An Encyclopaedia of Myself. Jonathan Meades

      He was an organic chemist, an expert in chemical warfare and defence against it, a jazz trumpeter, a pioneer of operational research, an inventor, a craftsman, an entrepreneur, a writer. He was a man of formidable learning, exceptional energy and limitless curiosity.

      He was born at Shepherd’s Bush. His father, then serving as a soldier, never really recovered from the First World War. When he was demobbed he became a groom in Neasden, then still more or less a village. It was in such places on the periphery of west and north-west London that Ken grew up as his father moved from job to job and his family moved from one rented flat to the next. Alcoholism, indigence and bailiffs followed them.

      His mother walked out – she would live to a great age on the north Kent coast. He left Latymer Upper at the age of sixteen after taking the School Certificate and sought work in order to provide for his increasingly unemployable father. By night he played trumpet in a jazz band with, inter alia, Les Hitchcock, nephew of Alfred, and Cliff Townshend, future father of Pete. At Number One Rhythm Club, off Haymarket, they were joined on stage one night by Louis Armstrong.

      By day he was a laboratory chemist. At C. A. Vandervell he was employed by the father of Tony Vandervell, who in the late 1950s manufactured the Vanwall F1 car. At British Drug Houses he was precociously involved in the development of an early commercial thyroxine used to stimulate underactive thyroid glands. It was made clear to him that an autodidact, no matter how talented, would always suffer a competitive disadvantage to a graduate, no matter how dull. He cut down on jazz and enrolled in evening classes at the Northern Polytechnic in Holloway to take a London external degree. He had yet to complete it when, just before the outbreak of war, he was offered a job at the Chemical Defence Establishment at Porton Down.

      Salisbury had not then, and still has not, a seat of tertiary education. Its intelligentsia was mainly composed of Porton Down scientists. They were clever people and, incidentally, my ad hoc teachers. Ken said that Porton had ‘the atmosphere of a university … there were scientists of every discipline – there was even an archaeologist who had dug round Stonehenge.’ Having received his degree and several promotions, he was, after little more than a year devoted to the design of chemical weapons, appointed head of the Munitions Section of the Australian Field Experimental Station. ‘Assessing bomb performance … What that actually meant was laying waste to a considerable area of the Queensland jungle.’

      Post-war he was seconded from there to BAOR, and then to Washington DC, Utah and Alberta, where he encountered the practices of operational research.

      The house next to my parents’ that Edward Fielden’s firm had torpidly built for Ken and Peggy was hardly finished when Ken was appointed Director, Chemical Defence Research and Development at the War Office. They let the house and moved to Twickenham. The first tenants sublet the granny annex to a girl who played host to Salisbury’s folkies, among them the future actor Brian Protheroe (né Jones), then a lab assistant at Porton. Ken sat on various NATO committees, went on to become Director of the Operational Research Establishment at Byfleet. In 1968 he was given the post of Scientific Adviser to the Treasury with a brief to apply operational research methods to large-scale government projects including the funding of the Channel Tunnel and the Thames Barrier, the NHS’s expansion and the introduction of decimalisation. He was instrumental in bringing computers into government. A move which was widely, though ultimately unsuccessfully, resisted. When he retired he was Chief Scientific Officer. He had come to admire William Armstrong, Denis Healey and Harold Wilson. He had foreseen, correctly, that Victor Rothschild’s CPRS – which he reckoned to be a club-like vanity project – presaged the advent of partial ‘special advisers’ and battalions of consultants. He was astonished by Tony Benn’s ‘silliness’. His reaction to any mention of our eventual Salisbury neighbour Edward Heath was to suppress a laugh.

      Although he was an ambulatory encyclopaedia he was reluctant to foist his knowledge on the unwilling. He was a measured optimist who believed in the values of the Enlightenment and in the beneficence of science. He was, equally, bewildered by the intellectual baselessness and fatuity of religious ‘faith’ and contemptuous of the tribalism that accompanies it.

      ‘I suppose we did do some pretty terrible things [at Porton] … In the chambers. The chambers … Even thinking about those chambers is, ah … Putting on masks to go in them … We did some pretty terrible things to ourselves too. It’s amazing there weren’t more like Bacon^fn4 – no one followed the safety drill. Pretty reckless, but that was how it was in those days. Thankless task Darlow^fn5 had – no one took any notice … The thing is, we didn’t think of what we were doing as terrible … It wasn’t terrible then … Defence of the realm – not too fashionable nowadays. Being one step ahead – that was the deterrent … Letting them know