Brocken, a well-known mountain in the Harz. Now I already knew
something about the Brocken, because of the optical phenomenon
known as the ‘Brocken Spectre’ or ‘Brocken Ghost’ which arises if
you stand on the summit and the sun throws your shadow on a
cloud below. If the conditions are right, you see your shadow with a


saintly rainbow-coloured halo around its head. I decided that I
would see if I could beat the o cial Intelligence Service in
discovering more about whatever was happening on the Brocken,
and so I wrote to Charles Frank explaining my interest in
meteorological phenomena of the optical variety, and that I would
be grateful for a rst-hand account of the Brocken ghost. Before I
heard from him, my time at the Air Ministry came to an end. I had
in the meantime found so many jobs to do that ve new Sections
were set up to take them over; the Sections thus set up were to
continue throughout the War.
On 2nd July I went to Teddington, and parked my car in the
grounds of the National Physical Laboratory. I knew that the
Admiralty Research Laboratory adjoined it, but was not certain of
the way. A mild-looking man passed me and I enquired if he could
tell me the way. He said that he was going there himself, and so we
walked chatting pleasantly on a ne summer morning. He told me
where I would nd Dr. E. G. Hill, who was to be head of the Infra
Red Group, and so I made my way to Hill’s o ce. Hill said that he
had instructions to take me to the Superintendent, who wanted to
see me before I started work. So we went together to the
Superintendent’s o ce, and he turned out to be the very man of
whom I had asked the way. He then surprised me by more or less
reading the riot act to me, and saying that he understood that I had
hitherto worked in a university laboratory, and that I would nd
things di erent in a Government establishment, and that in
particular I would be under direct orders from my superior o cer,


Dr. Hill. It struck me that he was overdoing things a bit, and I could
very easily have exploded. However, his attitude did not altogether
accord with what I would have expected of the very pleasant man
who had guided me to the Laboratory, and I guessed that something
must have happened. If indeed I lost my temper, this would con rm
the suspicions that he obviously had. I therefore took the dressing
down as meekly as I possibly could, and he nally ran out of steam.
Hill and I then departed, and as we were walking back, Hill said,
‘I’m sorry about that. Someone has been talking about you—do you
know a man called Watson-Watt?’
I intended to lie as low as possible, but within the hour an
opportunity occurred that I could not resist. The next step in the
disciplinary process was to overawe me with the O cial Secrets
Act. I was shown the Laboratory copy of the Act and asked to sign a
certi cate to the e ect that I had read the O cial Secrets Act
(1911) and understood it. I could not resist adding a postscript to
my signature: ‘The 1920 Act is also worth reading.’ Actually, having
been interested in o cial secrets I had some time before purchased
from the Stationery O ce copies of both Acts to see how they
applied to my work and to anyone who might try to reveal it. It was
almost incredible that the security authorities in the Admiralty had
not been aware of the later Act, and I awaited results. The certi cate
was duly taken back to the Laboratory o ce and a little later a
despatch rider was sent up to the Admiralty to check whether there
really was an Act in 1920. The upshot of the a air occurred on the
following afternoon when the Superintendent, whose name I now


knew to be Cha er, sent for me and said that now that I had been
with them for two days they had seen quite enough to realize that
what they had heard about me was entirely unjusti ed, and that he
wished to apologize for what he had said at our rst interview, and
that he hoped I would have a happy time at A.R.L. Cha er was a
gentleman, and this was true generally of his sta . They made me
very welcome, and I much enjoyed my time with them.
Curiously, before he became a civil servant Cha er had been a
mathematics schoolteacher, and among his pupils had been E. A.
Milne, one of our professors at Oxford. An interesting brush thereby
occurred between Milne and an o cer at A. R. L., Colonel Kerrison,
who had been seconded to the Laboratory for the development of
predictors for A.A. gun re. Kerrison was a very able mathematician,
but Cha er thought that some of his mathematics ought to be
checked, and had sent the calculations to Milne. The latter replied
saying that Kerrison was wrong, and that this was only to be
expected from someone who knew no more mathematics than a
colonel in the army. The story was that Kerrison had thereupon
written to Milne saying, ‘Dear Milne, With reference to what you
were saying about colonels, you may recall that in 1941 you gained
the second scholarship at Trinity, Cambridge. The rst scholar did
not take up his scholarship but went to ght for his country. He
was, Yours sincerely, A. V. Kerrison.’ I once asked Kerrison whether
the story was true: he told me that he had not sent the letter but the
facts were correct.


Another impressive character at A.R.L. was Stephen Butterworth.
He was one of a small class of applied mathematicians with a strong
practical outlook that this country produced in his generation, the
most notable instances being, of course, G. I. Taylor and A. A.
Gri th. Butterworth modestly held that his one claim to fame was
that as an Examiner he had once failed Captain P. P. Eckersley, the
Chief Engineer of the B.B.C. Despite his retiring nature he opened
up warmly to me, and I was sorry to observe that more than one
careerist in the Admiralty had climbed on Butterworth’s back by
exploiting his work. Happily, his true merit and their defects were
to show up in 1939.
The head of Group E, as the Infra-Red Group was known, was E.
G. Hill, who too was a gentleman. He was then aged about forty
ve, and had graduated at Bristol. Having been in the R.A.M.C. in
the First War, he had a pronounced interest in physiological
phenomena, and had spent a long time at H.M. Signal School at
Portsmouth on various problems of signalling, especially with infra
red. I learned a great deal of wisdom and naval lore from him,
including a comment by Admiral Burmister that, ‘There is not, there
never has been, and there never will be a completely satisfactory
system of recognition. For you have to take grave positive action on
a negative result,’ i.e. you have to shoot your opponent out of the
ocean, the grave positive action, if he does not make the right
recognition signal, which is a negative result that may also have
been caused by a breakdown in whatever device that he has been
provided with to identify himself. As it was not unknown for sailors


painting ship to also paint over the infra-red recognition lights, the
force of the Admiral’s dictum was easy to appreciate.
And then there was the Head Porter, generally known as Deputy
Superintendent, whose name happened to be Reginald Jones. He
was accorded his second title because this accurately re ected his
function—he was an indispensable factotum who looked after the
a airs of the Laboratory far more e ectively than any of the rest of
us. In 1938, when the Laboratory was given a fairly palatial new
building, the design was left to one of the Principal Scienti c
O cers and a Ministry of Works architect. The building was almost
ready for occupation when the Deputy Superintendent, performing
one of his other functions, took in the Superintendent’s usual tray of
afternoon tea, with the comment, ‘I suppose that you will be
wanting tea when we move over to the new building, sir?’ ‘Of
course’, replied the Superintendent. ‘Well, then, sir, you are not
going to get it!’ ‘Why not. Are you going on strike?’ ‘Certainly not,
sir—but there’s no electric point to boil my electric kettle!’ And then
as the extent of this peculiarly civil service disaster sank in, he
added, ‘And what’s more, sir, there is no electric point in the whole
building.’ ‘How do you know this?’ asked the Superintendent. ‘I’ve
looked at the plans, sir, and what’s more there’s no gas and no
running water except in the lavatories.’ And he was absolutely right.
The scientist and the architect between them had omitted all
services except electric light, and water for the lavatories. The
concrete oors were already set, and their lordships asked us to do
with an absolute minimum of facilities for the rst six months, after


which the necessary alterations could be counted as dilapidation.
Even so, the conduits had to be chipped into the concrete oors so
that electric cables could be laid. My namesake was one of the
towers of strength on which the rest of humanity depends. He had
been a Chief Yeoman of Signals in the Battleship Malaya at Jutland,
and I vowed that if ever I had a laboratory of my own I would try to
nd another Chief Yeoman as Head Porter; and when the time
came, twenty- ve years later, I did.
But even with all the gentlemanliness of A.R.L., I could not help
feeling the di erence in tempo from that which I had been
accustomed to in Air Defence. I felt rather like Winston Churchill
did when he was removed from his post as First Lord in 1915: ‘Like
a sea-beast shed up from the depths, or a diver too suddenly
hoisted, my face threatened to burst from the fall in pressure. I had
great anxiety and no powers of relieving it; I had vehement
convictions and small power to give e ect to them.’ Where he took
to painting, I took to glass-blowing, at which I was already fairly
good. I spent much energy in constructing an elaborate vacuum
system, but I had still plenty left, and some of it almost inevitably
went into practical jokes of one form or another.
In fact, when the Superintendent heard of some of my e orts he
let it be known to me uno cially that he would be grateful if a new
member of sta , who was being unduly inquisitive, could be kept
away from the true scent of what Group E was doing. He was an
enthusiastic optician, and there really was no harm in his enquiries
—it was just that he took a lively interest in everything around him.


But it could be an opportunity for entertainment, and a few days
after I had been apprised of the Superintendent’s desire, I happened
to meet the optician in another laboratory, and he clearly treated
me as an authority. In the middle of one conversation about
technological possibilities, the question had come up of how useful
it would be if one had a material that was both transparent to light
and a conductor of electricity. Turning to me he said, ‘But we
haven’t got transparent metal, have we doctor?’ ‘No,’ I replied and
then after a thoughtful pause, ‘Well, no, not o cially.’ He jumped
with enthusiasm and said, ‘So that’s what Group E is doing.’ It was
not di cult then to lead him on to discovering that what we were
trying to do was to build a transparent and invisible battleship. We
had produced enough metal to make an invisible torpedo boat, but
were having di culty because the crew were still visible, as was the
wake.
The summer of 1938 wore on to Munich time. I had arranged a
visit to Bawdsey, and had now received a letter from Charles Frank
to say that he did not believe in ghosts but would be glad to discuss
their nature with me at any time. Since he was home in Ipswich, it
was possible to see him on my way back from Bawdsey, where I had
found A. P. Rowe in a state of some alarm in case the Germans
raided his establishment as soon as the War started. When I met
Charles Frank he told me that he had immediately grasped the
signi cance of my letter about the Brocken, and had burned it at
once. He had taken a trip to see what was going on, and had
brought back a picture postcard of the new television-tower that


had been erected on its summit. German Air Force personnel were
generally around the area, and one thing that he observed neither of
us has been able to explain. It was an array of posts rather like
Belisha beacons with wooden pear-shaped objects at the top.
There was also, incidentally, the story that whatever was in the
tower at the summit was able to paralyse internal combustion
engines. As usually reported, the phenomenon consisted of a tourist
driving his car on one of the roads in the vicinity, and the engine
suddenly ceasing to operate. A German Air Force sentry would then
appear from the side of the road and tell him that it was no use his
trying to get the car going again for the time being. The sentry
would, however, return and tell him when he would be able to do
so. The sentry appeared in due course, and the engine started.
Incidentally, we did not believe the story, the explanation of which I
was to nd later, but we thought that it might be a good idea to
start the same tale going in England to see whether it would puzzle
the Germans. The story spread rapidly, and we heard of it from time
to time, with ever increasing detail. The last I heard of it was a
family of Quakers, who of course never lie, driving across Salisbury
Plain when the engine of their car stopped. In due course a soldier
appeared and told them that it would now start again, and so they
were able to continue on their way.
I returned to London on the evening of Monday 26th September,
and felt the tense calm of the London streets as people braced
themselves for the seemingly inevitable war. There was something
of the feeling that reached its culmination after Dunkirk. I was


unhappy in not having more to do at Teddington, and spent my
evenings distributing gas masks—more than two thousand in three
days.
Then came Chamberlain’s return with his pathetic scrap of paper
and his ‘Peace in our time’ speech. I was as angry as a cat which has
just been robbed of its mouse. Those who felt like that were a
minority among the almost hysterical majority who thought that
Chamberlain had done a great thing, but when I went into the Air
Ministry with Charles Frank’s information about the Brocken the
following morning I found that the Air Sta were convinced that
Chamberlain had only postponed the reckoning. As it happened, the
o cial Intelligence Service, which I had also briefed about the
Brocken while I had been stationed at Headquarters, came up with
some further information, but Charles and I between us had beaten
them by a day, and his description of activities on the Brocken was
much more detailed. This, as it turned out, did not go unnoticed.
On my return to A.R.L., I found some general laughter over what
had happened at the height of the crisis. Someone had thought that
in case of air raids some shelter trenches ought to be dug, and there
had been a general call for volunteers. A large squad of physicists
had therefore been assembled and they had sallied forth on to the
playing elds armed with spades and sandbags. A little while later
they were observed trudging sadly back, driven by an irate little
woman. She was Vera Cain, the captain of the Women’s Hockey
team, and they had chosen to try to dig their trenches in the middle
of her pitch. She had heard of their intentions, and had gone to the


Director, Sir Charles Darwin, and had convinced him that there
were many more sensible places to dig trenches. But even if she had
not had his authority I doubt whether anyone could have stood up
to her. I know, for we were married in 1940.
We became engaged on St. Patrick’s Day 1939, and began to pay
various social visits, particularly to Oxford. One Saturday evening in
the summer we had met Jim and Elsie Tuck, and I can remember
standing at a bus stop in the High while Jim told me about the
discovery of nuclear ssion, and the possibility that an atomic bomb
might one day be made. He said that it looked as though the idea
had already been conceived in Germany and that, indeed, from one
paper it appeared that one of the German physicists was trying to
warn the rest of the world.
I would have been interested in the matter anyway, but what now
made my interest acute was the visit I had had a few weeks before
from A. E. Woodward-Nutt, which I have described in the opening
chapter. Tizard had found there was little information coming
through from Germany, and so it had been proposed that a scientist
of some standing (Tizard may have had in mind Thomas Merton,
who had worked with M.I.6 in World War land who was an eminent
spectroscopist) should be appointed to conduct an enquiry into our
Intelligence Services, and recommend what should be done to
improve them. The Treasury, however, had refused nancial
support, saying that science was international and that British
scientists should be able to tell how their opposite numbers were
thinking by talking to them at conferences, and that this should cost


nothing. Faced with this frustrating reply, Woodward-Nutt had
remembered my interest in Intelligence matters with the Thost and
Brocken stories, and so he suggested that I could be transferred to
Intelligence, and that this would cost the Air Ministry nothing. This
was the main reason that I found myself in my war post.




CHAPTER SIX
The Day Before War Broke Out
M
Y LAST few months at the Admiralty Research Laboratory went
quickly, and I began to think about my new work. On 15th March
Hitler had invaded Czechoslovakia and on 7th April Mussolini had
taken over Albania. The treachery of the Munich Agreement was at
last obvious, even to Chamberlain; he now gave a guarantee to
Poland, and so all would depend on whether the Germans would be
satis ed with their present gains. By early August this seemed
increasingly unlikely, and then on 23rd August came the astonishing
news of the non-aggression pact between Germany and Russia. The
invasion of Poland appeared to be only a matter of time, and for me
it seemed now or never for a short holiday. Ever since 1934 I had
spent early September at Hoar Cross, and this year my visit could be
conveniently sandwiched between leaving Teddington and starting
in Air Intelligence. Moreover, the Meynells had invited Vera as well,
so with some misgivings we left Teddington shortly after the news
of the German pact with Russia came through.
If the next few pages seem to hold up my narrative of the war,
they may serve to provide a moment of comedy before a cataclysm


of high tragedy, for they give a glimpse of a carefree and gracious
life that the war was to sweep away for ever.
Life at Hoar Cross was as pleasant as it had always been. I took
my pistols with me; these were something of a joke with the
Meynells because I would disappear for hours and they never knew
what I was going to bring back. My bag was mainly rabbits but over
the years I had also shot hares, stoats, pigeons, crows, and jays. On
the rst Sunday of this particular holiday, which happened to be the
last Sunday in August, I was reconnoitring a copse to assess the
prospects for the week. I saw a great deal of wild life in this way,
since it was necessary to stand completely still for perhaps half-an
hour at a stretch before an animal or bird would timidly come into
view, and in the meantime I often saw things that I would have
missed on an ordinary walk.
That particular morning a rabbit loped across a footpath not more
than fteen yards from where I was standing, and its leisurely pace
completely misled me as to what was to happen next: a full-grown
fox came trotting, equally leisurely, after the rabbit. My thoughts
during the two or three seconds that the fox was visible were very
mixed. First, I had never shot a fox, a di cult target for a pistol;
indeed, this was the rst time I had ever seen a fox within range.
Secondly, it was Sunday morning, and thirdly, this was the ancestral
home of Hugo Meynell, known the world over as the father of
English foxhunting. I had the pistol in my hand and the fox in my
sights, just to see whether I could hit it, but I nally controlled
myself enough not to pull the trigger. When I returned to lunch I


told Vera, but she refused to believe that I had deliberately not
red. She said that it was much more likely that I had been so
surprised by the fox that I had been paralysed.
The following day I was out with the pistol when, about eighty
yards away, I saw something peering at me from behind a bush.
This was a fox’s head in silhouette, and all I could think of was
showing Vera that I could shoot foxes if I wanted to. Foxhunting or
not, I took careful aim and red: the fox slumped over dead. Then,
of course, came the reckoning. I was quite pleased with myself to
have shot such a wary animal, and at this range, but it would
require some explaining. When I went back to tea I quietly
confessed to Colonel Meynell who—instead of being annoyed—was
much amused. He told me, regretfully, that perhaps I ought to bury
the body quietly, since the Hunt had been over that very ground
during the morning and had failed to draw any foxes or cubs at all.
So that was the end of my fox.
On the following Thursday, 31st August, Lady Dorothy asked Vera
and me if we would mind going with her to another country house
in the afternoon, since a neighbouring Earl was holding an ‘at
home’, and she felt obliged to take a party across. Moreover, there
was to be some tennis; she knew that Vera was good at the game
and it would help if our party was strengthened in this respect. I
myself was unable to play since I had been badly stung on the ankle
while out shooting the previous day, but if Vera went I obviously
had to go too. No sooner had Lady Dorothy told us about the party
than her elder son, Hugo, started to warn us against going. ‘I’ll tell


you exactly what will happen. People will be standing about and
then someone will say, “What about tennis?” and (mentioning the
Earl’s Viscount son, by now in his forties) will say, “Ah yes, tennis!”;
then he will go and get his racquet, which is an old triangular one
with a great knob on the handle, and he will bring out two odd-job
men who will start to put the net up. But the net rope won’t be long
enough and they’ll have to go and get a bit of string. When he starts
to play, he’ll hit a ball hard into the net and the string will break
and things will have to start all over again. And at some stage in the
game he will trip over a manhole in the middle of the court.’
We laughed at this obvious caricature of a country tennis party,
but he insisted it was a truthful picture. Indeed, Colonel Meynell
seemed to give it some support for he told us that the Viscount had
been an o cer in his battery during the 1914-18 War. He was so
untidy that Colonel Meynell in an e ort to shame him into
smartening himself up had said, ‘Look here, if you will get yourself a
new pair of breeches I’ll pay half the cost!’ The Viscount duly
appeared in a new pair of breeches and a few months later the
Colonel received a bill from a rm of west-end tailors ‘To one half
the Viscount Blank’s breeches’.
We left with Lady Dorothy in high curiosity. I was enjoying the
prospect much more than Vera, because she was attired in a way
not altogether suitable for tennis, despite the fact that she had often
preached to me that if you were playing a sport you ought to be
properly dressed for it. She had indeed brought tennis dress to Hoar
Cross, but it included shorts rather than a skirt. At lunch she had


mentioned the fact, fearing that shorts were perhaps a little too
modern for the kind of party that we appeared to be in for, and
Colonel Meynell agreed. In that case, there was nothing for it but to
wear a party dress, actually an attractive dark blue American dress
with rather a long skirt. Her ensemble was completed by gloves and
a large oppy hat.
When we arrived we found that Hugo was not quite right, in that
tennis had already started and two formidable girls were thumping
the ball about the court more in the spirit of a County match.
Moreover they were attired in very brief shorts. When their game
was over, the Viscount suggested that a four should be made up,
and Lady Dorothy said that Vera would like to play. Vera was very
apologetic, saying that she had not come dressed for tennis because
she thought that shorts might be out of place. ‘You are quite right,
my dear,’ said the very positively voiced daughter of the house. ‘We
never wear shorts here!’ Perhaps the general embarrassment caused
by this remark, for it was surely within earshot of the two Amazons,
may have contributed to the subsequent course of a airs.
I watched Vera miserably go on to the tennis court to partner the
Viscount against the two girls who had obviously assessed the
amount of tennis that she had played by her blue dress. She seemed
to be about half their size. I have rarely enjoyed myself so much. I
knew how annoyed Vera was having to play in this habit, and I also
suspected that the Amazons were in for a surprise. Moreover, there
was enough already right about Hugo’s predictions to make me
hope that the rest might well come true. The Viscount’s racquet was,