The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain. Juliet Gardiner
at Pagani’s restaurant in Great Portland Street.
It was a distinguished (entirely male) table: the robustly confident young scientists who assembled to ‘let ideas roam’ over the question of ‘what role science might play in social development’ included the physicist and crys-tallographer J.D. Bernal (reverentially known as ‘the sage’ although he confessed that even his encyclopaedic knowledge had lacunae when it came to ‘fourth century Roumania’), who believed that science ‘held the key to the future’, while socialism had the ability to turn it; the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane, perhaps ‘the last man to know all there was to be known’, with a matchless ability to communicate the complex in public lectures, books and his regular science columns in the Daily Worker; the biologist and author of the best-selling Mathematics for the Million and Science for the Citizen, books he described as ‘primers for an age of plenty’ intended to equip their readers with sufficient knowledge to become effective citizens in a scientific age, Lancelot Hogben, a conscientious objector in the First World War whose acute mind challenged everything; the prehistorian Gordon Childe (another success with what he referred to as the ‘bookstall public’); the sinologist and historian of science Joseph Needham; the zoologist J.Z. Young; the Cambridge economic historian M.M. Postan and the Oxford economist Roy Harrod. Others, such as the literary critic I.A. Richards and the geneticist Lionel Penrose, declined to join but volunteered to ‘clock in’ as guests when the subject under discussion interested them.
Tots and Quots dinners lapsed for a time in the mid-1930s (not helped by the fact that Hugh Gaitskell probably lost the Minute Book), but the club reconvened in 1939 (with a slightly shuffled membership which now also included Richard Crossman) as a ‘platform to proclaim our views … about the vast potential [for the] applications of scientific knowledge when dealing with the complicated problems of war’.
But although ‘Gip’ Wells, who had co-written the best-selling The Science of Life with Julian Huxley at his father’s bidding, resigned after the first dinner, complaining that ‘he had hoped the whole thing would be fun, whereas we were obviously going to become monastic and deadly serious’, the small (fourteen was the average number) group of scientists and economists met regularly during the worst years of the Depression, eating well as they pondered the responsibilities of their discipline in a country shot through with social and economic problems.
In 1934 Ritchie Calder, the scientific correspondent of the Daily Herald, advocated that the House of Lords should be replaced by what he called a ‘Senate of Scientists’. The year before, the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins, in his Presidential Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, had urged the formation of a ‘Solomon’s House’ of the wisest (men) in the land who would assemble to synthesise knowledge, appraise its progress and assess its impact on society. The nutritionist F. LeGros Clark stated that scientists found politics ‘a disreputable game’, which it was their duty to ‘try to transform into a pastime with clean, scientific rules’. Professor Frederick Soddy was explicit: since science was society’s ‘real master’, society should ‘insist on being ruled, not by a reflection of a reflection, but directly by those [scientists] who are concerned with the creation of its wealth, not its debts’. J.B.S. Haldane, writing in Nature in January 1934, had suggested that refusing to apply scientific method to the conduct of human affairs would bring about the failure of Britain’s political and economic system.
When it was suggested to the eminent biologist Julian Huxley that he should stand for Parliament, he dismissed the idea, saying that what guided his life was a passion for truth, not its ‘obscuration’. In the book he was invited to write for a series entitled ‘If I Were Dictator’ (since this was before the full development of Hitler’s Third Reich or Stalin’s USSR, the word ‘dictator’ was not freighted with the same terrible associations it later came to carry), Huxley further showed his disregard for democratic politics, proposing instead a corporatist state in which elections would be ‘superfluous’. A central planning council would replace Parliament, which was little more than a ‘talking-shop’, according to Huxley, and lacked the necessary expertise to the run the country (as, presumably by extension, the electorate lacked the necessary expertise to choose a government).
Social issues in the 1930s had a direct bearing on the scientific community: technological advances were charged with having thrown thousands out of work, and creating machines for military savagery; the Hunger Marches were a symbol of the malnutrition of the unemployed, which Sir John Boyd Orr would quantify in 1936 in his book Food, Health and Income; Oswald Mosley was using spurious ‘scientific’ arguments to inflame anti-Semitism; genetic inheritance was the subject of much debate — the sterilisation of ‘morons’ (defined by the journal Nature as making up ‘a large proportion of the slum population … mental defectives of comparatively high grade … people lacking not only in intelligence but also in self-control, which is the basis of morality, and they reproduce recklessly’) was seriously discussed in Britain and put into practice in Nazi Germany; while the growing threat of war later in the decade rallied scientific expertise to steel defences and develop weapons of destruction.
Moreover, world events were enlarging Britain’s scientific community. British scientists were made acutely aware of the pernicious uses to which scientific theories and inventions could be put when Jewish scientists such as the chemists Gerhard Weiler, E.F. Freundlich and Michael Polanyi, who had been dismissed or resigned from their research or teaching institutes after Hitler came to power, fled to Britain, as did the biochemist Herman Blaschko, the biologist Hans Krebs, the physicists Max Born, Hans Bethe, Heinrich Kuhn, Rudolph Peierls and Kurt Mendelssohn. Boris Chain, a young biochemist, left Germany on 30 January 1933, the day Adolf Hitler was created Chancellor, and came to Britain, where he sought the help of J.B.S. Haldane. Chain eventually moved to Oxford University, and in 1945 he and Sir Howard Florey shared the Nobel Prize for their work on isolating penicillin (though the university denied him even a readership).
After Chain, Haldane sought out more young scientists who needed to flee Hitler’s Germany, working alongside Professor F.A. Lindemann (who had himself been born and educated in Germany and later, as Lord Cherwell, would be Churchill’s wartime scientific advisor) and an Oxford Professor of Organic Chemistry, Robert Robinson, on the Academic Assistance Council (AAC — renamed the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning in 1936). The Council, chaired by the physicist Sir Ernest Rutherford, director of the prestigious Cambridge Cavendish Laboratory, had come into existence in May 1933 after William Beveridge (then director of the London School of Economics) wrote a letter to The Times drawing attention to the plight of Jewish scientists in Germany and Austria. Beveridge had been alerted to the situation by Leo Szilard, a Hungarian scientist who had worked with Einstein (who had declared his intention never to return to Germany and to resign from the Prussian Academy of Sciences in protest at Hitler’s racial policies in March 1933), and a young Englishwoman, Tess (Esther) Simpson, who went on to run the organisation.
By 1935 around 25 per cent of all scientists and 20 per cent of all mathematicians had been dismissed from German universities under the Nazis’ harsh race laws. The AAC sought to enable such people to continue their research in British universities or industry or, as so many yearned to do, to move to the United States, thus ‘salvaging’ a number of scientists, in some cases with great difficulty. ‘Brains in Germany seem to be going cheap and we have no tariff for them,’ wrote W.J. Sollas, the aged Professor of Geology at Oxford. By May 1934, sixty-seven ‘wandering scholars’, as Rutherford called them, had found positions at London University, thirty-one at Cambridge, seventeen at Oxford and sixteen at Manchester, greatly enriching the British scientific community.
Although the early 1930s were ‘by far the richest time there has ever been’ for scientific innovation, in the opinion of the chemist and novelist C.P. Snow, with an annus mirabilis in 1932, when John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton succeeded in splitting the atom, and James Chadwick did likewise with the neutron, there was disquiet among sections of the scientific community. Many felt that those outside their profession looked down on scientific activities as culturally inferior to the arts, and they themselves were seen as little more than lab rats producing work only ‘of great value in their own departments’, in the dismissive view