Scientific governance in Britain, 1914–79 9781526100429

Table of contents :
Front Matter
Contents
Notes on contributors
Acknowledgements
Foreword by Professor Sir John Beddington
Scientific governance: an introduction
Part I Governance of science
Give me a laboratory and I will win you the war: governing science in the Royal Navy
Bureaucratic reformism and the cults of Sir Henry Tizard and operational research
The evolving role of the Chief Scientific Adviser to the Cabinet, 1940–71
Mugwumps? The Royal Society and the governance of post-war British science
The Defence Research Committee, 1963–72
Defence research and genetic engineering: fears and dissociation in the 1970s
Geological governance: surveying the North Sea in the Cold War
Doing it for Britain: science and service in oral history with government scientists
Part II Governance by science
Geneticists on the farm: agriculture and the all-English loaf
‘Man against disease’: the medical Left and the lessons of science, 1918–48
Science as heterotopia: the British Interplanetary Society before the Second World War
Governing science on BBC radio in 1930s Britain: religion, eugenics and war
Governing the science of selection: the psychological sciences, 1921–45
Governing for happiness: Mark Abrams, subjective social indicators and the post-war explosion of ‘middle-opinion’
Governance through education: Herman Bondi, Karl Popper and the making of scientific citizens
Index

Citation preview

Scientific governance in Britain, 1914–79

Scientific governance in Britain, 1914–79 Edited by Don Leggett and Charlotte Sleigh

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2016 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 978 07190 9098 1  hardback First published 2016

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

Notes on contributors Acknowledgements Foreword by Professor Sir John Beddington

page vii xi xii

Scientific governance: an introduction Don Leggett and Charlotte Sleigh

1

Part I: Governance of science   1 Give me a laboratory and I will win you the war: governing science in the Royal Navy Don Leggett

27

  2 Bureaucratic reformism and the cults of Sir Henry Tizard and operational research William Thomas

45

  3 The evolving role of the Chief Scientific Adviser to the Cabinet, 1940–71 James Goodchild

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  4 Mugwumps? The Royal Society and the governance of post-war British science Jeff Hughes

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  5 The Defence Research Committee, 1963–72 Jon Agar

100

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  6 Defence research and genetic engineering: fears and dissociation in the 1970s Jon Agar and Brian Balmer

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  7 Geological governance: surveying the North Sea in the Cold War Leucha Veneer

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  8 Doing it for Britain: science and service in oral history with government scientists Sally Horrocks and Thomas Lean

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Part II: Governance by science   9 Geneticists on the farm: agriculture and the all-English loaf181 Berris Charnley 10 ‘Man against disease’: the medical Left and the lessons of science, 1918–48   199 John Stewart 11 Science as heterotopia: the British Interplanetary Society before the Second World War Charlotte Sleigh

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12 Governing science on BBC radio in 1930s Britain: religion, eugenics and war Ralph Desmarais

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13 Governing the science of selection: the psychological sciences, 1921–45 Alice White

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14 Governing for happiness: Mark Abrams, subjective social indicators and the post-war explosion of ‘middleopinion’ 274 Scott Anthony 15 Governance through education: Herman Bondi, Karl Popper and the making of scientific citizens Neil Calver

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Index

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Notes on contributors

Jon Agar is Professor of Science and Technology Studies at University College London. He is the author of Science in the twentieth century and beyond (2012). Scott Anthony is Associate Professor of Public History at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His books include Public relations and the making of modern Britain (2012) and The projection of Britain: a history of the GPO Film Unit (2011). Brian Balmer is Professor of Science Policy Studies in the Department of Science & Technology Studies, University College London. His research combines historical and sociological approaches to explore the nature of scientific expertise, and the role of experts in science policy formation, particularly within the life sciences. He is author of Britain and biological warfare: expert advice and science policy, 1936–65 (2001) and Secrecy and science: a historical sociology of biological and chemical warfare (2013). John Beddington was UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser from 2008 until 2013. His research background is in population biology, in which subject he most recently held a chair at Imperial College London. He is currently senior advisor at the Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford, a centre of research that addresses global challenges. Neil Calver is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Kent. Publications include: ‘Sir Peter Medawar: science, creativity

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and the popularization of Karl Popper’, Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal for the History of Science, 67 (2013), 301–14; with Miles Parker OBE, ‘The logic of scientific unity? Medawar, the Royal Society and the Rothschild controversy’, Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal for the History of Science (forthcoming). Berris Charnley works for the ConSciCom project based at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford. He is interested in seeds, genes, farms and food, and in issues of participation and communication around knowledge production. His most recent book was an edited collection with Charles Lawson, Intellectual property and genetically modified organisms: a convergence in laws (2015). Ralph Desmarais holds a PhD from Imperial College London and is a historian of science whose research focuses on British scientific intellectuals and their political and cultural engagement in the decades straddling the Second World War. A representative work is ‘Jacob Bronowski: a humanist intellectual for an atomic age, 1946–1956’, British Journal for the History of Science, 45 (2012), 573–89. He is currently a visiting research fellow in the History Department, Kings College London. James Goodchild is currently completing his book entitled ‘The Birth of Scientific and Technical Intelligence’ (STI), which reassesses the Second World War origins of conceptual STI and, importantly, contextualises the foundations of STI into the wider structures of twentieth-century science and intelligence organisation. He has taught modern history at both Plymouth and Exeter universities and his research interests are grounded in the interrelationship between science, intelligence, war and the state. Sally Horrocks lectures in Modern British History at the University of Leicester and is senior academic advisor to the Oral History of British Science, a National Life Stories project in partnership with the British Library. She has published widely on industrial science in twentieth-century Britain and has acted recently as consultant to the BBC on commemoration of the First World War. Jeff Hughes is at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester. He writes on the history



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of radioactivity and nuclear physics and is currently researching the history of the Royal Society in the twentieth century. Thomas Lean holds a PhD in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine from the University of Manchester. His research interests include the history of technology, particularly the history of computing, public representations of science and technology, energy history and oral history. He is currently working on An Oral History of British Science and An Oral History of The Electricity Supply Industry for National Life Stories at the British Library. Don Leggett is Associate Professor of the History of Science and Technology at Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan. He is author of Shaping the Royal Navy: technology, authority and naval architecture, c. 1830–1906 (2015) and co-editor with Richard Dunn of Re-inventing the ship: science, technology and the maritime world, 1800–1918 (2012). His work has received the 2010 Singer Prize from the British Society for the History of Science and the 2013 Young Scholar Prize from the International Union for the History and Philosophy of Science. He is currently working on a book that explores the history of scientific expertise within the British state between 1870 and 1939. Charlotte Sleigh is Professor of Science Humanities at the University of Kent and has published on various topics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century history of science. She is currently editor of the British Journal for the History of Science and is working on a monograph about science and science fiction in interwar Britain. John Stewart is Emeritus Professor of Health History, Glasgow Caledonian University. His research interests include the history of childhood and of social welfare in twentieth-century Britain. Future projects include a biography of Richard Titmuss, social policy academic and advisor to the Labour Party. William Thomas is the author of Rational action: the sciences of policy in Britain and America, 1940–1960 (2015). He has held positions at the American Institute of Physics and Imperial College London, and is currently a senior historian at History Associates, Inc., in Rockville, Maryland, USA.

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Leucha Veneer is in the Engineering Innovation Centre at the University of Central Lancashire. The research for the paper within this volume was carried out as part of The Earth Under Surveillance project at the University of Manchester, as was ‘Underground and underwater: oil security in France and Britain during the Cold War’, by Roberto Cantoni and Leucha Veneer, in The surveillance imperative: geosciences in the Cold War and beyond, edited by Simone Turchetti and Peder Roberts (2014). Alice White is finishing her PhD at the University of Kent. Her research focuses on efforts to develop a science of human relations in Second World War and post-war Britain. She is also the editor of the history of science magazine, Viewpoint. Forthcoming published work includes ‘Silence and selection: the “trick cyclist” at the War Office Selection Boards’, in Felicity Mellor and Stephen Webster (eds) Silence and science communication (forthcoming 2016).

Acknowledgements

An edited volume is truly a collaborative enterprise, and in bringing this book to publication we have relied on the support, skill and insights of a good many people. Our first discussions of scientific governance emerged within a reading group that we organised at the Centre for the History of the Sciences at the University of Kent, and we recognise the valuable part that members of the group played in offering their initial thoughts as well as subsequent engagement with parts of this book. In September 2011 we brought together a number of historians working on twentieth-century science at a two-day conference at the University of Kent. The quality of discussion added both depth and perspective to our understanding of science and politics, and we thank all the delegates for their insights. We wish to acknowledge the School of History, the Kent Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and the British Society for the History of Science for supporting the event. This edited volume was conceived at that conference, and we thank those earlier contributors for their patience, as well as those whose important contributions were added to the project later on. All the contributors have exhibited a patient professionalism and readiness to engage with the themes of this volume and we greatly appreciate their work to bring this volume together. Finally, we acknowledge the support of Manchester University Press and the constructive feedback offered by its manuscript readers.

Foreword Professor Sir John Beddington

To an extent, my role in writing the foreword to this excellent book is arguably both dated and premature. The focus of the book is scientific governance in Britain between 1914 and 1979 and so ends approximately 30 years prior to my taking up the appointment as the UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser (GCSA). It is, I suppose, possible that the decisions of the period 1914–79 might have some predictive power about the governance of science in the UK some decades afterwards, but I shall not dwell on that notion. My own input here is, therefore, to focus on governance at the time I was GCSA, between 2008 and 2013, and to an extent reflect on the way that the role of GCSA has developed. I took up the position in January 2008 and my duties reflected changes that had occurred in the role over the previous three or four decades. As GCSA I reported directly to the Prime Minister, and the responsibilities were ample, being the quality of all science and engineering in the UK. Such a wide brief is arguably unachievable, given the enormous development of the scope of science and technology in the modern world. Following on from the activities of my predecessors, I was able to enhance the role of the GCSA by persuading government to appoint Chief Scientific Advisers (CSAs) to each of the main Departments of State. This group of CSAs, which included engineers, medics, economists, mathematicians and both biological and physical scientists, met with me regularly; we were able to use this community to address the key issues of science and engineering as they arose. I inherited and was Head of the Government Office for Science,



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a group that numbered around seventy individuals who enabled work to be done in a whole variety of areas. I return to this later. In his excellent essay on the evolving role of the CSA in this volume, Goodchild points to the origins of the role in the wartime advice of Lindemann, building on the pre-war work of Tizard and supplemented by Tizard’s subsequent role in the Ministry of Defence. Those were times of clear national emergency and in the modern role of CSA, involvement in emergency responses continues to be of central importance. The Civil Contingencies Secretariat in the Cabinet Office is responsible for preparing the National Risk Register. In simple terms, this calibrates potential emergencies against their likelihood and impact over a prospective five-year timeframe. During my time as CSA, I involved the cadre of CSAs in this work and the responsibility for mitigating and adapting to individual potential risks was devolved to the appropriate government departments, and the relevant scientific issues to the CSA of that department. In a real emergency, the mechanism of government revolves around the COBRA Committee, chaired by the Prime Minister or an appropriate Secretary of State. Scientific advice is presented to COBRA by the Scientific Advisory Group in Emergencies (SAGE), which I set up and chaired. In my time as GCSA, three rather different emergencies occurred. The first was high on the National Risk Register, having high likelihood and high impact, and concerned the threat of a pandemic of some disease (typically an influenza-related virus). The swine flu outbreak started in Mexico in late April 2009 and within a month had spread to some fifty countries. The mechanism of this fast geographical spread was largely traceable to the rapid spread of air traffic. This emergency lasted for several months as the epidemic developed. The SAGE Committee was chaired jointly by myself and Sir Gordon Duff, an eminent doctor who had chaired a preparatory committee on Pandemic Influenza for the Department of Health. In the event, the effect of the swine flu virus upon the population both in the UK and elsewhere was relatively small; although there was increased mortality in some groups, the overall level of mortality was fairly small compared with previous pandemics. A pandemic risk still remains as the top risk on the National Risk Register. The general feeling of those involved was that the swine flu was relatively benign and thus gave useful practice in dealing with something that has the potential to be rather more severe.

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The second emergency, in 2010, involved the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland, which erupted through a glacier, pushing superheated steam and ash high into the atmosphere. This coincided with a weather front which brought ash into the vicinity of the northeast Atlantic seaboard. The major effect of this was to disrupt air travel, although subsequent analysis indicated that the main issue was the implementation of the regulations that effectively forbade air travel if there was any ash in the air column. The emergency came to a natural end with a reduction in the emissions from the volcano and changing weather patterns. Lessons learnt from this were that regulations needed more effective formulation to account more appropriately for the real risk. An event such as occurred in Iceland was not on the National Risk Register and it is fair to say that this omission was a mistake, given that volcanic eruptions historically occur once every four years. The potential for this to coincide with unfavourable weather, bringing ash clouds to the vicinity of UK airports, was reasonably high. Subsequently the regulations have been changed and volcanic eruptions are now featured on the Register. The third emergency was of clear international impact, but had little direct impact in the UK. On 11 March 2011, there was a massive earthquake (magnitude 9.0) off the north-east coast of Japan and the subsequent tsunami killed tens of thousands of Japanese. A great deal of media attention and concern was focused on two nuclear plants, Fukushima Dai Ichi and Fukushima Dai Nei. The Tsunami damaged both plants, but one in particular, Fukushima Dai Ichi, was seriously damaged and explosive reactions within the reactors produced emissions of radioactive substances. The COBRA Committee was convened and effectively the issue posed was whether the UK should consider repatriating its nationals from Japan and move its embassy from Tokyo to the south of Japan. The role of the GCSA was to chair SAGE, which consulted with experts in a number of key areas including radiation monitoring, food health and the meteorology of the area. The advice from SAGE to COBRA was very clear: that there was really no need to move the UK expatriate population, nor to move the embassy, as the amount of radiation even in a reasonably severe case was modest. The UK adopted this advice and, apart from in the exclusion zone close to the plants themselves, took no further action, although prophylactic doses of iodine were made available to the



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population. This relatively low-key response was in sharp contrast to that of some other countries which evacuated their populations and transferred their embassies to the south of Japan. An interesting and new mechanism that was evolved to deal with this emergency was that the GCSA, with the help of the British embassy, took part in a number of question-and-answer phone conversations with UK expatriates. These conversations were made public and did much to reassure individuals where there was considerable uncertainty. This is not the place to go into the issues involved in any detail, but it was held that the lack of simple, coherent advice to the Japanese Government was a particular problem. The National Risk Register and the COBRA–SAGE discussions remain the main ways in which scientific advice in emergencies can be applied to government. The membership of SAGE consists of government scientists, appropriate academics and industry-based scientists. Of course, the balance and skills involved varies with the emergency. The proceedings and advice given are published and the composition of the SAGE Committee is similarly transparent. Compared to the earlier activities of the GCSAs reviewed in this book, the current role involves a significant amount of international involvement. At the most senior level, the Carnegie meetings of the CSAs and Ministers of Science for the G8, now extended to the G8+5, is the key annual event. The meetings provide the opportunity for a confidential forum for discussion of key scientific issues at high level. As indicated, the composition of the group involves CSAs where they exist, as is the case for the USA and the UK, and science ministers from other states. No minutes are taken and the cadre of sherpas is not involved in plenary discussions. International cooperation on scientific matters was taken forward by a series of bilateral discussions; of particular note were those with Japan, Russia, India, China and Brazil. Subject areas depended very much on the issues of interest to the combined parties. Often such meetings led to cooperative research funded in part by the UK Research Councils. This international interaction is facilitated by a network known as the Science and Innovation Network (SIN), led from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS). Key embassies and high commissions throughout the world have one or more SIN counsellors.

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Despite this relatively new international element, the CSA in the UK has few international counterparts. Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and the USA are the main ones. However, the role of the Chief Scientist in the USA is somewhat different to that in the UK, as it is a political appointment. Thus the appointment of the current US Chief Scientist, John Holdren, started with, and will end with, the Obama administration. During my time as GCSA, the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, appointed a CSA, Anne Glover, who acted as the CSA to the president. This post was abolished with the change of president to Jean-Claude Juncker, implying a more political role for the appointment than occurs in the UK – in my case I worked for both a Labour and a Conservative prime minister. An overriding change since 1979 is in the scale and scope of scientific activity. In consequence, a key development in the last few decades has been the relationship between the GCSA and the research base and, in particular, with the Director General (DG) of Research and Innovation. This is a title that has gone through a number of iterations in my time, but the role has remained unchanged, being a responsibility for the Research Councils, the universities and for part of higher education funding. For most of my time in government, this role was held by Sir Adrian Smith. The linkage between GCSA and DG was enormously fruitful and enabled a coherent view of the importance of different aspects of research and higher education to be developed in an integrated way. By way of an example, Smith attended the weekly meetings of the CSAs. When I started, the departmental home for both the GCSA and the DG of Research and Innovation was the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS). This was disbanded and the current home of the GCSA and DG is BIS. The interaction and cooperation between the GCSA and DG is really important. In essence, the GCSA is seen to have influence, and the DG control of the money, particularly for Research Councils and the Higher Education sector. The link in terms of scientific research is central to the Haldane principle, which points to the effective academic independence of the Research Councils. Close cooperation between the GCSA and the DG is of real importance. The role is usually taken by an independent academic. In my time, Sir Keith O’Nions, ex-CSA at the Ministry of Defence and former professor at the University of Oxford was DG. He was followed by Sir Adrian



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Smith, formerly Vice-Chancellor of Queen Mary University of London, and thence by Sir John O’Reilly, former Vice-Chancellor of Cranfield University. The cooperation is of real importance and was credited in part with achieving, following the change of government to the Coalition, flat funding for the science base and ring fencing for scientific research. Also key to this success was the involvement of the then Science Minister, David Willetts. In addition to the research funding provided by the Research Councils into universities and Research Council institutes, government departments also do a great deal of independent scientific research. Quasi-independent institutes, in particular the Met Office, the National Physical Laboratory and the National Nuclear Laboratory, are crucial in providing advice into government. The complexity of science and engineering in the modern world means that government is dependent on a significant number of Scientific Advisory Committees, which goes far beyond the CSA cadre. The most significant committee is the Council for Science and Technology (CST). This is chaired jointly by the GCSA, and in my time was co-chaired in succession by Dame Janet Finch and Dame Nancy Rothwell. A recent change to the composition of this committee, made by David Cameron shortly after taking office, was that the presidents of the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Royal Academy of Medical Sciences and the British Academy are all ex officio members. The CST reports directly to the prime minister and has produced a number of reports, some at the request of the Prime Minister or a Secretary of State, others on their own initiative. This high-level committee is complemented by around sixty Scientific Advisory Committees and a number of departments have Science Advisory Councils. Of particular note are those in the Ministry of Defence and Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Some controversy was generated in the science advisory system when Professor David Nutt was dismissed from a committee by the then Home Secretary, Alan Johnson. This problem threatened to erode the potential for government to receive scientific advice. The Code of Practice on Scientific Advisory Committees (CoPSAC) was revised to affirm the right of scientists who advise government to communicate their scientific opinions publicly, and this right was incorporated into the Ministerial Code by the Coalition Government.1

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The essential principles listed are that: • scientific advisers should be free from political interference with their work; • scientific advisers are free to publish and present their research; • scientific advisers are free to communicate publicly their advice to government, subject to normal confidentiality restrictions, including when it appears to be inconsistent with government policy; • scientific advisers have the right to engage with the media and public independently of the government and to seek independent media advice on substantive pieces of work; • scientific advisers should make clear in what capacity they are communicating. It is very hard to see how government can obtain comprehensive and independent advice without the expertise of these Scientific Advisory Committees. When I was GCSA, I met regularly with the chairs of these committees in a town hall meeting where issues across the whole spectrum could be discussed. Supporting the GCSA is the Government Office for Science, numbering around seventy people. Apart from work that had already been discussed, this group was involved in providing quality assessment of the research and development (R&D) work done by individual government departments. This is a rolling capability assessment and aims to evaluate the quality of work that is done. From time to time at the request of ministers, or parliamentary committees and government, particular studies are developed. Usually these take the form of an independent panel, sometimes chaired by the GCSA, sometimes by an independent academic, on particular areas. Two that stand out in my time are one on nuclear science following a critical report on nuclear R&D by the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee, and one on funding of climate science following a decision by the Ministry of Defence to pull funding from the Met Office Hadley Centre. A mechanism that was set up during my time as GCSA was the Blackett Review. This review covered areas which from time to time overlap with the security domain, but are aimed at having independent scientific input from both academia and industry which do not involve significant security vetting. The first of these



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looked at the problem of detecting nuclear material entering the country. Others have included assessing biological risks in wide areas. The recent one in the period of my successor involved the Internet of Things. Another key activity within the Government Office for Science was to look at the future by horizon scanning and other techniques. I inherited the Foresight team, which had the responsibility of looking forward and assessing implications for major challenges in the future. Typical timescales ranged from ten to forty years. The reports produced by the Foresight team were substantial; typically, projects involved some 400 contributors from around forty countries. The subjects studied were highly variable and involved substantial multi-disciplinary work. While I was GCSA, typical reports published included: Migration and Global Environmental Change; International Dimensions of Climate Change; Global Food and Farming Futures; Land Use Futures; Mental Capital and Wellbeing; Sustainable Energy Management and the Built Environment; Computer Trading in Financial Markets and the Future of Identity. Two Foresight reports were ongoing when I stepped down as GCSA, one on the Future of Manufacturing, which will look to 2040, and a second on the Future of Cities, which will look forward on a similar timescale. A significant part of the GCSA role which differs very much from the earlier years is the involvement of the media. I was regularly called upon to brief both the broadcast media and journals and newspapers on various key topics of the time. In emergencies this sort of activity became of particular importance, but it was also a vehicle for publicising some of the work developed by the Foresight team and other groups within the scientific sector. The reporting links of the role to the Prime Minister and the Cabinet Secretary provided quite extensive opportunities for the GCSA to follow their own ideas. This means that my successor, Sir Mark Walport, and my predecessors, Sir David King and Lord May, had the opportunity to develop their different agendas which they have felt to be important. My own particular interest was to develop ideas addressing concerns that population growth, urbanisation and increasing prosperity raised major issues of food, water and energy security which need to be addressed in the context of adapting to and mitigating climate change. For me, such work is still high on the agenda.

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1 Government Office for Science, ‘Principles of scientific advice to government’. www.gov.uk/government/publications/scientific-​advice-​to-​gov​er nment-principles/principles-of-scientific-advice-​to-​government. Pub­lis­ hed 24 March 2010.

Scientific governance: an introduction Don Leggett and Charlotte Sleigh

This candid attempt to take possession of the whole world must be made in the name of and for the sake of science and creative activity. Its aim is to release science …1

Writing in the first half of the twentieth century the author, biologist and science teacher H.G. Wells conceived of an age when the governance of society would be the work of engineers. This was not simply an assertion about who should wield the power behind the machine, but a bold statement about the skills required for successful governance. Engineers had distinctive values and characters: ‘They must keep on mastering new points, new aspects; they must be intelligent and adaptable; they must get a grasp of that permanent something that lies behind the changing immediate practice.’2 Wells and his readers took his point to encompass all those who embodied the ‘spirit of science’, a much-used term of the early twentieth century that included scientists as well as engineers. Wells’s Anticipations, first published in a series of articles in the Fortnightly Review in 1901, caught the attention of a wide audience – including the Royal Institution, where he was asked to deliver a Friday evening discourse – for whom the connection between science and governance was a matter of deep importance. The economist and Fabian Sidney Webb shared with Wells his ‘feelings about the coming predominance of the man of science, the trained professional expert’, and saw a place for him in a government of experts.3 Not everyone was so impressed. A young Winston Churchill, newly elected MP for Oldham, wrote to Wells that ‘nothing would be more fatal than for the government

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of states to get into the hands of the experts’.4 But by 1928, in the Open conspiracy, Wells had grown only more confident about his recommendations, and though his vision of the future may not have come true, explicit debates about science and governance continued to feature in British society. The term ‘scientific governance’ – and Wells’s mediating a­ ctivities – gesture at the fact that the governance of science incorporates more components of modern society than policy makers, scientists and industry. Not least in support of this position is the post-Foucauldian insight that governance is not entirely imposed from above, but powerfully enacted from within.5 The term scientific governance, then, summons two key senses in which science and governance are related: the governance of science, and governance by science. The first sense, which has been the more common mode to approach the history of British science in the twentieth century, has to do with the direction of science. Scientific governance here refers to the structures and institutions that shaped science, be they the subject of individual scientists’ work, the lobbying efforts of scientific societies or the growing role of the state in producing and consuming scientific knowledge. Among a number of developments that distinguish this century are the dramatic increase in the number of laboratories and scientists funded by the state and commercial interests; the formation of branches of government dedicated to scientific and industrial research; and the appointment of designated scientific advisors across government. As Arapostathis and Gooday have most recently shown, the courtroom and the press also governed innovation and technology – including those of use to the state.6 The governance of science, moreover, includes the formation of relevant ideology; bookending our volume are the Haldane principle, protecting the independence of research councils, and the Rothschild report, which introduced the concept of a customer contract into scientific research. Besides these moreor-less explicit ideologies in the governance of science there are also subtler features to consider: laboratory politics, disciplinarity, gender and a hundred and one other factors – often tacit – that shape the production of techno-science. The second sense, governance by science, is a little more elusive to grasp. The project of governing citizens and resources scientifically has been articulated and understood through a range of possibilities from the broadly rhetorical (an appeal to rationality or progress),



Scientific governance: an introduction

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through the planned society, to full-blown government by experts: technocracy. Perhaps the most significant development of the twentieth century in this field was the proliferation of the scientific expert, a ‘protean [figure] of authority and rational knowledge’.7 The expert can play a vital role in interactions between the sciences, politics and society, and yet seminal studies in both the history and sociology of science call into doubt the notion of a singular type of scientific expertise, in respect of how it is either generated or perceived by political communities.8 What science is in the context of a claim to expertise is unclear; this flexibility is indeed a part of its power. For Wells, it was engineers who carried the weight of national hope, while others espoused a looser sense of scientific rationality as a bulwark against politico-governmental propaganda. This second sense of scientific governance is perhaps more unique to the twentieth century, although one could point to apparently similar predecessors in Baconian fantasies of the New Atlantis, or the revolutionary rhetoric of late eighteenth-century chemistry. This volume is grounded in a strong intellectual tradition in the historical and sociological study of science, according to which the making of scientific knowledge is a political act.9 Scholars in Science and Technology Studies (STS) have developed sophisticated methodologies and a wealth of case studies for understanding the making, settling, institutionalisation and utilisation of scientific knowledge and practices. They have found that these processes cannot be separated from the domains in which knowledge is used, be they advisory boards to government, courtrooms or forums for public debate, and that this has important consequences for both the governance of science and the public understanding of science. For example, in her study of Britain’s bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE or, colloquially, mad cow disease) scare of 1996, Shelia Jasanoff takes it for granted that government institutions were expected to manage this episode of scientific uncertainty, and that their failure to do so created palpable ‘civic dislocation’. It is this insight about the governance of science that is so powerful and relevant for our book. It was neither necessary nor inevitable that tiny fragments of protein, and their passage through the food chain, should be expected to be a governmental matter. That this was the case shows how governmental institutions were regarded as the proper space for the exercise of scientific expertise – at least in this case study, in areas such as health and diet.10

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Such a co-production of science and social order is not peculiar to the twentieth century, as many studies in the history of science testify. Simon Schaffer and Steven Shapin’s magisterial Leviathan and the air pump (1985) reveals such connections between the integrity of experimental methods and the political order of Restoration England. Richard Drayton’s Nature’s government (2000) traces the idea of ‘improvement’ to reveal the links that sustained science and empire both in Britain and abroad. Finally, in this extremely brief review, Jon Agar’s history of the computer traces its function as both a metaphor and a technology of governance from the mid-nineteenth century, using it as a lens to examine the role of various ‘expert movements’ (statisticians, economists, operational researchers). ‘Technologies’, as Agar notes, ‘are manifestations of ways of ordering nature and society.’11 In short, there has always been an important relationship between scientific knowledge and political power, and the co-production of science and social order has long been a conceptual cornerstone to the history of science. In proposing scientific governance as a category for analysis this volume draws upon well-established traditions in STS in order to claim, firstly, that there is something particular about science, politics and society in the twentieth century; and secondly, that there is value to introducing this notion into the historiography of ­twentieth-century British science. Why scientific governance? Governance offers a revealing ‘big picture’ lens through which to view the changing contours and constitution of science in ­twentieth-century Britain. It is offered not as a context in which to understand British science – as is industry, warfare or ­imperialism – but as a way of connecting those involved in, and affected by, science in the twentieth century. It is not an actor’s category, but an analysts’ term that we propose for the ongoing study of the sciences, politics and society in twentieth-century Britain (and perhaps beyond). Prevalent actor’s categories, like technocracy, fail to capture the historical terrain that we attempt to chart in this volume. Technocracy, understood as governance by technical elites – or experts – fails to account for the role of figures like Wells. He, like other figures in this book who do not fit this category – ranging from military officers and science fiction fans to BBC program-



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mers and academic philosophers – played a role in the interface between science, politics and society that is very far from peripheral. Technocracy is also an unhelpful category for the historical study of this period on the grounds that, first, it does not capture the political realities of the British experience, and second, that it fails to break from a dichotomous understanding of experts and civil servants. This latter approach does not reflect the intricacies of government departments, their varied uses of scientific expertise and how policies were made.12 One can, moreover, historicise criticism of the term technocracy in Britain.13 The crystallographer and Marxist J.D. Bernal, who discussed the idea of ‘the scientist as ruler’ (citing Wells), objected to what he called the ‘vogue of Technocracy’. He believed that the premise of technocracy could never be realised on the grounds that ‘no one can think of any way of transferring control into [scientists’] hands’, and ‘that most existing scientists are manifestly totally unfitted to exercise such control’.14 Yet, despite this dismissal, Bernal saw potential for the scientist to effect real political change: ‘the scientist will certainly have a large and critically important part to play in the formation and development of the social organization of the future’.15 While the idea of technocracy per se is problematic in the British context, the history of governance reveals an increased use of techniques that drew on experts and expertise during the twentieth century. Patrick Joyce and others have brought new attention to the technologies and ‘techniques of governing oneself and governing others’ that are suggestive of scientists’ intervention in the governing of Britain.16 These technologies ranged from letters and filing systems to cameras and railways; in this volume they are extended more radically to such apparently non-bureaucratic entities as laboratories and wheat seeds.17 Ultimately Joyce remains sceptical of the unbound authority of experts: ‘there was limited chance of a “rule of experts” usurping the state’, but the technologies and techniques of governance that experts possessed ‘were still highly orchestrated by the state, which initiated some forms of expertise and appropriated others’.18 Scientific governance embraces these insights and provides a more inclusive concept of the politics of science than technocracy has offered the historian of Britain. It offers a path towards a new historiographical cohesion in the study of twentieth-century British

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science in which technical experts, policy makers and administrators can be analysed alongside popularisers, mediators and the users of scientific knowledge. This is particularly important, given the public profile of science intellectuals in twentieth-century Britain and the political historiography that has emerged around them.19 The problem with integrating these public scientists with the governance of science revolves around two principal issues: whether the public pronouncements of scientists reflected the realities of British science’s political standing; and the extent to which the discourses of public intellectuals like Wells, Bernal and C.P. Snow connected to the experiences of laboratory technicians, researchers in industry and academic scientists.20 Studies of public science and science policy have done much to resolve these problems by tracing the boundaries of public debate and the networks of the actors involved.21 This brand of historical reconstruction is arguably more productive than the terminology of ‘anti-histories’ that David Edgerton has applied to the public writings of these figures, and the declinist accounts of British science that they offered.22 By placing various scientific actors all on the same historical terrain, we can better understand the peculiar values and authority ascribed to science in the twentieth century, with science emerging not as distinct branch(es) of study but as a protean entity in the writings and interactions of our various figures. The process of governance brings together both the governors and the governed in a way that further serves to combine the study of scientific elites and policy makers with users, stakeholders and those affected by scientific governance – be they soldiers receiving psychological testing or citizens responding to the surveys of social scientists.23 Previous historiography of twentieth-century British science has tended to focus on the governance of science. Between the 1960s and 1980s, historical accounts of science and politics were dominated by institutions and the theme of science–government relations. A series of important case studies illuminated the formation and function of various national and industrial laboratories, governmental bodies and science lobbies.24 Insights from these studies have served to construct a picture of the state’s relationship with science in the interwar years that can be characterised by the state taking piecemeal interest in specific problems of national importance. These provided new structures and opportunities in which trained scientists could operate, obliterating the nineteenth-­



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century figure of the ‘reluctant patron’ of the sciences.25 All of this marked a new phase in the state’s organisation of – and funding for – the sciences, which had important consequences for scientists. However, as one scholar argued in 1980, central governmental attitudes to science across the twentieth century largely followed ‘traditional principles of British public administration’, with governmental resistance to central co-ordination and little desire to form a ‘deliberate “science policy”’.26 The study of these institutions and science–government relations continues, but with new concerns and questions. A more nuanced understanding of the politics of science has revealed the importance of the rhetoric of science in the process of legitimating its public funding – and, in the process, setting boundaries for the state’s role in organising research.27 These boundaries were of great importance in the work of the Medical and Agricultural Research Councils that were established in 1919 and 1931, respectively.28 Histories of publicly funded science, and the principle of non-interference from the government, shed light on how science was governed in the first half of the twentieth century – but this was not the only experience of scientific governance in Britain. Studies of science in the imperial context have yielded important insights into the relationship between the sciences, politics and society that reveal the deep connections between research, development, imperial policies and the identity of the British Empire.29 Such studies have broadly enriched the historiography of government organisation of science by bringing together the ideologies of politicians, the development of industries and the experience of researchers across the British world. Since the 1990s historians have also looked beyond the administration of research funding by civil departments of state, and toward the military services. David Edgerton’s Warfare state (2005) provides an important counterpoint to narratives of British research that predominantly focus on the experience of academic scientists. His study represents a continuation of earlier work rejecting the narrative of decline in British science and industry. Edgerton argues that the histories written since the 1960s have repeatedly missed the point: in failing to distinguish between absolute and relative decline; in tendentiously finding Britain wanting in comparison to the US; and in overlooking British industrial leadership within Europe.30 But, in a surprise move for what might otherwise have

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sounded like a left-wing defence of Britain’s scientific success in a broadly social-democratic era, he posits that the rude health of techno-science was sustained by a ‘warfare state’ that kept thinking and acting as though it were in active combat right the way through to 1989.31 Edgerton is certainly right in his insistence that we stop obsessing about decline and academic science – and in the process he has opened up the study of research in industry and the military to fresh investigation and scrutiny.32 More recently the study of patenting and intellectual property has provided fresh perspective on the governance of scientific research in which commercial concerns, cultures of reward and strategies for managing patents shaped the behaviour of actors.33 One area in which we do qualify Edgerton’s approach to the study of British science is in his prioritisation of a quantitative treatment of research spending for understanding how science was governed. Edgerton does not treat popular perceptions and cultural constructions of science as being important to the governance of science, which we have made a case for in this introduction, but instead considers them historiographically as a form of anti-history that serves to construct today’s narratives about science. An economic analysis of research spending will never fully reflect the intricacies of decision making in government, as scholars have shown through the reconstruction of the social and cultural contingencies involved in governing Britain. Edgerton’s warfare state arguments, and their implications for the history of twentieth-century science, have been seminal; but we also need to connect them with questions about the implications of state patronage for the moral authority of the sciences; the rise of experts and advisors within the state; the use of what we might loosely call scientific approaches to governing; and a host of other ways in which Britain was governed by science – as the following brief historical sketch of the century highlights.34 A brief history of scientific governance in the twentieth century Wells’s benign vision for scientific governance was an expression of Victorian middle-class aspiration, set amidst imperial and evolutionary unease. In the first decade of the twentieth century this vision was institutionalised in the form of organisations like the British Science Guild, founded in 1905 to ‘foster public appreciation of the role of science and the advantage of applying the



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methods of scientific enquiry … in affairs of every kind’, but most substantively in matters of national, and imperial, efficiency.35 Like a great many cultural presumptions, this vision did not survive the cataclysmic events of 1914–18 unaltered.36 The Great War, famously, was known at the time (and after) as ‘the chemists’ war’, this description referring not just to the infamous poison gases but to the vast industrial machinery of production for fabrics, metals, medicines and so on. Science was put on a footing of state patronage and steerage through the formation of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research to co-ordinate and promote research for the benefit of industry.37 By the end of the Great War scientists had begun to sense their worth to the nation, and some of them were beginning to take up the Wellsian baton in the name of peace. The journal Science Progress, for instance, argued in 1918 that there was little difference between German and British governance, only in the silliness of their respective leaders, and that the options for the future were either more radical democracy or else a frank commitment to rule by the ‘very best qualified persons available’ – scientists.38 An increased focus on governance raised questions about autonomy in science and the position of pure science. In wartime Cambridge a group of scientists insisted on the importance of science, in particular ‘pure science’, for British interests. Science and the nation (1917), a volume conceived by A.C. Seward, contained chapters that directly linked the work of the scientist to national matters: ‘The national importance of chemistry’, ‘The science of botany and the art of intensive cultivation’, ‘An agricultural war problem’ and ‘Geology as an economic science’. As Seward wrote in his introduction, the volume aimed to demonstrate ‘the supreme importance of a sympathetic and intelligent attitude towards the natural sciences on the part of those entrusted with the direction of national affairs’.39 In a chapter on ‘The government of subject peoples’, the psychiatrist W.H.R. Rivers made these connections explicit when he explained that the ‘object of this essay is to inquire how far science may be useful in the work of government itself’.40 Scientists’ realisation of their national value coincided with their professional – or perhaps one should say socioeconomic – ­ambitions. They wished to be well regarded, and well paid. Hyman Levy put it succinctly: ‘The war of 1914–18 was the occasion for the birth of the scientific profession.’41 Late on in the war, ­scientists

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at Cambridge and the National Physical Laboratory – mostly left of centre and war workers – agreed to emphasise the identity of their emerging profession through the establishment of a trade union.42 This was an awkwardly hybrid entity, carrying echoes of both guilds (skilled trade bodies) and clubs (gentlemanly organisations, Royal Colleges) as well as a political position. Arthur Tansley, for example, although he supported the National Union of Scientific Workers (NUSW), felt at first that a focus on the ‘economic interests of its members’ was too politically divisive for its potential members, distracting attention from the union’s other aim, namely, to give the scientific worker ‘a status commensurate with [his] importance … in national life’.43 Tansley’s fears proved correct, and the NUSW limped along until, off the back of the General Strike of 1926, it was cynically eviscerated from within by Alfred Mond (president of Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI)). It was reformed as the British Association of Scientific Workers, in which guise it remained the natural home for left-wing scientists, even if diminished as a political-economic force.44 By the time of the Great Depression, and a looming second world war, the notion of something like Wells’s conspiracy took on fresh plausibility and appeal; surely there must be a better way to run things than by ordinary politics. Werskey’s ground-breaking study, The visible college (1978), details the socialist ambitions of prominent scientists during the 1920s and, especially, the 1930s, connecting them to their vision of science.45 For the crystallographer J.D. Bernal, Marxism was nothing less than ‘the science of science’.46 Bernal’s own reading of the Great War and the economic crisis of the 1930s provided the impetus for examining how the work of scientists was connected with social, economic, political and military developments. In The social function of science (1939) he reflected on the organisational shifts in science during the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, insisting that science ‘has become an industry supported by large industrial monopolies and by the State’. His commentary raised a number of issues about how science was both governed and used in the governance of society. It stressed the collective nature of scientific work, the importance of administration, the efficient co-ordination of research and its application to social problems.47 After detailing the social function of science in the first four



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decades of the twentieth century, Bernal turned to his personal and political hopes for what science could do for humanity if its internal and external relations with other social institutions were reorganised. The relationship between the extent of organisation, freedom of researchers and support for science formed a complex dynamic in which Bernal worked out his concerns about scientific governance.48 He was sceptical about the role of the state in co-ordinating science – ‘Science can never be administrated as part of a civil service’ – but had faith in the self-governance of scientific organisations. Science had a large contribution to make to society, and Bernal was not alone in explicitly identifying its capacity for governance. For another Marxist, the biochemist J.B.S. Haldane, writing in 1940, the need for science was greater in the present day than ever before: ‘we must think scientifically, not only about weapons and health, but about politics and philosophy’.49 He believed that science was deeply connected to a variety of public spheres in society, from the research conducted in large universities to the everyday concerns of Britons.50 If the First World War was a matter of evolution for science and scientific governance, the Second World War was revolution. It was the historical fulcrum for the sons of Wells and their meritocratic, socialist or socially democratic ambitions. There is still much to learn about the precise aims and ambitions of these – and lesser-known – scientists: their notions of architecture, design, health, industry and much more. Werskey’s subjects, though Oxbridge outsiders, were nevertheless Oxbridge; but what of those on the academic periphery, in industry? What were their connections with business, with government? What of those whose idealism was refracted through lenses other than socialism? Although many socialist scientists and doctors initially focused their energies on a critique of governmental care for its people (vide Bernal’s study of the inadequacy of air-raid precautions) they inevitably became involved in the war effort. By 1942 the Association of Scientific Workers had 16,000 members, and these were not on the whole pacifists with regard to this conflict. Whereas ‘planning’, that shibboleth of socialist scientists before the war, sounded horribly soviet, wartime operational research was simply force majeure; no one in their right mind objected to it. Ultimately it paved the way to the post of Chief Scientific Adviser that is enshrined in government to the present.51 As national

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­ iscussion turned to reconstruction, a broadly socially democratic d consensus politics prevailed. This was fertile soil for the ambitions of the public scientists who had dominated immediately before and during the war. They could have written Attlee’s 1946 manifesto for him, with its election-winning promise of rule by experts: The Labour Party intends to link the skill of British craftsmen and designers to the skill of British scientists in the service of our fellow men. The genius of British scientists and technicians who have produced radio-location, jet propulsion, penicillin, and the Mulberry Harbours in wartime, must be given full rein in peacetime too.52

While research sponsored by the British government did not reach the scale of ‘Big Science’ in the US, there were some largescale projects, notably the military/civil projects at Windscale/ Calder Hall (Sellafield).53 Not the least of the scientists’ successes was the establishment of a National Health Service, albeit not quite such a total one as the socialist doctors had hoped. Meanwhile, a nexus of scientists and designers, film-makers and officials produced films directing the people how to live in this reconstructed society: how to be healthy, where to live (in rational new cities). One should add at this point that architects were extremely significant contributors to these visions made (literally) concrete, and historians of science need to find ways of incorporating road makers, building makers, town planners and other designers into a proper history of the neo-Elizabethan scientific era. But if architecture was the most visible of all the sciences that hoped for preferment in the scientifically and socially enlightened peace, it may be argued that the social-psychological sciences were the most successful – and the most invisible. Their reach extended into education policy, industry, management, family, gender and childhood and adolescence.54 An explosion of educational and structural governmental changes made way for more scientists, technicians and scientific citizens than ever before. Most famously, the Barlow Report of 1945 made provision for reorganisation and expansion of the scientific civil service as a pillar of post-war reconstruction. Its numbers, as historians have discovered, mushroomed.55 Meanwhile the Robbins Report (1963) promised higher education to all who were capable of it. It made a point of showing how pulling up the ordinary man or woman pulled up science, and vice versa, in its recommendation to give university status to pre-existing Colleges of Advanced



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Technology. C.P. Snow, with all his tentacles in government and academia, was a node connecting the government as employer of technical staff and as patron of the new, scientifically educated middle class. As Guy Ortolano has revealed, Snow’s liberal-technocratic ideal was both influential amongst, and galling to, his peers.56 If one had to pick a peak for scientific governance in the twentieth century, it might be 1963, with an expanded scientific civil service, a brace of new universities poised to open and both political parties making their manifesto stands on science. The post-war period is now beginning to receive the historical attention it deserves in relation to science, but there are still extraordinary gaps in our knowledge. The new universities, for example, are generally understood to be a response to the government reports calling for more scientists – but we do not even know what proportion of science students they took, or what they taught them. Nor have we questioned the seemingly natural fit, almost too good to be true, between science touted as a subject, as a discipline of democratic epistemology, and the production of scientists as desideratum of the national economy. Our book ends in the year that finally saw a scientist ascend to the highest office of the land. Had Wells’s dream come true? No. Paradoxically, Thatcher’s regime marked the end of the consensus era in which science, or at least certain ideas of science, had flourished. Under her watch as Secretary of State for Education and Science, the Rothschild reforms devastated – or so scientists agreed – their intellectual autonomy.57 Herein there lies a paradox; for Rothschild the economic libertarian was supporting the notion of the taxpayer as client to science: a most Bernalist principle, on the face of it. But the marketisation of knowledge is an undisputed legacy of Thatcher, and the destruction of technical industry nearly so; and latterly, Thatcher’s most important cabinet colleague, Nigel Lawson, has been revealed as a despiser of science, a climate-change denier. This leaves some tricky historical questions. Should we discount Thatcher’s education and professional shaping as irrelevant to her political career and economic ideology? Or does she, as at least one of us suspects, represent a view of science from the interwar period that has yet to receive full historical attention? We leave these and many other questions for a future history.

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Scientific governance in Britain, 1914–79 Chapter outlines

Although governance of and by science are inevitably interrelated, we have separated the two themes in this volume. The first section of this book collects essays that have to do with the governance of science: the second, governance by science. Scientific governance is not intended as a single designation: it is manifold in both its senses. Leggett’s essay (Chapter 1) on the short-lived Board of Invention and Research (BIR) opens the section on the government of science, and in so doing contributes to emerging scholarship on invention and cultures of managing research in science. It grapples with the conflicting interests of researchers and the state during the crucial period of the Great War. The BIR was essentially a social experiment: a trial ‘hub in the organisation of government, academic and … commercial laboratories’. Leggett’s story is an important and subtle corrective to the cliché that war is a driver of scientific ‘progress’. Warfare may not provide any simple stimulus for scientific research, but it has certainly provided stimulus for scientific governance, as the next two chapters in this section also explore. During the Second World War the British military services established new scientific advisory posts in response to the needs of combat – posts which went on to exert a powerful effect in the post-war environment. As the services saw it, Thomas explains in Chapter 2, engineers offered not only concretely useful equipment, but an apparently ‘scientific’ method of planning combat operations more generally. The reforms associated with these interactions, argues Thomas, ‘subsequently took an unusually prominent place in the annals of British science policy’; operational research opened up the alley to scientific advice at the heart of government. It also opened up a rhetorical touch-point for subsequent critiques of government in its supposed failure to recognise the virtues of organised science policy, and the ‘decline’ which this allegedly occasioned. operational research was thus arguably the ur-discipline of socially embedded science during the Second World War and beyond. In Chapter 3, Goodchild expands the story further, exploring the evolving nature of governmental scientific advice during the successive incumbencies of Frederick Lindemann, Henry Tizard and Solly Zuckerman as Chief Scientific Adviser. Lindemann’s personal relationship with Winston Churchill compares with Tizard’s



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unofficial service to Labour; Zuckerman occupied an official role of Government Chief Scientific Adviser to both Labour and Conservative governments, establishing a ‘necessary facet of scientific governance that now heads an extensive network of scientific advice’. The evolution of this role is an instructive account of the changing nature of government science according to context and contingency: of personality, need and ambition. As Hughes’s Chapter 4 reveals, the Royal Society – traditional governor of elite science and socially close to the higher echelons of politics – was left high and dry by the changed climate of the postwar period, uncertain as to its role in this altered and expanded world of science. It struggled to respond to exactly those governmental trends which emerged through the shorter twentieth century, and which are covered by the chapters constituting this part of the book. In Hughes’s words: With government, the military, industry and universities pulling it in different directions, how should science be organised, and what were the implications for individual scientists? Should science be socially and economically planned, or must scientists be allowed complete freedom in their research? Could scientific knowledge be kept secret, or was openness a precondition for scientific work? How should ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ research be approached in the context of debates about economic productivity? And how should British science properly be related to work in the Empire, the Commonwealth, Europe, the United States and indeed the Soviet Union, in the post-war geopolitical context?

While the Royal Society dithered, the government’s demand for scientific military advice intensified along with the Cold War. Aspects of the ongoing relations between science, government and defence are covered in this volume by Agar, and in the chapter jointly authored by Agar and Balmer. Agar’s account in Chapter 5 of the Defence Research Committee (DRC f.1963) forms a useful counterpart to Goodchild’s account of personal relationships, showing how science and government were negotiated in that unavoidable twentieth-century entity, the committee. The DRC ‘kept a critical watch on defence research, greenlighting some major projects and closing others, drawing in external advice while expressing internal interests, [and] compared British programmes with those of allies and enemies’. As both Agar and Goodchild note en passant, the pathways of advice created strange dead-ends in the

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maze of scientific governance, places where the democratic spirit of science (and of science in democracy) broke down and where the left hands were hidden from the right. As has been explored elsewhere, the era of the military-­industrialacademic complex redefined the nature of science itself; in the terms of this book, it brought science into political governance – even if it was not inherently military in its nature.58 In Chapter 6 Agar and Balmer provide a nuanced, close-up account of such a process in action, examining ‘military dimensions of, and reactions to, early genetic engineering’ – a story that is of value both to the history of genetics as well as military science. They argue that ‘decoupling’ was a crucial part of this governance: although there is no evidence that the British government sought to develop new weapons via the new technologies, nevertheless scientists and civil servants, in conjunction with the wider public, reconfigured the science by actively decoupling it from its military potential. The intersection and dissociation to which they point undoubtedly has relevance to later twentieth-century events. Veneer’s Chapter 7, on North Sea geology, provides another insight into governmental negotiations of science during the Cold War. It concerns the efforts of the Institute of Geological Sciences to survey the North Sea on behalf of the Ministry of Power during the 1960s. Veneer argues that the relationship between these two entities evolved from one of state patronage of science to ‘a model based upon both planned science and scientific planning’. Moreover, her work highlights the labile nature of expertise in such rearrangements: ‘how and when [administrators] come to realise what expertise they require; how crucial … expertise really is; how (and whether) this expertise can be fitted into existing administrative structures; and, finally, what effect these requirements then have on scientific institutions attempting to provide the expertise’. Understanding the governmental roots of energy science will be of value both to historians, and, through that, to unfolding policy decisions. The final chapter in this section, Chapter 8 by Horrocks and Lean, explores the individual human narratives that constitute the bigger picture of governmental science. These, as they point out, have been conspicuously missing from extant economic-driven histories of government and civil service science. Their account, drawing on the new Oral History of British Science project, reveals



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the motivations, goals and ethos within the real working worlds of science. They find that national duty was part of a complex of obligations and satisfactions that scientists have attributed to themselves, subsumed within their overall desire to prioritise ‘doing the science’. In turn, their self-accounting undergoes a dramatic shift as they recall a change of governance in the later century, more attuned to commercial concerns. Their chapter speaks to the hidden ideologies and practices that are no less crucial than institutions in the governance of science. Turning in the book’s second half to governance by science, we re-tread the shorter twentieth century, this time with an eye on enacted and textual claims about the value of the politico-social directivity of science. As our historical sketch has described, scientists at the very turn of the twentieth century sought to advance science and efficiency for national and imperial benefit. Charnley’s essay in Chapter 9 explores an early example of this kind of ambition, in the form of geneticists’ attempts to breed new varieties of wheat. These varieties, it was hoped, would not only bring economic advantage to the arable sector, but would send a powerful message through recreating the national staple as a scientific, British entity. His account is unusual and valuable in that it describes ambitious aims for ordinary science in action, away from the usual suspects of scientific unions and the like. The politically and socially fertile decades of leftist science between the wars are represented in this section by two chapters. Before the inevitability of a second world war became apparent, science and invention offered a source of hope to a generation. Governance by science, it seemed, might avoid repeating the military and economic mistakes of the past. Stewart’s account in Chapter 10 of the Socialist Medical Association (SMA), ultimately leading to the inauguration of the National Health Service in 1948, is not merely of historiographic importance in its own right. It is also interesting from the point of view of scientific rhetoric: the doctors concerned specifically and explicitly linked their mission to an account of medical science itself, through the metaphor of the social body. By their lights, medical science was implicitly and necessarily turned towards enlightened governance. Sleigh’s study in Chapter 11 of the British Interplanetary Society (BIS) opens a window on a forgotten interwar group and their

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rather different scientific dreams. The BIS envisioned a very different kind of science to the socialist variety espoused by Haldane, Bernal and the SMA. Its aspirational members – young, moderately educated men in the industrial heartlands of the north – imagined it as entrepreneurial, inventive: American, even. Desmarais, meanwhile, pays careful attention in Chapter 12 to the media channels exploited by scientists during the same period. His chapter shows how the BBC retained a steadying hand on what might be portrayed as science in the public sphere, ‘upholding the disciplinary authority of the natural sciences and scientists, while avoiding negative criticism from other institutions that could jeopardise the BBC’s own standing and independence’. Through shaping, in the long term, the issues to which science was allowed to speak, and in what ways it was permitted to do so, the BBC exerted a powerful role in legitimating the rational democracy. During the war, as we have already seen, operational research exemplified a scientific means of government that was increasingly adopted by traditional wielders of power. White’s Chapter 13 in this volume explores a parallel example of the opportunities for science provided by the necessity of military organisation, but with more emphasis on the emergent rhetoric about the role of science in governance. Tavistock clinicians worked with the British army on its recruitment procedures. In so doing, she argues, they used the Second World War to extend their remit from the sick to the healthy, and to pursue their vision of group-relations in the Army qua microcosm of post-war society. Needless to say, this was not without conflict over the question of expertise and authority. What White describes is an example of the social-psychological sciences’ efforts to govern citizens of the post-war society. Anthony’s essay in Chapter 14, exploring the Social Science Research Council Survey Unit during the 1970s, is another case in point. The particular Unit study that he chooses – happiness, or well-being – may surprise readers who encountered it as a feature of the Blair regime. This phenomenon, as techno-managerial tool, turns out to have a longer history than one might have suspected. Anthony’s key figure, Mark Abrams, was an adviser to Harold Wilson’s whiteheat regime. He is important as an instance of a social scientist seeking to bring a scientific understanding to ‘middle opinion’, and in so doing to enable the intervention of science into the process of political decision making for democracy.



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Chapter 15, the section’s final chapter, returns to Hughes’s topic of the scientific elite and their self-accounting, but does so in the later century. Calver’s narrative shows how Herman Bondi saw a Popperian education for school-age children as the device that would achieve a populace that was truly literate and supportive of science. As such, it is an invaluable pre-history of the Public Understanding of Science movement, crucial to understanding the period that extends beyond the rise of Thatcher and up to the present day. The Royal Society’s belated adoption, in the Bodmer Report, of scientific education for citizenship, belonged in an era of social democracy that was already over. Notes  1 H.G. Wells, The open conspiracy: blue prints for a world revolution (London: Victor Gollancz, 1928), p. 36.  2 H.G. Wells, Anticipations of the reaction of mechanical and scientific progress upon human life and thought (London: Harper & Brothers, 1902), p. 95.  3 H.G. Wells Papers, Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (hereafter Wells Papers), W126, Sidney Webb to H.G. Wells, 8 December 1901.  4 Wells Papers, C238, Winston Churchill to H.G. Wells, 17 November 1901.  5 Michel Foucault, Power, ed. James D. Faubion (3 vols, Penguin: London, 2002), III: 201–22.  6 Stathis Arapostathis and Graeme Gooday, Patently contestable: electrical technologies and inventor identities on trial in Britain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).  7 Roy MacLeod, ‘Introduction’, in MacLeod (ed.), Government and expertise: specialists, administrators and professionals, 1860– 1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1–24, p. 1.  8 Alan Irwin and Brian Wynne (eds), Misunderstanding science? The public reconstruction of science and technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Michel Callon, Pierre Lascoumes and Yannick Barthe (eds), Acting in an uncertain world: an essay on technical democracy, trans. Graham Burchell (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); Harry Collins and Robert Evans, Rethinking expertise (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007).  9 Bruno Latour’s oft-quoted insight makes this point: ‘Science is not politics. It is politics by other means’: Bruno Latour, The pasteurization of

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France, trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 229. 10 Sheila Jasanoff, ‘Civilization and madness: the great BSE scare of 1996’, Public Understanding of Science, 6 (1997), 221–32. This study serves as an example from a large and varied body of scholarship. While this is not the place for a comprehensive survey, readers might begin by consulting Shelia Jasanoff (ed.), States of knowledge: the co-production of science and social order (New York: Routledge, 2004); Wiebe E. Bijker, Roland Bal and Ruud Hendriks, The paradox of scientific authority: the role of scientific advice in democracies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009); Mark B. Brown, Science in democracy: expertise, institutions and representation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009); Callon, Lascoumes and Barthe, Acting in an uncertain world; Stephen Hilgartner, Science on stage: expert advice as public drama (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Sheila Jasanoff, Designs on nature: science and democracy in Europe and the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Sheila Jasanoff, The fifth branch: science advisers as policymakers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Philip Kitcher, Science, truth and democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Robert A. Pielke Jr., The honest broker: making sense of science in policy and politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Sheila Jasanoff, Science and public reason (New York: Routledge, 2012). 11 Jon Agar, The government machine: a revolutionary history of the computer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), p. 427. 12 For a wide-ranging, but flawed account of technocracy, see W.H.G. Armytage, The rise of the technocrats: a social history (London: Routledge, 1965). For proposals and projects for government by experts see G.R. Searle, The quest for national efficiency: a study of British politics and political thought, 1899–1914 (London: Ashfield Press, 1971, 2nd edn 1990); Theodore Porter, ‘Statistical utopianism in an age of aristocratic efficiency’, Osiris 17 (2002), 210–27. For important studies of the role of expert knowledge and decision making in government departments see Gail Savage, The social construction of expertise: the English civil service and its influence, 1919– 1939 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996); Glen O’Hara, Governing post-war Britain: the paradoxes of progress, 1951–1973 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Patrick Joyce, The state of freedom: a social history of the British state since 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 13 Anna-K. Mayer, ‘Reluctant technocrats: science promotion in the neglect-of-science debate of 1916–1918’, History of Science, 63 (2005), 139–59.



Scientific governance: an introduction

21

14 J.D. Bernal, The social function of science (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1939), pp. 398 and 403. 15 Bernal, The social function of science, p. 398. 16 Joyce, State of freedom, pp. 10–11. 17 Beyond the immediate British context important studies include Tony Bennett and Patrick Joyce (eds), Material powers: cultural studies, history and the material turn (New York: Routledge, 2013); Andrew Barry, Political machines: governing a technological society (London: Bloomsbury, 2001); Timothy Mitchell, Rule of experts: Egypt, techno-politics, modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). We also acknowledge the intellectual debts of our insights to the work of Bruno Latour; see Bruno Latour, ‘Give me a laboratory and I will raise the world’, in Karin D. Knorr-Cetina and Michael Mulkay (eds), Science observed: perspectives on the social study of science (London: Sage, 1983), 141–69. 18 Joyce, State of freedom, p. 334. 19 The primary study is Gary Werskey, The visible college (London: Allen Lane, 1978). Also see Paul Gary Werskey, ‘British scientists and “outsider” politics, 1931–1945’, Science Studies 1 (1971), 67–83. Two recent studies are Ralph John Desmarais, ‘Science, scientific intellectuals, and British culture in the early atomic age: a case study of George Orwell, Jacob Bronowski, P.M.S. Blackett and J.G. Crowther’ (PhD dissertation, Imperial College, London, 2010); and Neil R. Calver, ‘Popper: hero of British science, 1934–1994’ (PhD dissertation, University of Kent, 2014). 20 These problems are raised for reflection in Frank M. Turner, ‘Public science in Britain, 1880–1919’, Isis, 71 (1980), 589–608. 21 See, for example, Guy Ortolano, The two cultures controversy: science, literature and cultural politics in postwar Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); William Thomas, Rational action: the science of policy in Britain and America, 1940–1960 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015). 22 We do not, however, reject the important insight that much of the declinist discourse can be read as an attempt to promote technocratic governance in Britain; see David Edgerton, Warfare state: Britain, 1920–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 191–229. 23 For the the case of medicine and nutrition see David Smith (ed.), The history of nutrition: institutional, professional, scientific and policy issues (London: Routledge, 1997). 24 Examples include Russell Moseley, ‘The origins and early years of the National Physical Laboratory: a chapter in the prehistory of British science policy’, Minerva, 16 (1978), 222–50; Russell Moseley, ‘Government science and the Royal Society: the control of the National

22

Scientific governance in Britain, 1914–79

Physical Laboratory in the interwar years’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 35 (1980), 167–93; Ian Varcoe, Organizing for science in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974); Roy MacLeod and Kay Andrews, ‘The Committee of Civil Research: scientific advice for economic development, 1925–1930,’ Minerva, 7 (1969), 680–705; Roy MacLeod and Kay Andrews, ‘The origins of the DSIR: reflections on ideas and men, 1915–16’, Public Administration, 48 (1970), 23–48; Roy MacLeod, ‘Scientists, government and organised research in Great Britain, 1914–16’, Minerva, 8 (1970), 454–7. 25 Peter Alter, The reluctant patron: science and the state in Britain, 1850–1920 (New York: Berg, 1987). 26 Philip Gummet, Scientists in Whitehall (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), p. 1. 27 Sabine Clarke, ‘Pure science with a practical aim: the meanings of fundamental research in Britain, circa 1916–1950’, Isis, 101 (2010), 285–311. 28 Timothy DeJager, ‘Pure science and practical interests: the origins of the Agricultural Research Council, 1930–1937’, Minerva, 31 (1993), 129–40; J. Austoker and L. Bryder (eds), Historical perspectives on the role of the MRC: essays in the history of the Medical Research Council of the United Kingdom and its predecessor, the Medical Research Committee, 1913–1953 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 29 Sabine Clarke, ‘A technocratic imperial state? The Colonial Office and scientific research, 1940–1960’, Twentieth Century British History, 18 (2007), 453–80; Sabine Clarke, ‘The research council system and the politics of medical and agricultural research for the British colonial empire, 1940–52’, Medical History, 57 (2013), 338–58; William K. Storey, ‘Plants, power and development: founding the Imperial Department of Agriculture for the West Indies, 1880–1914’, in Sheila Jasanoff (ed.), States of knowledge: the co-production of science and social order (New York: Routledge, 2006), 109–30. 30 David Edgerton, Science, technology and the British industrial ‘decline’, 1870–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 31 Edgerton, Warfare state. Also see Robert Bud and Philip Gummett (eds), Cold War, hot science: applied research in Britain’s defence laboratories, 1945–1990 (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1999). 32 Also see Sally Horrocks, ‘Enthusiasm constrained? British industrial R&D and the transition from war to peace, 1942–51’, Business History, 41 (1999), 422–63; Sally Horrocks, ‘Defence research and private industry in Britain: finding capacity for research in the electronics industry, 1940s–1960s’, Yearbook of European Administrative History, 20 (2008), 165–85. 33 Arapostathis and Gooday, Patently contestable; Christine MacLeod,



Scientific governance: an introduction

23

‘Reluctant entrepreneurs: patents and state patronage in new technosciences, circa 1870–1930’, Isis, 103 (2012), 328–39; Christine MacLeod and Gregory Radick, ‘Claiming ownership in the technosciences: patents, priority and productivity’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 44 (2013), 188–201. 34 We take inspiration for these questions from Steven Shapin, The scientific life: a moral history of a late modern vocation (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2008). 35 Roy MacLeod, ‘Science for imperial efficiency and social change: reflections on the British Science Guild, 1905–1936’, Public Understanding of Science, 3 (1994), 155–93. The Conjoint Board of Scientific Societies, at the Royal Society, aimed at a similar purpose. 36 Roy MacLeod, ‘The scientists go to war: revisiting precept and practice, 1914–1919’, Journal of War & Culture Studies, 2 (2009), 37–51. 37 Clarke, ‘Pure science with a practical aim’, 285–311. 38 ‘The reform of democracy’, Science Progress, 12 (1917–18), 301–9. 39 A.C. Seward, ‘Preface’, in Seward (ed.), Science and the nation: essays by Cambridge graduates with an introduction by the Right Hon. Lord Moulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917), pp. v–vii, p. vi. 40 W.H.R. Rivers, ‘The government of subject peoples’, in A.C. Seward (ed.), Science and the nation: essays by Cambridge graduates with an introduction by the Right Hon. Lord Moulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917), pp. 302–28, p. 302. 41 Roy MacLeod and Kay MacLeod, ‘The contradictions of professionalism: scientists, trade unionism and the First World War’, Social Studies of Science, 9 (1979), 1–32, p. 2. 42 MacLeod and MacLeod, ‘The contradictions of professionalism’, pp. 10–11. 43 ‘The National Union of Scientific Workers’, New Phytologist, 17 (1918), 1–2. 44 In 1969 it merged once again to form the Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs (ASTMS), a trade union once again. 45 Timothy Boon, Films of fact: a history of science in documentary films and television (London: Wallflower Press, 2008) gives another valuable perspective on the work of public-facing, socialist science. 46 Werskey, The visible college, p. 198. 47 Bernal, Social function of science, p. xiii. 48 Bernal, Social function of science, pp. 275–6, 321–4 and 345. 49 J.B.S. Haldane, Science in peace and war (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1940), pp. 5–6. 50 William McGucken, Scientists, society, and state: the social relations of

24

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science movement in Great Britain, 1931–1947 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1984). 51 For scientists in government see Gummett, Scientists in Whitehall. Also see Tom Wilkie, British science and politics since 1945 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). 52 Iain Dale, Labour Party general election manifestos 1900–1997 (London: Routledge, 2013), p. 55. 53 Peter Galison and Bruce Hevly (eds), Big science: growth of large-scale research (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992). 54 Nikolas Rose, Governing the soul: the shaping of the private self (New York: Routledge, 1989); Rhodri Hayward, Psychiatry in modern Britain (London: Bloomsbury Continuum, forthcoming 2016). Notwithstanding these excellent studies, the psychological sciences have scarcely been touched by British historians. 55 Between 1929 and 1956, numbers of professional/scientific classes increased from 18,500 to 99,000. Rodney Lowe, The official history of the British civil service: reforming the civil service, volume I: The Fulton Years, 1966–81 (London: Routledge, 2011). 56 Ortolano, The two cultures controversy. 57 Jon Agar, ‘Thatcher, scientist’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 65 (2011), 215–32. 58 See, for example, Mark Solovey, ‘Introduction: science and the state during the Cold War: blurred boundaries and a contested legacy’, Social Studies of Science, 31 (2001), 165–70. See also the other articles in this special edition.

PART I

Governance of science

1

Give me a laboratory and I will win you the war: governing science in the Royal Navy Don Leggett

Give us laboratories and we will make possible the Great War without infection, we will open tropical countries to colonization, we will make France’s army healthy, we will increase the number and strength of her inhabitants, we will create new industries.1

One of the most persistent ideas about the relationship between war and science is that war has a ratchet effect on scientific research. In an often quoted remark on the eve of the Great War, the American astronomer George Ellery Hale told President Woodrow Wilson that ‘war should mean research’.2 In his history of science in the twentieth century, Jon Agar notes that ‘Historians agree that the First World War accelerated a trend towards increased organisation in the modern world’ – including the ‘institutionalisation of planned invention’.3 This was a major transformation that science underwent in the twentieth century, but the path was rarely straightforward. As Bruno Latour reminds us, there was nothing ‘inevitable’ about how invention and research were institutionalised and governed.4 The first decades of the twentieth century were marked by the establishment of a number of new institutions and means of governing scientific research in Britain. The opening of the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in 1902 for state-sponsored scientific and engineering research established a centre of precise measurement for industry and government.5 In 1915 the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) was founded after discussions at the Board of Trade about production concerns during wartime.6 In July 1915 the Board of Invention and Research (BIR)

28

Governance of science

was formed by the Admiralty to focus the ‘scientific and inventive powers of the country’ on war work.7 The formation of a dedicated scientific board, directly connected to the naval service, could be read as part of this trend towards greater state patronage of research and the growing institution of government science, but by September 1917 the decision had been was made to abolish the BIR. Examining an institution at the intersection of science and government that was deemed to have failed in its job is a revealing enterprise. The BIR may have been short lived, but in its brief existence it provided an invaluable experiment in scientific governance. Its culture of governance shifted through its internal transformations, interactions with existing Admiralty technical departments and connections with an expanding state infrastructure for invention and research. Its membership of leading British scientists and engineers asked substantial and consequential questions: how should invention be assessed and research encouraged? What facilities would its members use? And were the existing laboratories and experimental stations adequate to achieve its objectives? The BIR was more than a government board, it was a hub in the organisation of government, academic and, occasionally, commercial laboratories. The BIR also provides an important case study for examining how the principles governing research and invention changed during the Great War. John Gusewelle notes that the BIR was initially conceived as a consulting board, but that its members increasingly wanted to encourage invention through laboratory work.8 Roy MacLeod and Kay Andrews trace this latter aspect of the BIR’s activity through its contribution to the war at sea.9 In describing the structure of the BIR and the focus of its work, these historians have paved the way to further enquiry into the changing cultures of scientific governance during the Great War. This chapter thereby focuses on the shifting cultures of governance at work in the BIR and, after 1917, the debate on governing invention and research for the Royal Navy. The Great War had an undoubtedly important role to play in the changing relationship between science and governance in the twentieth century. It provided an opportunity for scientists and inventors to make a new role for themselves within the state – one for which they fought hard. Drawing on the letter pages of The Times,



Governing science in the Royal Navy

29

MacLeod and Andrews illustrate that in 1914 scientists and science writers alike (the main example being H.G. Wells) believed that the scientific community had not been asked to co-operate in research or consult with the government and military services.10 Britain’s wartime government decided that the BIR ought to play a part in that relationship, and has left a paper trail that sheds light on the expectations that scientists, engineers, politicians and sailors had for scientific governance. This chapter follows that trail in order to evaluate precisely how the experience of war work informed those expectations and shaped post-war discussions about planned researched within the state. Governing invention and research through the BIR The BIR was established by the British Admiralty in July 1915, and was charged with ‘responsibility for organising and encouraging the scientific effort in relation to the requirements of the Naval Service’.11 MacLeod and Andrews argue that the BIR was set up for the express purpose of sifting through the thousands of inventions that the Royal Navy received following the outbreak of war in July 1914. By June 1917 it had received 41,127 submissions. Ideas ranged from barrage balloons to repel Zeppelin attack to ‘a bad smell’ that had ‘much upset’ a cleaner who believed ‘it might be bottled up and used against the Germans’.12 The establishment of the BIR in 1915 was designed to silence accusations that the government was not taking these public submissions seriously by giving them thorough consideration, and developing whatever ideas were deemed to possess potential. The BIR was formed by the First Lord of the Admiralty, Arthur Balfour, a noted philosopher and member of the Royal Society, shortly after coming into office following Herbert Asquith’s 1915 cabinet reshuffle. The organisational structure of the BIR consisted of a central committee, consulting board and six sectional sub-­ committees that specialised on specific topics: the design of airships and landships, naval construction, wireless telegraphy, oil fuel, gas warfare, explosives and schemes for submarine detection. The membership of the consulting board comprised the members of the BIR’s six sectional sub-committees. This group included William Crookes, Oliver Lodge, Ernest Rutherford, William Bragg, Robert Strutt (Lord Rayleigh), Gerald Stoney and Bertram Hopkinson.

30

Governance of science

These scientists and engineers were not paid for their work. The membership of the central committee consisted of the physicist J.J. Thomson, the chemist George Beilby, the engineer Charles Parsons and, as the sole active naval member, Vice-Admiral Richard Peirse. This group was placed under the direction of a retired naval officer, Admiral John ‘Jackie’ Fisher. Fisher was a well-known figure in Edwardian Britain. He first found notoriety for his actions in the bombardment of Alexandria in 1882, and later became known for his fervent pursuit of technological reforms in the Navy. He was the driving force behind the dreadnought battleships that dominated naval politics and AngloGerman relations in the decade prior to the Great War. He also reformed naval education to emphasise the importance of engineering and provided invaluable opportunities to technically minded naval officers during his time at the Admiralty.13 When war broke out Fisher was in retirement, but in October he was recalled to the Admiralty as First Sea Lord. Following the failed Dardanelles campaign, Fisher resigned from office and began a public war of words with his superior in the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. When Balfour took over as First Lord of the Admiralty he recalled Fisher to lead the BIR. Churchill objected to the appointment, but on 8 July 1915 he received a letter from Balfour seeking to placate him: ‘You have so often spoken to me of Fisher’s great gifts as an inventor, as well as of his general originality of mind and his consuming energy. These surely are qualities too valuable at such a time as this to be thrown away.’14 Fisher was an energetic force at the BIR. He renamed the building in Cockspur Street where it met ‘Victory House’, and wrote with Wellsian zeal about the role of invention in the war effort. On 5 July he wrote Balfour: ‘This war is going to be won by many inventions. Eleven months of war have shown us simply as servile copyists of the Germans. … Many inventions must be fostered.’15 Fisher brought this zeal to the BIR, telling the first meeting that it must ‘hustle’: ‘Celerity was the key of War, and War was the object of the Board.’ Cambridge physicist J.J. Thomson worked closely with Fisher on the central committee and was struck by his ‘pronounced personality’ and ‘extraordinary driving power’: ‘His method was that of the mailed fist rather than the gloved hand.’ In terms of governing invention and research this was a stark contrast to what Thomson had encountered in past research establishments:



Governing science in the Royal Navy

31

he spent very little time in determining which [course] should be chosen, and in his choice he seemed to be guided by instinct rather than by reason. When he made his choice, his whole energies were thrown into carrying it into effect. This was a great contrast to the practice I had been accustomed to in University matters.16

No more perfect example of Fisher’s unique leadership of the BIR could exist than when, at the inaugural meeting of the board, Fisher appealed to a room of scientists and engineers on how the BIR would proceed in the governance of invention and research with a naval example: ‘any fool could obey orders, only “Nelsons” can disobey orders, as in the classic case of the Battle of Cape St. Vincent. No one of those present could know what the “careful” man had cost the country in this war. What was wanted was Imagination – big Conceptions and quick Decisions.’17 As ambitious as Fisher’s rhetoric was about the role of the BIR in directing invention, the reality of the BIR’s work was quite different. Its standing order of ‘organising and encouraging the scientific effort in relation to the requirements of the Naval Service’ was initially limited to the assessment of ideas for invention and research submitted by members of the public.18 By June 1917 the BIR had received 41,127 submissions: that worked out at 790 submissions a week. When the BIR received a submission it was registered, numbered and delivered to the secretary, Captain Crease. He made the first judgement of the letter’s content, deciding whether to ­re-direct it to one of the sub-committees or reply to the sender with an acknowledgement that the BIR would not take up the suggestion. His contribution to the decision-making process was to weed out submissions from unreliable sources: ‘If the letter is obviously from a lunatic or contains some ridiculous proposals, or proposals which have been examined before, it is answered at once and no further action is taken.’19 The other scenarios Crease encountered were submissions in which the sender set out the terms for how they wished to be remunerated for their invention, prior to disclosing any detail about it; or, often in the case of letters from the United States and Canada, the sender requested expenses for travel to London so that they might make their proposal in person. If the secretary wanted to give a letter further consideration, it was entered onto an index card and a short description of the work was recorded. It was then passed to the assistant secretary of the

32

Governance of science

relevant sectional sub-committee, who would assess the proposal in detail. He would consult with the ‘Admiralty experts on the particular subject wherever possible’, meaning the members of the consultative committee. The number of proposals was again whittled down at this stage. If the assistant secretary still found some value in the proposal it was passed on to all the members of the sectional sub-committee. At this point the decision to investigate or reject a proposal came under the control of scientists and engineers.20 If they wanted to continue with a suggestion, the matter was taken to the central committee, where Fisher and others acted on the advice of the sub-committees. If a financial commitment was to be made, it was decided at that meeting. Under Fisher’s leadership the central committee quickly decided that the sub-committees would have ‘full authority to allocate their experimental work at their discretion to various Laboratories, Scientific Bodies, or Scientists’. The central committee would, however, be required to sanction those decisions. The only instance when the central committee’s approval was not required was if the president wanted to immediately commission work costing less than 200 shillings.21 The central committee met on a weekly basis to sanction funding decisions made by the sub-committees, make its own recommendations about the direction of research and decide whether that work should require the attention of BIR members. The number of inventions submitted to the BIR that were taken up was very small, but in the process of investigating these inventions the scientists and engineers of the BIR undertook a large amount of self-directed research. By the end of 1917, the BIR had charged over £40,000 in research expenses alone, and was predicting £55,000 by the end of the first quarter of 1918. Early work sanctioned by the central committee tended towards the research agendas of established researchers, such as Ernest Rutherford’s experiments on ways of collecting sound from water, William Bragg’s study of water-piercing shells for destroying submarines and Charles Merz’s investigation into controlling the vertical path of submarines by means of water jets.22 Governing principles and authority Why did the BIR’s illustrious membership of scientists and engineers wish to be involved in a scheme that invited submissions for inventions from members of the public? Might not their involve-



Governing science in the Royal Navy

33

ment in such a model of invention undermine their own authority? The members of the BIR held to a belief that the Board ought to do more than judge submissions from the public. From the very first meeting of the BIR the subject of its governing principles and authority was keenly debated with Fisher and Balfour. Balfour had provided explicit guidance on how the BIR would contribute to the governance of the scientific war. He began by stating that the members of the BIR should not be involved in invention. Instead ‘it would be their business, with the help of the departments concerned, to formulate practical demands for new devices’.23 Balfour saw the function of the BIR primarily in terms of advice and co-ordination. The actual work of research and invention would be left to the existing branches of the Navy and the learned societies. He anticipated that the BIR would ‘farm out’ assignments for either ‘theoretical consideration’ or ‘practical experimentation’ to ‘the various learned bodies with whom they would be in touch’. In this way BIR members were expected to manage expectations and guide the Navy through the choppy waters of invention and research. ‘No purpose’, Balfour wrote, ‘is served by informing the scientific world that the Admiralty would like very much to be furnished with a sure and easy method of destroying submarines.’24 The governing principles Balfour offered fell far short of a practical plan for governing invention and research. It was unclear precisely how the members of the BIR would collaborate with other institutions, how it would assess and co-ordinate invention and research. The First Lord stated his hope that the BIR would work with Admiralty departments and groups like the Royal Society’s War Committee, but did this mean that BIR members would be required to utilise their personal networks and the good-will of civilian scientific establishments, or was it up to the BIR to forge institutional ties and commission new laboratories? Uneasy with this ambiguity, Fisher asked Balfour to further define the BIR’s role. Writing on 5 August 1915, the First Lord restated his vision that the Board should not only ‘sift’, but ‘promote’ invention. But instead of prescribing a specific role, he called on the departments of the Navy to inform the BIR of any materiel problems that might require solution: ‘No doubt every Department in the Admiralty that deals with matériel is confronted with problems that have so far baffled solution.’ An order was issued to the fleet that explained

34

Governance of science

that the BIR had been established for the purpose of ‘co-ordination and encouragement of [the] scientific effort in relation to the requirements of the Naval Service’.25 Balfour’s vision of the BIR as a site of governance relied on the full co-operation of the Navy’s technical and operational departments. To ‘sift’ and to ‘promote’ research and invention were two distinct approaches to encouraging the scientific war. Sifting entailed examining ideas for research and invention from a wide variety of sources, making judgements about their viability and distributing funds for their completion. In this way the BIR could promote research and invention, but here lay the source of much confusion within the Board, where members preferred to understand promoting research and invention as the work of professionalised scientists and engineers, not the Navy’s technical departments. If we examine the concerns of members of the BIR it becomes clear that they wanted to do more than manage invention – to ‘sift’; they wanted to establish laboratories and experimental stations within the British state. That is to say that they wanted to institutionalise their expertise and authority, and actively govern invention and research. Balfour had neither prescribed specific practices for assessing the ideas and inventions that the BIR received, nor precisely defined how BIR members would undertake research on their viability – other than relying on the goodwill of the Navy and outside laboratories. Early meetings of the central committee reveal how its members made their own apparatus and time available to members of the sub-committees, as Parsons did in September 1915 with the offer of his parabolic mirror and investigative skills to examine a proposal for ‘Blinding Light’.26 Some scientific organisations also offered their assistance to the BIR. On 9 September 1915 the Physical Society contacted the BIR to volunteer itself ‘to carry out research work’.27 The experiences of BIR members also reveal problems in working with the Navy. The BIR’s work on submarine detection is an illustrative example of a lack of co-operation with the Navy. Thomson and Bragg initially worked to develop a hydrophone – an underwater listening device – with naval officers at the Hawkcraig establishment located north of the Firth of Forth, albeit they were working in a separate set of buildings than the naval officers. From the BIR’s viewpoint, Thomson and Bragg were working independently from the naval officers, and they only



Governing science in the Royal Navy

35

received Bragg’s reports. Thomson believed that Fisher’s opponents in the Navy had undermined the BIR and Bragg’s work. In 1917 Bragg was relocated to a new experimental station at Harwich, where he continued work on the design of a hydrophone.28 The ongoing issue for the BIR was this: if members were to conduct research, where would they do it and how would it be funded? One solution was to expand the state’s investment in laboratories. Late in 1915 the shipbuilding industrialist and philanthropist Alfred Yarrow approached the Admiralty with a plan to establish naval laboratories for physics and engineering. Yarrow had already endowed numerous scientific and engineering facilities, including a test tank at the NPL for the British shipbuilding industry. He believed that the British government needed to follow the German model of funding academic scientists to work for industry.29 Fisher placed his support behind Yarrow, adding his own note that as a member of the Royal Commission on oil fuel and oil engines he had discovered a real need for engineering research.30 Yarrow criticised the government for leaving research and invention in the hands of private business, specifically citing the NPL test tank as a scheme that should have received state funding when the NPL was conceived.31 The BIR central committee formally lent its support to Yarrow’s appeal and commissioned its sub-committees to report on the possible benefits of a Naval Engineering Experimental Station and a Naval Physics Experimental Station. Members of the BIR central committee recognised that the scheme might offend the engineering branch of the Navy, so they emphasised that the experimental stations would work only on ‘future’ schemes, and that their inception was in no way a reflection of their opinion of the current state of engineering within the Navy. The subsequent BIR report noted that Britain spent less on scientific research than Germany and America; and that where the Navy had established experimental stations these were for gunnery and torpedoes, which represented only a fraction of the increasing complexity of mechanical warfare at sea.32 Engineering members of the BIR, such as Dugald Clerk, Bertram Hopkinson, Charles Merz and William Ernest Dalby, believed a central station would be key to successful research. Dalby recognised that the naval establishment would have to be persuaded to let the BIR go in this new direction, and so went about constructing

36

Governance of science

‘interest’ in the new laboratories. He hoped that by presenting the practical tasks that members of the sub-committees undertook, ‘Mr. Balfour will see that without the provision of a laboratory such as that proposed the investigations involved in the solution of the problems put forward in the agenda cannot be properly made’. The BIR’s engineering members also asserted that the station should be led by an engineer who would be in direct contact with the Board of Admiralty. The experimental station, Dalby concluded, ‘should not be under the control of any Department of the Navy either in a direct or veiled manner’. Charles Parsons, who had developed marine turbines for the Navy and commercial sector, supported the scheme and argued that the Royal Navy should not continue to rely on private industry to innovate with any invention other than those that were commercially viable. Finally, Thomson argued that the additional experimental stations would be vital to the Royal Navy in both war and peace. This focus on the post-war was a recurring theme with scientists and engineers in the BIR, which suggests that they were acutely aware that prior to 1914 their advice and skills had not been in demand from government and the Navy.33 Governance in the aftermath of the BIR Leading a board responsible for governing invention and research ultimately failed to capture Fisher’s interest. It was not long before he grew unhappy with his role and what he perceived to be a lack of political support for the BIR from Asquith and Balfour. Referencing the work of ‘sifting’ inventions, he began to call the central committee ‘the Grand Jury’.34 By January 1916 he was once again complaining to the leader of the opposition, Andrew Bonar Law: ‘I have been put in charge of a Chemist’s Shop.’35 He did maintain the importance of finding inventions to win the war, writing in March 1917 to Maurice Hankey that it was ‘the “APPARATUS” that is wanting’. But in the same letter Fisher complained that his recent offer to return to the Admiralty as Controller of the Navy had been refused.36 Relations between the BIR and the Navy deteriorated when, in February 1917, the central committee addressed a catalogue of complaints to Balfour about a lack of co-operation, citing Thomson and Bragg’s experiences with the Navy at the Hawkcraig establishment.37 Balfour formed a committee consisting of civil servants



Governing science in the Royal Navy

37

Sothern Holland and Ross Skinner and the chemist Alfred Egerton, who had been working closely with Churchill at the Ministry of Munitions, to examine the claims. The committee’s remit was to assess the direction and application of scientific knowledge and manpower to the problems of naval warfare. Its members judged that the BIR had been a victim of novelty and Admiralty uncertainty about the role of scientists and engineers in governing invention and research. The Navy up to quite a recent date has possessed no research institution and such establishment as now exist have grown up in spite of little encouragement and the absence of any general plan. The Board of Invention and research … has not received the full support of the Admiralty … men of science willing to give their assistance have not been put in the position to get the necessary information to deal effectually with the problems put before them.38

The committee members visited the Navy’s experimental stations in Harwich and Hawkcraig and its technical establishments HMS Vernon, Excellent and Dolphin, as well as the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington and the Engineering Laboratory at South Kensington, which had undertaken a lot of work for the BIR. They also spoke to members of the central and consulting committees. Having investigated how the BIR operated, the committee came to the conclusion that it had served a useful role in screening invention, but its move into promoting research had not been an effective use of scientific manpower. It identified a number of structural faults in how scientific activity within the Navy was governed, including that ‘scientists are not in and amongst the problems they work on’ and that ‘the present constitution of the BIR does not admit of the individual driving and co-ordinating power which is so necessary in all executive undertakings’.39 The committee’s final report sympathised with the BIR, pointing to management problems rather than interpersonal ones between it and the Navy. Nevertheless, the committee recommended abolishing the BIR and replacing it with a research body based within the Navy under the direct control of the Board of Admiralty. With the decision to abolish the BIR, discussions about establishing new engineering and physical laboratories gained momentum. Civilian members of the BIR were adamant that if the BIR were abolished, the scientific projects that the Admiralty had

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c­ ommitted to should come under the control of civilian scientists, rather than naval officers. From one perspective they got their way. The Admiralty established a new engineering laboratory in Greenwich (albeit not on the scale Yarrow had proposed in 1916) and appointed Merz to the new (unpaid) position of Director of Research and Experiment. But this was a restricted and much reduced settlement, as compared to the one that the members of the BIR had hoped for. It was much more in line with the recommendations of the Holland, Skinner and Edgerton committee, which had concluded that the management of invention and research by scientists and engineers heading committees had been a failure; and that scientists and engineers had instead to come under the direct control of naval officers. In May 1918, former members of the BIR, Thomson, Rutherford and Richard Therlfall (demonstrator at the Cavendish laboratory, Cambridge), made a proposal to Merz to make ‘the service of science available for the needs of our Navy’.40 The physicists repeated their appeal for a physics experimental station, now with the hope that Merz could campaign for their scheme within the Admiralty. At the heart of their proposal was an argument for the importance of ‘pure’ science, based on its preceding applied science.41 ‘[I]t is desirable to distinguish carefully between the processes involved in scientific discovery and invention … Pure scientific research and discovery supply the principles and necessary data which serve, so to speak, as the raw material for invention.’ With this, the physicists outlined why they thought the Navy ought to be interested in ‘pure’ science: The introduction of new methods into Naval Warfare, such as the employment of submarines, raises new problems whose solution is essential for the efficiency of the Navy. These problems afford scope for the employment of physical principles and methods which have not hitherto received practical applications. Experience gained during the war has shown that such principles may require further study.

Thomson, Rutherford and Therlfall believed that their model for research could be used to suggest new lines of development and invention within industry. Once again placing an emphasis on the role of science in governing future technical developments, it was their contention that naval supremacy would not be maintained by ‘technical improvements’ but by fresh scientific projects.



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Merz took the proposal to the war cabinet, requesting approval for the ‘creation of a proper Research Institution for the Navy’. The cabinet members were agreed that existing research institutions ‘were not suitable for that required by the Navy’, that ‘research work in England was in a very confused condition’ and if they sanctioned the Admiralty proposal, they would be met with similar requests from the Ministry of Munitions and Royal Air Force, and that if the three departments conducted their own research, the potential for overlap might increase. Agreeing in principle to the need for such an institution they formed a sub-committee consisting of representatives from the Ministry of Education, Admiralty, Ministry of Munitions, War Office, Treasury, Air Ministry, NPL and Department of Scientific and Industrial Research so that a solution could be found that guaranteed that research work in branches of government was not repeated.42 Further support for the scheme came from Eric Geddes, First Lord of the Admiralty and former Deputy Director-General of Munitions Supply, in a memo to the war cabinet. Geddes strongly supported proposals for an institution which, as he understood it, would ‘survey the whole field of Physics for principles suitable for application to Naval problems and could make further researches to test whether such principles show promise of utility’. He also expressed a great belief in the power of ‘scientific method’ to govern technical developments in the Navy: ‘The discovery and adoption of an entirely new scientific method would be likely to give our Navy a more decided advantage than a mere technical improvement of well-known existing methods, and the proposed Institution should prove of the highest value in indicating scientific possibilities and in promptly carrying out investigations to test their utility.’43 To this author the utility of pure science was clear. The sub-committee appointed to examine the proposal for a physical research institution for the Navy reported back to the war cabinet in April 1919. In investigating the value of the proposal it had set out to investigate the organisation of research from the point of view of the ‘war services’ and how they could benefit from work being undertaken ‘for general, scientific, or industrial purposes’. The sub-committee agreed ‘fully’ with the aims of the proposal and ‘largely’ with the methods it outlined. The sub-committee also saw the following problems: naval officers dealing with immediate naval problems were not acquainted with what resources

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scientists had to help them. Similarly, men of science had neither the connections nor the power to ‘find useful application in naval practice’. It summed up the quandary thus: ‘For technical advance in such service as that of the Navy there is indeed first the difficulty of getting the question put, and then the problem of answering it.’ The sub-committee agreed that pure scientific research could play an important role in the future of naval power: ‘it is clear that many of the problems that are now recognised as offering promise of advance in the work of the Navy and of navigation generally lie in regions of physics, which have been relatively neglected in modern exploratory research’.44 Agreeing with the proposal in principle, the sub-committee’s recommendations seriously altered the scope and authority for a new physical research institution. Some features remained: that the director should be a physicist and that the institution should consist of a laboratory and a sea station. Rather than building a new institution, the sub-committee recommended using the station at Shandon, as it provided for both conditions. It also recommended that the central laboratory proposed in the memorandum need not be as large as the sub-committee insist: ‘much of the work there contemplated for the Naval Research Institution can, we believe, be carried out in other laboratories’. What this meant in practice was not addressed, but the report highlighted the funds available to the DSIR for research.45 In the end, the sub-committee concluded that ‘we have in view that much of the research in pure physics which the original proposal contemplated would be carried on in other laboratories and by men of science, not on the staff at Shandon or in the Navy Laboratory’.46 The same laissez-faire attitude to scientific research that had existed in the early days of the BIR remained, and Thomson, Rutherford and Therlfall’s hopes for expanding the state’s infrastructure were dashed. Conclusions The wartime experiences of how members of the BIR and the Navy governed invention and research hold an important place in the formation of structures and cultures of scientific governance in twentieth-century Britain. The BIR ultimately failed to provide a lasting resource to the Navy, partly out of a lack of co-ordination and co-operation, partly out of a failure to construct interest in its



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laboratory work and establish the potential benefit of pure research to the Navy. Nevertheless, its brief history provides insights into the visions for governing invention and research that its members sought to institutionalise. Britain’s scientists were eager to demonstrate their skills in an attempt to surpass the limited role of ‘sifting through inventions’ that Balfour had imposed on the BIR. The wider concerns of its members reveal that they wanted to do more than simply manage invention. In taking a lead in the encouragement of invention and research, members of the BIR formed plans for governing science and the network of new institutions that they proposed. This account of the struggles of scientists and engineers to govern invention and research makes two important historiographical points about science in twentieth-century Britain. First, David Edgerton’s Warfare state argues that the historiography (including the existing studies of the BIR) has been overly concerned with the role of academic scientists. Edgerton’s corrective warfare state thesis would have our attention shift from the ‘outside specialists’ to the ‘regular work’ of technical officials within the Admiralty.47 Such a study is surely required, but so too is a path toward studying the history of science and war that does not prioritise one group of investigators over another, but instead examines them side by side. In seeking to achieve balance, a history of how invention and research were governed provides a new path. Second, this account of governing science in the Royal Navy demonstrates the contingent and contested nature of the ­twentieth-century shift towards greater organisation, institutionalisation and state support for science. In the case of the BIR, whatever ratchet effect there was on scientific facilities and research spending during the war was ratcheted back down in 1918. But that should not take away from this important episode in redrawing the relationships between science, industry and the military that, overall, are so important in twentieth-century history. The history of the BIR provides insights into the visions for governing invention and research that were held by both politicians in government and members of the BIR. War ended in 1918, but these actors continued to examine new ways of organising scientific research and to explore varied approaches for extending their authority over them.

42

Governance of science Acknowledgement

I thank participants of the Wunderkammer reading group at the University of Kent and the Legacies of War seminar series at the University of Leeds for the feedback they offered on this paper. Research for this chapter began when I was a Junior Caird Fellow at the National Maritime Museum, London and was completed thanks to funding from the University of Kent. Notes  1 Bruno Latour, ‘Give me a laboratory and I will raise the world’, in Karin D. Knorr-Cetina and Michael Mulkay (eds), Science observed: perspectives on the social study of science (London: Sage, 1983), pp. 141–69, p. 159.  2 Quoted in Daniel J. Kevles, The physicists: the history of a scientific community in modern America (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), p. 116.  3 Jon Agar, Science in the twentieth-century and beyond (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), pp. 91–2.  4 Latour, ‘Give me a laboratory’, pp. 145, 158.  5 M. Eileen Magnello, A century of measurement: an illustrated history of the National Physical Laboratory (Bath: Canopus, 2000).  6 Roy MacLeod and Kay Andrews, ‘The origins of the DSIR: reflections on ideas and men, 1915–1916’, Public Administration, 48 (1970), 23–48.  7 John Fisher papers, Churchill College Archive, Cambridge (hereafter Fisher papers), FISR 7/1, ‘First general meeting of the Board of Invention and Research’, 29 July 1915.  8 John K. Gusewelle, ‘Science and the Admiralty during World War I: the case of the Board of Invention and Research’, in Gerald Jordan (ed.), Naval warfare in the twentieth century, 1900–1945: essays in honour of Arthur J. Marder (London: Croom Helm, 1977), pp. 105–17, pp. 106–7.  9 Roy MacLeod and Kay Andrews, ‘Scientific advice in the war at sea, 1915–1917: the Board of Invention and Research’, Journal of Contemporary History, 6 (1971), 3–40, pp. 18–28. 10 MacLeod and Andrews, ‘Scientific advice’, p. 5. See, for example, ‘The mobilization of invention. To the editor of the Times’, The Times (11 Jun 1915), p. 9. 11 Arthur J. Marder (ed.), Fear God and dread nought: the correspondence of Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher of Kilverstone (3 vols, London: Jonathan Cape, 1952), III: 269.



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12 MacLeod and Andrews, ‘Scientific advice’, pp. 10, 14–15; Robert Strutt, Life of J.J. Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1942), p. 180. 13 Don Leggett, Shaping the Royal Navy: technology, authority and naval architecture, c.1831–1906 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), pp. 222–3, 249–52. 14 Winston Churchill papers, Churchill College Archive, Cambridge, CHAR 13/53/10, Arthur Balfour to Winston Churchill, 8 July 1915. 15 John Fisher to Balfour, 5 July 1915, Fear God, III: 276. 16 J.J. Thomson, Recollections and reflections (London: Bell, 1936), pp. 217–18. 17 Fisher papers, FISR 7/1, 2–3, ‘First general meeting of the Board of Invention and Research’, 29 July 1915. 18 Marder, Fear God, III: 269. 19 Fisher papers, FISR 7/4a, 1, ‘Note by the Secretary and Naval Assistant on the proposed procedure of the Board’, 4 August 1915. 20 Fisher papers, FISR 7/4a, 1–2. 21 Fisher papers, FISR 7/1, 1, ‘The central committee, Board of Invention and Research’, 26 August 1915. 22 Fisher papers, FISR 7/1, 1, ‘Board of Invention and Research’, 16 September 1915. 23 Fisher papers, FISR 7/1, 2, ‘First general meeting of the Board of Invention and Research’, 29 July 1915. 24 Fisher papers, FISR 7/1, 2, ‘Board of Invention and Research’, 29 July 1915. 25 Fisher papers, FISR 7/1, 2, ‘A general meeting of the Board of Invention and Research’, 13 August 1915. 26 Fisher papers, FISR 7/1, 1, ‘Board of Invention and Research’, 16 September 1915. 27 Fisher papers, FISR 7/1, 1, ‘Board of Invention and Research’, 9 September 1915. 28 MacLeod and Andrews, ‘Scientific advice’, pp. 18–28. 29 For the institutionalisation of scientific research in Germany see David Cahan, An institute for an empire: the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt 1871–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 30 Fisher papers, FISR 7/5, 7, ‘Government research establishments’, 15 July 1916. 31 Fisher papers, FISR 7/5, 4, Alfred Yarrow, ‘Views on the effect of industrial development on emigration, and the effect of emigration on the progress of the country’, 14 July 1916, in ‘Government research establishments’, 15 July 1916. 32 Fisher papers, FISR 7/5, 6–7, ‘Naval engineering and physics research

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establishments’, quoted in ‘Government research establishments’, 15 July 1916. 33 Fisher papers, FISR 7/5, 8–10. 34 Fisher papers, FISR 7/1, 3, ‘First general meeting of the Board of Invention and Research’, 29 July 1915. 35 Fisher to Andrew Bonar Law, 7 January 1916, Fear God, III: 289–90. 36 Churchill papers, CHAR 2/92/73–4, Fisher to Maurice Hankey, 30 March 1917. 37 MacLeod and Andrews, ‘Scientific advice’, pp. 29–30. 38 Admiralty papers, The National Archives, Kew, ADM 293/8, 4–5, ‘Report on the present organisation of the Board of Invention and Research’, 21 September 1917. 39 Admiralty papers, The National Archives, Kew, ADM 293/8, 3. 40 William Wordsworth Fisher papers, National Maritime Museum, London, FHR 7, J.J. Thomson, Ernest Rutherford and Richard Therlfall to Charles Merz, 15 May 1918. 41 For the contested nature of pure and applied science at this time see Graeme Gooday, ‘“Vague and artificial”: the historically elusive distinction between pure and applied science’, Isis, 103 (2012), 546–54; Sabine Clarke, ‘Pure science with a practical aim: the meanings of fundamental research in Britain, circa 1916–1950’, Isis, 101 (2010), 285–311. 42 Cabinet papers, The National Archives, Kew (hereafter Cabinet papers), CAB 23/7/42, 3–4, ‘War Cabinet, 479’, 27 September 1918. 43 Cabinet papers, CAB 24/64/2, 2 ‘War Cabinet and Cabinet, Physical research institution for the Navy, GT-5702’, 16 September 1918. 44 Cabinet papers, CAB 24/5/41, 1–3, ‘Committee on a physical research institution for the Navy, G240’, April 1919. 45 Cabinet papers, CAB 24/5/41, 3. 46 Cabinet papers, CAB 24/5/41, 5. 47 David Edgerton, Warfare state: Britain, 1920–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 320.

2

Bureaucratic reformism and the cults of Sir Henry Tizard and operational research William Thomas

During the Second World War, the British military services established new scientific advisory posts and ‘operational research’ groups. These institutional reforms improved the ability of engineers to design equipment that best fitted the services’ needs and they improved the services’ use of that equipment as well as the planning of combat operations more generally. The reforms also subsequently took an unusually prominent place in the annals of British science policy. This fact is mainly attributable to the intense rhetorical efforts of the reforms’ proponents. Led by A.V. Hill – a Nobel laureate physiologist, Royal Society secretary and, from 1940 to 1945, Independent Conservative Member of Parliament for Cambridge University – a handful of vocal scientist reformists routinely linked calls for adjustments in the military services’ scientific bureaucracy to a much grander narrative: Britain’s hesitant but progressive exploitation of ‘science’ for the national good. The use of this narrative dates at least as far back as Charles Babbage’s well-known 1830 polemic, Reflections on the decline of science in England and on some of its causes. And, as David Edgerton has argued extensively, it has played a crucial role in the development of an influential ‘declinist’ historiography of twentieth-century Britain.1 As Edgerton has also pointed out, the actual proposals that ‘techno-declinist’ narratives girded were rarely especially imaginative. They mainly involved things like raising funding levels, improving education and training regimens, amending institutional structures, appointing more qualified people to committees and prioritising projects differently.2 These sorts of issues were such

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routine problems of governance that in reality there was little that was peculiar about them when they happened to concern ‘science’ policy specifically. Nevertheless, wartime reformists believed they could foment an anxiety that government and military authorities altogether failed to understand how to navigate a large array of exotic but essential policy issues involving science – this, even though the main source of opposition to their proposals was often other scientists. The narrative also allowed reformists to blame the failure of their proposals on the government’s traditional inattention to the proper exploitation of Britain’s scientific resources. And, once they had successfully advanced reforms, it allowed them to portray new proposals as progressive steps in further overcoming past inattention. Of course, all this rhetorical manoeuvring also masked the underlying fact that authorities generally did or did not adopt reforms based on their own assessments of a given reform’s particular merits, not in response to rhetoric. In revisiting the well-trodden history of wartime scientific advice and operational research, my aim is to demonstrate more clearly than have prior accounts how institutional reformism and rhetorical manoeuvring operated in tandem. But it is also to show that this was not a cynical coupling: wartime reformists genuinely understood their rhetoric to reflect the principles informing the provisions of their proposals. They were deeply worried that the military’s research and development projects were incorrectly prioritised and needlessly duplicated, and that equipment designs did not reflect the services’ real requirements. Thus, their accusations revolved not around established authorities’ neglect of ‘science’ per se, but around their more specific inability to ‘co-ordinate’ it properly. The sorts of problems that reformists targeted were ordinarily resolved by the services through the work of technical officers and proving grounds, and through liaison between various technical facilities and the services’ planning bodies. The novel technologies and pressing conditions of the war certainly created a need to augment this bureaucracy. Accordingly, the specific content of reformists’ rhetoric typically involved portraying as rare the skill necessary to augment the bureaucracy properly. They effectively created a personality cult around Sir Henry Tizard, rector of the Imperial College of Science and Technology and a long-standing government administrator and adviser, by repeatedly invoking his exemplary ability to co-ordinate scientific work and to integrate it



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with military planning. And, from 1941, they paid a great deal of attention to operational research groups, which not only co-ordinated scientific and military work, but subjected the formulation of the military’s tactics and equipment requirements to routine and rigorous scrutiny, or, as it was often put, to ‘scientific method’.3 This discussion should also illuminate the historiographical roots of an influential discourse that has permeated discussion of British science policy since about 1960. Tizard’s and operational research’s symbolisation of the essential virtues underlying proper science policy ensured that they became canonical references in post-war narratives of the effective integration of ‘science’ into the successful British war effort.4 Critics could thus cast subsequent alleged failures of science policy as resulting from a failure to recognise the virtues of which Tizard and operational research were emblematic. In this way, authors who told the history of the war work could claim to be recovering the rare virtue necessary for effective science policy to be consistently formulated henceforth. The pattern was set in 1961 with scientist-turned-novelist C.P. Snow’s lionisation of Tizard in his book Science and government. Subsequently, a raft of books appeared – with similarly telling titles – all narrating the halting progress of the British state’s ability to formulate a proper science policy. These included science writer Ronald Clark’s The rise of the boffins (1962) and his biography Tizard (1965), science journalist J.G. Crowther’s Statesmen of science (1965) and Science in modern society (1967), sociologist Hilary Rose and biologist Steven Rose’s Science and society (1969), policy scholar Phillip Gummett’s Scientists in Whitehall (1980), historian William McGucken’s Scientists, society, and state (1984) and journalist Tom Wilkie’s British science and politics since 1945 (1991).5 That the present volume is still concerned with the historical relationship between ‘science’ and ‘governance’ suggests the enduring appeal of this historiographical tradition. The cause of co-ordination During the First World War, young scientists A.V. Hill and Henry Tizard held leadership positions in, respectively, a Ministry of Munitions scientific group dedicated to improving anti-aircraft gunnery methods, and the Royal Air Corps’s experimental flying establishment. In their posts, each gained an appreciation of the

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difficulties involved in developing a research programme that could have immediate practical benefits. Following that war, Hill returned to academic science. Tizard, meanwhile, entered the government’s new Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) as a high-ranking civil servant, where he set up a series of committees aimed at co-ordinating civilian and military research. He left the DSIR in 1929 to become the rector at Imperial College, but remained a member, and from 1933 chairman, of the government’s Aeronautical Research Committee. Then, at the beginning of 1935, Tizard and Hill were brought together as, respectively, chairman and a member of the Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence (CSSAD), which oversaw the development of radar in the Air Ministry. Shortly thereafter Oxford physicist Frederick Lindemann, a friend and adviser to Winston Churchill (then a backbench MP), also joined the Committee, eager to goad what he and Churchill viewed as a complacent Air Ministry into a more aggressive research and development programme. Tizard warned Lindemann not to antagonise the ministry’s researchers, but Lindemann quickly began pressing projects contrary to those researchers’ opinions of their viability.6 In 1936 his behaviour prompted the resignation of Hill and another CSSAD member, Patrick Blackett, an academic physicist and budding Marxist intellectual. The CSSAD was quickly thereafter dissolved and reconstituted with them, but without Lindemann, who was replaced by Cambridge radio physicist Edward Appleton. For Tizard, Hill and Blackett, the experience cemented an idea in their minds that failing to work effectively within a bureaucracy was not only bad administrative practice, but reflected particularly poorly on scientists, who were professionally obligated to seek out and take into account relevant evidence and ideas in their work. They applied this principle not only to Lindemann, but to civil service researchers who would not collaborate with them as readily as those in the Air Ministry. Thus, in 1938, when Tizard was rebuffed by Admiralty research directors when he pressed for the creation of a new committee for co-ordinating research programmes across Britain’s three military services, he fumed that their attitude was not one that would be ‘adopted by really first-class scientists, who would be perfectly willing to try and learn from anybody’.7 Similarly, in 1939, Hill began pressing with the Royal Society’s other leaders for the Society to be tasked with co-ordinating various



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government and military research programmes around the nation’s war needs. This proposal was also resisted, not only by civil service researchers but by the heads of the state’s medical and agricultural research councils. Rather than admit that the proposals were flawed and superfluous, as opponents claimed, Hill and his allies preferred to imagine that resistance was rooted in the researchers’ entrenched mentality. When Appleton, who had just been named to lead the DSIR, offered his own criticism, one of Hill’s allies in the Cabinet Office marvelled that Appleton had become ‘plus royalist que le roi’ so soon after taking up a state position.8 Importantly, though, the military sometimes judged proposed reforms worthwhile. In November 1939 the Air Ministry assigned Tizard to the new post of Scientific Adviser to the Chief of the Air Staff. His remit to advise ‘on new applications of scientific research to the tactical requirements of the Royal Air Force’ was largely a formalisation of activities he had been undertaking as chair of the CSSAD. However, the appointment of a civilian adviser to military staff (rather than to the military’s largely civilian research establishments) was also a novel bureaucratic development. It represented an official acknowledgement of the importance of actively ­co-ordinating choices about potential development projects with assessments of the military’s most pressing equipment needs. Tizard was even assigned a staff of two military officers to help assess those needs.9 Then, shortly after Tizard’s position was created, the Air Ministry appointed radar specialist Robert Watson Watt to another new post, Scientific Adviser on Telecommunications (SAT).10 The need for scientific advisers within the Air Ministry would soon become pronounced when the Ministry of Aircraft Production was broken off from the Air Ministry following Churchill’s becoming prime minister in May 1940.11 Almost as soon as the Air Ministry had made its new appointments, however, tensions began to arise. Following the appointment of Watson Watt, Assistant Chief of the Air Staff Air Vice Marshal Sholto Douglas wrote in an office minute, ‘I gather that Sir Henry Tizard (not unnaturally) does not view with enthusiasm the appointment of a second Scientific Adviser to the Air Staff in addition to himself.’12 But the real conflict would come when the rise of Churchill brought Lindemann into a position of influence. In June 1940, Tizard, at the suggestion of Watson Watt, dropped in on an ‘informal’ Air Ministry ‘meeting on gadgets’ to which he had

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not been invited and found Lindemann discussing development priorities with the new Secretary of State for Air (and Churchill ally), Sir Archibald Sinclair. Tizard felt compelled to resign his advisory post and his chairmanship of the CSSAD. In his resignation letter to Sinclair he explained his decision in terms of maintaining proper bureaucratic arrangements for the provision of scientific advice: For some years, before the war, as well as since the war, I have had the chief responsibility for giving the Air Ministry independent advice, and have been Chairman of a strong committee appointed for the purpose. We have worked throughout in close personal touch with the Air Staff and I have made it my business to study the operational needs and difficulties of the Commands.

He continued that it was not appropriate that conflicting sources of advice should exist, so as to avoid ‘confusion’ and the possibility that technical advice would not be ‘properly co-ordinated’.13 Later that summer, he left on a mission to America to trade research advances. Hill, who was still unsuccessfully advocating new versions of the Royal Society reform proposal, was deeply disturbed by Tizard’s resignation.14 He quickly tendered his own resignation from the CSSAD and wrote to Sinclair that, while he was always at the service of the Air Ministry, ‘the present dominance of the situation by a person whom I do not trust would make it useless for me to try to exert an initiative’. Having been elected to the House of Commons in a February by-election, he also threatened to raise the issue there, while allowing that, in view of the invasion of France, ‘it would do no good to pursue the matter further at present’.15 By the end of July, France had fallen and Britain had come under aerial attack, exposing the inadequacies of the equipment being used by the British Army’s Anti-Aircraft (AA) Command to direct its guns. Hill, acting as a member of the Ministry of Supply’s new Advisory Council on Scientific Research and Technical Development, called a meeting to address the issue. One of the results of that meeting was the assignment of Blackett to a new advisory position to the Commanding General of AA Command. The post would also allow Blackett to assess the Command’s tactical requirements at first-hand and to liaise with equipment designers in the Ministry of Supply. Offering him the position, Hill made his view of the post’s significance clear: ‘You would be able to do for the AA



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Command what Tizard ought to have been given a chance to do for the RAF.’16 Meanwhile, the same summer, members of the urbane zoologist Solly Zuckerman’s ‘Tots and Quots’ dining club anonymously published a book with Penguin called Science in war. The book’s cover warned that the nation’s ‘scientific resources’ were being only ‘half used’, and in the text the authors made various recommendations for putting the nation on a more secure war footing.17 The book’s criticisms resonated in that summer’s atmosphere of recrimination, and particularly with the accusations of another polemical missive, Guilty men. In September, Hill prevailed upon, among others, the chief of the guilty men, Lord President of the Council Neville Chamberlain, to make ‘a more confident use of our scientific resources’ by adopting the Royal Society’s proposal. As an example of a forward-thinking use of scientific advice, he pointed to Blackett’s new position at AA Command.18 Hill was finally successful: a cabinet-level (but largely impotent) Scientific Advisory Committee was approved almost immediately. As Undersecretary of the Treasury Alan Barlow wrote to politician Lord Maurice Hankey, asking him to be committee chairman, ‘I think it is clear that the Government will have to set up some committee of the kind, if only to keep the scientific people quiet.’19 Hill, in any event, would not remain quiet. By 1941 he had decided to follow through on his earlier threats to make his discontent public. In January he spoke before the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee lobbying group. His address, which was reprinted in Nature in March, warned that because military research could become isolated, it was prone to ‘stagnation and complacency’, and was directed by individuals who had ‘become officials rather than working scientists’. This system stifled talented outsiders who were brought in on an emergency basis, placing them in ‘posts in which they can exert relatively little influence’, leading to ‘their ability and imagination’ being ‘imperfectly used’.20 The remarks incensed the Director of Scientific Research at the Admiralty, since, as a civil servant, he was not allowed to make a response.21 But Hill’s polemical blade was fickle. In March he praised the Admiralty in a House of Commons debate, pointing to its appointment of a new scientific advisory panel. He remarked, ‘It embodies the principle which has long been urged of co-operation between inside and outside scientists on the one side, and between scientific

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research people and naval Service staff on the other.’ He noted the existence of his own Ministry of Supply committee, and pointed again to the ‘co-operation’ between officers and ‘scientific people’ at AA Command. However, if he praised developments in the Admiralty and the Army, it was mainly to criticise the Air Ministry. The brunt of Hill’s criticism focused on the Ministry’s failure to retain Tizard, who, since returning from his North American mission in October 1940, had taken up an advisory post at the Ministry of Aircraft Production – a virtual exile in the eyes of his allies. Pointing to the dissolution of the CSSAD and the apparent plight of Tizard, Hill argued that the co-operation that had allowed radar to be effectively integrated into interception tactics during the Battle of Britain was now endangered. As a consequence, he warned, ‘We are living off our fat.’22 Yet, Hill supposed, ‘The matter could be put right now if Sir Henry Tizard could be induced to return by offering him proper facilities and proper authority in his work.’ This did not, of course, mean that Tizard was ‘like Achilles, sulking in his tent’. To the contrary, Hill took the opportunity to highlight Tizard’s unfailing virtue. He was unique, alike for his operational knowledge, for his knowledge of aeronautics and aerodynamics, for his technical and scientific knowledge, and for the complete confidence which his scientific colleagues, and, may I say, the officers of the Royal Air Force, have in him. I submit that it is intolerable that we should not be using a man of his quality to the full, and that it is disgraceful that he should be driven from his position in the [Air] Ministry.

In passing, Hill also referred to ‘operational research’, the importance of which was ‘not yet fully realised’.23 This was perhaps the first time any strong significance had been ascribed to the subject. By the autumn it would become a topic of substantial practical importance, as well as much animated discussion. The cause of operational research From 1938 the term ‘operational research’ was used intermittently by radar researchers to distinguish work done to integrate it into combat operations from ordinary work done in the research establishments.24 When Hill referred to it in March 1941 he took it to mean much the same thing. To him, it involved working with ‘new,



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untried equipment which is going through its teething troubles’, ensuring that its trial in combat was properly planned and anticipating ‘the way in which the enemy will counter its use’. According to Hill, ‘This reaction between the pure research people on the one side, and those doing the business in the air or with the guns on the other side, is of the utmost importance in the type of war in which we are now engaged.’25 Thus, in his view operational research was significant essentially because it was a continuation of the kind of co-ordination already personified by Tizard. However, the concept of operational research was at that time in the middle of a significant change arising from a series of bureaucratic accidents. In September 1940 Watson Watt’s advisory position had been transferred to the Ministry of Aircraft Production, but the Air Ministry was eager to retain close contact with him, and to have him study the RAF’s radar requirements. Therefore, in early 1941 he was granted three ‘Operational Research Officers’ (OROs) who would liaise on his behalf with the Fighter, Bomber and Coastal Commands of the RAF to help assess those requirements.26 This was not a major move, since two of the three OROs were already liaising between the RAF and the Telecommunications Research Establishment. And, as valuable as their work was to Watson Watt, it was already highly valued by the RAF officers running the commands. Sholto Douglas, now in charge of Fighter Command, found the scientists working for him so useful that he tried to prevent Watson Watt from taking charge of them.27 By May 1941 the apparent effectiveness of the ORO system in informing both his advice and operational planning had inspired Watson Watt to make it the basis of a new proposal that would elevate him to the post of Scientific Adviser to the Air Council (SAAC, ‘despite the humourists’). This post would give him authority to advise on the implementation of not only radar, but all technologies in the RAF.28 The proposal received Tizard’s endorsement, and in June 1941 appeared to be on its way to being implemented, before being held up by criticisms from the Permanent Under Secretary for Air.29 Meanwhile, in January, A.V. Hill had recommended through his Scientific Advisory Committee that a scientific adviser, akin to Blackett at AA Command, be installed at Coastal Command to help implement radar in hunts for German submarines.30 Perceiving a threat to his own advisory role, Watson Watt instead recommended that Blackett himself be seconded to both the RAF and

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the Admiralty to work on anti-submarine tactics, thus leaving his own radar-oriented bailiwick unchallenged.31 This proposal was accepted and Blackett joined RAF Coastal Command in March. However, Blackett soon began to gather a group of scientists around him and Watson Watt’s ORO, chemist John Kendrew. This ‘Operational Research Section’ was still ostensibly under Watson Watt’s control, but its work quickly began to inform Blackett’s work as a general adviser on tactics as much as it informed Watson Watt’s work as a technical adviser on radar.32 Then, in July 1941 Tizard recanted his endorsement of Watson Watt’s scheme, based upon a more ‘mature consideration’ of what operational research was and what function it played. Sensing that the subject needed clarification, he had already asked the Air Ministry to supply him not only with all instances of ‘the type of operational research that is now being carried out at the Commands and by the various sections of the Air Staff’, but also with ‘the operational statistics that are now being collected in any form’. Although his survey remained incomplete, Tizard felt confident enough to say that ‘the object of operational research is to endeavour by scientific study of the results of operations against the enemy to arrive at methods for using existing military equipment in the most economic and effective way, and to guide future technical and operational policy’. In other words, operational research could entail research in support of planning combat operations, regardless of whether any particular equipment was directly at issue. This definition led Tizard to the conclusion that operational research ‘must … cover a wide field and it should be, and no doubt is, regarded as a normal function of a well organised force’. Thus, its direction ought to ‘be entrusted to high officers of the Royal Air Force and not to civilians or independent scientific men’. This meant that Watson Watt should not have control over it. However, Tizard argued, since ‘the work itself demands a scientific training and outlook’, operational research staff ought to be recommended by the research leaders at the Ministry of Aircraft Production.33 Following Tizard’s clarification of the meaning of operational research, events proceeded quickly within the RAF, and an official, well-organised operational research bureaucracy was established by the end of September.34 Finding his staff essentially stolen from him, Watson Watt complained to the Deputy Chief of the Air Staff, who informed him that the ‘domestic rela-



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tions of the various authorities’ among the scientists and engineers were not his responsibility.35 Meanwhile, public critics of the state organisation of science were immediately energised by the events surrounding operational research. In September Hill spoke at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BA) in a session dedicated to the subject of ‘Science and government’. In his speech, ‘The use and misuse of science in government’, he lauded recent developments, praising Tizard’s work in particular. Hill approved that he was ‘at last in a position to give his unique knowledge and experience unhindered to the scientific needs of air warfare’. Tizard had not actually changed positions since March, when Hill had found his placement so appalling. Naturally, Hill was not uniformly optimistic, still seeing room for the creation of new advisory positions and for generally more contact between ‘scientists’ and the ‘users’ of the equipment that they produced.36 Hill was joined at the BA meeting by the crystallographer, Marxist intellectual and Tots and Quots member J.D. Bernal, who gave an address titled ‘The function of the scientist in government policy and administration’. The previous year Bernal had been one of the main authors of Science in war. Now, like Hill, he praised developments in the organisation of science toward the goals of the war, mentioning the importance of operational research. He was particularly keen to urge that the virtues of the wartime organisation of research should not be forgotten when peace came. ‘With such an integrated body of information, research, development, execution, and control’, he observed, ‘we have the backbone of a scientific administration, one which is scientific through and through and not merely by the addition of a few eminent scientists.’37 Around the same time, operational research began to spread quickly beyond the RAF. In October 1941 Blackett wrote a report titled ‘Scientists at the operational level’, which laid out the new conception of operational research for a broad military audience.38 In December he moved to the Admiralty to found a new group there. In May 1942 the War Office appointed the director of the National Physical Laboratory, physicist Charles G. Darwin, to double as the Scientific Adviser to the Army Council.39 In the summer of 1942 Tizard and his allies began holding meetings, which were in large part dedicated to strategising the further expansion of operational research. However, this was now pushing against a door

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that was already partway open.40 Over the course of 1942 the RAF began to expand its operational research sections into its overseas commands, the Royal Canadian Air Force adopted an operational research group and the British Army broadened its operational research effort beyond AA Command.41 The same year, the United States Navy created analogous ‘operations research’ groups to study mine and anti-submarine warfare, and the U.S. Army Air Forces began to establish a network of ‘operations analysis’ sections that same autumn.42 Initially, critics regarded operational research as merely a favourable development in their now-established narrative of their struggle to integrate science effectively into the war. In early 1942, for instance, Tizard, who was usually content to work through ordinary bureaucratic channels, addressed the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee, praising the ‘tactics’ of Britain’s scientific war effort while criticising its ‘strategy’, i.e. its overarching organisation. He noted, ‘The present Government and Parliament attach a value to the help and guidance of scientists that no previous Parliaments have ever done.’ He recognised the progress made in the RAF and noted that the cause had ‘spread to other Departments. But’, he insisted, ‘not yet enough.’43 Speaking a few weeks later, against the backdrop of the fall of Singapore, Hill struck a more sour note in the House of Commons, blaming events on poor planning and co-ordination. ‘Lip service’, he claimed, ‘is often paid to science and engineering, but these are still regarded too often only as the handmaidens and not as the equal partners of statecraft and generalship.’ He praised developments at AA Command, in the RAF and the Admiralty so as to turn his polemics on the War Office, warning that until its leaders proved willing ‘to learn from the technicians … we shall remain in the soup’.44 Behind the scenes, Tizard was already advising the War Office on whom it should appoint as its scientific adviser.45 Gradually, the success of operational research helped to temper the polemics of reform. Throughout the spring and summer of 1942, Hill continued to demand a more deeply integrated and formalised scientific bureaucracy.46 In a March 1942 letter to Tizard, he explained that he simply did not ‘trust in rather casual cross linkages by “co-ordination” or “liaison”’.47 However, as the network of operational research expanded, reformists began to regard it as satisfying their demands. The burden now increasingly fell on scien-



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tists to live up to its example. In March 1943, for instance, Tizard wrote to Zuckerman, who was stationed as an independent scientific adviser in North Africa, warning him, ‘You might be exposing yourself to the criticism which is now levelled with some justice against scientific men, namely that you are getting away from science and making recommendations on strategy and tactics.’ Tizard, of course, did not feel that these areas were out of bounds but, rather, that Zuckerman simply needed to ‘put a little more science’ into his work.48 In May, Zuckerman, now well schooled, wrote to Tizard explaining the principles underlying the proper integration of operational research staff into a field command.49 Finally, in the summer of 1943, Tizard brought his bureaucratic reformism full circle, arguing that the Air Ministry should appoint a ‘full time operational research adviser’.50 In November Imperial College physicist George Thomson was appointed as Scientific Adviser to the Air Ministry.51 The scientific advisory and operational research network that now stretched coherently across the three military services would be perpetuated in the post-war period. Post-war rhetoric and the discourse of science policy With the formalisation of a scientific advisory and operational research system running across Britain’s three military services, even the most obdurate scientist reformists at last had reason to believe that they had succeeded in evangelising their views about the need for properly integrating ‘science’ into the war effort. And, from 1943 the rhetoric surrounding Henry Tizard and operational research remained subdued until the end of the war, when it experienced a brief resurgence. This resurgence was fuelled not by Hill, who had always been motivated by the emergency of the war, but primarily by scientists with a broader intellectual interest in the place of science in society. For instance, in a November 1945 address at the Royal Institution, Bernal pointed to the successful wartime experience of operational research as heralding the arrival of planned science and the planned society. He went so far as to suggest that the moment represented an entirely new phase of human history, as important as when civilisation usurped evolution as the primary driver of change in the human condition.52 Soon, however, complaint once again became the dominant register. In 1947 Blackett, speaking as president of the Association

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of Scientific Workers, decried a post-war ‘counter offensive of the administrative civil service’ against the wartime incursion of ‘technologically educated but sometimes rather uncouth outsiders’. As an example, he criticised the Ministry of Fuel and Power for its policies during the cold and snowy winter just passed, arguing that ‘a technologically informed Ministry with an Operational Research Section’ would never have been so short sighted. But he naturally found a silver lining in Henry Tizard’s then-recent appointment to both the new Advisory Council on Scientific Policy and the Defence Research Policy Committee, which he cited as ‘decisive evidence’ of the failure of the counter-offensive he had detected. He recalled how Tizard had called a conference ‘the day after a heavy blitz, where he assembled fighter pilots and Air Marshals, radar designers and administrators to thrash the problem of the defence of London’. Observing that this was ‘the spirit in which the tasks of peace should, but are not always, being tackled’, he looked to the future with guarded optimism.53 After a few years this line of rhetoric returned into dormancy before re-emerging in the 1960s. When it did, Tizard’s career and wartime operational research took their places as way stations rather than turning points in the history of the halting progress of British science policy. However, because they remained symbols of the virtues underlying the formulation of appropriate science policy, they retained the ability to spark controversy. Thus, when Snow published Science and government, detailing the pre-war and wartime conflicts between Tizard and Lindemann, rehashing old battles became not only a matter of clarifying the historical record but also one of whether the principles of proper governance were adequately understood. When physicist R.V. Jones, a defender of Lindemann’s, took a soft position on whether Britain could permit the existence of a ‘scientific overlord’, Blackett strenuously objected: You give no hint as to where in the Government machine these men should be placed, or what authority they should have, and over what departments or organisations. You mention no formal relation with other scientists but do make the surprising remark ‘Provided that the scientist concerned does not isolate himself from the experience and opinions of his fellow scientists …’ You mention no obligation to consult, to do or not to do seems to be left to the overlord’s initiative.



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These were pressing matters for him, because he was at that time in consultation with a committee meeting under Cabinet Secretary Burke Trend to consider a new round of civil service reforms.54 For Blackett, only statutory specificity could help to ensure that any new bureaucratic machinery would not be dependent on the choice of appointees to ensure that it embodied the qualities of Tizard and not Lindemann. In time, the Trend Committee would itself become a way station in the annals of British science policy. However, the problem with a history populated by iconic incidents is that it always takes them to be pivotal moments turning on the principals’ understanding of the most basic ideas that supposedly distinguish proper from improper policies. In doing so, they create a highly selective portrait of what policies have actually existed, how they have shifted and what their actual consequences have been. Rehearsing a version of the standard war narrative in 1974, Solly Zuckerman explicitly allowed that his was a ‘small picture’ and ‘obviously only one man’s point of view’, and therefore had ‘to be seen against a background of many others’, which would, ‘for example’, take into account the full ‘mass of scientific advisory committees of one sort of another’ that had proliferated during the war.55 He was correct. While the critical account I present here may clarify the issues involved in the construction of a more satisfactory history and historiography of science policy, ultimately a much more systematic programme of empirical historical research will be required. Notes  1 David Edgerton, Science, technology and the British industrial ‘decline’, 1870–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); David Edgerton, Warfare state: Britain, 1920–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).  2 Edgerton, Science, technology and the British industrial ‘decline’, p. 202.  3 See William Thomas, ‘The heuristics of war: scientific method and the founders of operations research,’ British Journal for the History of Science, 40 (2007), 251–74.  4 See especially J.G. Crowther and R. Whiddington, Science at war (London: HMSO, 1947).  5 Ronald W. Clark, The rise of the boffins (London: Phoenix House, 1962); Ronald W. Clark, Tizard (London: Methuen & Co., 1965);

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J.G.  Crowther, Statesmen of science (London: Cresset, 1965); J.G. Crowther, Science in modern society (London: Cresset, 1967); Hilary Rose and Steven Rose, Science and society (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1969); Philip Gummett, Scientists in Whitehall (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980); William McGucken, Scientists, society and state: the social relations of science movement in Great Britain, 1931–1947 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1984); Tom Wilkie, British science and politics since 1945 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991).  6 See Clark, Tizard, pp. 126–7, on Tizard’s warning, and chapter 6 on Lindemann’s goals for the committee.  7 On Tizard’s proposal, see a brief discussion in McGucken, Scientists, pp. 168–9; and material in Cabinet papers, The National Archives, Kew (hereafter Cabinet papers), CAB 21/711; the quote is from a memorandum by Edward Bridges, 14 January 1939.  8 On Hill’s proposal, see McGucken, Scientists, chapters 7 and 8. Quote from Cabinet papers, CAB 21/1163, memorandum by Wing Commander William Elliot to Edward Bridges, 30 October 1939.  9 Records of the Air Ministry, The National Archives, Kew (hereafter Air Ministry), AIR 14/98, memorandum from HQ Bomber Command, 12 November 1939. 10 On Watson Watt’s appointment, see material in Air Ministry, AIR 2/3181. 11 The Ministry of Aircraft Production and the Ministry of Supply housed the research establishments that had previously been part of the Air Ministry and War Office, respectively. The Ministry of Supply had been detached in 1939. 12 Air Ministry, AIR 2/3181, minute from Douglas to CAS, 23 December 1939. 13 Clark, Tizard, pp. 233–4. The CSSAD had become the Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Warfare in 1939. 14 A new proposal had just been submitted to Churchill: Cabinet papers, CAB 21/829, W.H. Bragg to Churchill, 10 June 1940. 15 Papers of Sir Henry Tizard, Imperial War Museum, London (henceforth Tizard Papers), HTT 58, A.V. Hill to Secretary of State, 21 June 1940. 16 Papers of Patrick Blackett, Baron Blackett of Chelsea, Royal Society Library, London (hereafter Blackett Papers), PB/9/1/52, letter from Hill to Blackett, 12 August 1940. 17 Science in war (London: Penguin 1940). On the book’s publication, see Solly Zuckerman, From apes to warlords (London: Hamilton, 1978), pp. 109–12.



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18 Cabinet papers, CAB 21/829, letter from Hill to Chamberlain, 21 September 1940. 19 Cabinet papers, CAB 21/829, letter from Alan Barlow to Lord Hankey, 18 September 1940. 20 A.V. Hill, ‘Science, national and international, and the basis of ­co-operation’, Nature, 147 (1941), 250–2. 21 Admiralty papers, The National Archives, Kew (hereafter Admiralty papers), ADM 1/11577, minute by C.S. Wright, 21 March 1941. 22 Hansard, 369 (11 March 1941), 1226–30. 23 Hansard, 369 (11 March 1941), 1226–30. 24 Harold Larnder, ‘The origin of operational research’, Operations Research 32 (1984), 465–75, p. 471. 25 Hansard, 369 (11 March 1941), 1226–30. 26 Air Ministry, AIR 2/8587, minute by Watson Watt, 7 January 1941. 27 Air Ministry, AIR 2/8587, letter from Douglas to Under Secretary of State, Air Ministry, 27 January 1941. 28 Air Ministry, AIR 2/5352, ‘Memorandum on operational research’, unsigned and undated; letter from Watson Watt to VCAS, 23 May 1941. 29 Tizard Papers, HTT 302, Memorandum from Tizard to VCAS and CAS, 17 July 1941. 30 Air Ministry, AIR 19/148, letter from Hankey to Sinclair, 6 January 1941. 31 Air Ministry, AIR 19/148, memorandum from Watson Watt to Private Secretary to the Secretary of State, 24 January 1941; minute from Watson Watt to Private Secretary to the Secretary of State, 28 January 1941. 32 The Operational Research Section’s first report, for instance, had little to do with radar: Air Ministry, AIR 15/731, ORS Coastal Command, Report 125, ‘Activity of enemy aircraft in the western approaches in May, 1941’. 33 Tizard Papers, HTT 302, Memorandum from Tizard to VCAS and CAS, 17 July 1941. 34 For a fuller account, see William Thomas, Rational action: the sciences of policy in Britain and America, 1940–1960 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015). 35 Air Ministry, AIR 2/5352, letter from Watson Watt to DCAS, 3 October 1941; letter from DCAS to Watson Watt, 6 October 1941. 36 A.V. Hill, ‘The use and misuse of science in government’, The Advancement of Science, 2 (1942), 6–9. 37 J.D. Bernal, ‘The function of the scientist in government policy and administration’, The Advancement of Science, 2 (1942), 14–17. 38 P.M.S. Blackett, ‘Scientists at the operational level’ [1941], reprinted in

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Blackett, Studies of war, nuclear and conventional (London: Oliver & Boyd, 1962), pp. 171–6. 39 Records of the War Office, National Archives (hereafter War Office), WO 291/1301, ‘Operational research in the British Army 1939–1945’, October 1947, 1–2. Darwin soon found himself overburdened and was replaced by his deputy, physicist Charles Ellis. 40 Minutes of these meetings can be found in Tizard Papers, HTT 298. For brief discussion, see Edgerton, Warfare state, pp. 163–4. 41 Air Ministry, The origins and development of operational research in the Royal Air Force (London: HMSO, 1963). 42 See Erik P. Rau, ‘The adoption of operations research in the United States during World War II’, in Agatha C. Hughes and Thomas P. Hughes (eds), Systems, experts and computers: the systems approach in management and engineering, World War II and after (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), pp. 57–92. 43 Tizard Papers, HTT 572, Speech by Tizard at a Parliamentary and Scientific Committee luncheon, 3 February 1942. 44 Hansard, 378 (24 February 1942), 125–32. 45 War Office, WO 32/10330, Tizard, memorandum, 25 February 1942. 46 Chronicled in McGucken, Scientists. 47 Tizard Papers, HTT 57, Hill to Tizard, 1 March 1942. 48 Tizard Papers, HTT 360, Tizard to Zuckerman, 30 March 1943. 49 Tizard Papers, HTT 322, Zuckerman to Tizard, 22 May 1943. 50 Air Ministry, AIR 20/3145, letter from Tizard to Sir Charles Portal, 15 July 1943. 51 Air Ministry, AIR 20/3145, A.W. Street, office memorandum, 26 November 1943. 52 J.D. Bernal, ‘Lessons of the war for science’ [1945], reprinted in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series A, 342 (1975), 555–74. 53 Blackett Papers, PB/5/1/4/19, Blackett, AScW presidential address, 24 May 1947. 54 Blackett Papers, PB/9/1/64, Blackett to Jones, 4 January 1963. 55 Lord Zuckerman, ‘Scientific advice during and since World War II’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series A, 342 (1975), 465–80, esp. 473.

3

The evolving role of the Chief Scientific Adviser to the Cabinet, 1940–71 James Goodchild

The office of the British Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser (GCSA) originated from prime ministerial preference during the Second World War and slowly transformed into a necessary facet of scientific governance that now heads an extensive network of scientific advice. The nature of the role, however, has been in perpetual transformation, essentially because of the evolving domestic circumstances and modern global challenges. It was therefore necessary that respective GCSAs should channel their personal and institutional scientific interests through networking and bureaucratic acumen. The GCSA’s role was one of contingent and contextual variability. Appreciation of the reasons why can be understood through the early history of the GCSA’s appointment. This chapter briefly examines the evolution of the position of GCSA through the experiences of its pioneering personalities – Frederick Lindemann, Henry Tizard and Solly Zuckerman – and explores how each envisaged his respective responsibilities. Lindemann famously served Winston Churchill and no other master; Tizard served only a Labour administration in an unofficial capacity as GCSA; Zuckerman advised both Labour and Conservative governments officially as GCSA from 1966. As this chapter demonstrates, each in his own way contributed to the position of GCSA that slowly evolved to become integral to British scientific governance and to the role that is held in such high regard today. Compared with politicians, whose powers have been well defined by law or custom, the term ‘adviser’ lacks (both in political practice and in political studies) a well-established meaning – essentially because of the unofficial status of many advisers and the greater

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variety of their roles.1 Yet unofficial status was a hallmark of the first two GCSA pioneers. Tizard was ‘the first and the greatest of the back-room boys’, who had been ‘the more or less acknowledged scientific adviser to pre-war governments’.2 During the Second World War this role was undertaken by Lindemann. He had many critics over the years, mainly because of his unique relationship with Churchill, yet it was due to their unorthodox connection that the very idea of the position and role of GCSA was unofficially created. Only when Zuckerman was elevated to the pinnacle of governmental scientific advice did the position and role of GCSA warrant official civil service recognition. Zuckerman’s career has since been evoked as the preferred role model of the position.3 This chapter further develops that sentiment, yet, at the same time, importantly confirms that Zuckerman became the model GCSA because of the experiences of his two unofficial predecessors – a fact that Zuckerman knew only too well. Unofficial GCSA pioneers The exceptional friendship between Churchill and Lindemann (fondly known as ‘the Prof’) featured in many war narratives and biographies, and has left a dichotomous legacy.4 Always fascinated by science, Churchill highly appreciated the Prof’s ability to make technical matters and statistics quickly intelligible.5 Lindemann’s position as Churchill’s ‘Grey Eminence’ caused great chagrin, however, before, during and long after the war – not least because of the friction their partnership created in the ever-growing scientific community advising the service ministries, which lasted for two decades from the 1930s.6 Nevertheless, Churchill was the first British prime minister to have a scientist as one of his closest advisers and to introduce an enduring ‘scientific method’ into the highest echelons of politics.7 This is important and should not be forgotten, irrespective of the personal reasons behind Churchill’s choice. Lindemann was the principal ambassador of science within the innermost circles of government at a time when science became integral to the destinies of nations. This assured other men of science that their language and reasoning would be understood within those circles.8 Lindemann (Cherwell hereafter) left Whitehall with Churchill, following the Labour victory in the general election of July 1945. Although it could be argued that science was not centralised under



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Cherwell, his exit from Whitehall temporarily severed centralised scientific advice. It was not until November 1945 that Herbert Morrison, as Lord President of the Council, established the Committee on Future Scientific Policy (with Alan Barlow as chairman) to ‘consider the policies which should govern the use and development’ of British scientific manpower and resources for the next decade.9 Such considerations significantly resembled proposals Tizard had previously presented to the Chiefs of Staff.10 The ‘Barlow Committee’ seriously considered continuing the GCSA role in the form of ‘one man assisted by a scientific staff’ but, deeming it ‘neither necessary nor desirable to designate any one man as Chief Scientific Adviser to His Majesty’s Government’, agreed instead upon a committee comprising six official and six independent scientists to serve the Attlee administration.11 The result was the Advisory Committee of Scientific Policy – a ‘benign recommendation’ and ‘impotent’ body created to advise Morrison toward ‘formulation and execution of Government scientific policy’.12 There was therefore no GCSA under Attlee. Prompted by Tizard’s appeal for scientific staff attached (but ‘not overburdened by administration’) to the Chiefs of Staff was the formation of the Defence Research Policy Committee (DRPC).13 Replacing a 1945 committee (chaired by Cherwell) that had dealt with the scientific functions of the Deputy Chiefs of Staff Committee, the DRPC formulated British defence scientific policy, and served as the ‘gatekeeper’ of military programmes rooted in science and technology (S&T) research and development (R&D).14 Believed to be the only scientist for the job, Tizard officially became Chief Scientific Adviser (CSA) to the newly created Ministry of Defence (MoD) in November 1946.15 As Tizard was chosen to chair both of the newly formed parallel civil and defence scientific advisory committees, and because he had direct access to Attlee when required, by the time the Advisory Council for Scientific Policy (ACSP) was formed (January 1947), he had reached the highest status in the Civil Service of any previous scientist and was GCSA in all but name. Although the DRPC was advisory and had no official executive authority, its potency derived from the fact that any conclusions approved by the Chiefs of Staff and the MoD could not be revoked without the DRPC’s express agreement.16 Tizard’s extensive and undefined scientific remit, however, did not include nuclear power – essentially due to irrational secrecy. Atomic research and e­xperimental work had begun at

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Harwell in late 1945, after which, and following the precedent set by Churchill during the war, matters of atomic research were never formally brought before Cabinet during the entire Attlee administration. Such matters were instead debated by the secret Cabinet committee, GEN 75 (renamed GEN 163 in January 1947), which then directed atomic scientific research. Although the Minister of Defence, A.V. Alexander, was cognisant of GEN 163, Tizard, his CSA, was not. Tizard undertook his formidable task as unofficial GCSA with a heavy heart. As the services and the scientists would accept no one else, he had been drawn without much enthusiasm, and with some reluctance, into the complexities of politics from which he had long escaped for the tranquil cloisters of Oxford.17 Tizard therefore set plans in motion, as early as October 1949, for a smooth succession. He insisted that his successor should be a man acceptable to the Chiefs of Staff, as well as carry weight in the scientific world and possess ‘actual working experience of Service problems’. Tizard recommended ‘by far the best’ man – Sir John Cockcroft.18 Such a successor would perhaps have placed atomic matters into the sphere of scientific policy. Cockcroft, however, was determined to stay at Harwell at least until the Windscale project was operational (expected by September 1952).19 Tizard therefore recommended Frederick Brundrett (a founding member of the Royal Naval Scientific Service) to act as his DRPC deputy and Zuckerman as ACSP deputy in the meantime.20 It was also arranged for Cockcroft to sit on the DRPC by mid-1950. Tizard’s resignation plans were arranged five months before the Attlee administration’s majority fell to eight, and two years before the 1951 election restored Churchill (and Cherwell) to Downing Street.21 Cherwell believed that his main purpose upon returning to office (aside from advising Churchill generally) was to secure the creation of an independent organisation for atomic energy. The Waverley Committee’s White Paper, published on 10 November 1953, established the Atomic Energy Authority (AEA) and Cherwell resigned directly afterwards – although he remained Churchill’s unofficial adviser for a few months more. There had been no repetition of his wielding the over-quoted ‘power without responsibility, power greater than that exercised by any scientist in history’.22 There were, however, two important factors to Cherwell’s brief return as unofficial GCSA. From the start, he had no time for the ACSP,



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and had been partly responsible for Cockcroft’s decision to remain at Harwell rather than accept Tizard’s dual responsibility of chairing both the DRPC and ACSP.23 Instead, Cockcroft accepted the role of chairman of the DRPC on a part-time basis, knowing that Brundrett would deputise. Alexander Todd, a Cambridge professor of chemistry, took the chair of the ACSP, also on a part-time basis.24 The Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) also had executive powers of scientific governance in the civil sphere at this time, with formation of the Scientific and Industrial Research Council under the August 1956 Department of Scientific and Industrial Research Act.25 These arrangements separated civil and defence scientific advice, the only connection being Cockcroft, who, as director of Harwell, still sat on the ACSP.26 Secondly, although Churchill was unwilling to do without his personal adviser, his peacetime administration required much less of the Prof’s special type of scientific advice.27 Only in economics and atomic energy were Cherwell’s skills required with familiar alacrity, and yet, ironically, it was because of a persistent difference of opinion on atomic policy that Cherwell officially split with Churchill in 1953.28 Through pursuit of a political goal, Cherwell had, in effect, eradicated any possibility of succession for the role of unofficial GCSA that he himself had created. Both he and Tizard had served as a necessary bridge between the civil and defence spheres during the crisis periods of the Second World War and the early Cold War. With that bridge removed, the separation of scientific advice for the civil and defence spheres continued throughout the remaining eleven years of Conservative power, and for two years into Harold Wilson’s administration. As chairman of the DRPC, Cockcroft was MoD CSA by proxy, until 1954 when he was replaced by Brundrett, a man who saw himself as a ‘professional Civil Service scientist’ and who was indeed much more of an administrator than a scientist.29 Brundrett in turn was replaced by Zuckerman in 1959.30 Although Todd remained chairman of the ACSP through to its cessation in 1964, some contemporaries believed that Todd’s part-time appointment inevitably restricted his scope for contact with ministers and that Todd was ‘more a commentator on, rather than a leader of, scientific policy’.31 Historians have, on the whole, concurred that the ACSP lost its teeth following the demise of the dual role played by Tizard as unofficial GCSA; that Cherwell’s return destroyed Tizard’s system of scientific co-ordination; and that an integrated

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science policy had become one of the post-war holy grails – much dreamed of, but never found.32 GCSA role model The minister–adviser relationship (in the style of Churchill and Cherwell) was restored by Zuckerman in his role as CSA to the respective Ministers of Defence during the first half of the 1960s: Harold Watkinson, Peter Thorneycroft and Denis Healey.33 It appears to have been Thorneycroft’s political preference, as much as anything else, that inspired the superiority of the influence of individual scientific advice over that which was committee driven, for he requested that Zuckerman should accompany his reports with a brief statement of his personal views as CSA.34 Zuckerman was, arguably, the greatest pioneer of the GCSA role, not only because of political circumstance but also due to his remarkable ability as a bureaucrat-scientist. During the Second World War he had been one of the very few research scientists allowed into the inner circles of government planning, after which he served on many post-war committees that focused extensively on wedding science to statecraft. Importantly, Zuckerman’s wartime experiences and contacts placed him within significant Cold War spheres of influence and made him the ideal candidate (along with William Penney) to advise the Prime Minister on nuclear policy (for both defence strategy and disarmament) – work that ‘involved long and interesting discussions with the Americans and Russians’.35 For this reason among many, Zuckerman became the first scientist to be officially elevated to the solitary position of GCSA, from May 1966, with responsibility to co-ordinate all government policy on the strength and use of its scientific resources. Zuckerman was publicly named ‘CSA to the Secretary of State for Defence and to the Government’ as a whole with the change of government in 1964. Although this move was viewed by contemporaries as a sideways shift (essentially due to Zuckerman’s opposing the ‘rundown’ of Britain’s carrier fleet), he nonetheless thereafter made the role his own; so much so that he was frequently asked to advise respective prime ministers long after he had retired from public office.36 Indeed, Zuckerman called himself the ‘government’s continuity man in Whitehall’ and was permitted to keep a room in the Cabinet Office until 1984,



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from where he unofficially provided scientific advice to successive prime ministers.37 Alan Cottrell succeeded Zuckerman as GCSA in April 1971 and, importantly, was the last scientist to do so from the MoD.38 Yet Cottrell’s appointment was ‘one pip below’ that of Zuckerman, which meant that Cottrell did not quite have the required contacts within the civil service.39 As a result of the November 1971 Rothschild Report and its ‘customer-contract’ principle, scientific advice to government departments suffered a process of devolution, as did the role of the GCSA, which ‘more or less disappeared into the Cabinet Office’.40 Even the Royal Society later noted that scientific advice within the governmental system had steadily eroded since 1972.41 Robert Press (previously on Zuckerman’s nuclear weapons staff) succeeded Cottrell in name but not in function, for, as science had permeated into all essential departments, a Cabinet co-ordinator was hardly required. Press’s appointment as Deputy Secretary, Science and Technology therefore heralded the temporary severance of the GCSA role as it moved in 1976 into the ‘Think Tank’ known as the Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS).42 In February 1982 the House of Lords debated the report of the first session of the Select Committee on Science and Technology, which dealt with the effectiveness of provision and co-ordination of scientific advice to the government. This was the first time that the upper House had held a committee ‘looking into scientific matters’. The Committee regretted the disappearance (after an official tenyear existence) of the GCSA role into the CPRS during the Heath administration, and that there existed ‘a vacuum at the centre’ around which S&T advice was ‘seriously weakened’ through intentional scrambling with other sorts of advice. It was necessary thereafter to reinstate the role – which the Thatcher administration did with the 1981 appointment of Dr Robin Nicholson. This was welcomed as ‘a good step in the right direction’ and, it seems, one almost entirely founded upon the path laid by Zuckerman.43 It is important at this juncture to appreciate the significance of wartime scientific organisation permeating through Whitehall during the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. This is demonstrated by a comparison of the GCSAs and MoD CSAs. Officially, Tizard set the precedent for the latter role that still remains in place today: that none of them was or has been a politician (the role remained independent of politics – on the surface at least); and the position

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has been a practical guarantee of knighthood (a given, perhaps within the civil service). Examination of the GCSAs demonstrates that although most were, not all of these scientists were knights of the realm (either before or after inception), and that, except for Professor John Ashworth, all were Fellows of the Royal Society before their appointment. The factor that stands out the most, however, is that, irrespective of Cherwell’s and Tizard’s immense contribution to the formulation of the role of GCSA, the only scientist officially designated by that title for the period 1940–77 was Solly Zuckerman, who was officially appointed by Harold Wilson in 1966 and who held the title until he retired from full-time civil service in 1971. After that date, until 1977, Zuckerman performed the role unofficially for Wilson, Edward Heath and James Callaghan. These comparisons further clarify the great extent of R&D and S&T applied to the defence of Britain and her receding empire, the importance placed upon the chief scientist responsible for such scientific organisation and how this necessarily shifted over time. In the early years (between 1940 and 1974) of Whitehall-instituted scientific advice the names of the GCSAs and MoD CSAs are almost the same – the only exceptions being Cockcroft, who was integral to atomic science, and Brundrett, who served a long career in naval science administration. Importantly, there is the gap between 1953 and 1966 in the role of GCSA, when it was enacted primarily by the MoD CSA, but also by Todd as Chairman of the ACSP. Thereafter, the two positions were held by separate individuals. This illustrates not only the diversity of S&T moving into the latter years of the twentieth century, and the subtle drive away from British techno-nationalism (even in Margaret Thatcher’s era), but also, and most importantly, the administrative understanding of just how fundamental S&T had become to the entire social fabric of Britain. Crucially, the role of the GCSA – the scientist advising the British government at the highest level – therefore needed to be susceptible to evolution. Of the three pioneers of the role, Solly Zuckerman is the least understood. Although he had his doubts regarding the potential of Tizard’s ACSP, he was given the opportunity to serve as a member. Zuckerman came to be Tizard’s right-hand man in the proceedings of the Advisory Council on Scientific Policy. The importance of this is that Zuckerman was sitting in the wings, making his own observations of what was needed, but not enacted, so far as scientific



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policy was concerned. Therefore, in 1960, when requested by the new Minister of Defence, Lord Louis Mountbatten, to become his CSA, and as such to become a full-time civil servant, Zuckerman had invaluable experience in both civil and defence science policy from an independent scientific adviser’s perspective. This was crucial to his later success as the GCSA. Even more important than this, however, was his remarkable familiarity with top American scientific and military men, with whom he had worked with during the war and who now had important friends in key positions within the US government. And because the Eisenhower administration’s ‘New Look’ defence policy had forced the US to study nuclear sharing again, Zuckerman found himself, in both of his advisory roles between 1960 and 1971, at the heart of Anglo-American Cold War policy. Reading the second volume of Zuckerman’s memoirs fully confirms just how much British scientific policy had become integral to US-driven Cold War politics. He was fairly familiar with John F. Kennedy, and became great friends with the president’s Scientific Adviser, Jerry Weisner. On many occasions Zuckerman traversed the Atlantic, and visited sites of nuclear development, weapons research and space programmes. Yet there was much more to Zuckerman’s remit than Cold War applied science – he was heavily concerned with the British ‘brain drain’; the explosive population growth; the exploitation of Britain’s natural resources; the future of Britain’s North Sea oil; the Thames Barrier; the Torrey Canyon oil spillage; finding the most effective use of Britain’s technological resources; environmental concerns and even climate change. Yet, despite his centrality to all of these issues, whenever Zuckerman is mentioned in the memoirs and biographies of the five prime ministers whose cabinets he served, it is almost always relative to Cold War British defence. Zuckerman had long foreseen the need for a ‘permanent Government scientist’ to be ‘appointed Director’ in a new, ‘sufficiently senior post’.44 While serving as MoD CSA (in Tizard’s old Whitehall office) he cleverly mastered the art of the mandarin, and conveyed the sense of having no personal power because of the powerful emperor looking over his shoulder.45 It was Zuckerman’s impressive networking skills, therefore, that stood him in great stead as GCSA and led him to undermine Snow’s thesis that it was ‘dangerous’ for a scientist to be in a position of isolated power.46 Yes,

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he had scientific staff, but he dwelt in the corridors of power much more than any other previous or subsequent GCSA. Such access to all government business was obtained through his chairmanship of the Central Advisory Council on Science and Technology. An undefined role Never has there been a rigid guideline for the role of GCSA. Even today’s GCSA has a carefully worded but impressively loose remit within which to work – to provide scientific advice personally to the prime minister and members of the Cabinet (although this now is in consultation with the departmental CSAs ‘when appropriate’) and to advise the prime minister and Cabinet on government scientific and technological policy.47 Cherwell in effect laid the first stone on the long path toward some type of definition for future GCSAs to tread. Tizard walked the path and led many followers. By the time Zuckerman became GCSA there was an expected skill set: a general grasp of science; a scientific way of thinking; expertise in a specific scientific subject; connections in the scientific community; prestige as a distinguished scientist (mid-career at least); possession of specialist skills on policy research; adaptability to change; and optimism toward science’s solving of political problems.48 The differing interpretation placed on scientific advice by each of the pioneering GCSAs throughout the short initial existence of the role deepened its lack of definition. Brundrett recalled that Cherwell was ‘firmly convinced that he had a big personal contribution to make’ and was ‘primarily interested in ensuring that he used science and scientists to make it’, yet his ideas about organisation were elementary in the extreme; whereas Tizard was ‘filled with a burning desire to ensure that scientists could play their proper part in the machinery of government’ and ‘understood the necessity for organisation’.49 Tizard’s immediate successors benefited significantly from the networks he had set in place. Cockcroft, Todd and Brundrett walked in Tizard’s deeply entrenched footsteps of committee-based scientific advice. Although not dismantling the structure he himself had helped to construct, Zuckerman preferred to blend collective debate with highly successful personal networking. Lord Hailsham, Minister for Science (1959–64), noted that figures like Zuckerman who could ‘bring to bear a truly scientific



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intellect on the totality of scientific problems’ were the exception rather than the rule and, arguably, there was therefore no such thing as science, only sciences.50 Whether Zuckerman (or indeed any GCSA) was perceived as a ‘man for all sciences’, however, is rather a moot point.51 Zuckerman believed that the office of GCSA ended with Cherwell and was not restored until 1964, during which time respective prime ministers took their scientific advice ad hoc.52 He was also convinced that he had devised the CSA title. Upon accepting the role as MoD CSA, he deemed the title inappropriate, for he knew little about the ‘hardware’ side of the military scene.53 Yet it was commonly accepted that the origin of the office of GCSA was created during the war – in actuality if not in title. In Zuckerman’s day, as in Cherwell’s, the function of GCSA was not at the peak of a pyramid of advisory committees, but that of a solitary man who participated in matters of a scientific nature that came before the Cabinet.54 Zuckerman also preferred to recall that the GCSA role was ‘abolished’ upon his retirement, which was rather unfair to his successors, especially Cottrell, whom he had personally groomed for the position.55 In reality, the role continued via the collective voice of the CPRS, but with subsequent GCSAs and departmental CSAs recruited from academic science.56 None, however, matched the influence on policy that was enjoyed by Cherwell, Tizard and Zuckerman. The brief tradition of MoD CSAs being automatically elevated to the GCSA role also ended. These changes mirrored the shifting pattern in public discourse of scientific advice. The 1970 Labour rhetoric (that it would take more than six years to modernise and humanise Britain) rang hollow.57 Scientific governance was transformed from the traditional scientific influence on political matters, such as medicine, weaponry and space exploration, towards the permeation of socially oriented and natural sciences into policy with more redistributive implications, such as economics, transportation and law – creating an environment in which the ‘existence’ of technical debate, more than its ‘substance’, stimulated political activity.58 The diminution of military threats (which had initialised the role of scientists in government policy making) did not affect the interests of scientists in public affairs, so that by the mid-1970s scientific civil servants were expected to tackle issues of welfare, crime, education and environmental pollution.59 Even with Nicholson’s 1981

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a­ ppointment as ‘an intelligent focus’ for government, and especially as S&T ­co-ordinator so that departments were not pulling in different directions on scientifically based issues, the role’s ‘terms of reference’ remained ‘to be spelled out in detail’.60 Subject to suitable sanctions and firm contact with their fellow scientists, the pioneer GCSAs and CSAs may well have provided a reasonable compromise between dictation and indecision.61 Yet the days of the ‘philosopher-king’, so well epitomised by Cherwell and Zuckerman, were past.62 The ‘scientific hero’ – or ‘science Czar’ – temporarily went out of fashion. The pragmatic, sensible, logical path became the expected advice from GCSAs, upon whom certain responsibilities were enforced by the findings of respective committees, such as those chaired by Burke Trend and Victor Rothschild.63 The overriding factor was expense accountability, especially during the period of accelerated decolonisation and economic depression. Cherwell was always thrifty and, whether right or wrong, in many instances during the war his so-called ‘crackpot’ schemes got the job done by avoiding the interfering trammels of bureaucracy. In Tizard’s time, Britain’s resources had been sucked dry by the war, and so his remit was more about future planning than about current research. Cold War defence research took precedence over everything else – so much so, in fact, that when Tizard handed over the reins to Cockcroft and Brundrett the defence scientist was the chief scientist in Whitehall. By the time Zuckerman reached the pinnacle of political science advice, the ‘age of Sputnik’ had ensured an almost ‘no holds barred’ principle on defence research. Following Zuckerman’s official resignation in 1971, the ability to fund such a grandiose national scientific showcase had suffocated in economic crisis. Consequently, scientific advisers faced the dilemma of public accountability, as common perception of the need for ‘cutting-edge’ science and technology had dwindled as much as the funding had. Conclusion The office of GCSA owes much to the three pioneers – Lindemann, Tizard and Zuckerman. It evolved from Churchill’s suspicion that ‘Whitehall would not take full and swift advantage of new scientific developments’, which encouraged him to appoint his scientist friend as his personal adviser.64 Consideration of Cherwell’s



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unprecedented position by the Barlow Committee confirms that the bureaucratic foundations of the role had been laid, if only tentatively. Tizard was ‘well satisfied with the position given to him’ when he returned to Whitehall as unofficial GCSA after the war.65 In Brundrett, Todd and Zuckerman, Tizard nurtured three first-class scientific administrators and ideal successors in his guise. Yet it was Zuckerman who became a ‘super-mandarin’, exercising considerable influence over policy during the Macmillan–Home– Wilson–Heath era.66 Thereafter, the importance of scientific advice to government at the highest level, in an ever-changing world, was significantly under-estimated. Following the official restoration of the role with Robin Nicolson, the enduring task of the GCSA has always been to ensure that government seeks and utilises the best expert scientific advice.67 Complete honesty and openness, morality and prudence, public (and political) accountability and sensibility became the watchwords of the GCSAs, who also had to be modest, constant, dispassionate and the voice of many.68 Advice also had to be authoritative, evaluative, unbiased, ‘neatly-timed’, coherent, cost-effective and representative.69 Such a close adviser to the prime minister was an unprecedented role, and it was one that Cherwell had performed particularly well. The very fact that a replacement for Cherwell’s position was actually considered by the Attlee administration certainly shows that Cherwell had laid the foundations of the role, if only unofficially. Tizard, during his time as unofficial GCSA, was a reluctant servant who wriggled and squirmed throughout in order to escape. To his credit was the fact that Tizard nurtured two first-class scientific administrators in Brundrett and Zuckerman. And of all the men who have held the position of GCSA, arguably none has performed the ideal so well as Solly Zuckerman. Cherwell was his prime minister’s scientific and economic adviser; Tizard, as the chief scientist in Whitehall, was GCSA in all but name, while Zuckerman was the model GCSA. The role of GCSA was created by Cherwell, maintained by Tizard and fine-tuned by Zuckerman. Each of them in their own way brought science to the fore of high politics, in ‘very different ways’ and in difficult situations.70 Throughout the foundational epoch, the role necessarily evolved and was transformed, according to contemporary circumstances.

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 1 Herbert Goldhamer, The adviser (New York: Elsevier, 1978), p. 3.  2 A.J.P. Taylor, ‘Lindemann and Tizard: more luck than judgment?’, Observer Weekend Review (9 April 1961), p. 21.  3 The Foundation for Science and Technology’s report of a dinner/ discussion on ‘The role of the Chief Scientific Adviser’, held at the Royal Society on 26 June 2001, www.foundation.org.uk/events/ pdf/20010626_summary.pdf, accessed 10 November 2010.  4 See as examples R.F. Harrod, The Prof: a personal memoir of Lord Cherwell (London: Macmillan, 1959); Earl of Birkenhead, The Prof in two worlds: the official life of Professor F.A. Lindemann, Viscount Cherwell (London: Collins, 1961); Martin Gilbert, Churchill: a life (London: Heinemann, 1991), p. 512; Thomas Wilson, Churchill and the Prof (London: Cassell, 1995).  5 A.M. Low, ‘Churchill and science’, in Charles Eade (ed.), Churchill by his contemporaries (London: Hutchinson, 1953), pp. 439–50, p. 446.  6 See especially C.P. Snow, Science and government (London: Oxford University Press, 1961).  7 Low, ‘Churchill and science’, p. 446; Charles Webster, ‘The scientific method’, Sunday Times (9 April 1961), p. 34.  8 R.V. Jones, ‘The Right Hon. Viscount Cherwell, P.C., C.H., F.R.S.’, Nature, 180 (1957), 581.  9 Diaries, correspondence and papers of Henry Tizard, Imperial War Museum, London (hereafter Tizard papers) HTT 427, Herbert Morrison to Henry Tizard, 9 November 1945. 10 Tizard papers HTT 427, Tizard to Alan Barlow, 14 November 1945; Cabinet papers, The National Archives, Kew (hereafter Cabinet papers) CAB 80/97, Tizard, ‘Central direction of scientific effort’, 12 October 1945. 11 Personal papers of Solly Zuckerman, Baron Zuckerman of Burnham Thorpe, University of East Anglia, Norwich (hereafter Zuckerman papers) SZ FSP 1/1, ‘F.S.P.(46) 18th meeting annex: draft scheme for central government machinery for science’, 18 June 1946; Zuckerman papers, SZ FSP 1/1 and Cabinet papers, CAB 132/51, ‘F.S.P. (46) 21st meeting’, 16 July 1946, p. 1. 12 Zuckerman papers, SZ CSA 22, Zuckerman, ‘The scientific civil service’, 5 November 1962, p. 12. 13 Henry Tizard, ‘Science and the services’, Journal of the Royal United Service Institution, 91 (1946), 333–46; Jon Agar and Brian Balmer, ‘British scientists and the Cold War: the Defence Research Policy Committee and information networks, 1947–1963’, Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, 28 (1998), 209–52, p. 213.



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14 Personal Papers of Frederick Brundrett, Churchill College Archives, Cambridge (Brundrett papers) BRUN 1/1, Frederick Brundrett, ‘The place of science in the machinery of government’, 15 January 1951, 14. 15 Tizard papers, HTT 462, Clement Attlee to Tizard, 16 May 1946; Tizard papers, HTT 462, Hastings Ismay to Tizard, 17 May 1946; Tizard papers, HTT 462, Herbert Wimperis to L.P. Coombes, 30 October 1946; Tizard papers, HTT 462, Wimperis to Tizard, 30 October 1946. 16 Frederick Brundrett, ‘Government and science’, Public Administration, 34 (1956), 247; Chapman Pincher, ‘Organisation of defence research in Britain’, Nature, 177 (1956), 251; Agar and Balmer, ‘British scientists and the Cold War’, 244. 17 Ronald W. Clark, Tizard (London: Methuen, 1965), 376–84; Philip J. Gummett and Geoffrey L. Price, ‘An approach to the central planning of British science: the formation of the Advisory Council on Scientific Policy’, Minerva, 15 (1977), 119–43, p. 138. 18 Tizard papers, HTT 467, untitled note to the Minister of Defence, A.V. Alexander (Ministry of Defence), from Tizard, 18 October 1949. 19 Tizard papers, HTT 462, John Cockcroft to Tizard, 29 May 1951. 20 See Nature, 163 (26 February 1949), 315 for confirmation of Zuckerman’s appointments as Deputy Chairman both on the ACSP and on the Committee on Industrial Productivity. This dual appointment was to ‘help to relieve the burden on the chairman, Sir Henry Tizard’. 21 See Tizard papers, HTT 462, Tizard, ‘Defence research policy organisation suggested timetable’, 24 October 1949; Clark, Tizard, pp. 401–4. 22 Birkenhead, The Prof in two worlds, p. 211. 23 Solly Zuckerman, Monkeys, men and missiles: an autobiography, 1946–88 (London: Collins, 1988), p. 104; Agar and Balmer, ‘British scientists and the Cold War’, p. 236. 24 Philip Gummett, Scientists in Whitehall (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), pp. 33–4. 25 Harry Melville, The Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962), pp. 49–50. 26 Tom Wilkie, British science and politics since 1945 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 50, 55; Agar and Balmer, ‘British scientists and the Cold War’, p. 210. 27 Birkenhead, The Prof in two worlds, p. 281. 28 John Colville, The fringes of power: Downing Street diaries, 1939– 1955 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1985), p. 643; J.G. Crowther, Statesmen of science (London: Cresset Press, 1965), p. 373; Martin

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Gilbert, Never despair: Winston S. Churchill, 1945–1965 (London: Heinemann, 1988), p. 714. 29 Brundrett papers, BRUN 1/10, paper by Brundrett entitled ‘Science and government’, 12 April 1961, 2. 30 See ‘Scientific Adviser to the Ministry of Defence’, Nature, 184 (10 October 1959), 1105. 31 Gummett, Scientists in Whitehall, pp. 33–4. 32 Norman J. Vig, Science and technology in British politics (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1968), p. 23; Hilary Rose and Steven Rose, Science and society (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 74; Gummett, Scientists in Whitehall, p. 4; Agar, Science and spectacle (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1998), p. 54. 33 Zuckerman, Monkeys, men and missiles, pp. 164, 218–19; Agar and Balmer, ‘British scientists and the Cold War’, p. 245. 34 Ministry of Defence, The National Archives, Kew (hereafter Ministry of Defence papers), DEFE 7/1854, Peter Thorneycroft to Zuckerman, 8 November 1962; Agar and Balmer, ‘British scientists and the Cold War’, p. 245. See also the leading articles ‘Advice and dissent’ and ‘The limitations of advisers’, Nature, 214 (22 April 1967), 333, 341–2. 35 Zuckerman papers, SZ, FSP 1/1, Minutes of meetings of the Committee on future scientific policy, April 1946; Zuckerman papers, SZ FSP 1/2, Privy Council Office letter confirming Zuckerman’s invitation to sit on the Barlow Committee, 23 January 1946; Zuckerman papers, SZ FSP1/2, Zuckerman to Herbert Morrison, 25 January 1946. 36 Gordon Greig, ‘Sir Solly moved from defence job’, Daily Mail (25 May 1966), p. 1; ‘Sir Solly retiring’, Daily Mail (26 March 1971), p. 4. 37 Zuckerman, Monkeys, men and missiles, pp. 449–70; Jonathan Rosenhead, ‘Obituary: Lord Zuckerman (1904–1993)’, Journal of the Operational Research Society, 44 (1993), 1171; John Peyton, Solly Zuckerman: a scientist out of the ordinary (London: John Murray, 2001), pp. 226–7. 38 ‘Cottrell steps up’, Nature, 230 (2 April 1971), 269. Zuckerman retired on 31 March. 39 ‘“Science and government”: Select Committee report’, House of Lords Debate (hereafter HL), Hansard, 427 (15 February 1982), 393. 40 Lord Rothschild, A framework for government research and development (London: HMSO, 1971); ‘Government research and development’, HL Hansard, 328 (28 February 1972), 784–926; ‘“Science and government”’, HL Hansard, 427 (15 February 1982), 374. 41 Lord Flowers, ‘“Science and government”’, HL Hansard, 427 (15 February 1982), 389. 42 ‘Should scientists be seen and not heard?’, Nature, 248 (26 April 1974),



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722. For the official papers of Robert Press, see Cabinet papers, CAB 178 and Ministry of Defence, DEFE 19. 43 ‘“Science and government”’, HL Hansard, 373–5, 384–5, 387–8. 44 Zuckerman papers, SZ FSP 1/2, ‘Memorandum on Science Secretariat for Office of Lord President of Council’, November 1945, p. 2. 45 ‘An influential fellow’, Nature, 362 (8 April 1993), 482; ‘No more mandarins’, Nature, 210 (11 June 1966), 1086. 46 C.P. Snow, Postscript to science and government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 35. 47 See Government Office for Science, ‘The Government Chief Scientific Adviser’s guidelines on the use of scientific and engineering advice in policy making’, June 2010; ‘Chief Scientific Advisers and their officials: an introduction’; and ‘Code of practice for scientific advisory committees’, December 2007, available at www.bis.gov.uk/go-science (accessed 25 June 2011). 48 H. Brooks, ‘The scientific adviser’, in R. Gilpin and C. Wright (eds), Scientists and national policy-making (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), pp. 73–96. 49 Brundrett papers, BRUN 1/10, ‘Science and Government’, 12 April 1961, p. 2. 50 Lord Hailsham, The door wherein I went (London: Collins, 1975), 183; Geoffrey Lewis, Lord Hailsham: a life (London: Jonathan Cape, 1997), p. 186. 51 Rose and Rose, Science and Society, p. 102. 52 Lord Zuckerman, ‘Scientific advice during and since World War II’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 342 (1975), 477. 53 Zuckerman, Monkeys, men and missiles, p. 194. 54 J.B. Poole and Kay Andrews (eds), The government of science in Britain (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972), p. 198. 55 Zuckerman, ‘The functions of scientific advisers’, Minerva, 19 (1983), 194. The official line was that the GCSA role ended with the resignation of Cottrell in 1974: ‘Chief Scientific Adviser’, House of Commons Debate (HC), Hansard, 32 (22 November 1982), 334. 56 David Edgerton, Warfare state: Britain, 1920–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 170. 57 See The Labour Party’s Manifesto for the 1970 general election ‘Now Britain’s strong let’s make it great to live in’, p. 3. 58 Dorothy Nelkin, ‘The political impact of technical expertise’, Social Studies of Science, 5 (1975), 35–54, pp. 35–6, 46–9; Jerome Ravetz, ‘Scientific knowledge and expert advice in debates about large technological innovations’, Minerva, 16 (1978), 273–82. 59 Harvey M. Sapolsky, ‘Science policy in American state government’, Minerva, 9 (1971), 322–48, pp. 327–8.

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60 ‘“Science and government”’, HL Hansard, pp. 373–5, 384–5, 387–8. 61 Personal Papers of Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett, Royal Society Archives, London, PB.91.64, draft of R.V. Jones’s ‘Lord Cherwell’s judgement’, sent to Patrick Blackett on 5 December 1962. Jones referred to the CSAs as ‘scientific Chiefs of Staff’. 62 R.V. Jones, ‘Philosophers and kings’, Minerva, 16 (1978), 342–8, p. 347; Rodney W. Nichols, ‘Some practical problems of scientific-advisers’, Minerva, 10 (1972), 603–13, p. 604. 63 See especially Peter Hennessy, Whitehall (London: Pimlico, 2001), pp. 223–35; Rose and Rose, Science and society, pp. 88–90; Gummett, Scientists in Whitehall, pp. 42, 195–202. 64 Wilson, Churchill and the Prof, p. 23. 65 Webster, ‘Scientific method’. 66 Stevenson Pugh, ‘Solly supreme’, Daily Mail (17 July 1963), p. 1. 67 John Beddington, ‘Foreword’ to Government Office for Science, Cultivating community: sharing good practice across SAC secretariats, March 2010. 68 Solly Zuckerman, Beyond the ivory tower: the frontiers of public and private science (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970), pp. 127–8; Zuckerman, ‘Scientific advice during and since World War II’, pp. 478–9. 69 R.V. Jones, ‘Temptations and risks of the Scientific Adviser’, Minerva, 10 (July 1972), 441–3, 446–51; Nichols, ‘Some practical problems of scientific-advisers’, pp. 604–9; Gummett, Scientists in Whitehall, pp. 113–17. 70 Zuckerman, ‘Scientific advice during and since World War II’, p. 478.

4

Mugwumps? The Royal Society and the governance of post-war British science Jeff Hughes

Addressing a London meeting of the Association of Scientific Workers in March 1946, Harold Laski, chairman of the Labour Party, was ‘barracked by a section of his audience’ of several hundred when he suggested that ‘scientists in this country had shown a lamentable lack of civil spirit in the way in which they had conducted the world to which they belonged’. There were ‘such loud cries of dissent when he compared the vast majority of the members of the Royal Society with “mugwumps” that he was forced to stop speaking for several moments’. A ‘mugwump’, Laski later explained, was ‘a man who sat so long on the fence that the iron entered into his soul’.1 Laski’s immediate target was the role of scientists in the creation and use of the atomic bomb, but coming from such a prominent political figure, this direct and controversial criticism of the Royal Society drew public attention to the role of Britain’s oldest and most eminent scientific institution in the moral leadership and institutional governance of British science. British scientists were deeply divided in this immediate post-war period by intense debates about the role, meaning and management of science in a liberal democratic society, and about the nature of scientific knowledge and the proper conduct of scientific work. The complex entanglement of science and state during the Second World War raised new and fundamental questions. With government, the military, industry and universities pulling it in different directions, how should science be organised, and what were the implications for individual scientists? Should science be socially and economically planned, or must scientists be allowed complete freedom in their research? Could scientific knowledge be kept secret, or was

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openness a precondition for scientific work? How should ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ research be approached in the context of debates about economic productivity? And how should British science properly be related to work in the Empire, the Commonwealth, Europe, the United States and indeed the Soviet Union, in the post-war geopolitical context?2 As Britain’s senior scientific society with a prestige deriving from its heritage and its place in the establishment, the Royal Society (RS) was implicated in these discussions over the changing organisation and conduct of scientific work and the wider governance of British science. Its role in the disciplinary and institutional control of British science was limited mostly to advising government on appointments to senior posts and ex officio membership of numerous committees and governing bodies, and its formal links with the state were confined to the government’s provision of its accommodation and its disbursement of relatively small government grants-in-aid for scientific research and publication. But while commentators on modern British science have recognised that the RS has maintained strong informal ties to government, managed through the exercise of discreet lobbying and indirect influence, they have tended to pass swiftly over such intangibles to focus on more direct aspects of the relations between scientists and government.3 While more recent scholarship has begun to offer insights into the history of the twentieth-century RS, we still know little about how it positioned itself in relation to government and other institutions.4 With the transformations wrought by war and the landslide election of a Labour government, the period immediately after 1945 offers a remarkable vantage point from which to explore the ways in which the RS worked as an organisation as it reoriented itself in the new political, cultural, economic and institutional post-war landscape. The increased funding for science, spurred by the new government’s commitment to scientifically driven productivity, new national and international organisations and structures (such as the creation of UNESCO in 1946 and the government’s new science advisory apparatus in 1947), the emerging importance of science for national security and the imperatives of a social-democratic polity created challenges and opportunities for the RS, framing its own institutional project of post-war renewal. This paper explores the ways in which the RS sought to locate itself in these debates about the form and governance of British



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science in period 1945–55. The RS was not a homogeneous body, and its managers needed strategies to manage internal debate and to produce workable outcomes reflected in an institutional ‘voice’ which positioned the RS carefully in relation to scientists and their institutions, the bureaucratic machinery of Whitehall and the state, and the larger political reaches of government. I show some of the ways in which those who represented continuity and held power in the affairs of the RS – the Officers and secretariat – managed this process, explore why the notion of ‘independence’ came to weigh so heavily for some of them in the post-war years, and explain the implications of this ‘independence’ for the RS’s role in the governance of post-war British science. ‘Independence’, I argue, shaded into irrelevance – and both were the achieved outcomes of deliberate positioning work. Establishing relevance, projecting identity: renewing the Royal Society The RS emerged from the war on the institutional side-lines. The immediate post-war framework of scientific governance was dominated by the research councils (the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the Agricultural Research Council (ARC)) and science-related government departments (principally the Lord President’s Office, Ministry of Health, Ministry of Education, Treasury, Research Associations and the University Grants Committee on the civil side, and the Services, now augmented by the Ministry of Supply, on the military side). The RS channelled parliamentary grants-in-aid for scientific investigations (£14,000 in 1945–46) and scientific publications (£7,000 in 1945–46), and supported scientific research (mostly in universities) through a range of research funds and schemes.5 Despite the enmeshment of the sciences into the wartime state, at the policy level the RS’s Scientific Advisory Committee to the War Cabinet had been relatively weak, and in the closing months of the war and his presidency of the RS, Henry Dale lobbied for the creation of a more effective vehicle for scientific advice to government. Joining the ranks of those already planning for the peace, the RS convened a number of panels in 1944 to think about the future needs of university science, and produced a report in 1945 that was intended to shape discussion on the topic. Behind

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these plans lay questions of the identity and purpose of the RS in relation to post-war scientific governance.6 The election of the Oxford organic chemist Robert Robinson to the RS presidency in 1945 brought uncomfortable resolution to a fraught debate among the Fellows, many of whom had seen the consummate scientific administrator Henry Tizard as the most promising candidate to succeed Dale and nurture the RS’s relationship to the new Labour government.7 Robinson assumed the leadership of an organisation whose management was dominated by its Officers – the President, the Physical Secretary (Alfred Egerton 1938–48, then David Brunt 1948–57), Biological Secretary (Edward Salisbury, 1945–55), Treasurer (Thomas Merton, 1939–56) and Foreign Secretary (Archibald Hill, 1945–46, then Edgar Adrian, 1946–50). Elected annually with sixteen other Fellows of the Royal Society (FRSs) normally serving for two years each, the Council was nominally the RS’s governing body, but spent most of its time on electoral and honorific functions, the business of publications and so on.8 Questions of policy were largely in the control of the Officers, serviced by a small secretariat headed by John Griffith Davies, Assistant Secretary (1937–46). Robinson inherited from Dale a set of assumptions and plans already in train – most notably a plan hatched in 1943 to secure a more spacious post-war home for the RS and other scientific societies in London. He had to deal, too, with novel challenges – the negotiation of the RS’s role in the management of the rapid postwar growth of science, the ongoing freedom/planning debate, new issues about openness versus secrecy, and the economic value of scientific research. The now widely trumpeted scientific successes of the war changed the substance and tone of public discourse about science and its capabilities. Academic scientists (Robinson among them) had returned from their wartime work with vastly expanded horizons of expectation about what organisation and teamwork could achieve and with their eyes opened about military and industrial science. At the Anniversary Dinner in 1945, for example, Robinson asked a remarkable question, indicative of his aspirations for post-war science: ‘Why not attack cancer and tuberculosis on the atomic bomb scale?’9 Discussions of such questions evoked conflicting political and moral values within the RS, in the scientific community and in the wider polity about the proper aims and conduct of science.



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Much of the RS’s activity in late 1945 and early 1946 focused on the organisation of a large conference on Empire/Commonwealth science. Originating from wartime discussions between scientific officials led by Alexander King, a chemist, civil servant and protégé of Tizard, the Empire Scientific Conference was held from 17 June to 8 July 1946, with the official support of the government and a £15,000 grant from the Treasury. Organised principally by Egerton and Griffith Davies under the guiding hand of Tizard, the conference was in fact a double meeting, a three-week discussion meeting of scientists, followed by a policy-setting British Commonwealth Official Scientific Conference of academic scientists, departmental scientific advisers and civil science administrators.10 The high-level organising committee included the secretaries of the DSIR, the ARC and the MRC, and was in close touch with the Treasury. As we shall see, these links at the official–bureaucratic level were typical, and constitutive, of the RS’s relations with government. The Empire Scientific Conference was opened by the king, who cast the scientific outcomes of the war – penicillin, insecticides, synthetic drugs, improved weather forecasting, radar, jet propulsion and the atomic bomb – as auguries of future development.11 The programme included long sessions of reports and comparative discussions on the organisation of scientific research; the current state of agricultural and medical science and the control of infectious diseases; nutrition; land utilisation, conservation, survey and mapping; physical standards; the management of scientific records and scientific information; mineral and other natural resources; scientific cooperation across the Empire; and the post-war needs of fundamental research, focusing on the RS’s own 1945 report on the subject. Alongside the business sessions, an extensive social programme took delegates to Cambridge, Oxford and key state scientific institutions, with a hectic whirl of ambassadorial and ministerial receptions, including a government reception hosted by the Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs, and tea with the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee.12 This extraordinary itinerary and the largesse afforded the delegates demonstrates the strength of the RS’s links with government officials and with leading figures in industry and elite social and cultural circles and the political, social and cultural capital they betokened (usefully, Egerton was the brother-in-law of Stafford Cripps, President of the Board of Trade and, from late

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1947, Chancellor of the Exchequer). These ties were undoubtedly strengthened by the ultimate success of the conference. Indeed, the RS seems to have been regarded by the Foreign Office as the natural vehicle for dealing with international science. With the creation of UNESCO in 1946, the revivification of the International Council of Scientific Unions and the development of a structure of British national adhering committees under its auspices, the RS projected itself into international science, culminating ultimately in its central co-ordinating role in the UK’s contribution to the International Geophysical Year in 1957.13 By comparison, the British Commonwealth Scientific Official Conference held from 9 to 19 July was a more workaday affair. Opened by Herbert Morrison, Lord President of the Council (the minister with responsibility for civil science), much of the meeting was devoted to establishing inter-governmental committees, procedures for continuing wartime scientific liaison, mechanisms for collaboration and information circulation, and professional matters such as superannuation – a significant issue for the emerging scientific civil service. The conference established working committees to deal with specific practical subjects, including agricultural and medical sciences, building and fuel research, food preservation, natural resources including minerals and fisheries, radio and cosmic rays and particular regional issues. Drawing on the discussions and resolutions at the Empire Scientific Conference, recommendations were made for future practice; these subsequently gave rise to a number of more specialist meetings on Commonwealth coordination. Strikingly, the work of both conferences focused very heavily on applied science and state institutions – discussion of the RS’s ‘PostWar Needs’ report on fundamental science was, at best, marginal.14 With the government’s commitment to using science to enhance economic productivity nationally and internationally, the RS discreetly positioned itself at the heart of the policy-making process by facilitating the links between those who would set and enact policy. Yet, as the bureaucrats slogged to produce their recommendations and procedures, the RS demonstrated a very different facet of its project of cultural renewal, this time through the use of its rich history. The delayed Newton Tercentenary (there had been only token celebrations in 1942) was a five-day spectacular for representatives of more than thirty national scientific academies. Formal presentations and lectures were accompanied by receptions, conversaziones



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at the RS, a trip to the opera at Covent Garden, a mayoral reception at the Guildhall and visits to the Royal Mint, Grantham and Woolsthorpe Manor, all crowned by a garden party at Buckingham Palace attended by the king and queen (generally overlooked in its recent historiography, the ‘Royal’ remained (and remains) important in cementing the RS into the establishment – Princess Elizabeth (now Queen Elizabeth II) was elected a Fellow in 1947).15 The celebrations used Newton and the past as a source of solidarity and renewal, and served very effectively to project a sense of purpose grounded in hallowed tradition. They also, coincidentally, deflected attention from the discussions of state and applied science going on simultaneously at the British Commonwealth Scientific Official Conference. Yet, as the RS and its distinguished guests re-consecrated Newton and the purity of individual scholarly endeavour – a ‘shining example of the exalted power of the human mind,’ according to the RS’s semi-official post-war historiographer Edward Andrade FRS – the Newton Tercentenary celebrations were made practically possible by very modern corporate financial support from the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, Distillers Company, ICI, Lever Bros and Unilever, Shell, Courtaulds, English Electric and General Electric.16 It was, in part, the ability to efface such contradictions that allowed the RS to develop its relationships with political and economic interests as a form of soft power. Courting government: clubs, conviviality and co-option While the RS was able to draw on the generosity of industrial benefactors and royal patronage for this exercise in historically grounded internationalism, Newton’s legacy had other post-war uses. Robinson revealed RS plans for a ‘fitting National Memorial in the form of an Isaac Newton Observatory’ and announced Treasury support for the project.17 Although the observatory would be government owned, he hoped that ‘it could be arranged that the Royal Society remains closely associated with the work of the new observatory as it has been with the inception of the scheme’, as in the case of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich.18 Simultaneously, as perhaps his most significant act of policy, Robinson was beginning negotiations with government ministers and officials over a still more ambitious scheme to provide spacious new accommodation in London for the RS and other learned scientific societies. The

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development of these negotiations reveals a great deal both about the RS’s relationship to government and about the government’s view of the RS’s role in scientific governance. In order to help ensure continuing political support for these ambitious schemes, for example, Prime Minister Clement Attlee (1947) and Chancellor of the Exchequer Stafford Cripps (1948) were elected as Fellows of the RS under Statute 12, which sanctioned Council to elect ‘persons who, in their opinion, either have rendered conspicuous service to the cause of science, or are such that their election would be of signal benefit to the Society’.19 As a form of honorific patronage, this act of incorporation placed if not a sense of obligation, at least some constraint, on the lofty recipient. Another way in which the RS managers sought to exercise informal influence was through the pomp of the Anniversary Dinner, held every 30 November at a prestigious London hotel. A fixture in the London round of diplomatic and business receptions, parties and soirées, the Anniversary Dinner constituted a social space within which FRSs could mix convivially with leading politicians (including Attlee (1945), Cripps (1946) and Morrison (1945 and 1948)), senior civil servants, civic dignitaries, military and ecclesiastical leaders, diplomats and others of the great-and-the-good. This parade is revealing, for the formulaic ritual of after-dinner speeches and toasts also allowed coded and not-so-coded messages to be communicated. Cripps, for example, reassured his audience that the government had no intention or desire to plan fundamental research – a defence of scientific freedom which would have been music to many of his listeners’ ears as the freedom/planning debate took a new post-war turn.20 Just as the RS managed simultaneously to be deeply involved in discussions about applied science and to valorise the individual genius of a Newton with big business footing the bill, Cripps’ remarks have to be understood in the context of the government’s plans to harness science and technology for industrial production and economic recovery. Cripps wanted Britain to produce its way out of austerity; economic development and an export drive were central to this aim, and science and technology were presented as the key means of achieving it. Beginning with the 1946 Barlow Committee Report on Scientific Manpower, a succession of committees were established to deal with the issue, including the National Production Advisory Council for Industry and the Anglo-



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American Productivity Council, in which Alexander King played a leading role, now as head of a Central Scientific Secretariat.21 In 1947 Morrison appointed a Committee on Industrial Productivity, and it is against this economic background that the creation of the Advisory Council for Science Policy (ACSP, successor to the wartime Scientific Advisory Committee and a response to Dale’s pleas for a more robust advisory mechanism) in 1947 must be understood.22 Significantly, both the ACSP and its sibling the Defence Research Policy Committee were chaired from 1947 to 1952 by Tizard, whose impact on British science policy now became much greater than it could ever have been, had he been elected President of the RS instead of Robinson in 1945.23 In this new ecology of interlinked committees, the issue for the RS became how to position itself to maintain and exploit its close links with government and industry whilst simultaneously appearing to be disinterested, ideologically neutral and distant from matters of politics and economics so as to preserve the ‘independence’ which publicly warranted its capacity to offer advice. With Tizard – a trusted insider who had been RS Foreign Secretary from 1940 to 1945 and the choice of many for President in 1945 – doing the overtly political work in the corridors of power, the RS Officers could be assured that they were close to decision making while being formally detached from it. Such co-option worked in different ways and at various levels, from royalty down. When Assistant Secretary Griffith Davies retired at the end of 1946, it seems that the well-placed Alexander King – now Secretary of the ACSP – was invited to apply for the position.24 He declined, however, so Robinson recruited David Martin, an Edinburgh-trained chemist whom he knew well both from wartime work in the Ministry of Supply and from the Chemical Society, where Martin had been General Secretary from 1945. Martin quickly became central to the organisational machinery of the RS, reforming its bureaucratic procedures and acting as a point of continuity across the burgeoning structure of committees that were emerging to deal with new aspects of national and international post-war science. He attended Council, Officers’ meetings and was secretary of many sub-committees. The range of his contacts, disclosed by his recently discovered diary from 1947 to 1949, is indicative of the RS’s links to Whitehall and beyond. In January 1948, for example, he discussed UNESCO with Adrian,

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conference matters with Bernal and Egerton and general RS affairs with a Robinson ‘overwhelmed with business’ after visiting Sweden to collect his 1947 Nobel Chemistry Prize; he lunched with the Chief Scientific Officer of the American Embassy and showed him round scientific London; he met with DSIR and Treasury officials; he attended meetings of the Executive Committee of the Society for Visiting Scientists; and he discussed a proposal to set up a Military Research Facilities Committee with Owen WansbroughJones, Scientific Adviser to the Army Council. He traded news with FRSs and administrative colleagues in other learned societies, often over lunch at the Athenaeum or the Savage Club – conviviality in clubland was crucial in the management of scientific affairs and the work of the RS, as we shall see.25 Martin’s connections with his counterparts in the civil service (especially the DSIR and the Treasury) were particularly important. Later in 1948 he recorded that ‘[w]e have found a very sympathetic attitude in Mr. P.D. Proctor who has succeeded Sir Alan Barlow at the Treasury’ – the all-important source of government grant-in-aid and other financial support.26 Proctor was assiduously courted by the Society, and was a guest at several Anniversary Dinners. Martin was able to exploit such connections effectively when he spent much of his first year on the organisation of a large Conference on Scientific Information, which arose out of the recommendations of the 1946 Empire Scientific Conference. In July 1947 the RS produced a report on ‘The Publication of the Results of Scientific Research in the UK’ which discussed the problems of scientific publication, particularly the slowness of the process but also the paper shortages endemic in austerity Britain. Critiques of scientific publication and information management tied in, of course, with wider discussions across government of industrial productivity and the effective use of scientific resources, again linking the RS to the government’s economic agenda.27 Egerton took charge of a formidable organisation of committees and steering groups, built around the key categories of ‘publication and distribution of papers reporting original work’, ‘abstracting services’, ‘indexing and other library services’ and ‘reviews, annual Reports etc.’. Extraordinarily elaborate advance preparations were made in order to maximise the effectiveness of the meeting (including a questionnaire on scientists’ reading habits, circulated by Bernal and John Kendrew). Written contributions and conference discus-



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sions were complemented by an exhibition at the RS, intended to reinforce the practical nature of the conference, and including ‘Scientific Journals, Abstracts and Reviews; Printing and Methods of Reproduction; Classification in Science; Mechanical Indexing and Sorting; and Microphotography and Microfilm Readers’. In addition to all this there was, again, an extensive programme of visits to His Majesty’s Stationery Office (notable for duplicating and distribution activities with extensive mechanisation) and other large government and commercial organisations making extensive or innovative use of information technology.28 Attended by some 500 delegates and observers, the conference was intended to produce practical suggestions and real policy outcomes, all with the RS’s imprimatur. In his opening speech, Herbert Morrison pledged official government recognition of and support for the recommendations of the conference via Tizard’s Committee on Industrial Productivity. Yet, in discussing the very nature of scientific communication, the conference confronted fundamental organisational and epistemological issues. Bernal’s proposal for the central organisation of scientific publication via a National Distribution Authority was the most controversial of these, bringing to a head several years of debate about ‘Bernalism’ and planning.29 On the opening morning of the conference, The Times published not only a critical letter from A.G. Tansley and J. Baker (founders of the Society for Freedom in Science, which had been opposing Bernalism for a decade) but an anonymous leader by the vexatious Andrade criticising Bernal’s ‘cavalier and insidious’ proposals, which raised ‘issues of centralization and regimentation, which will evoke strong and justified protest at the conference’.30 In his opening address Robinson bluffly parried this vexed question of freedom and planning through the recognition of legitimate differences about means and an insistence on shared ends. This adept manoeuvre helped to neutralise a politically and professionally contentious issue and create a consensus around which discussions could proceed.31 The meeting was a great success. Among its principal outcomes were the establishment of an RS Information Services Committee, which in June 1950 issued a ‘Fair Copying Declaration’, intended to ensure that ‘scientists have no undue difficulties in obtaining copies from libraries and other organisations supplying information’ without infringing copyright.32 The scheme was rapidly adopted by over

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100 learned societies and publishers representing more than 170 journals and, following extensive discussions in Harold Wilson’s Board of Trade, led ultimately to the broader provisions of the 1956 Copyright Act.33 More than this, however, the conference once again aligned the RS closely with the interests and imperatives of the Labour government. As Robinson had hoped, the RS was projecting itself in the late 1940s as a modernised, engaged and relevant institution and, thereby, beginning to stake a strong claim to a share in the emerging governance structures of British science. Rebellion and retrenchment: the Science Centre scheme Such claims were mediated, as we have seen, by an extensive but purposefully discreet set of personal connections between RS Officers and politicians, industrialists and policy makers, and given traction through a network of overlapping and interlocking committee and club memberships and a core group of senior FRSs, many of whom (for example Patrick Blackett and Alexander Todd) would later become Officers. These networks were complemented at a bureaucratic level by Martin and his links with his counterparts across Whitehall and with rank-and-file FRSs. Even so, there continued to be disagreements not just among the FRSs but among the Officers themselves about the direction and purpose of the Society. Such disagreements could spill over from contained private discussion to more open public expressions of dissent, rupturing the usual, tacitly agreed sense of collective responsibility. At the Anniversary Dinner in 1948, for example, Adrian announced in an otherwise light-hearted reply to the toasts that the aims of the RS ‘are the promotion of natural knowledge’, and ‘though we are not all agreed as to the best way to do it – whether to plan with Professor Bernal or to follow our noses with Professor Polanyi’, he felt ‘a danger that people will expect that the scientific study of industry and of human relationships will work miracles overnight’.34 The point was clear – and in direct contradiction to what Robinson had said at the Anniversary Dinner three years earlier before the same principal guest, Herbert Morrison. Adrian’s broadside reflected growing alarm among a small but vocal group of FRSs that the RS was in danger of becoming too close to government, or at least that its connections were becoming too openly formalised, with a risk to its much-vaunted – if largely rhetorical – independence. The opposition crystallised around



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the plan to secure new premises. With strong support from Max Nicholson, the civil servant heading Morrison’s office, this quickly became a large project incorporating not just the RS and many other learned and professional scientific societies, but most of the government departments associated with science (the research councils, Nicholson’s newly created Nature Conservancy and the Board of Trade’s new National Research Development Corporation), the Patent Office and Library (which were to be expanded) and the British Commonwealth Scientific Office. Morrison told Minister of Health Aneurin Bevan of the need to ‘bring science out of the backroom by giving it a site appropriate to the burdens we are laying on it. We cannot hope to go ahead as a modern scientific nation if we do not give our scientists the tools to do their job and if we keep them huddled away in old-fashioned slum properties scattered all over London.’35 Cripps was also sympathetic and approved funding. Discussions on possible sites for what was now intended to be a national flagship ‘Science Centre’ took place with the Ministry of Works between 1947 and 1950, eventually leading to the selection of a site on the South Bank of the Thames, near that earmarked for the 1951 Festival of Britain – intended symbolically to represent cultural continuity with the Festival and to proclaim the vitality of British science and its institutions. Despite the promise of government funding, the selection of a site and the drawing up of initial plans, the Science Centre – a ‘New Jerusalem’ for post-war British science – did not come to be. A small cabal of FRSs led by G.I. Taylor, G.P. Thomson and E.C. Bullard agitated against the scheme, fearing that physical contiguity with the research councils and other institutions of government would have an effect on the putative ‘independence’ of the RS. This was a bit rich, since all three ringleaders were themselves closely involved in government and military science (Bullard was Director of the National Physical Laboratory). More significant was the fact that all three were politically conservative; a fundamental underlying anxiety for them was the dirigisme of the socialist state, and their RS was a bastion of scientific elitism. Crucially, Adrian – who became Master of Trinity College Cambridge in 1951 – shared these views, and as an Officer increasingly expressed his scepticism about the proposed move. When he succeeded Robinson as President in 1950, the scheme quickly lapsed and was eventually shelved by the Conservatives when they returned to government in 1951.

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Adrian’s presidency was marked by a pointedly distant public relationship with government. At the Anniversary Dinner in 1953 he spoke with characteristic eloquence to the marquess of Salisbury, who now occupied the post, in recognising that ‘[w]e have a traditional friendship with the Lord President of the Council – not an entirely disinterested one on our side, since he keeps the roof over our heads, but it is a friendship which we have valued all the more in these past years when scientific matters have become so all-­ embracing and Lord Presidents have been such agreeable and understanding Ministers’.36 But, reflecting on the role of the RS at the end of his term in 1955, he took a harder line. Because ­‘[s]­cientific issues are now of great concern to those who frame the laws and policy of the State,’ there should be ‘some independent body to advise on them’. What was needed, he said, was ‘not an Academy to pronounce on the controversial points of scientific theory but one with a reasonable knowledge of the direction in which research is heading’. This was emphatically not a role for the RS: ‘As a Society we have never aspired to an organized control of scientific research; even in times of grave national emergency we have preserved our status as a private body willing to cooperate with the State but unwilling to forfeit our independence.’ He was, he said, ‘convinced that the most important thing that [the RS] does now is to exist and to perpetuate its existence by electing new Fellows’.37 This astonishing statement of the essential irrelevance of the RS was an exaggerated backlash against the more engaged approach that Robinson had taken with respect to the RS’s relations with the state and its role in governance. Adrian eschewed any such role – at least in public. In the world of clubland lunches, formal dinners and receptions and the day-to-day bureaucratic relations with officials in ministries, research councils and other agencies maintained by Martin, things continued exactly as before: discussions and negotiations carried on and agreements reached quietly and without advertisement. Adrian’s statement made no difference to that. But it did project a much more elitist and patrician view of the RS than many FRSs felt was appropriate, stirring a revolt among the Fellowship. Following the Officer and Council elections of 1955, when Cyril Hinshelwood succeeded Adrian as President, FRS Cyril Darlington tried to rally support for a reform of the RS’s electoral system. Once again, the RS’s own self-governance came into question from within its own ranks,



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and with it its fitness to represent or govern anything at all external to itself.38 Conclusion At the opening session of the Empire Scientific Conference in June 1946, pricked by Laski’s recent public criticism, A.V. Hill mused: perhaps our Canadian colleagues know what a mugwump really is; I did not, so consulted the Oxford Dictionary: it appears that mugwump is a North-American Indian word meaning ‘great chieftain,’ which was applied offensively in the presidential election of 1884 to signify an independent in politics. The Royal Society’s motto is Nullius in Verba, which means that we do not take our opinions from other people, but form them for ourselves. In other words we are mugwumps and the professor was right. I hope we can live up to his epithet.39

Hill’s riposte cleverly turned Laski’s barb to the advantage of the RS. But the RS’s Officers and Fellows were not mugwumps. The word-play belied the work that the Officers and the RS’s secretariat put into maintaining links with government departments, the military, industry, universities, other learned societies and national and international organisations. The industrially well-connected Robinson sought to align the RS closely to government imperatives, not least to help secure new accommodation for the scientific societies and realise a new vision to project the institutions of British science to the nation and the world. His Officers initially supported his engaged and expansionist vision. As we have seen, however, a President could determine a direction for policy but could not ensure its enactment. A faction within the RS itself sought to distance the RS from the engagement with government – or at least a socialist government – that Robinson had encouraged as the RS simultaneously reconfigured its own institutional identity and renegotiated its place in the wider post-war scientific dispensation. Focused particularly on the Science Centre plan, but expressing a wider sense of dissatisfaction with the direction of the RS, the opposition revealed what a disparate and fractured body the RS was, and the precariousness of its ideological cohesion. These controversies took place at the intersection of a glorious, mythologised past, an intellectual and institutional landscape ­energised and transformed by the war, and a set of imagined futures

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for British science. In such circumstances, it is not surprising that any claims for the RS’s prospective role in scientific governance were contested and that its relationship to the state was – like that of a much newer institution, the BBC – fraught with anxiety over ‘independence’. In this sense, Laski’s criticisms about leadership were not without foundation. It is telling that the Association of Scientific Workers’ 1947 Pelican paperback Science and the nation, an ambitious manifesto for the central organisation and ­co-ordination of British civil science, did not even mention the RS, still less suggest it as part of its proposed institutional or professional framework for governance.40 This account complicates but enriches our understanding of post-war British science and the diversity of contemporary possibilities for its governance. It challenges what the literature often characterises as the irrepressible growth of science after 1945, with increased budgets, manpower and ambitions and abundant influence for scientists in policy making. The extraordinary reversal of our expectations about state patronage of post-war science entailed in the RS’s refusal of large-scale government funding, its own discreet courting of government ministers and other elites, the exercise of influence through interlocking committee and club memberships and the key role of middle-level bureaucrats like Martin should make us think afresh about where power lay in post-war British science, and perhaps even of what constitutes governance as a process. In his magisterial 1962 Anatomy of Britain, Anthony Sampson quoted an ‘eminent’ FRS who put it pithily: the RS ‘had the choice after the war of remaining a mutual admiration society, or really taking part in the control of science. It chose the former. It threw away the handles of power.’41 What an achievement. Notes  1 ‘Students heckle Prof. Laski,’ The Manchester Guardian (7 March 1946), 5. Laski was responding to Winston Churchill’s ‘iron curtain’ speech the previous day at Fulton, Missouri. Isaac Kramnick and Barry Sherman, Harold Laski: a life on the left (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1993), pp. 502–4.  2 G. Jones, Science, politics and the Cold War (London: Routledge, 1988); David Edgerton, Warfare state: Britain, 1920–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).



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 3 N.J. Vig, Science and technology in British politics (Oxford, Pergamon, 1968), p. 27; Stuart Blume, Toward a political sociology of science (New York: Macmillan, 1974), pp. 190–1.  4 Peter Collins (ed.), The Royal Society and science in the twentieth century, special issue of Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 64 Supplement 1 (2010).  5 There was an additional grant of £1,600 in that financial year for scientific conferences. ‘Grants for scientific investigation and publication’, Nature, 155 (1945), 325; ‘The development of the society, 1940– 1989’, in J. Rowlinson and N.H. Robinson (eds), Record of the Royal Society. Supplement to the Fourth Edition for the Years 1940–1989 (London: Royal Society, 1992), 1–38.  6 A.C.G. Egerton papers, Royal Society Archives, London (hereafter Egerton papers), AE/1/9/12, ‘Report on the needs of research in fundamental science after the war’; Peter Collins, ‘A role in running UK science’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 64 (2010), S119–S130.  7 Peter Collins, ‘Presidential politics: the controversial election of 1945’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 65 (2011), 325–42.  8 C.D. Darlington papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford, G92, F.A.E. Crew to C.D. Darlington, 21 November 1944.  9 ‘The anniversary dinner’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 4 (1946), 19–35, p. 26. 10 The Royal Society Empire Scientific Conference, June–July 1946. Report (London: Royal Society, 1948), 2 volumes; British Commonwealth Scientific Conference, London, 1946. Report of Proceedings (London: HMSO, 1946), Cmd 6970. In addition, an ‘Informal Commonwealth Conference on Defence Science’ had been held in London earlier in June, also under the chairmanship of Tizard. See Cabinet papers, The National Archives, Kew (hereafter Cabinet papers), CAB 133/80, ‘Informal Commonwealth Conference on Defence Science’. 11 Empire Scientific Conference, Report, p. 18. 12 Empire Scientific Conference, Report, pp. 36–9. 13 Jennifer Goodacre, ‘Representing science in a divided world: the Royal Society and Cold War Britain’ (PhD dissertation, University of Manchester, 2013). 14 Sabine Clarke, ‘The meanings of fundamental research in Britain, circa 1916–1950’, Isis, 101 (2010), 285–311. 15 Royal Society, Newton tercentenary celebrations, July 1946 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947). 16 Royal Society, Newton tercentenary celebrations, p. 92. 17 ‘Isaac Newton observatory’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 5 (1948), p. 74. 18 Newton tercentenary celebrations, p. 2.

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19 The year book of the Royal Society of London, 1949 (London: Royal Society, 1949), p. 83. 20 ‘Anniversary dinner 1946’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 5 (1947), 5–26, pp. 6–7; William McGucken, Scientists, society and state: the social relations of science movement in Great Britain, 1931– 1947 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1984), pp. 265ff. 21 Scientific manpower. Report of a committee appointed by the Lord President of the Council, 1946, Cmd 6824; Nick Tiratsoo and Jim Tomlinson, Industrial efficiency and state intervention: Labour 1939– 51 (London: Routledge, 1993); Alexander King, Let the cat turn round: one man’s traverse of the twentieth century (London: CPTM, 2006), pp. 169–95. 22 Philip Gummett and Geoffrey Price, ‘An approach to the central planning of British science: formation of the Advisory Council on Science Policy’, Minerva, 15 (1977), 119–43; McGucken, Scientists, society and state, pp. 307ff. 23 Jon Agar and Brian Balmer, ‘British scientists and the Cold War: the Defence Research Policy Committee and information networks, 1947– 1963’, Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, 28 (1998), 209–52. 24 King, Let the cat turn round, p. 139. 25 Jeff Hughes, ‘Doing diaries: David Martin, the Royal Society and scientific London, 1947–1950’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 66 (2012), 273–94. 26 Hughes, ‘Doing diaries’, p. 282. 27 Egerton papers, AE/1/7/4; A. Black, D. Muddiman and H. Plant, The early information society: information management in Britain before the computer (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 66–73. 28 The Royal Society scientific information conference, 1 June–2 July 1948. Report and papers submitted (London: Royal Society, 1948), pp. 46, 47–8, 232–4. 29 Dave Muddiman, ‘Red information scientist: the information career of J.D. Bernal’, Journal of Documentation, 59 (2003), 387–409, p. 396. 30 [E.N. da C. Andrade], ‘Records of research’, The Times (21 June 1948), p. 5. 31 H. East, ‘Professor Bernal’s “insidious and cavalier proposals”: the Royal Society Scientific information conference, 1948’, Journal of Documentation, 54 (1998), 293–302. 32 ‘Fair copying declaration and list of publishing organisations subscribing to it’ (London: The Royal Society, 1950), p. 3, quoted in Brad Sherman and Leanne Wiseman, ‘Fair copy: protecting access to scientific information in post-war Britain’, Modern Law Review, 73 (2010), 240–61, p. 250.



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33 Sherman and Wiseman, ‘Fair copy’. 34 ‘Anniversary dinner 1948’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 6 (1949), 82–103, pp. 93–4. 35 Cabinet papers, CAB 124/2035, Herbert Morrison to Aneurin Bevan, 4 August 1949. 36 ‘Anniversary dinner 1953’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 11 (1954), 6–13, p. 10. 37 ‘Address of the President Lord Adrian, O.M., at the anniversary meeting, 30 November 1955’, Proceedings of the Royal Society, A 234 (1956), 151–60, p. 157. 38 Collins, ‘Presidential politics’, p. 338 and n.66. 39 A. V. Hill, ‘Mugwumps’, in The ethical dilemma of science (London: The Scientific Book Guild, 1962), p. 130. 40 Association of Scientific Workers, Science and the nation (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1947), pp. 174–8. 41 Anthony Sampson, Anatomy of Britain (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1962), p. 514.

5

The Defence Research Committee, 1963–72 Jon Agar

What is a useful and productive focus of analysis for historians of scientific governance? Committees are the natural unit of bureaucracy, and their workings are crucial in any account of either government at large1 or science policy decision making in particular.2 Since committees generate paperwork they form and organise the primary source records that are the starting point for historical research on government. However, the fact that such records are convenient is not a reason, in itself, to choose committees as a focus of analysis. Indeed, historians, in search of less powerful voices, should always be ready to question and challenge, as well as understand, the archival categories of the past. Nevertheless, there are a number of positive reasons to observe past committees at work. Committees are mid-range entities, between individual and largescale organisation, and this feature is an advantage, since personal interventions, motivations and career paths can be weighed alongside broader, impersonal, strategic forces. Committees can be dry as dust (as anyone who has sat on one knows), but they also exist because something is at stake: the balancing of interests, the gathering of disparate energies for a common purpose or, sometimes, the cynical desire not to reach a decision. Committees can be dynamic (making decisions, sharing knowledge) and they can be obstructive (blocking change, indulging in ‘group think’). Either way, they are significant. This chapter is on the Defence Research Committee (DRC). It was born in 1963, out of the ashes of a similar body, the Defence Research Policy Committee (DRPC). The DRC debated and reviewed defence research issues behind closed doors. Only now



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have many of its papers – at least, broadly, until 1972 – been declassified. It is still with us. I argue that since it kept a critical watch on defence research, greenlighting some major projects and closing others, drawing on external advice while expressing internal interests, comparing British programmes with those of allies and enemies, then it forms a proper focus for the attention of historians of scientific governance. The predecessor: the DRPC The DRPC was the highest-level decision-making body wholly concerned with military research and development (R&D) in Britain in the early Cold War.3 The committee had been established in 1947, paired on the civil side with the Advisory Council for Scientific Policy, with the aim to ‘formulate a coherent scientific policy covering the whole range of defence research’, advising on priorities and levels of effort, and reporting to the Chiefs of Staff, the Defence Committee and later the Minister of Defence. It was chaired by a succession of four prominent scientific advisers: Henry Tizard, John Cockcroft, Frederick Brundrett and Solly Zuckerman. It was dissolved in 1963 and replaced, in part, by the subject of this study: the DRC. Earlier commentators, probably misled by the characteristically contrarian views of Zuckerman, considered the DRPC to be a limp and inconsequential influence.4 This early assessment was wrong. The DRPC was indeed an influential body. It was a key forum for the inter-service debates about research and acted as a ‘gatekeeper’ for British military research projects. One routine but consequential task the DRPC undertook was a wide-ranging review of defence science. The science in turn had to be choreographed to fit with changing military strategy and economic circumstances. However, while the DRPC had a broad remit it was critically constrained in ways that shaped the decisions it took. For example, the DRPC was in practice restricted to non-atomic science, which had its own decision-making processes. In turn, the DRPC was more sympathetic to its own ‘weapons of mass destruction’: chemical and biological weapons. Another instance of constraints was the extraordinary asymmetry in knowledge about friendly and enemy R&D programmes. The cold, existential fact of the Cold War, that devastation could be minutes away, placed an emphasis

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on ­ preparation: the research and development of offensive and defensive military systems. The ‘present armament race’, observed the DRPC’s longest-serving member, the Admiralty scientist (and astronomer) Sir John Carroll, ‘was in fact a research and development race’.5 Yet almost nothing concrete was known about Soviet research: ‘direct penetration of the Russian research and development programme was impossible’, complained an intelligence official in 1955. ‘We had never seen a single [piece of] Russian equipment until it was in operational service or deliberately shown.’6 A looking-glass effect became evident: the DRPC had to shape the British defence science programme based on knowledge of what it – and Western allies – could do on the assumption that the East could do similar. I will argue that both of these features also describe the DRC. The DRC: overview So what do we see? There are continuities and changes. First, the DRC, like the DRPC, conducted major reviews of the defence research programme, balancing inter-service demands, responding to new strategic guidance and, more often than not, searching for cuts as projects overran budgets and the national economy struggled. Second, the DRC acted as a gatekeeper for specific projects, of which a partial list of the most significant would include: helicopters, satellites, fuel cells, beryllium as an aero-engine material, computers, magneto-hydrodynamic power sources, radar, inertial navigation, pump jets, ram jets, micro-electronic components, sonobuoys, laser weapons, tanks, night vision, rockets, hypersonic aircraft and chemical and biological weapons. Third, some topics received attention that they had not under the DRPC. Examples include the balance between civil and military research, the potential contribution of the human sciences, especially psychology, and what was somewhat euphemistically called ‘aid for civil power’, in other words R&D in response to the troubles in Northern Ireland. Fourth, international relations, and the knowledge that might flow through them, remained important. It is no surprise that the relations with the two superpowers were most critical. The United States was a source of leadership, collaboration and also anxiety over dependence. Soviet research and development remained an enigma, which meant that occasional glimpses, such



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as the extraordinary case of the ‘Berlin Firebar’, discussed below, were influential. Finally, one trend was towards an increasingly influential role for a handful of ‘independent’ academic scientists, in particular John Kendrew and Hermann Bondi, and to a lesser extent Brian Flowers and J.L.M. Morrison. They led major investigations and their voices could sometimes dominate discussion. However, this trend culminated, problematically so, in the establishment in the late 1960s of a new system for bringing outside expertise to bear on defence policy: the labyrinthine collection of bodies headed by the Defence Scientific Advisory Council (DSAC). The emerging structure, a DRC, which became a more conventional Whitehall committee, and DSAC, which channelled largely academic input, is the system for guiding defence research that has lasted up to the present. However, as I shall show, the system got off to a very rocky start. The DRC and reviews of defence R&D The context for the transition from DRPC to DRC was that of profound transformation in defence policy. Rearmament in the early Cold War left the UK in the late 1950s with a V-bomber nuclear force, already becoming obsolescent, retooled defence research establishments and a hydrogen bomb programme. The success of the latter in May 1957 rebooted UK–US atomic relations and prompted the formation of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Duncan Sandys, the aggressive new Minister of Defence, forced through the decisions outlined in his 1957 White Paper, often in the teeth of opposition from Chiefs of Staff, including the end of National Service, cutting back conventional armaments and placing more reliance on nuclear deterrence to be delivered by missiles. When the ballistic missile Blue Streak overran budgets in 1960 it was cut in favour of an American air-to-surface missile called Skybolt launched from the V-bombers.7 In 1962, when Skybolt was withdrawn, the submarine-launched strategic American missile Polaris was chosen, a cheaper (but not cheap) means of delivering British thermonuclear bombs.8 Under the Wilson administration the Ministry of Aviation became absorbed into the Ministry of Technology. Mintech had changed greatly between initial plans – a small department based around

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the state-owned patent-holding National Research Development Corporation (NRDC) – and actualisation – an enormous department absorbing NRDC, the Atomic Energy Authority, most of the broken-up Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (all in 1965), the procurement part of the Ministry of Aviation (1967) and the Industrial Reorganisation Corporation (1969). The Wilson government searched for defence cuts for reasons that went beyond a response to precarious economic circumstances. First, following the logic of the Sandys realignment of defence policy, major projects, darlings of the armed services and aviation ministry, were cancelled, including the sophisticated TSR-2 tactical strike aircraft and the P.1154 supersonic vertical take-off fighter, both in 1965.9 Second, Mintech aimed to shift R&D spending from defence to civil areas, encourage diversification, links to industry and spin-off from defence laboratories, as well as moves ‘from civil aerospace and civil nuclear power to other sectors’, ‘from government laboratories to the private sector’, and from seeing underinvestment in research as the problem to other means of stimulating growth.10 Finally, to force through these changes Conservative and Labour politicians expanded the Ministry of Defence so as to be a central, powerful body, relegating the three armed service departments. The DRC, its chair and chief scientific adviser (CSA) and its secretariat, the Defence Research Staff, sat in the heart of this reformed MoD. So the DRC was part of an expanded structure to ensure control and debate about military systems. Co-created with the DRC were a Weapons Development Committee (WDC) and an Operational Requirements Committee. The DRC’s terms of reference were: (i) To advise the Minister of Defence and the Chiefs of Staff on all scientific and technical matters which may affect the formulation and direction of defence research policy. (ii) To keep the defence research programme under review, so as to ensure that it is appropriate to defence needs, having regard to available resources, and in particular to ensure that all concerned are made aware in good time of scientific developments which may be of military interest.11

Members of the DRC were senior scientific advisers and controllers from the MoD and the Ministry of Aviation, plus externals, including ‘two or three independent scientists’, and representatives,



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when relevant, from DSIR, the Treasury and the Joint Intelligence Board.12 Successive chairs of DRC, illustrating a slight trough in status, were Solly Zuckerman (1963–66), materials scientist Alan Cottrell (1965–67), deputy CSA for MoD E.C. Cornford (1968– 69), his successor N. Coles (1969–71) and Hermann Bondi (1971 onwards). The challenge, recognised explicitly by Solly Zuckerman chairing the first meeting, was to steer a path between non-intervention, merely collating information for the minister, and too much intervention, interfering with the day-to-day management of research.13 So the approach was to conduct rolling programmes of general reviews and carefully select topics for special review (often forming working groups), while being flexible enough to respond to pressing issues. The framework for defence policy also introduced further guidance, including the Treasury’s insistence to keep an eye out for ‘opportunities for rationalisation and generally increased efficiency’; Mintech’s interest in promoting civil industry; an injunction to think through the benefits, drawbacks and consequences of ‘interdependence’; and work within what was known and not known about other countries’ research and development. The parallel WDC dealt, broadly, with the ‘development’ rather than the ‘research’ of R&D, and therefore was even more concerned with specific weapons systems. Nevertheless, there was overlap, if not, it seems, turf wars. Where there was considerable shared interest, for example in the case of electronics components – still discussed under the slightly anachronistic term ‘valve development’ – the DRC and WDC held joint meetings, chaired by Sir William Cook. Some parts of the research programme also fell under the WDC, for example nuclear propulsion for submarines. The operation of the DRC inevitably changed over time. If you imagine a spectrum from grand strategy through calls for types of military systems, through to research, development and procurement, then problems arose as each level shifted in relation to each other. Zuckerman, for example, saw problems in tying research to specific weapons systems, which might be cancelled.14 There was a case therefore for supporting ‘component’ research independently. Throughout, the DRC had to deal with uncertainty about future shifts:

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It would be valueless to review the research programme until the Chiefs of Staff doctrine had been revised in the light of agreed Ministerial changes in defence policy. The Committee ought then to concentrate on the proper deployment of scientific effort and the priorities which ought to be given to the various Research fields … Unless there was a clear statement of defence policy there was danger of perpetuating the situation under which [the DRC] had to draw up their own assumptions … Furthermore, unless a clear indication of defence policy could be given to scientists … it would be impossible for them to play their proper part in formulating and implementing future research programmes. There were bound to be changes in strategic policy over the years, and judgements would have to be made on which technologies were likely to pay dividends for future weapons. Research would be influenced by the types of major projects.15

Indeed, the changes acted both up and down: Research would be influenced by the types of major projects which would continue but it ought not to be forgotten that research might well influence strategic policy as it had in the past, eg. Polaris submarines.

This recognition of complexity of relationships, how everything shapes everything else, applied within research too. Research ‘could not be managed except in relation to the ‘environment of the demand’, said Sir Robert Cockburn, noting that roughly 30% of R&D was ‘research’, and of that 20% was ‘applied research determined by decisions taken on projects’ and 10% was ‘basic or general research’.16 But the latter ‘was not in practice completely unorientated. It was inevitably influenced by the environment in which it was undertaken.’ This view supports Paul Forman’s analysis of the orientation of US (defence) research, and my more general ‘working worlds’ hypothesis on the relationship of science to arenas of problems.17 The regular, typically annual, reviews of the major research programmes of the armed services and aviation are fascinating documents, but there is not room here to discuss them in detail. In general they attempted to pull together knowledge of research in order that the politicians and the Chiefs of Staff could make major decisions. Decisions at the next tier down were often made at DRC, although sign-off might happen elsewhere. The substantial work composing the review was carried out by the Defence Research



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Staff and the working groups. Models include the less regular major reviews of the DRPC, but also the so-called ‘von Karman’ reviews conducted under NATO auspices, with the difference that the DRC had access to more secret material.18 It is true to say that the DRC struggled with achieving overviews in the face of massive detail and constant change. Only occasionally was clarity achieved, such as in 1964 when the ‘dying points’ and ‘growing points’ were clearly identified.19 These, after all, might be disputed, as chemical and biological weapons (CBW) was between Aviation and Army.20 The DRC also occasionally noted areas of expertise where research establishments struggled to recruit, an indicator either that a research area was growing in importance or that defence research did not appeal to university students, not least for moral reasons.21 By 1969, the uncertainties over control encouraged a new ‘management by objectives’ to be adopted. There is a sense of déjà vu here, since a similar attempt to take a managerial grasp of defence systems development had emerged a decade earlier. So, for example, rather than approve specific navigation systems, the research was geared to objectives, such as ‘improved reliability and life’, or just ‘cheaper’ inertial systems.22 In 1971, the establishment of a Procurement Executive, as well as the emergence of DSAC, discussed below, further reduced the role of the DRC. The DRC as gatekeeper In a similar fashion to the DRPC, the DRC continued to act as a gatekeeper for defence research. Projects would come before the Committee, either as part of the comprehensive service reviews or as individual items. The outcome might be expansion, confirmation, cuts or cancellation. I will give several brief examples before discussing one particular, illustrative case in more detail. CBW had a peculiar significance for the old DRPC, the Committee’s interest being related to its semi-permanent exclusion from shaping nuclear research. CBW continued to be reviewed under the DRC, although now as one – albeit important – topic among many. CBW was considered in the defence research review of 1966, in the ‘light of the increase in the Russian threat’, and an increase in funds for both Porton Down establishments was agreed.23 When the DRC devoted a whole meeting to reviewing CBW in December, there was a ‘divergence of views’, especially on

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the likelihood of full-scale biological weapons attack, but also on other aspects.24 W.B.H. Lord, the assistant CSA (research) at the Ministry of Defence, was bullish, calling for, in particular, high priority to be given to ‘the discovery of incapacitating agents and the means of delivering them’.25 But there ‘would be no purpose in working on this potentially valuable weapon’, he added, ‘if our forces were to be denied it for largely emotional reasons and positive steps might need be taken to change opinion on these weapons in some quarters’. On chemical weapons he noted that ‘as a deterrent it would only be credible if the enemy knew it could be used’. The DRC endorsed the incapacitating agents suggestion (leaving it to the prime minister to consider implications for the Geneva Protocol), while supporting a limited chemical weapons deterrent over objections from the Army representative. The DRC took a special interest in computers, which were becoming smaller, cheaper and, by the 1960s, embedded in weapons and defence systems.26 The issue was to get the whole to work together. ‘The problem extended beyond the land/air battle’, noted Solly Zuckerman from the chair in 1964, ‘there were, for example, problems of co-operation between submarines and aircraft, and there was a close civil interest.’27 A working party set up to examine online computing for the 1970s, ‘with the object of considering the possibilities for standardisation and modular construction’, recommended the development of a single series of machines.28 It envisaged 1,600 computers for thirty-three projects, for use in ‘ships, aircraft and army units’. Here we see the influence of defence on the civil industry, and the way that DRC approval could have broader consequences. Again, like the DRPC, individuals on the DRC could act as project champions. In 1964, for example, Sir Robert Cockburn, director of the Royal Aircraft Establishment, complained that the amount of funds spent on helicopter research was ‘insignificant’, leading to a dependence on American designs.29 Supported by Morien Morgan, the Ministry of Aviation’s controller of aircraft, he persuaded the DRC to take a ‘new look’.30 Cockburn was also influential in the call for new facilities for high-altitude research at the Rocket Propulsion Establishment, Westcott.31 At issue was an understanding of the movement of rockets, not least ballistic missiles. Sometimes, the DRC agreed, research had to be done in anticipation: ‘an accumulation of experience and knowledge was



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essential if the right decisions were to be taken on future weapons. Research facilities could not be constructed quickly and it was not always acceptable to wait until there was a clear objective.’ This linkage between general research and specific objectives was a continual thorn. Other examples of the phenomenon of project champion include the Navy representatives’ championing of pump jets, which promised a low-noise means of replacing propellers of ships and submarines. A programme of research had started at the Admiralty Research Laboratory, prompted by a visit to the United States, as early as 1951.32 Full-scale trials were endorsed by the DRC in December 1964.33 Sometimes the DRC would withhold support. In 1966, for example, there was a considerable squabble about hypersonics (Mach 5 and above). The Aeronautical Research Council was pushing for expansion, while the DRC had previously suggested that work should be cut back and Britain should be more dependent on research underway in Sweden, the United States and France. The DRC was the superior body, so it was there that the bureaucratic fight was conducted. Again, the salient points were international co-operation and dependence, and the need to invest in a stock of expertise that might be called upon decades down the line. There was also a sociology of expectations at work: there was a ‘general tendency for the speed of weapons to increase’. This shaping assumption has a parallel with Moore’s Law in computing. Fuel cells provide an interesting case study of the DRC as gatekeeper. Fuel cells have their origins in nineteenth-century electrical physics. In the 1930s, Thomas Francis Bacon had developed the first hydrogen-oxygen fuel cells, adapting them for Royal Navy submarine use in the Second World War.34 Patents collected under the NRDC were exploited through a consortium pulled together by the NRDC and Energy Conversion Ltd in the UK and Pratt & Whitney in the United States in the 1950s, and fuel cells would later be on board the Apollo missions. Other work was underway overseas. By 1964, the Defence Research Staff produced an overview of the field.35 The authors noted that the current British defence research contribution was ‘trivial’, despite Bacon’s lead – £100,000 in defence research establishments and £45,000 in extra-mural contracts in the UK, compared to $50 million through the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Advanced Research Projects Agency in the United States. Yet, they claimed, here was

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a technology that promised compact and silent power, with immediate application in ‘underwater beach reconnaissance units’ and future potential in ships, submarines and radars. The DRC convened a working party, and soon agreed an increase in funds. By 1968, the research had progressed, overseen by the Navy. Furthermore, the other armed services were in support. The Army favoured hydrazine/air fuel cells for Cymbeline, its proposed new mortar-locating radar, which, operating close to enemy lines, needed to be quiet. Air Marshal Sir Peter Wykeham stated to his fellow DRC members that the Air Force Department supported the research, even when there was no immediate air application.36 Mintech, through the DRPC, was enthusiastic on the civil side – three-quarters of fuel cell investment was non-defence. However, by the following year, the DRC became the forum for first doubts being expressed and, later, cancellation. At a time of cuts, the DRC wanted to see the expense being pushed onto the civil budget. In return Mintech expressed fears that if ‘the Defence work on fuel cells were to be terminated the whole fuel cell techniques programme would suffer a severe set-back’.37 Moreover, the situation was complicated by the existence of a Memorandum of Understanding having been signed with the United States, divvying up research, as well as existing contracts, with industry (Energy Conversion Ltd, Shell) and universities. The Army began to explore what it might take to silence an off-the-shelf German Wankel spark ignition engine as an alternative. DRC again was the forum for debate, and eventually agreed the cancellation of the fuel cell projects. First Mintech pulled out of supporting fuel cells for Cymbeline and then, in 1971, the Navy ceased all but one line of fuel cell research.38 New topics In this section I examine three topics that the DRC either addressed as novelties or revisited with new urgency: civil/military relations, human factors research and Northern Ireland. At its first meeting the DRC reminded itself that further ‘consideration would have to be given to improving the interchange of information’, since ‘there was a tendency for research work in universities, in industry and in civil and military establishments, to be carried on independently’.39 Under Wilson, acting through the expanding Mintech, this ‘consideration’ became something more directed,



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urging on the identification and support for civil benefits from defence research, particularly in areas such as micro-electronics, computers, aircraft and automobiles.40 Studies of the factors inhibiting ‘spin-off’, prompted by an OECD inquiry, were conducted in 1964.41 When the DRC returned to the matter, after consultation, in 1966, there was disagreement about the extent of the problem. D.N. Forbes, a member of the defence secretariat at MoD, said that ‘in the past Defence Establishments had not, in the main, made any conscious effort to look for aspects of their work which would have some interest to the Civil world outside and no person or cell had been responsible for such activity’.42 If the DRC wanted dissemination, then things would have to be actively changed. On the other hand, E.C. Cornford, chief scientist for the Army, replied that his own enquiries ‘did not support the suggestion that Establishments gave little attention’ to spin-off; the problem, he thought, was perhaps not one of attitude or lack of information but of ‘effort put into dissemination’. The push was coming from Mintech, and the problem (and solution) was seen as one of information flow, although the short-termism of industry was also mentioned. ‘Flash reports’ (brief summaries), better libraries and copying Malvern’s ‘Industrial Interface’ were all mooted as solutions. Human factors – which covered personnel, ‘anti-personnel’ and the deployment of experts including physiologists, sociologists but especially psychologists – were another topic that received more attention from the DRC than from the DRPC. Nevertheless, it was, and would remain, a Cinderella branch of defence research. ‘Man lay at the centre of all military activity’, noted Dr Peter Krohn, academic endocrinologist and a confidant of Zuckerman’s, who had chaired a working party into the topic in 1967, adding that ‘this tended to be forgotten’.43 Human factors research was spread across different establishments, and was funded to the tune of only just over £1 million per annum. Krohn argued for a central establishment where greater investment would be well rewarded and there were many problems that could be tackled. The kinds of problems meant by ‘personnel’ were noise, protective clothing, stress and working in confined, dangerous spaces. ‘Anti-personnel’ methods meant inducing these in the enemy. Krohn had found ‘virtually no anti-personnel work being carried out’ in the UK, because it had ‘apparently been decided some time ago to rely on American work’.44 However, just as offensive CBW work

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was sometimes justified so as to better develop defences, it was likewise, thought Krohn, ‘important … to know more about the methods of attacking human beings so that better protection could be devised’. However, Krohn’s call came just as the defence budget was being cut. The counter-argument was that personnel research, including psychological research, led to more effective use of weapons and therefore savings overall. In the end the DRC resisted setting up a ‘Human Factors Research Establishment’, not least because in the present situation, it was claimed, ‘psychologists were working closely with physiologists and with weapons designers and it would be a mistake to pull them out and put them in a central Establishment’.45 Instead, ways of making military psychology a more attractive career path were explored.46 Nevertheless, the DRC recognised that the ‘trend [for more human factors research was] … likely to continue as equipment became more complex … [and the] lack of systematic knowledge of man’s reactions and capabilities is often the main factor limiting advance’.47 The troubles in Northern Ireland began in the late 1960s. British troops were deployed in August 1969. Research and development had been geared towards supporting the Army during the Cold War or overseas insurgencies. The sudden appearance of Northern Ireland as a battlefield therefore provoked new questions about research policy. As late as May 1969, discussion at DRC of ‘improved riot control agents’, principally CS gas, mentioned Hong Kong but not Northern Ireland.48 Yet by the 1972 DRC annual review it was noted that [t]he continuation of the troubles in Northern Ireland has led to an increase in demand upon the R&D resources and manpower of several of the Army-orientated establishments in support of UK Forces. Both the Internal Security problem and the increase in terrorist activity throughout the world reflects the ever increasing need for long term planning and research for defence against these types of aggression.49

This included work on CS gas for the Himsworth Committee, but also ‘more fundamental work, including a programme of work covering the whole field of wound ballistics relating not only to chemical and blunt trauma weapons but to high velocity missiles and fragments’. The Chemical Defence Establishment ‘on a “war-time” basis of urgency’ produced ‘rubber bullets, by hand, working roundthe-clock’.50 In general, however, ‘aid to civil power’ was an area



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that the struggling DSAC (discussed below) tried to contribute, in terms of offering advice on research policy, more so than the DRC.51 International relations International relations were central factors shaping defence R&D policy in several ways: as part of diplomacy towards Europe (not discussed here52), as restricting information flows about enemy systems and as ties between Cold War allies expressed variously as knowledge exchange, cooperation, interdependence and competition.53 What was implicitly a strong factor shaping the work of the DRPC, that allies’ R&D programmes were taken as proxies for the Cold War enemy’s state of the art, was stated explicitly at the DRC: One of the recurring difficulties in intelligence work is how to keep abreast of defence research … On the often justified assumption that technical developments in advanced countries remain more or less in step, one possible line of approach is to keep the scientific intelligence community as closely as possible in touch with our own forward thinking.54

In the absence of certain knowledge of Soviet R&D, the British defence research establishments continued, in the 1960s, to model research in response to the West’s own mirror image. This meant that rare glimpses into Soviet capabilities were doubly valuable. One such occasion was the crash, on 6 April 1966, of a Soviet twin-engined YAK 28(B) FIREBAR fighter aircraft into the Stößensee, a lake in the British sector of Berlin. The ‘prolonged salvage operations afforded an opportunity for a team of officers from the Aircraft Technical Intelligence staff, assisted by specialists from the Royal Radar Establishment and the National Gas Turbine Establishment, to exploit the wreckage before it was returned to the Russians’.55 The engines were pulled out of deep mud, while the wiring and electronics were carefully examined, as the Russians watched all the while from a nearby hill. The result was ‘very valuable intelligence’, immediately shared via the WDC and DRC. In terms of the relations between the UK and Cold War allies, a long list could be given of topics in which particular United States interests and projects had to be discussed at the DRC. The types of responses can be categorised: topics in which US relations were constantly under review by the DRC (space); research where American

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commercial interests were an issue (magnetohydrodynamics, helicopters); areas where the US might learn from the UK (night vision, ‘Chobham armour’, fuel cells, ‘bottom bounce’ sonar); areas where American leadership meant that collaboration or purchase was sought (electronics, airborne computers, detection of submarines, CBW detection, electronic warfare) but which also came with fears of losing global competitions in new industries; and areas where collaboration was sought, but with the knowledge that it would entail further restrictions, since the Americans were not keen that information released to the UK was shared with European or other partners (space, satellites, missiles). Two cases – beryllium and laser-damage weapons – illustrate the unequal special bind between UK and US defence research. Beryllium, one of the lightest metals, was a new candidate as an aero-engine material in the early 1960s. (The element also had atomic uses.) But it also had a peculiar significance for UK–US relations. In 1964 the DRC supported a joint evaluation study, not least because it ‘represented the first practical programme of technical co-operation with the United States’ (at least for some time).56 Rights to exploit commercially any benefits had to be carefully worded and explicitly cleared at high political levels. Solly Zuckerman expressed what was at stake: ‘If the United Kingdom did not participate in the Beryllium research programme there was the double risk that the Americans would gain a lead and be less cooperative on any further metallurgical research programme.’ Actually there was a triple risk: beryllium as an industrial material, later, would be identified as a major chemical hazard. Nevertheless, the need to keep the superpower sweet meant that more UK money went into beryllium research than would otherwise have happened. A similar situation can be found a year later in proposed ­co-operative research on ‘laser damage weapons’. In this case the UK had no ‘clear requirement’, but this was overridden by a request to the Ministry of Aviation ‘to find a suitable field of collaborative research with the Americans’.57 The Ministry ‘doubted whether the programme was of sufficient Defence value’, yet noted that ‘it was probable that if this particular proposal was abandoned there would be repercussions which might prejudice collaborative development with the Americans for a long time to come’.



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‘Independent’ scientists ‘If the warfare state was civilianised’, writes Edgerton, ‘it was through increased influence of long-standing civilian associates.’58 True, yet the ‘crucial’ civilian associates on the DRC, aside from the civil servants, were indeed academics rather than the businessmen Edgerton finds. Zuckerman held on to his professorship in anatomy at Birmingham while he was chair of the DRC, CSA to, in overlapping capacity, the MoD and the government as a whole. From the start the DRC had the aim of including ‘two or three independent scientists’. In fact, the number was fewer, but with influence that was out of proportion. Cosmologist Hermann Bondi and molecular biologist John Kendrew formed the first rank. Also heard were the voices of nuclear physicist Brian Flowers and mechanical engineer John Lamb Murray Morrison. A third rank of occasional players were Zuckerman’s colleague Peter Krohn, whom we met above, geophysicist Edward Crisp Bullard and aerodynamic engineer Douglas William Holder. It would be naïve to call any of these figures ‘independent’ – they all had careers that stepped between academia and government. Some of the most substantial, detailed investigations conducted by the DRC were through its working groups, chaired by these scientists, and on specific topics on which the scientists spoke loudly. Bondi led on space (1964–65, with a major space diplomacy visit to the United States in 1966), Kendrew on anti-submarine warfare (1965), Flowers on conventional weapons (1965–67), Morrison on armoured warfare (1965–66) and Krohn on human factors (1967), while Bullard influenced sonar (1968) and Holder computing (1969). In committee, the scientists were less beholden to specific projects (they rarely acted as project champions) and could take a cold, hard, perhaps more disinterested look. Bondi, for example, like Zuckerman, was critical of spreading resources thinly when it seemed like a compromise between service interests.59 However, the point should not be overplayed. The DRC was significant because it was a forum in which defence research was shaped in informed discussion between primarily military representatives. The ‘independent’ scientists were an effective part of the mix. All the more ironic, then, that effective advice on defence research was nearly scuppered by a massive expansion in the late 1960s of the use of independent scientists. The DSAC was established on

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April Fool’s Day, 1969. Composed ‘principally of scientists and technologists from outside the Ministry of Defence’, it was asked to provide advice, review ‘scientific and technological aspects of the Defence Research Programme’, advise on ‘long-term policy’, including ‘where appropriate … broader aspects of Defence Policy’, advise on manpower, scope and balance, bring to attention relevant developments outside defence and advise on specific issues on request.60 Initial plans were for a chair (W.R. Hawthorne, an ailing academic engineer and Master of Churchill College), fifteen independent members and seven official members. It soon developed into a sprawling set of committees, sub-committees, and sub-sub-committees which together mark the single biggest influx of academic scientists into the world of defence research advice.61 This was all supplementary to the existing DRC, ORC (Operational Requirements Committee) and WDC.62 The DSAC clearly struggled to find its feet. While it will require further documentary research to establish its eventual influence – and indeed the DSAC and DRC survive through to today – the DSAC was subject to some of the most withering and sarcastic commentary I have seen from a civil servant’s pen. Alan Smith was charged with summarising DSAC work for Zuckerman, Cottrell and Simpson. In November 1970 he observed that ‘1. DSAC has bred more boards and sub-boards than anyone can keep track of. 2. Most of these are yapping around the periphery of the MOD without coming to grips with real issues. 3. Some of them are still getting in one another’s way.’63 Another DSAC meeting was described as ‘rambling and inconclusive … in the course of which they raised several thorny and some potentially seditious questions, most of which concern subjects outside their terms of reference … If the Minutes are to be believed, this meeting was in the nature of a collective confessional, and about as constructive.’64 When one of the sub-boards volunteered that it was ‘quite impracticable for a part-time group of independent experts to make anything more than superficial comments or provide an automatic endorsement of official policy’, Smith’s wry comment was: ‘This is a blunt and uncompromising statement of the general problem of advisory committees.’65



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Conclusion Committees can be problems. They can fail to work as intended, and this was certainly true of the early years of the DSAC. However, committees are also places where much of the work of governance gets done. For historians, committees present opportunities, sites at which attention can be focused productively, since they are locations of encounter of ideas, interests, parties, individuals and organisations. I have examined here the second phase of the committee for UK defence research, the DRC between 1963 and 1972. I have argued that it shaped the research agenda, reviewing, cutting and redirecting the work of research establishments in the light of changing strategic and economic circumstance. It is a contribution to the story of how we made decisions about defence in the past, but also today, since the DRC continues, largely in secret deliberation, alongside the DSAC. Notes  1 Peter Hennessy, Whitehall (London: Secker & Warburg, 1989).  2 Philip Gummett, Scientists in Whitehall (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980).  3 Jon Agar and Brian Balmer, ‘British scientists and the Cold War: the Defence Research Policy Committee and information networks, 1947– 1963’, Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, 28 (1998), 209–52.  4 Cabinet papers, The National Archives, Kew (hereafter Cabinet papers), CAB 134/4854. STO(CS)(84)33, ‘Scientists bureaucrats and ministers’, the text of a public lecture by Zuckerman, 24 October 1984, is strong evidence of his dismissive view of the DRPC.  5 Agar and Balmer, ‘British scientists and the Cold War’, p. 209.  6 Quoted in Agar and Balmer, ‘British scientists and the Cold War’, p. 211.  7 Richard Moore, ‘Bad strategy and bomber dreams: a new view of the Blue Streak cancellation’, Contemporary British History, 27 (2013), 145–66.  8 For an updated view see Andrew Priest, ‘In American hands: Britain, the United States and the Polaris nuclear project, 1962–1968’, Contemporary British History, 19 (2005), 353–76.  9 Sean Straw and John W. Young, ‘The Wilson government and the demise of TSR-2, October 1964–April 1965’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 20 (1997), 18–44.

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10 David Edgerton, Warfare state: Britain 1920–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 252, 258, as part of a rejection of the standard reading of White Heat. 11 Records of the Ministry of Defence, The National Archives, Kew (hereafter Ministry of Defence), DEFE 10/571, ‘MoD. Draft procedures of the Defence Research Committee’, 1963. 12 Specifically, from MoD: CSA, Assistant CSA (Studies), Assistant CSA (Projects), Assistant Chief of Defence Staff (Operational Requirements), Under Secretary (R&D), Controller of the Navy, Deputy Controller (R&D), Master General of the Ordnance, Chief Scientist (Army), Deputy Chief of Air Staff, Scientific Adviser (Air); from Ministry of Aviation: Chief Scientist, Controller Aircraft, Controller Guided Weapons and Electronics; externals: two or three independent scientists, representative from DSIR, Director of Scientific Intelligence (JIB) and Under Secretary (Defence Materiel) Treasury. 13 Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/571, Zuckerman, ‘Committee procedures’, 12 December 1963. 14 Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/570, Minutes, DRC, 15 December 1964. The specific context was aircraft equipment components. 15 Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/570, Minutes, DRC, 3 March 1965. 16 Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/570, Minutes, DRC, 19 December 1963. 17 Paul Forman, ‘Beyond quantum electronics: national security as basis for physical research in the United States’, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 18 (1987), 149–229. Jon Agar, Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond (Cambridge: Polity, 2012). 18 See Agar and Balmer, ‘British scientists and the Cold War’, for the DRPC reviews. See Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/570, Minutes, DRC, 19 March 1964, for the NATO von Karman studies, which did not have access to ‘secret’ and ‘top secret’ documents. 19 Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/570, Minutes, DRC, 19 March 1964. 20 Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/624, Minutes, DRC, 22 February 1966. 21 ‘Students tended to think that defence research was confined to nuclear weapons, and there was a reluctance to become associated with it… Biological research also had a bad image’, noted in Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/570, Minutes, DRC, 3 March 1965. Universities not producing enough trained electro-chemists, necessary for fuel cell projects, were an issue in 1964. Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/571, ‘Fuel cells’, 7 February 1964. The importance of retaining hypersonics experts was mentioned in 1966. Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/624, Minutes, 17 May 1966. In 1970, all departments reported problems recruiting operational researchers, while the Amy and Aviation Supply both struggled to find computer scientists, MAS also wanted more



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experts in electronics, technical costing and management-trained engineers, and the Army wanted some specific engineers, psychologists and biologists with biomedical expertise. Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/800, Minutes, DRC, 3 November 1970. 22 Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/793, Minutes, DRC, 1 April 1969. 23 Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/624, Minutes, DRC, 22 February 1966. 24 Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/624, Minutes, DRC, 17 January 1967. 25 Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/624, Minutes, DRC, 20 December 1966. 26 See, for example, Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/572, ‘Airborne digital computers research programme’, 4 March 1965. 27 Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/570, Minutes, DRC, 20 February 1964. 28 Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/625, ‘Cabinet. Official Committee on Technology. Computers for future weapons systems’, July 1966. Project Christchurch is discussed in Jon Agar, The government machine: a revolutionary history of the computer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), pp. 290–1. 29 Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/570, Minutes, DRC, 20 February 1964. 30 For Morgan as one of the ‘protagonists of advanced aircraft’, see: Andrew Nahum, ‘The Royal Aircraft Establishment from 1945 to Concorde’, in Robert Bud and Philip Gummett (eds), Cold War, hot science: applied research in Britain’s defence laboratories, 1945–1990 (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1999), pp. 29–58, p. 49. 31 Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/570, Minutes, DRC, 21 July 1964. 32 Tom Wright, ‘Aircraft carriers and submarines: Naval R&D in Britain in the mid-Cold War’, in Robert Bud and Philip Gummett (eds), Cold War, hot science: applied research in Britain’s defence laboratories, 1945–1990 (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1999), pp. 147–83, pp. 164–6. 33 Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/570, Minutes, DRC, 15 December 1964. 34 J.M. Andújar and F. Segura, ‘Fuel cells: history and updating. A walk along two centuries’, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 13 (2009), 2309–22. 35 Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/571, ‘Fuel cells’, 7 February 1964. 36 Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/793, Minutes, DRC, 19 March 1968. 37 Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/793, Minutes, DRC, 1 April 1969. 38 Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/800, Minutes, DRC, 23 March 1971. 39 Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/570, Minutes, DRC, 19 December 1963. 40 Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/570, Minutes, DRC, 8 July 1965, for Mintech and micro-electronics. In the case of aircraft, the DRC had to respond to the Plowden report, which called for less government support of the industry. The DRC modelled what a 20% cut would

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mean. See Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/625, Minutes, DRC, 18 January 1966. See also Edgerton, Warfare state, p. 242. See Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/793, Minutes, DRC, 22 May 1968, for automotive research, Mintech and British Leyland. 41 Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/571, ‘MoD. Dissemination of information on research’, 12 October 1964. 42 Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/624, Minutes, DRC, 17 May 1966. 43 Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/624, Minutes, DRC, 21 March 1967. Krohn’s report can be found in Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/626, ‘Report of the personnel and anti-personnel research working party’, February 1967. 44 Later in 1967 more information was extracted about American experience, not least in Vietnam. 45 Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/624, Minutes, DRC, 19 September 1967. TSR-2 was clearly identified in the working party report as an important example of this interplay. 46 A Chief Scientists’ Panel on Personnel Research was established under B.W. Lythall, Chief Scientist (Royal Navy), and produce an interim report in 1970. 47 Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/803, ‘MoD. DRC. Annual review of defence research programme 1972’, 6 October 1972. 48 Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/793, Minutes, DRC, 22 May 1969. CS gas is commonly called ‘tear gas’. 49 Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/803, ‘MoD. DRC. Annual review of defence research programme 1972’, 6 October 1972. 50 Ministry of Defence, CAB 168/244, Smith to Cottrell, 26 August 1971. 51 See Ministry of Defence, DEFE 13/826, exchange of letters between William Hawthorne and Lord Carrington, 3 August 1971 and 4 November 1971. 52 See Helen Parr, Britain’s policy towards the European Community: Harold Wilson and Britain’s world role, 1964–1967 (London: Routledge, 2006). 53 For US–UK competition as a major feature of the Cold War, see: Jeffrey A. Engel, Cold War at 30,000 feet: the Anglo-American fight for supremacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Edgerton, Warfare state, p. 234, says that the ‘key technological competitor [for the UK] was not the Soviet Union but the USA’, while also noting the ‘great deal of sharing’ that in fact went on. 54 Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/571, ‘MoD. Draft procedures of the Defence Research Committee’, 1963. 55 Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/625, ‘Soviet weapon technology. “Berlin Firebar”’, 28 July 1966. The Soviets were judged to be behind



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in micro-electronics, ‘at least equal’ in turbine materials and well aware of counter-electronic warfare methods. 56 Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/570, Minutes, DRC, 13 May 1964. 57 Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/570, Minutes, DRC, 25 May 1965. 58 Edgerton, Warfare state, p. 146. 59 See Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/570, Minutes, DRC, 16 March 1965. See also Kendrew and Bondi’s influence on the discussion of sonobuoys. Minutes, DRC, 18 May 1965. 60 Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/807, ‘Defence Scientific Advisory Council’, 2 April 1969. 61 A Biological Research Advisory Board, Chemical Defence Advisory Board, Ships Board, Undersea Warfare Board, Vehicles Board, Weapons Board, Assessment Committee and Military Engineering Committee, all dominated by professors, each with its own sub-sub-committees. 62 Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/807, ‘DSAC. Statement by Sir William Cook’, 2 May 1969, sets out his vision for DSAC and its relationship with DRC. 63 Cabinet papers, CAB 168/244, Smith to Simpson, Cottrell and Zuckerman, 16 November 1970. 64 Cabinet papers, CAB 168/244, Smith to Simpson, Cottrell and Zuckerman, 18 November 1970. 65 Cabinet papers, CAB 168/244, Smith to Cottrell, Press and Simpson, 1 July 1971.

6

Defence research and genetic engineering: fears and dissociation in the 1970s Jon Agar and Brian Balmer1

On 4 May 1978 a letter was sent to the Arms Control and Disarmament Department (ACDD) at the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) raising concerns about cutting-edge genetics and biological warfare. The letter came not from a scientist, but from a distinguished historian, Michael Howard, then the Chichele Professor of the History of War at Oxford University. Howard had recently discussed the possible uses of genetic engineering for military means with a research student, Jeremy Levin, working in the field of genetics. This conversation had disturbed Howard sufficiently enough for him to write to the ACDD warning of ‘alarming’ possibilities and enclosing a briefing paper, ‘Genetic Engineering and Biological Warfare’ written by the student.2 The paper suggested a range of ways that recombinant DNA (rDNA) techniques, then a relatively new area of science, could be put to military use. Possible applications included: an increase in the lethal capacity of microorganisms; an increase in their specificity to target and infect particular groups; disguising a lethal gene by removing it from a pathogen and then inserting it into a common, normally benign, organism; conferring antibiotic resistance on a pathogen; and producing toxins. The paper concluded that, should any of these applications prove feasible, ‘then governments will be forced to re-evaluate their policies towards the use of biological agents in warfare’. A month later, the Arms Control and Disarmament Research Unit (ACDRU), the research arm of the ACDD, sent a response to Howard.3 In quite direct terms, it noted that the forced reassessment of biological warfare proposed in Levin’s paper was a



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view ‘not shared by the experts in the Ministry of Defence whom we have consulted’. The letter proceeded to elaborate, using a near-­verbatim version of a letter sent a few days before from the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to the ACDRU. This earlier letter is worth quoting at length to illustrate the Ministry’s frank dismissal of Levin’s views: We have discussed Mr Levin’s paper with our experts. The general view is that it presents a grossly oversimplified picture of a highly complex subject. Many of the ideas are not as revolutionary as the author implies. And indeed a number of the proposals could be achieved by conventional means … Moreover, any newly-­constructed organism will still be covered by the Geneva Treaty … Perhaps the most important fact is that it is inconceivable that the more dramatic developments suggested by Mr Levin could take place undetected, as he implies, since the existing controls over genetic manipulation experimentation are extremely rigid.4

So, in no uncertain terms, the FCO and MoD told Howard that his fears were unfounded. Yet this response is at least a little puzzling. The emergence of rDNA technologies, or more colloquially genetic engineering, just a few years earlier had been accompanied by a widespread public discussion of numerous ways in which genetic engineering might present new risks to humans and the environment. And, as will be discussed in this chapter, the military potential of rDNA research was given earnest attention within the closed world of government and biological defence research. Moreover, this instance of ‘de-coupling’ of biological weapons research from genetic engineering was not isolated. With regard to ‘de-coupling’, two interconnected aspects interest us. First, the discovery of rDNA techniques in the early 1970s had provoked a debate about to what extent and under what conditions ‘genetic manipulation’ should be allowed to continue. While these debates concluded that research should be permitted under controlled circumstances, this turned the matter into a regulatory issue in which ‘genetic manipulation’ had to be defined. Here we show that key actors, in particular the chief scientist of the British ‘think tank’ the Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS), John Ashworth, shaped the regulatory definition of what ‘genetic manipulation’ would be. At this time, in the search for defence cuts, the Microbiological Research Establishment (MRE) at Porton Down,

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Wiltshire, the home of the British biological defence programme, was threatened with closure. Defenders of MRE, however, argued that it was ideally placed to develop further and deploy the new genetic engineering techniques. It would be foolish, and perhaps dangerous, they said, to shut such a facility just as promising new methods were appearing. In particular, the regulatory discussion had generated a tiered categorisation of genetic manipulation risk and the associated laboratory containment levels needed to minimise risk. The MRE could provide a rare offering to the research and policy community – containment facilities at the highest tier, level 4. But of course what could be described as ‘genetic manipulation’ would depend on what it was defined to be. Ashworth, we will argue, was simultaneously intervening into the debate over MRE in the same timeframe as he was seeking a regulatory definition of ‘genetic manipulation’. The search for a solution to the crisis over MRE, especially one which relied on its potential as a genetic manipulation laboratory, we show, was also complicated by the fact that MRE was associated with – and therefore required dissociation from – defence research. To explore the second aspect of de-coupling, we return to the Howard letter and subsequent discussion within the FCO about the potential of genetic engineering as it might be applied to biological warfare. In this context, we argue, a slightly different de-coupling took place. Although the potential danger from rDNA technologies was recognised, the likelihood of this posing a threat was minimised through the mechanisms of the recent Biological Weapons Convention. In this chapter we follow the forging of some of these connections and dis-connections, with a view to understanding the military dimensions of, and reactions to, early genetic engineering. In doing so, we seek to demonstrate the work that went into forging the ongoing intersection and dissociation of two regimes of science and technology governance. These regimes are, on the one hand, the containment and safety of genetic manipulation experiments and, on the other hand, arms control and biological disarmament. The emergence of rDNA and public discussion about military applications Techniques that enabled genetic material to be cut and spliced between organisms were discovered in the early 1970s. In 1971,



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Paul Berg’s method, which snipped and reconnected viral nucleic acid, suggested an ability to insert foreign genetic material, using phages, into bacteria. Berg suspended his work as news of the experiment raised alarm. In 1972, Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen offered even more effective techniques, used to make the first genetically modified organism, an antibiotic-resistant E. coli. These methods, immediately patented, launched the new biotechnology industries. The scientific community, through gatherings such as the Asilomar conference near Monterey, California, held in 1975, urgently discussed rules of self-regulation under which genetic modification might be allowed to continue. Over this period, the framing of genetic engineering as a hazard began to be whittled slowly down from a broad discussion of risks, including the application of this new technology to biological warfare, to a narrow set of issues around laboratory safety and non-human DNA.5 Furthermore, Wright’s seminal account of the governance of early rDNA technologies makes clear that the 1970s experiments did not start the debate. Science fictions involving some form of genetic or hereditary manipulation have a long heritage and have formed a cultural reference point in numerous public discussions about the future of genetics and society.6 And the expressions ‘genetic engineering’ and ‘euphenic engineering’ were in circulation by 1965; a related term, ‘genetic surgery’, was in use two years earlier.7 During the 1970s, wider debate about the potential benefits and harms from genetic engineering took place in a context of rising concern, with roots in the 1960s, over the social and environmental implications of new science and technology, alongside new worries about the safety of laboratories working with pathogenic micro-organisms or other hazardous material.8 Wright argues that between 1972 and 1974, a period covering the landmark experiments, ‘no single discourse dominated public or private discussions of genetic engineering’.9 Anxieties about such possibilities as new drug-­ resistant bacteria, cancer-causing viruses and cellulose-degrading bacteria mixed freely with concerns over such matters as laboratory safety, health, the environment and biological warfare. Turning to biological warfare, again an association with genetic engineering preceded the debates of the early 1970s. As early as 1962, military officials in the US hinted that they were interested in molecular biology;10 and in more public arenas popular science

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books such as the best-selling Biological time bomb contained a section entitled ‘The Spectre of Gene Warfare’. Here the author, British journalist Gordon Rattray-Taylor, discussed various possibilities for how ‘the genetic engineers’ could use genetics for malign purposes. It is notable that the discussion focused entirely on covert and long-term scenarios in which the genetic make-up of entire populations was weakened over time. Rattray-Taylor finished his litany of possibilities by suggesting: Or perhaps actual gene warfare. If viruses can be used to carry new genetic material into cells, perhaps one could tamper with the genes of another nation without their ever realizing the fact. History would simply record, as is often done in the past, that such-and-such a nation rose to power while certain other countries entered decline.11

In short, this ‘eugenicist’ notion of biological warfare was not the same notion as the deliberate engineering of pathogenic organisms that accompanied the first rDNA experiments. A few years later, in 1971, Joshua Lederberg warned, in an American Scientist article about the Biological Weapons Convention negotiations, that recent developments in molecular biology ‘offers us the prospect of engineering the design of viruses to exquisite detail’, citing recent work on the chemical synthesis of viral DNA that had been achieved ‘in a small laboratory on an annual research budget which is miniscule compared to weapons hardware’.12 And Bernard Dixon, in a 1973 New Scientist editorial on rDNA research, outlined some of the potential benefits before adding: ‘other prospects are less welcome. DNA hybridisation must look an attractive proposition for biological warfare researchers (who are, of course, still about their business despite recent gestures towards biological disarmament).’13 The Berg letter to Science and other leading journals, written in July 1974, which raised the alarm, had focused more on particular types of experiment rather than particular applications or drivers of the research. The committee that formulated the letter had considered including a reference to military applications, but this was excised from an earlier draft. In a similar vein, at the press conference prior to the release of the Berg letter, attempts by journalists to raise the issue of biological warfare were side-stepped by scientist David Baltimore’s claim that this issue would need to be addressed only if it became a reality. The deferral of particu-



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lar types of experiment lasted until the Asilomar conference in February 1975, where once again issues around biological warfare were explicitly excluded as beyond the scope of the discussion.14 Defining genetic engineering for regulatory purposes In the UK, the Advisory Board for the Research Councils set up a working party of senior scientists under the Master of Clare College, Cambridge, Lord Ashby, to ‘make an assessment of the potential benefits and potential hazards of techniques which allow the experimental manipulation of the genetic composition of micro-organisms’. The working party’s report, published in January 1975, recorded that members were ‘convinced that the hazards are less serious than some of us had first thought’, and that ‘provided precautions are taken’, research, which might have extraordinary applications in medicine and agriculture, should be not only permitted, but encouraged.15 While Ashby recommended voluntary safety controls, later that year a different committee, the Godber committee, recommended that a Dangerous Pathogens Advisory Group be established, with statutory powers to regulate both genetic engineering and dangerous pathogens. Following Ashby and Godber, another working party, under Sir Robert Williams, proposed a draft code stipulating safety precautions, including a statement that ‘no genetic manipulation experiment should be undertaken in containment conditions less stringent than those used for work with common pathogens’.16 The committee also issued a tiered categorisation of four levels of increasingly rigorous physical containment that would be required for particular types of genetic experiment. One consequence of this categorisation was that it created scarcity – the MRE was one place where category 4 experiments with dangerous pathogens could take place. We will explore the significance of this observation for the governance of the MRE later in the chapter. Finally, a Genetic Manipulation Advisory Group (GMAG) was established to advise further on appropriate precautions. When the scientific advisory board to the MRE, of which Williams was a member, discussed the issue they noted that ‘no work at MRE had been carried out or was being contemplated, involving genetic engineering experiments’. (The wording here was weaselly: genetic engineering had been contemplated at MRE but not started.17) Williams also reported that allocating experiments

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to appropriate containment categories was a major problem for his working party. The committee did, nevertheless, recognise that, with MRE’s high-level containment facilities, there was commercial potential. Professor Mark H. Richmond, on the committee, proposed that ‘they should perhaps develop the capability to carry out this type of work, particularly since industrial firms were showing interest but usually had only a requirement for a single type of experiment. However, he recognised the possibility of misrepresentation of any MRE research.’18 These interventions therefore made genetic engineering a regulatory issue. However, effective and clear regulation needed an agreed, workable definition of its subject, ‘genetic manipulation’. Under the Health and Safety at Work Act, this regulation fell under the purview of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE). On 25 August 1976, the Health and Safety Commission proposed in a consultative document that ‘No person shall carry out any activity intended, or likely to alter, the genetic constitution of any micro-organism’ without informing the HSE.19 This definition of genetic manipulation immediately had scientists up in arms. Professor J.M. Thoday, head of Cambridge University’s Department of Genetics, and president of the Genetical Society, complained that the definition was ‘so broad as to include a vast range of activities most of them harmless and many of them beneficial’.20 He provided a long list to prove his point. A fierce exchange of views between Michael Ashburner, a member of Thoday’s department, and the HSE appeared in Nature.21 Three Glasgow professors wrote directly concerning the HSE’s ‘sweeping and restrictive regulations’ to the Secretary of State for Education and Science, Shirley Williams.22 With complaints reaching the ears of ministers, John Ashworth, chief scientist of the CPRS, went into action. ‘I had written to the Health & Safety Executive asking them not to be so stupid’, he wrote to one angry scientist, ‘but, alas, it was too late.’23 Other interested bodies, including the Science Research Council, Medical Research Council (MRC) and Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, swung behind Ashworth. Ashworth now took the lead in negotiating definitions of ‘genetic modification’ in the UK. In November 1976 he suggested the rule ‘No person shall carry out any activity intended to transfer or likely to transfer genetic information into an organism in a way that circumvents the natural species barrier to such transfer …’,



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running successive drafts, via the HSE and directly, past an ‘old boy-net’ of senior scientists.24 Agricultural scientists objected, for example, to the above wording because it would cover and limit basic techniques, such as the use of colchicine to double chromosome numbers.25 Ashworth’s next rule was run past Oxford biochemical geneticist Walter Bodmer.26 In summary, in late 1976 John Ashworth was at the centre of negotiations over the regulatory meaning of ‘genetic manipulation’. Simultaneously, he was centrally involved in whether the MRE should be saved from closure because it could exploit genetic engineering techniques, if they could be named as such. Whether intentional or not, the new definition of genetic modification, into which Ashworth intervened, was wide enough to be congruent with the campaign to save the MRE, crucially, once it had been dissociated from the military. The Microbiological Research Establishment: close or move? Although institutions for research into biological warfare had existed at the Porton site since 1940, the MRE had been established in 1957 with a primary military objective to define and assess the possibilities of offensive use of biological warfare and to devise defences against such possibilities.27 Over two decades its research programme had diversified, and included not only defence work but also fundamental microbiological research and research with commercial ties to industry. Built at Porton Down, next to the Chemical Defence Establishment, by 1976 the MRE employed 105 scientific and professional staff and 190 industrial employees, excluding support staff. The main building had three floors, two of which housed 185 laboratories, each equipped with filtered ventilation and capable of disinfection. In addition, the MRE possessed an animal wing of thirty-six laboratory modules (‘for work with pathogenic microorganisms [with]…provision for separate handling of clean and infected animals and for sterilization of all effluent’), an engineering workshop and, one mile distant, a microbial products section with large culture vessels geared for mass production.28 Finally, a vaccine production unit, two miles distant, had been converted from an old animal isolation facility. The MRE formally worked under the Procurement Executive of the Ministry of Defence. Its annual expenditure ran at £2.5 million, nearly three-quarters of which fell on the defence budget. However, when asked to locate cuts in the

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stringent economy of the mid-1970s, the MoD announced that it wanted to withdraw its sponsorship. The options were for the MRE either to close or to find a new home, and perhaps new roles. Defence cuts of £3 billion were agreed by Cabinet in December 1975. In part fulfilment of these cuts, the MoD ‘decided that the defence need for the MRE at Porton was now so reduced that … it could be closed down’, with funding ceasing from April 1978.29 The acting chief scientific adviser, Robert Press, set out the repercussions in a report to the Cabinet Secretary, John Hunt, in June 1976.30 Closure was ‘foreseeable, indeed inevitable, unless additional civil support is forthcoming’. Departmental interest – on the Rothschild customer–contractor principle – might not alone justify the ‘continued existence of a national centre of excellence which provides unique facilities and offers services which are likely to be increasingly required’. Press found ‘significant potential in commercial terms’.31 He also, in the full accompanying report, noted that the ‘facilities [were] readily adaptable to “genetic engineering”’, indeed might be described as an ‘ideal site for all such work … [Such] a solution could be expected to be acceptable to the general public.’32 So, if the MRE was to survive it must chase greater commercial ties, but there was also a hint that the establishment might find a new biotechnological role. In the summer of 1976, Press was retired and John Ashworth, as chief scientist at the CPRS, took over his responsibilities. What is striking is that Ashworth, over the following year, built a case for rescuing the MRE based on both of Press’s suggestions – pursuing commercial contracts and playing up the suitability of the facilities for the exciting new ‘genetic engineering’ at the same time as negotiating a relatively relaxed definition of the latter. The MRE had always had a commercial arm, producing enzymes, vaccines and marketable substances such as asparaginase.33 But now it was asked to push products harder. A press release of the time, for example, is invitingly headed ‘We sell bacteria by the kilogram’.34 In July 1976 Sir Kenneth Berrill, head of the CPRS, suggested testing more widely the commercial potential of the MRE’s research, starting with what he called ‘the ethical drug companies’. In fact, the CPRS contacted at least twenty-eight companies, not only Berrill’s suggested ‘ethical’ exemplars, Boots and Glaxo.35 Generally, with a few exceptions, companies either replied that they could conduct any necessary research in-house or offered rela-



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tively small levels of contracted research. Nevertheless, one feature that did excite interest was the high-containment facilities – always necessary for dangerous pathogens, but also, now, likely to be necessary for riskier genetic engineering – at the MRE. Alfred Spinks of ICI, for example, wrote: we have defined some areas where MRE has facilities that we lack: the most significant of these is probably the availability of specialist containment facilities at the level of category 4 of the Williams Committee Report. We have a sizable molecular genetics project … [Our category 3 research] is mainly concerned with the transfer of DNA from bacteria to bacteria … but any work that we might wish to do with human genes would probably need to be contracted to Porton, initially.36

Likewise the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) was also sounded out about placing contracts with the MRE. But the stumbling block here was the perceived military orientation of Porton. John Kendrew, the eminent molecular biologist and EMBO’s director, wrote that ‘as soon as the Defence connection is ended he would be in a position to place EMBO … contracts’ with the MRE.37 There would be no European sponsorship of Porton research, including perhaps genetic engineering, before de-coupling it from its military association. The second feature of Ashworth’s strategy was to amplify the MRE’s capacity for genetic engineering.38 Genetic engineering had been only a passing reference in Press’s report. This emphasis came as a ministerial clash over the MRE’s future reached crisis point. David Owen, Minister for Health, had dropped by the MRE, unexpectedly, in late July 1976, and pronounced himself impressed by the facilities.39 In September 1976, William Rodgers, Minister of Defence, loudly complained in Cabinet about the dragging of feet and demanded swift implementation of cuts. The issue was punted to the Science and Technology ministerial (STM) committee, a rarely used body where ministerial fights could be played out. Against this background Ashworth composed the first of a series of influential, and to some extent controversial, documents on the future of the MRE: the impact of ‘genetic manipulations’ on the status of Porton has been seriously underestimated … The moratorium on these experiments focussed attention, inevitably, on the possible dangers – what

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has not been sufficiently publicised is the tremendous excitement that there is amongst the academic research workers on the one hand and the larger chemically/microbiologically orientated industries on the other. The benefits of this work will be immense and, as things go, quick – say within 5–10 years.40

Porton could be the commercial supplier (perhaps ‘world supplier’) of microbial enzymes necessary for genetic engineering. The growth of genetically engineered microbes and the testing of genetically engineered organisms and agents (such as viruses for ‘pest control’) would require level 4 – Porton – containment. ‘By the greatest of good fortune we have one of the two centres which are recognised, world-wide, as “safe” for microbiological work,’ Ashworth concluded. ‘To close such a centre just at the moment when there is going to be an immense increase in demand for such facilities is too short-sighted.’ While some in Whitehall were more sceptical (perhaps more realistic), including the departing Dr Press, the CPRS notes for the ministerial meeting urged not closing the MRE until the CPRS had fully assessed the industrial consequences of genetic engineering, alongside the secure financing of the station.41 On 13 October the STM agreed this line. The stakes were still high. In November the Prime Minister, James Callaghan, sought reassurance, after the Minister of Defence complained that he was not receiving the support of colleagues in the search for cuts, that the MRE situation would be resolved soon.42 The outcome, largely shaped by Ashworth at the CPRS, was acceptance, agreed in January 1978, for a slimmed-down MRE, more focused on commercial services, available for genetic engineering work and dissociated from the military. As part of this solution, the Ministry of Defence had announced in December that the small number of military microbiology staff would be transferred to the Chemical Defence Establishment, also, of course, at Porton Down.43 After flirting briefly with the notion of the HSE playing the role (precisely in the month – October 1976 – when Ashworth was also negotiating definitions of genetic engineering), the recommendation made was for the Department of Health and Social Service to be the sponsoring department and the Public Health Laboratory Service to manage the MRE.44 While some genetic engineering contracts did come to the MRE – the Wellcome Research



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Laboratories invested £50,000 in 1977 – it was never a major programme.45 De-coupling from the military was an essential prerequisite for this investment, indeed the MRC, which had been tasked with reviewing the civil research capability of the MRE, made it a condition that any ‘connection with defence work would have to be clearly and decisively severed’ so as to head off largely foreign fears of application to biological warfare.46 The MRC continued: ‘There is strong feeling in, for example the United States and in Eastern Europe, that these new techniques of genetic manipulation have potential for application to biological warfare.’ Supporting evidence for this claim is the reported statement that the European Commission DGXII considered a ‘civilian Porton Down’ to be a ‘prime contractor’ for genetic engineering funds. But the importance of this divorce was more symbolic – the excitement and high expectations for biotechnology had been cashed in to secure a future for the MRE. The Biological Weapons Convention and the threat from genetic engineering Howard’s letter to the FCO in 1978, which opened this chapter, was therefore written in the wake of these attempts to de-couple the MRE from biological warfare and re-connect it with genetic engineering. With respect to the regulatory framing of the debate, the archive copy of Howard’s letter in the FCO files has, handwritten on it, a note stating: ‘we looked at genetic engineering as a possible MDW [mass destruction weapon] in 1976, and came to the conclusion that existing safeguards in the UK on this type of research are reinforced by the finding of the Williams working party.’47 It is interesting to note that the dismissal of the problem was not about whether or not genetic engineering could be applied for military purposes. Instead, there was first an appeal to the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), which banned biological weapons and had entered into force in 1975, and the observation that, notwithstanding their novelty, genetically modified agents would still fall under its prohibitions. Second, officials placed their faith in existing UK regulations to either uncover or prevent work that was being undertaken with military use as a goal. But, the response to Howard certainly did not represent the full range of opinion within the ministries. Put rather more bluntly by

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one ACDRU official: ‘the MoD’s letter to Mr Dean [ACDRU] of 26 May and consequently our reply to Professor Howard were somewhat disingenuous … It is unwise to mislead the (informed) public in the way that the MoD has persuaded us to do.’48 Such dissension rested on a lengthy desk office memorandum, titled ‘Genetic Engineering (Recombinant DNA Technology): The Military Significance of the Threat’, that had been prepared by Gradon Carter from the Defence Intelligence Staff’s Directorate of Scientific Intelligence.49 Classified as ‘secret discreet’, it opened with the caveat that the views expressed were those of the author and that it was intended as a rapid means to disseminate information.50 Yet Carter wrote with some authority. He had worked at Porton Down since 1948 and joined the Ministry of Defence’s Directorate of Scientific and Technical Intelligence in 1976. Carter noted in his memorandum that, unless they had access to specialised expertise and equipment, there was little threat from terrorist groups using genetic modification. Likewise, he expressed scepticism about cancer-causing weapons, which would take too long to take effect for military purposes, and ‘ethnic weapons’ designed to target specific populations. On the other hand, he was far less sceptical about the possibility of using genetic engineering to enhance the features of existing biological warfare agents, for example by making them grow faster or produce greater quantities of toxins. Carter suggested that the ‘main advantage’ of genetic engineering would be to insert genes from pathogens into common harmless organisms, making the cause of any illness difficult to identify. The effect would be to ‘impede the selection of therapy and cause panic and disruption’. This said, Carter was also insistent that none of his assessment should imply that existing agents were ineffective. The memorandum finished with an outline of the paucity of intelligence information about the USSR, not only on genetic engineering but on biological weapons in general. The difference in the tenor of this memorandum and the message conveyed to the FCO and beyond suggests that the MoD was keen to play down the military significance of the new techniques. FCO and MoD officials returned to the topic of genetic engineering early the following year, this time in relation to preparation for the first review conference of the BWC, scheduled for 1980.51 Part of this preparation involved some discussion about a meeting held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977 to discuss



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the applicability of the BWC to rDNA technology.52 The group considered whether or not genetically modified organisms were beyond the scope of the BWC, and whether or not rDNA technology could produce more controllable and predictable weapons. The Convention, they concluded, would cover putative novel organisms. As to the likelihood of such organisms being manufactured, they argued that: Although new pathogens and toxins might be created using recombinant DNA techniques, there is little reason to suspect a priori that they will differ in a militarily significant way from natural pathogens and toxins. New natural pathogens are constantly being discovered in remote parts of the world, these discoveries do not appear to have significantly altered capabilities or incentives for biological warfare.53

So, while creating new types of organism was possible, those at the meeting argued that ‘operational specificity of effect is more difficult to achieve than clinical specificity’. In other words, even an augmented pathogen would still face a host of challenges shared with older biological agents, such as dispersal, survival, confinement to targets and so on. These challenges, the authors argued, meant that there was little incentive in the near future for would-be bio-weaponeers to turn to genetic modification, Above all, under international law, their use would still be illegal and so ‘would invite sanction and retaliation’. The covering memorandum, written to the MoD by Alan Bebbington, a scientist from the Chemical Defence Establishment (CDE) at Porton, noted that the conclusions of the meeting ‘correspond precisely with our earlier advice to you’ (although they did not correspond to Carter’s assessment of dangers). The same position was rehearsed at a meeting, held to discuss scientific developments relevant to the BWC, between MoD and FCO representatives in May 1979. Here, the MoD representatives argued that the drivers of genetic engineering were almost anyone but the military, such that flagging the problem of military applications was in danger of giving the distorted impression that new types of BW agents and techniques had recently emerged which had given new impetus or significance to this type of warfare. This was not so and the changes and developments that had taken place were of significance largely because of the exposure given to them by the press …

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Pressure such as pure science, medicine and commerce was spurring research in these fields and the fact that some areas may have military significance does not necessarily mean that they would be attractive military options.54

This line of thinking, including the suggestion that in the public domain possibilities had been conflated with actualities, fed into discussions with US officials about putting together a background paper on new scientific and technological developments relevant to the Convention. The paper was to be authored by representatives from several nations, but Dr Robert Mikulak of the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency had already shared with the UK delegation to the United Nations Committee on Disarmament his early drafts on what he wanted the section on rDNA technology to look like. In the draft, he outlined the by-now familiar notion that existing organisms could be modified to enhance their suitability as biological warfare agents. He also sounded a note of caution, warning that organisms could not be ‘engineered to order’ and that ‘engineering a radically different organism would represent a truly Herculean undertaking’.55 The draft also contained the caveats that modified organisms might not differ in militarily significant ways from unmodified pathogens, and that they ‘would not be fundamentally different from the organisms and toxins which were known in 1971’, in other words, prior to the 1972 BWC. When UK experts were asked to comment on Mikulak’s draft paper, there was some disagreement. The general view at Porton was that Mikulak had under-estimated the potential of genetic engineering, even though ‘the question of who would want to do this is another matter’.56 Moreover, Bebbington challenged the proposal that modified pathogens would fail to differ from natural pathogens, adding ‘this is precisely the reason for world-wide concern about recombinant DNA’.57 With echoes of the discussion prompted by Howard the previous year, it was noted that ‘Porton feels there should be reference to the great public concern about the potential safety hazards of genetic manipulation as demonstrated by the moratorium agreed several years ago which will tend to inhibit research’. This reassurance was intended as a ‘counter-­balance’ to the potential military applications of genetic engineering. These disagreements did not alter the overall consensus that ­whatever novelty these organisms might or might not possess, they



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were still covered by the BWC. Although not mentioned explicitly in any documentation, the rationale underpinning this conclusion was the General Purpose Criterion enshrined in the first article of the BWC. This states that all micro-organisms are outlawed by the treaty unless they can be justified for peaceful purposes. In other words, the illegality of any state’s possessing micro-organisms depends on that state’s intent to cause harm, rather than on the nature or identity of the living organism itself. Along these lines, Porton had already advised the FCO and MoD that ‘the BW Convention as it now stands covers all new agents and toxins produced by new biological agents including those (i.e. biological agents) which have been derived by genetic engineering techniques’.58 This perspective was endorsed at a meeting to consider the scope of the background paper on 20 July 1979, where everyone  in attendance agreed that rDNA techniques were the most important issue to consider, but also that the ‘aim of the paper will be largely descriptive but would aim to show implicitly that any recent technological or scientific techniques do not undermine the Convention’.59 By the end of the year, the USSR, USA and UK as the depositary nations for the BWC had met in New York, where, according to Gradon Carter, ‘there was complete agreement that no new scientific developments were unembraced by the Convention and that no new amendments were needed’.60 And, indeed, this was the general stance eventually adopted at the first review conference when it took place in 1980, although this was a temporary position, as concerns about the military threat from genetic engineering grew during the 1980s. That said, even as late as 1984, US Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg echoed the line that had prevailed until the first review conference when he wrote that, in the near term: ‘The added input of biotechnology is small compared with the revolution in politics and warfare that would follow the introduction … of BW whether with existing or actual applications.’61 Conclusions We started this research because we were curious about whether there was a military interest in genetic engineering, perhaps even one that led to changes in defence research carried out in the UK. We found no evidence that the UK in the 1970s exploited genetic engineering techniques as a source of new weapons or defences.

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However, we have shown that the discovery of rDNA techniques, the powerful tools of the new genetic engineering, led to several significant acts of dissociation that reconfigured the landscape of possibilities and conjectures around this new technology. The two regulatory regimes of arms control and laboratory safety were brought into and out of alignment by the activities of scientists, civil servants and a wider public. We have shown three such acts. First, in order for the MRE to be saved and reoriented towards civil, commercial research, it had to be divorced from direct military patronage. In this respect, concern for economic competitiveness shaped the governance of both genetic engineering and biological weapons, configuring them for the time being as separate issues. Second, insofar as the MoD and FCO reaction to Michael Howard’s letter can be taken as an indicator of a wider stance, the military potential of genetic engineering was publicly denied. Finally, despite anxieties expressed both within and outside Whitehall about the potential use of genetic engineering in biological warfare, such concerns were dampened by invoking the provisions of the BWC. Notes  1 Both authors contributed equally to the research and writing of this chapter. Balmer’s research for this chapter was supported by ESRC grant ES/K011308/1.  2 Foreign and Commonwealth Office, The National Archives, Kew (hereafter Foreign and Commonwealth Office), FCO 66/1228, Michael Howard to Christopher Mallaby (ACDD), 4 May 1978.  3 Foreign and Commonwealth Office, FCO 66/1228, C.R. Dean (ACDRU) to Professor Michael Howard, 1 June 1978.  4 Foreign and Commonwealth Office, FCO 66/1228, from G.H. Mungeam, DS11, MOD to C.R. Dean, ACDU, 25 May 1978. From the context, it is clear that the ‘Geneva Treaty’ here refers to the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention rather than the earlier 1925 Geneva Protocol on chemical and biological warfare.  5 Susan Wright, Molecular politics: developing American and British regulatory policy for genetic engineering, 1972–1982 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Robert Bud, The uses of life: a history of biotechnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).  6 Jon Turney, Frankenstein’s footsteps: science, genetics and popular culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).  7 Bud, Uses of life; Wright, Molecular politics.



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 8 Jon Agar, Science in the twentieth century and beyond (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012).  9 Wright, Molecular politics, p. 135. 10 Wright, Molecular politics, p. 118. 11 Gordon Rattray-Taylor, The biological time bomb (London: Thames & Hudson, 1968). 12 Joshua Lederberg, ‘Biological warfare: a global threat’, American Scientist, 59(2) (March–April 1971), 195–7. 13 Bernard Dixon, ‘Biological research (1)’, New Scientist (25 October 1973), p. 236. 14 Wright, Molecular politics. 15 Report of the working party on the experimental manipulation of the genetic composition of micro-organisms (Ashby report), Cmnd. 5880, London: HMSO, January 1975. 16 Report of the working party on the practice of genetic manipulation (Williams report), Cmnd. 6600, London: HMSO, August 1976. 17 ‘It is proposed that research on the applied genetics of micro-organisms of commercial interest [specifically antibiotic-producing fungi] should be expanded at MRE and, in particular, extended to an analysis of the benefits achievable by genetic recombination.’ Ministry of Defence, The National Archives, Kew (hereafter Ministry of Defence), DEFE 10/861, S. Jackson, ‘DSAC. BRAB. CPAC. Improvement of antibiotics-producing strains of fungi via genetic recombination’, 2 March 1972. 18 Ministry of Defence, DEFE 10/1123, Biological Research Advisory Board (BRAB), 2nd meeting, 23 January 1976. 19 Health & Safety Commission, Consultative document: compulsory notification of proposed experiments in the genetic manipulation of micro-organisms, 25 August 1976. 20 Cabinet papers, The National Archives, Kew (hereafter Cabinet papers), CAB 184/284/2, Thoday to McDonald, 19 October 1976. 21 Ashburner mocked the HSE, suggesting it had been influenced by the ‘mutant monsters so vividly portrayed on television every Saturday evening on Dr Who’. ‘An open letter to the Health and Safety Executive’, Nature, 4 November 1976, 2–3, followed by a reply from HSE’s J.H. Locke, p. 3. 22 Cabinet papers, CAB 184/283, Subal-Sharpe, Williamson and Paul to Williams, 13 October 1976. This letter was widely carbon-copied, including to Ashworth. 23 Cabinet papers, CAB 184/284/2, Ashworth to Williamson, 25 October 1976. 24 Cabinet papers, CAB 184/283, Ashworth to Williamson, 27 November 1976, stated that the HSE was ‘anxious, as indeed am I, to avoid the

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fiasco of their first attempt [at regulation] and I promised them that I would try out, on a strictly confidential “old boy-net” basis, various thoughts’. Riley at Cambridge was another member of this network. 25 Cabinet papers, CAB 184/284/2, Henderson to Ashworth, 10 December 1976. 26 Cabinet papers, CAB 184/284/2, Ashworth to Bodmer, 14 December 1976. ‘What do you think of the following definition?’ asked Ashworth, ‘No person shall carry out any activity which, by using biochemical manipulation of extra-cellular nucleic acids, is intended, or likely to: (a) insert genetic information into organisms; (b) circumvent the natural barriers to such insertion, and (c) propagates this information.’ 27 Brian Balmer, Britain and biological warfare: expert advice and science policy, 1935–65 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). The UK abandoned its offensive BW programme in the mid-1950s. 28 Cabinet papers, CAB 184/283, ‘The Microbiological Research Establishment, Porton Down. A note by the Ministry of Defence’, undated (1976). 29 Records of the Prime Minister’s Office, The National Archives, Kew (hereafter Prime Minister’s Office), PREM 16/2228, Hunt (Cabinet Secretary) to Prime Minister, 18 November 1976. 30 Cabinet papers, CAB 184/285, Press to Hunt, 30 June 1976, enclosing ‘Future of the Microbiological Research Establishment. Note by Chairman of an Interdepartmental Group’, 30 June 1976. 31 The predicament of MRE was recognised as a case where the Rothschild approach, championed during his leadership of the CPRS, endangered laboratories that were forced to contract through ‘what the trade calls sociology of organisations’. See Cabinet papers, CAB 184/285, Ross to Jones, 27 September 1976. 32 Cabinet papers, CAB 184/285, Ross to Jones, 27 September 1976, pp. 3, 20. 33 Cabinet papers, CAB 184/284/1, Harris, ‘The industrial context of MRE’, 22 October 1976, describes the commercial work in some detail, naming firms and substances. 34 Cabinet papers, CAB 184/283, Press release, 14 September 1976. 35 Cabinet papers, CAB 184/283, contains a list of companies, contacts and much of the subsequent correspondence. 36 Cabinet papers, CAB 184/283, Spinks to Berrill, 22 December 1976. Category IV facilities were nearing completion when GMAG visited in May 1978. ‘GMAG visits Porton’, New Scientist (25 May 1978), p. 493. 37 Cabinet papers, CAB 184/283, Ashworth to Gibson, 25 November 1976. 38 There is evidence that some attention was being paid to this area at



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the establishment: a confidential 1976 review of defence work at the MRE noted that expert advice on bacterial genetics was part of the establishment’s research programme, adding that ‘the possibilities for modifying potential agents by genetic procedures require continuous appraisal in relation to the rapid development of microbial genetics. There is potential spin-off in the “breeding” of new microbes which produce substances valuable to medicine or commerce.’ Ministry of Defence, DEFE 55/427, MRE Programme Review (75-76) Major Field 18, Biological Defence, April 1976. ‘Modifying potential agents by genetic procedures’ may not mean rDNA. It could also mean induced mutation. 39 Cabinet papers, CAB 184/285, Newman, ‘Visit of Dr D Owen …’, 27 July 1976. The immediate context was a proposal to transfer the staff of the North London-based National Institute for Biological Standards and Control to the remote MRE Porton. He would also have gauged staff concerns about rumours of closure. 40 Cabinet papers, CAB 184/285, Note by Ashworth, 8 September 1976. Handwritten draft in Cabinet papers, CAB 184/283. 41 Cabinet papers, CAB 184/283, ‘Cabinet. Ministerial Committee on Science and Technology. Future of Microbiological Research Establishment, Porton Down. Note by CPRS’, 8 October 1976. Drafts in Cabinet papers, CAB 184/285. 42 Cabinet papers, CAB 184/283, Hunt to Prime Minister, 18 November 1976. 43 The Institute of Biology, in a press release, 8 December 1976, noted that this demilitarisation created the ‘opportunity to establish a centre for important work … developing biochemical engineering and in genetic manipulation’. 44 Cabinet papers, CAB 184/331, ‘Future of the Microbiological Research Establishment, Porton Down. A report by the CPRS’, 20 January 1977. 45 Cabinet papers, CAB 184/332. GEN 61 Cabinet sub-committee, 1977, lists new commercial orders, including £230,000 for aspariginase to France, a ‘Porton cabinet’ for Nigeria (potentially £426,500), £80,000 microbial decontamination work for Seveso, amongst others, in addition to the Wellcome funds. The Wellcome’s interest in MRE’s high security as well as potential genetic engineering is spelled out in Cabinet papers, CAB 184/331, Vane to Berrill, 17 January 1977. The extraordinary background to the microbial ecology solution to the contamination at Seveso is described in Ashworth to Berrill, 12 January 1977. 46 Cabinet papers, CAB 184/333, MRC, draft report of the committee on the use of MRE Porton for civil research, September 1977. Cabinet papers, CAB 184/331, Ashworth to Vickers, 12 July 1977.

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47 Foreign and Commonwealth Office, FCO 66/1228, Michael Howard to Christoper Mallaby (ACDD), 4 May 1978. 48 Foreign and Commonwealth Office, FCO 66/1228, Secret. P.A. Towle (ACRDU) to Mr Innes Hopkins (ACDD). Genetic Engineering and the Military Significance of the Threat, 4 July 1978. 49 Carter returned to Porton in 1979 and later became the official historian for the chemical and biological defence establishments. 50 Foreign and Commonwealth Office, FCO 66/1228, Ministry of Defence, Defence Intelligence Staff, Directorate of Scientific and Technical Intelligence. Genetic Engineering (Recombinant DNA Technology): The Military Significance of the Threat. Desk Officer Memorandum prepared by Mr G.B. Carter, 9 May 1978. 51 Five-yearly review conferences after the date that the treaty entered into force (1975) were scheduled into the treaty regime under Article XII of the BWC. 52 The meeting took place on 9 August 1977 under the auspices of the Program in Science and Technology for International Security, Department of Physics, MIT. It was attended by David Baltimore, Bernard T. Field, Maurice Fox, Walter Gilbert, Matthew Meselson, Alexander Rich and Kosta Tsipis. A version of their report later appeared in the November 1978 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. 53 Foreign and Commonwealth Office, FCO 66/1438, Report attached to: To Gordon S. Mungeam, DS11 MOD from Dr Alan Bebbington, Deputy Director (chemistry) procurement executive, MOD, CDE. Biological Weapons Convention, 9 February 1979. 54 Foreign and Commonwealth Office, FCO 66/1438 BW Review Conference Scientific Developments. P.J. Robinson (ACRDU), 9 May 1979. 55 Foreign and Commonwealth Office, FCO 66/1438. Draft R. Mikulak, 2 June 1979. Recombinant DNA Techniques. 56 Foreign and Commonwealth Office, FCO66/1438. UK Comments on the Mikulak draft on Recombinant DNA Techniques (n.d.) 57 Foreign and Commonwealth Office, FCO66/1438. UK Comments on the Mikulak draft on Recombinant DNA Techniques (n.d.) 58 Foreign and Commonwealth Office, FCO 66/1438. Miss L. Ress DS11, MOD to G.C. Ford ACDD, FCO. BW Convention Conference, 30 May 1979. 59 Foreign and Commonwealth Office, FCO66/1438. P.M.W. Francis (UK Delegation to the Conference of the Committee on Disarmament, Geneva) to GC Ford (ACDD, FCO). Biological Weapons Convention Review Conference: Depositary Paper on New Scientific and Technological Developments, 23 July 1979.



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60 Foreign and Commonwealth Office, FCO66/1438. Gradon Carter to G.C. Ford, 3 December 1979. 61 US National Library of Medicine. Lederberg Archive. Comment to DSB on the significance of advanced biotechnology to C.W. and B.W., 10 October 1984. http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/access/BBGLZL.pdf.

7

Geological governance: surveying the North Sea in the Cold War Leucha Veneer

This essay considers the notion of scientific governance in the context of the changes in the British geosciences in the 1960s. Various aspects of scientific governance are discussed in this volume, but the facet of scientific governance that especially concerns me here is the importance of particular scientific knowledge to administrators: how and when they come to realise what expertise they require; how crucial this expertise really is; how (and whether) this expertise can be fitted into existing administrative structures; and, finally, what effect these requirements then have on scientific institutions attempting to provide the expertise. At this time, concerns over Britain’s energy security, and especially the ongoing economics of supplying Britain’s ever-­increasing demands for oil, were rife in the Ministry of Power, which was responsible for all aspects of national energy supply. Many branches of the geosciences, including oceanography and seismology, had already been very obviously pressed into dealing with military and security concerns in the Cold War context, and British geological surveying could no longer remain even slightly aloof. The scientific institution in question here is therefore the Institute of Geological Sciences (IGS), as the British Geological Survey was known in the 1960s. The Survey had been founded in the 1830s as the Geological Survey of Great Britain, and its initial purpose had been to add geological details to the topological surveys of the country then underway by the Ordnance Survey. Gradually its geological surveys became more and more valued in their own right for both scientific and economic purposes, and the Survey split from the Ordnance Survey, growing from a handful of geologists



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in the early 1830s to a large and highly specialised and professional staff – not only geologists and surveyors, but also mineralogists, palaeontologists, stratigraphers, draughtsmen and, of course, administrators – by the late nineteenth century. Throughout the twentieth century the Survey gave scientific advice to many government departments, but the IGS would have a new problem to deal with: an entirely new and systematic geological survey of the coastal shelf was required by the government. Thus the 1960s and 1970s IGS project to survey the North Sea on behalf of the Ministry of Power not only gives us a case study of the points outlined above but also throws new light on the British government’s control of science in general, and geology in particular, during the Cold War. The changes in the structure, functions and funding of the IGS during its early years, and in particular the relatively successful struggle of its Director, Sir Kingsley Dunham, to implement those changes and work under the constraints they imposed, were all a direct consequence of the new scientific expertise required by the Ministry of Power and the British government’s changing approach to scientific research. These major changes in the pursuit of British state geology and geophysics in the 1960s were thus brought about by two factors: the exploration of the North Sea for gas and oil, culminating in the 1969 confirmation that there were commercially viable oil fields in the North Sea, and the reorganisation of the British government and civil science during Harold Wilson’s first term as prime minister (followed by further changes under the succeeding Edward Heath administration), which began in 1964. The changes in the IGS that its directors, first Sir James Stubblefield and then Sir Kingsley Dunham, oversaw during this period stemmed from both of these factors and are illuminating not only in investigating science under the first Wilson administration but also in considering how science is used and governed by state apparatuses. Dunham was an absolutely key figure in this, not only because of his position as IGS Director during most of this crucial period, but also due to his prior experience of science in academic, administrative, commercial and governmental contexts, as well as his relentless desire to ensure that both the economically motivated, government-sponsored surveys of the IGS and the fundamental general survey work that underlay them received fair attention – and fair funding. I shall discuss some of the organisational and administrative

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changes that took place at government level, moving from what could be termed state funding or state patronage of science to a model based upon both planned science and scientific planning, and how this affected the birth and growth of the new IGS, followed by discussion of the activities of the Ministry of Power as exploration of the North Sea became vital. I shall then turn to the relationship between the IGS and the Ministry of Power as North Sea oil became commercially viable. I shall conclude with some thoughts on how this institutional analysis helps us to think further about scientific governance. Broad administrative changes In 1965 British geosciences were seriously affected by significant changes in the way the British government administered science and technology. Wilson had been elected prime minister of a Labour administration in 1964, but changes had been envisaged by the previous government too, and consultations were already underway. Civil science as a whole was affected by a report from a committee convened under Sir Burke Trend, the Cabinet Secretary, which concluded in 1964 that the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) was unwieldy and civil science should be reorganised under research councils. This naturally affected the Geological Survey of Great Britain, as it was then known, but as far as geology was concerned, the key recommendations for change within the discipline were contained in the Brundrett Report. This was the report of a committee first convened in May 1962 under the chairmanship of Sir Frederick Brundrett. Brundrett had been in the Royal Naval Scientific Service during the Second World War, and in 1950 he became the Deputy Scientific Adviser to the Minister of Defence, first under Sir Henry Tizard and then under Sir John Cockcroft, before succeeding the latter in 1954. Much of his work at this time was concerned directly with military science – planning and developing new equipment for the armed forces. He retired from the Ministry of Defence in 1959, but still worked in public and civil service for some time, acting as a civil service commissioner and also chairing various committees, which had always been one of his greatest skills.1 The Brundrett Report, as it became known, was actually entitled Report of the Committee on Technical Assistance for Overseas



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Geology and Mining. However, it dealt fairly broadly with how the overseas aspects of the Geological Survey of Great Britain should be reorganised in the post-war, postcolonial nation, and this therefore also affected how the Survey itself should be reorganised. The main recommendations of the Brundrett Report were that more technical assistance was required, beyond surveying, in mining and related industries, and that all these efforts, both domestic and overseas, should come under one body.2 Combined with Trend’s report on the DSIR, these recommendations effectively brought the IGS into being. The Science and Technology Bill received the royal assent in March 1965 and the DSIR, which had administered most aspects of government science since the First World War, ceased to exist. The Geological Survey of Great Britain, founded in the 1830s, had for the past forty-five years been part of the DSIR and its structures and functions now came under the newly formed National Environment Research Council (NERC). NERC quickly set up a number of committees, including the Geology and Geophysics Committee, to begin dealing with its new responsibilities in the earth sciences, although it had a wider remit, with oceanography, amongst other sciences, also under its control. The new IGS included not only the old Geological Survey of Great Britain, which was considered to be its main function, but also the Museum of Practical Geology and the Overseas Geological Survey. It also took over other seismological and geomagnetic projects that had been run from the Royal Observatory, but the three main sections remained the backbone of the organisational structure. The Geological Survey, as the section was now called, was administered regionally, with offices in London, Leeds and Edinburgh, and also included the palaeontological, petrographical and hydrogeological departments, since these had survey functions of their own and were of particular relevance to the survey mission to continuously improve the geological cartography of the British Isles. The Museum, with its attendant library, remained in London, and the Overseas Survey was organisationally combined with the Mineral Surveys, forming a third section which also included the departments responsible for specialist analysis, such as the geochemical and geophysical divisions.3 As new units with particular survey aims were formed they were fitted into the existing structure of the three sections, so Continental Shelf Units I and II, the first

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housed in Leeds and the second in Edinburgh, were added to the Geological Survey section, and the Mineral Assessment Unit was placed among the Overseas and Mineral Surveys. Palaeontologist Sir James Stubblefield had been Director of the Survey since 1960, and he agreed to direct the new IGS under the NERC, rather than under the Science Research Council, although he later came to doubt the wisdom of that decision, thinking that the Survey might have been better placed under the Science Research Council.4 However, he retired in 1966, while the changes were very much still in progress, and Kingsley Dunham was appointed as his replacement. Unlike his predecessor, who had worked as a palaeontologist in the Survey for his whole career, Dunham had begun his geological career in the Survey before returning to academia in 1950, taking up the Chair of Geology at Durham University, where he had been a student. At this time he had also worked as a consultant, as well as taking up roles in university administration – by 1955 he had become a pro-vice-chancellor. He was also elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1955. Dunham’s organisational and administrative abilities were ever in demand: he served on the committee which produced the Brundrett Report, and was otherwise heavily involved in science policy for some time before his appointment as Director of the IGS, and for all this work he was knighted in 1972. He retired in 1975, but his familiarity with science policy before his appointment, and his experience of academic, government and commercial science had stood him in good stead, although he had found some of the difficulties of securing funding in government science increasingly challenging. For him, however, the most frustrating part of his IGS position was no longer being able, as an NERC employee, to join the science policy committees that he had become accustomed to serving. Instead, therefore, he turned his attention to learned societies, serving as Foreign Secretary of the Royal Society and President of the Geological Society while he was Director of the IGS.5 The Ministry of Power and the North Sea The British government had had major concerns over British oil security for most of the twentieth century, and this had only increased following the Second World War.6 The demand for oil was continually increasing, and in the late 1940s attempts to



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a­ nticipate not only increasing but changing needs were dealt with by the Petroleum Fuels Policy Subcommittee, which operated under the Defence Research Policy Committee, with representatives from the military, the Ministry of Supply and the Ministry of Fuel and Power.7 However, coal and oil supply was the remit of the Ministry of Fuel and Power (renamed the Ministry of Power in 1957), and in the 1950s, with both coal and oil consumption increasing, ensuring diversification of supply was one way that the Ministry was able to increase the security of that supply. With coal there was little problem, since Britain’s own natural resources were abundant, but for oil this was more difficult. One of the Ministry of Power’s most important responsibilities in the 1950s, therefore, was regulating oil companies, both foreign and domestic. The Abadan Crisis, which began in 1951 when the Iranian government nationalised the Iranian assets of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, and the Suez Crisis in 1956 had both disrupted supply of Middle Eastern oil to Britain, and Ministry of Power officials were aware that not only the possible actions of hostile governments but even unfavourable weather conditions in the Mediterranean might severely interrupt supplies again at any time. The Ministry therefore pursued a strategy of stockpiling and diversification with regard to crude oil. Officials attempted to ensure that companies shipping crude oil to refineries in Britain, such as Esso and BP, stockpiled enough oil at those refineries for short-term emergencies,8 and also encouraged that supply be as diverse as possible in terms of source, encouraging oil companies to seek and exploit oil in as many different regions as they could. Into this environment came the discovery of gas under the North Sea in 1959, although the full extent of the Groningen gas field was not realised until 1963. With this discovery, expectations that there was also oil under the North Sea – which had existed since the Second World War – appeared to be realised. Britain, Norway and other European nations with North Sea coastlines rushed to claim what territory they could. In 1963 in Norway and in 1964 in Britain laws were passed to claim sovereignty over all submarine resources within each country’s coastal shelf. However, how to define one’s coastal shelf was itself a vexed international question. Various methods for assigning sovereignty over such territories, depending on circumstances, were laid out in the United Nations

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Convention on the Law of the Sea, so there was scope for contention, and not all the countries involved had ratified that agreement in any case. However, much of the North Sea – everything north of claims by Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and West Germany – clearly belonged either to Britain or to Norway, and the Ministry of Power’s desire to exploit any resources as soon as possible led to rapid agreement on a simple median line, although it was more advantageous to Norway than to Britain. This agreement was finalised in 1964 and both countries were already preparing to issue the first licences for commercial exploration of the area. The Minister of Power chose to allocate blocks to applicants as he saw fit, rather than auction them off to the highest bidder – a clear indication that while income was important, it was second to control. Only Western European and American countries gained access, and the licences included certain conditions. Complete agreement over allocation of territory was not reached until 1972, but in the meantime Britain was exploring all undisputed territory as rapidly as possible. By the late 1960s, when more gas but no oil had been found, hopes were beginning to wane; then, in 1969, the Ekofisk oil field was discovered – in Norwegian territory, but not far from the median line, and British hopes were renewed. By 1980 over 100 oil and gas fields had been discovered across the North Sea. The licences issued by the Ministry included various conditions, such as the requirement that the companies were to provide all the raw data they collected, including seismic data from their initial surveys and well logs and cores from any drilling, to the Ministry of Power. This, of course, was part of the Ministry’s desire to control knowledge about the resources as well as the resources themselves, but simply collecting this information was not sufficient, especially since the companies were not required to supply any of their further interpretative work – this the Ministry could hardly demand without raising serious concerns over the security of commercially sensitive data, and it needed the co-operation rather than the suspicion of the operators. Still, it was bad enough that even British companies might have an advantage over the Ministry, and that operators from other Western European nations or the US might do so was unthinkable – although NATO allies, they were still economic rivals.



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By 1967, therefore, there was a growing realisation within the Ministry that it had insufficient scientific expertise to deal with these collections of data; moreover, this would be difficult to obtain internally because the Ministry itself could not provide a ‘satisfactory career structure’ for ‘scientific staff’.9 There was also a growing material problem (well cores are physically large and heavy specimens), and increasing external pressures: the Labour Party North Sea Study Group was pushing for a separate department or sub-department of petroleum technology, or at least for the Ministry to strengthen its technical arm and capabilities in some way – as one memo put it: ‘The Minister would be less vulnerable to possible criticism if he could show that arrangements were in hand.’10 Officials in the Ministry of Power consequently began to develop plans to use the data to build an overall picture of the sub-surface geology of the North Sea for practical and political reasons: ‘a nucleus of qualified staff … could furnish reports to the Ministry which would be valuable in many contexts, e.g. allocation of new licences, assessment of reserves, estimates of production costs and consideration of unitisation schemes’.11 The IGS was clearly the obvious institution to analyse the data. The Institute of Geological Sciences The IGS, as the old Survey had done, advised and co-operated with many government departments, including the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food and the Ministry of Defence. It was closely involved with the Ministry of Transport as a consultant on road building – in 1967, for example, the major motorways the M4 and the M5 were being built, a northward extension of the M6 was being planned and there were numerous other plans for more motorways and major roads,12 and the relevance of geological knowledge to such deliberations had become obvious – ­considerable resources had previously been wasted in building motorways over unstable strata.13 Naturally, the IGS also collaborated with the Ordnance Survey, and with ‘numerous oil and mineral exploration companies [which] received considerable geological help from the scientific staff’,14 as well as in what could be called overseas scientific aid – mapping, for purposes of infrastructure development, in developing countries. For my purposes, however, the most important government connection was between the IGS and the

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Ministry of Power, the ministry responsible for energy supply and therefore for administering oil and gas exploration in the North Sea. Furthermore, much of the advice given to other ministries was at least largely based on existing survey knowledge; the work for the Ministry of Power would require investigation of previously unsurveyed territory. Dunham was also keen to increase collaborative research, and partnerships with universities grew greatly under his directorship; for example, geologists at the University of Sheffield were heavily involved in a tidal project in the Humber estuary.15 However, one of the first collaborations arranged by Dunham was not research based but was, rather, the linking of the IGS’s Mineral Resources Division to the government’s inter-departmental Mineral Resources Consultative Committee (MRCC), and the link was essentially Dunham himself, as well as some of his staff. The MRCC was established following an informal meeting in May 1967 between Dunham, two NERC representatives and three officials from the Department of Education and Science (DES). The MRCC was not intended to ‘resolve scientific arguments’ but, rather, to ‘settle priorities where differences of opinion arose between departments’.16 For this the reason it was decided that it should be chaired by someone from the DES, since that department did not require the services of the IGS directly. In short, the MRCC was to decide whether a particular problem should be considered urgent; if it was, then the NERC and the IGS had to decide whether the IGS could do the work in the normal course of its responsibilities or if special arrangements had to be made with the department that required assistance. The MRCC also included Dunham and various other IGS staff, and also representatives from various departments and ministries, including the Board of Trade, the Department of Economic Affairs, the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works, the Ministry of Housing and Local Government and, of course, the Ministry of Power, as well as the Ministry of Technology, a department which had been established under Wilson’s incoming government in 1964 and which absorbed the Ministry of Power in 1969, and then was itself merged with the Board of Trade when Heath came to power in 1970, forming the Department of Trade and Industry. Within the IGS itself, new units were also required for new purposes. Continental Shelf Unit (CSU) I was formed in 1967 in



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Leeds and CSU II in 1968 in Edinburgh, as well as the Mineral Assessment Unit (MAU) in 1967 in London. The Survey had previously confined its attention more or less to Britain’s landmass, and the CSUs were founded to survey and map Britain’s continental shelf, both in the search for submarine resources and also because greater knowledge of the sea bed was quickly becoming required for other purposes, such as building new refineries and pipelines. The purpose of the MAU was to complement their work on the analysis side, but it also had broader concerns, such as the search for uranium in Scotland – also illuminating in the context of the Cold War, since Dunham considered there was an ‘urgent need to reappraise resources of useful minerals in Britain’.17 Dunham was responsible for overseeing most of this integration and amalgamation and was also soon under heavy pressure to get the new continental shelf work moving quickly. Dunham therefore ensured that both the immediate investigations and the long-term aims of the continental shelf programme were speedily put in train. The priorities he set, though, may have disconcerted some members of the MRCC by being primarily scientific rather than economic in focus: in 1967 CSU I began sampling the sea bed in the eastern Irish Sea to learn more about the sedimentary basin there.18 CSU I did not neglect the North Sea, however, and the first geological task there was to establish the stratigraphy. This was mainly carried out through examination of the samples and data obtained from commercial drilling, rather than through IGS surveys, and this was one of the ongoing problems for the IGS, since the companies drilling for gas and oil in the North Sea were not always timely in dispatching the seismic results, drill cores and well data to the IGS, although they were required to do so under the terms of the licences issued by the Ministry of Power. Nevertheless, in 1967 Dunham was able to report that their examination, although necessarily incomplete because the CSU had received only about half the samples and data it should have had (from 52 wells, when about 100 had been or were being drilled), was underway and looking promising.19 This new offshore work continued to grow over the next few years: in 1968, CSU II was formed in Edinburgh and more samples and data were received from commercial wells. CSU I continued to examine the data and went on with its programme in the Irish Sea,

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as well as beginning similar operations in the Humber estuary. CSU II immediately began surveying off the Hebrides and in the Firth of Forth, although all these activities, as well as a collaboration in the Atlantic Ocean with the National Institute of Oceanography, were hampered by the fact that the Marine Geophysics Unit did not have sufficiently experienced staff.20 By the 1970s, the CSUs were also working with the IGS’s geophysical groups to analyse the seismological data. In 1970 Dunham was able to report that CSU II had reached the point where sufficient information had been obtained for the IGS to be able to give useful advice on mineral prospects and sea bed conditions around the Scottish coasts.21 He also reported that: As I forecast last year, a contract was signed during the early part of the year between the Natural Environment Research Council and George Wimpey and Company Limited for a five-year programme of drilling and sampling on the British continental shelf. The programme is designed primarily to drill boreholes through the sea-bed drift deposits into solid rocks, and the information thus obtained will be used for the calibration of the geophysical investigations which have already been made. […] The ship will work for 10 months each year, the time being shared between the two Continental Shelf units. […] Knowledge of sea floor conditions around the Scottish coasts has been built up to the extent that Continental Shelf Unit II can now give useful advice about mineral prospects and conditions affecting pipe lines and other marine works over substantial areas.22

By 1971 a number of major oil fields had been discovered by companies in the British areas of the North Sea. The rate of commercial oil exploration and discovery was rapidly increasing and a plan was being made to construct a 110-mile marine pipeline from the Forties field to the coast near Peterhead.23 To give advice on the pipeline simply meant even more work for the IGS, however, since it meant that the CSUs needed to work on superficial as well as solid deposits (i.e. on the shifting drifted deposits of the sea floor as well as on the strata of the bedrock below). By this time, however, the IGS was beginning to produce maps of offshore areas, so the work continued apace, but with optimism and a sense of its overwhelming importance: Dunham considered the discovery of oil under the North Sea to be ‘the most important geology-based development in Britain since the opening up of the coal-fields’. He



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even went so far as to suggest that ‘by the end of the decade a substantial proportion of the United Kingdom’s oil requirements may be available from the North Sea’.24 By 1972, not only pipelines but the underground storage of petroleum in coastal areas was being planned, and Dunham considered that the full effect of these ongoing developments had not yet been felt by the IGS, but perhaps would be over the next few years. More samples and data from the oil companies were now arriving, and were often larger as well – one well core was 2,062 metres long.25 The relationship between the Ministry of Power and the IGS The MRCC was the forum through which officials in the Ministry of Power initially communicated to Dunham their concerns about their lack of ability to use the geological data they possessed, and they then quickly began to arrange direct meetings. It very rapidly became clear that the IGS would itself need help if it was going to be the Ministry’s geological North Sea expert: there were financial concerns and staffing issues, and it needed the co-operation of the North Sea Operators’ Committee if there was to be any hope of access to already-interpreted data. As Dunham put it in August 1967, ‘without [interpreted data] the detailed assessment of the potential of the Southern North Sea will be a very long job indeed, if it is possible at all’.26 By mid-1968 the Ministry of Power was becoming very concerned that the IGS would not have anything for it (and had not yet even said it would be able have anything for it) by mid-1970, although it had had some reassurance that data would begin to flow in early 1969. As things turned out, the report was not actually ready until mid-1971 and the Ministry of Technology, into which the Ministry of Power had by then been absorbed, had to be content with that. Part of the problem was the slowness with which the operators sent their data to the IGS, and there was little that either the Ministry of Technology or the IGS could do about that. However, to go back to 1968, the Ministry of Power needed at least some information, and as quickly as possible – the first licences expired in 1970. Operators were usually fairly keen to co-operate, at least in principle and up to a point, and the North Sea Operators’ Committee recommended to its members that they co-operate with

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any approaches for data from the IGS – the Ministry issued the licences, after all, and of course some data had to be provided under the licences. Nevertheless, there were fears that national interests might trump any respect that the IGS or the Ministries of Power and Technology would have for commercial confidentiality. The operators were reassured by Ministry officials, however, and therefore handed over even confidential interpretations of data to the Ministries of Power and Technology and the IGS. Naturally, this caused some problems later on, as they realised that the Minister might well use their confidential data to decide in favour of licences issued to British Gas, which would, of course, be in the national interest. In this the Ministry took a hard stance and was unmoveable, merely reiterating to the operators that its own first concern was British national interests and British nationalised companies, although in practice it seems that there was little actual conflict. Meanwhile, in June 1967 the DES had established the MRCC, as mentioned earlier. It was through this committee that Ministry of Power officials first communicated their concerns regarding their North Sea data to Dunham, and direct meetings were quickly arranged in which the Ministry officially requested that the IGS should begin analysis of North Sea data and produce a report for the Ministry by mid-1970. At this point, Dunham was willing but cautious: he did not have sufficient staff; they did not yet have the data they needed from the operators; and the available time was not really long enough. Indeed, Dunham agreed that work would begin at once, but did not give any guarantees that it would be completed on time. The Ministry agreed to Dunham’s request for funds to employ either more staff or consultants, but by mid-1968 Ministry officials began to be very concerned that the IGS would not have anything for them (and Dunham had not yet even said that the IGS would have anything for them) by mid-1970. Dunham did reassure them that data would really begin to flow in early 1969. As has been noted the report was delayed until 1971, and the Ministry of Technology, as it had by then become, had to be satisfied with this. Operators had been somewhat slow in supplying their data to the IGS and to alter the transfer of this information was beyond the capacity of either that of the Ministry or the IGS, even though the operators were legally obliged under the licences to provide at least their raw data; since the Ministry issued the



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licences, they could not afford to appear uncooperative, but they did not necessarily have to be fast, as they had to analyse the data themselves first. However, Dunham had other concerns brought on by all the North Sea work. He became increasingly worried as it became clear that ‘[t]he area of Great Britain geologically mapped during 1970 was less than in 1969, continuing the trend of previous years. This trend seems inevitable in view of the increasing amount of other work, particularly advisory work for other public bodies, that is now being undertaken. Nevertheless, it is a matter for some concern as this work is one of the main sources of scientific capital on which the scientific staff can draw […].’27 And, of course, nothing is ever simple: ‘On the other hand, some of the Institute’s advisory work has required special surveys […], and this has been a fruitful source of new knowledge that would not otherwise have been made available.’28 The balancing of what might be termed ‘pure’ versus ‘applied’ geological fieldwork was difficult in Dunham’s view, since neither had either point or sense without the other, so imbalance was detrimental to both, yet this balance became increasingly difficult to maintain as questions of funding arose – and government officials usually see it differently from scientists and scientific administrators. This theme continued to be a source of concern to Dunham until his retirement in 1975, and was further complicated by governmental changes in 1972. The Heath government implemented the proposals in another report on the organisation of government science, the Rothschild report, returning control of some scientific funds to government departments and taking it away from the research councils. Ministries became customers, and the IGS a contractor – the problem with this arrangement was that there was no guarantee that the departments would continue to consult with the IGS indefinitely, potentially much reducing the Institute’s income, possibly at short notice. Stressing the inherent connection between the two strands of the IGS’s work was therefore vital to Dunham’s ongoing strategy of maintaining overall funding for all aspects of its work, not just payment for applied surveys and road-building advice, as he insisted in 1972: ‘I regard it as of the highest importance that this long-term programme should be maintained, for without it, the Institute could not meet the many demands made upon it,’29 and continued to insist in 1973: ‘Any diminution of the basic work

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would be self-defeating in that vital data would be lost, and never fitted in to the complex synthesis upon which our understanding of these islands is based.’30 Conclusion The intersection between science and government cuts several ways even in this short case study. The recognition of the importance of accurate scientific knowledge to the business of government is revealed in the Ministry of Power’s sudden and then growing (if also somewhat belated) awareness not only of the importance of precise and detailed geological knowledge of the North Sea for its own purposes, but also that it could not easily achieve it alone, and therefore had to recruit the expertise of the IGS. This realisation followed from the understanding that the Ministry of Power had to have to manage the ongoing licensing of the oil companies – and therefore required at least at much knowledge of the geology of the North Sea as the companies themselves were gathering if it was to manage this process with any hope either of economic success or of increasing Britain’s energy resources and therefore security. Furthermore, it was clear to Ministry officials that this expertise did not and would not fit into existing administrative and career structures, and that new relationships between government departments, as well as with the IGS, would have to be established. In combination with wider changes in British public science, this in turn altered not only the size and the structure, but also the aims and purposes, of the IGS, creating controversy over what the role of the IGS actually was. The greater income that this need for new knowledge generated for the IGS led to its growth, and also to the gathering of new geological knowledge that would not have otherwise have been available, but it quickly also became problematic from the point of view of the scientists themselves. The fundamental general survey work of the IGS, without which the IGS might as well not really exist as far as Dunham was concerned, was being side-lined to make time for more immediate interests and, as the funding from the NERC through the DES was being reduced in the cuts of the early 1970s, the only way to increase income was to accept both commercial and government contracts – an uncertain path to tread, as this potentially further reduced the time available for basic survey work.



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The place of geology in scientific governance was, and was understood at the time to be, vital both to national security and to the economy, in at least some sectors of government and under some administrations – although, of course, there was little overall agreement as to how it should be funded or by whom. Notes  1 Richard Powell, ‘Brundrett, Sir Frederick (1894–1974)’, rev. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).  2 Report of the Committee on Technical Assistance for Overseas Geology and Mining (London: HMSO, 1964).  3 Institute of Geological Sciences annual report for 1967 (hereafter IGS annual report for 1967) (London: HMSO, 1968), p. 4.  4 Peter A. Sabine, ‘Stubblefield, Sir (Cyril) James (1901–1999)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).  5 Peter A. Sabine, ‘Dunham, Sir Kingsley Charles (1910–2001)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).  6 See, for example, Richard Bailey, ‘Unequal shares in the North Sea’, Energy Policy, 6 (1978), 320–31; Johan J. Holst, ‘The strategic and security requirements of North Sea oil and gas’, in Ian Smart and Martin Saeter (eds), The political implications of North Sea oil and gas (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1975); Daniel Yergin, The prize: the epic quest for money, oil and power (New York: Free Press, 1992).  7 Ministry of Defence, The National Archives, Kew, DEFE 10/107, ‘Papers of the Defence Research Policy Committee: Petroleum Fuels Policy Sub-Committee, 1947–1949’.  8 Ministry of Power, The National Archives, Kew (hereafter Ministry of Power), POWE 63/75, ‘Oil Stockpiling and Security’, undated.  9 Ministry of Power, POWE 63/201, untitled Memorandum, 21 June 1967. 10 Ministry of Power, POWE 63/201, untitled Memorandum, 21 June 1967. 11 Ministry of Power, POWE 63/201, untitled Memorandum, 21 June 1967. 12 IGS annual report for 1967, p. 20 13 Department of Education and Science, The National Archives, Kew (hereafter Department of Education and Science), ED 222/1, Mineral Resources Consultative Committee, 24 May 1967. 14 IGS annual report for 1967, p. 23

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15 Institute of Geological Sciences annual report for 1968 (hereafter IGS annual report for 1968) (London: Institute of Geological Sciences, 1969), pp. 3, 30. 16 Department of Education and Science, ED 222/1, Mineral Resources Consultative Committee, 24 May 1967. 17 IGS annual report for 1967, p. 3 18 IGS annual report for 1967, p. 93. 19 IGS annual report for 1967, p. 93. 20 IGS annual report for 1968, p. 86 21 Institute of Geological Sciences annual report for 1970 (hereafter IGS annual report for 1970) (London: Institute of Geological Sciences, 1971), p. 3. 22 IGS annual report for 1970, p. 3. 23 Institute of Geological Sciences annual report for 1971 (London: Institute of Geological Sciences, 1972), p. 2. 24 Institute of Geological Sciences annual report for 1971, p. 2. 25 Institute of Geological Sciences annual report for 1972 (hereafter IGS annual report for 1972) (London: Institute of Geological Sciences, 1973), p. 34. 26 Ministry of Power, POWE 63/201, Kingsley Dunham to J.A. Beckett, 16 August 1967. 27 IGS annual report for 1970, p. 1. 28 IGS annual report for 1970, p. 1. 29 IGS annual report for 1972, p. 3. 30 Institute of Geological Sciences annual report for 1973 (London: Institute of Geological Sciences, 1974), p. 2.

8

Doing it for Britain: science and service in oral history with government scientists Sally Horrocks and Thomas Lean

The existing literature on government science says very little about the people who actually carried out the research. It tells us much about how research policy was formulated and funded, the strategic goals it was intended to achieve and the practical outcomes (or lack thereof) of research programmes but reveals much less about those whose working lives were spent on these projects, either individually or collectively. We know very little indeed about what motivated individuals to take up posts in government science, the daily rhythms of their work, how they felt about it or how changes in policy affected them and their careers. This absence of attention to government scientists has persisted, despite the observation that training, securing and retaining the right personnel were continual concerns of those who managed British government science, and played a major role in shaping education provision.1 This lacuna can be explained, in part at least, by limitations on sources. Few have written their memoirs and they have not left substantial archives of personal papers because their work belonged not to them, but to their employers. Some prominent individuals, many of them advisers rather than career civil servants, have received scholarly attention, but for the vast majority there is little beyond the fragmentary traces of them found in official archives, in documents that reflect the administrative processes that produced them. This is particularly the case for those who worked on classified projects, whose records remain inaccessible and who were unable to discuss their work in public.2 The collection of a substantial archive of oral history recordings by the Oral History of British Science (OHBS) project, a National Life Stories project based at the British

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Library, now makes it possible to look at the lives and careers of government as well as industrial scientists.3 During the first phase of this project around 100 life story interviews with scientists and engineers involved with aerospace, computing, materials science, civil engineering, electronics, scientific instruments, oceanography, climate science, geophysics, geology, meteorology and glaciology have been completed. Of these individuals, over forty spent a significant period during their careers (beginning between the 1940s and 1970s) working as government scientists. A number of others did so for much shorter periods, for example to fulfil the requirements of National Service during the 1950s. Each life story is essentially an oral biography, beginning with childhood and progressing through the various parts of the interviewee’s life at length. Using oral sources tells us, as Alessandro Portelli notes, ‘not just what people did, but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing, and what they now think they did’.4 This allows us to begin to integrate the perspectives of government scientists into the historiography of government science by exploring the motivations that led people to become government scientists, how they understood the goals and direction of their own work and the meanings they ascribed to it. These recollections also reveal, often indirectly, the ethos that they perceived to underpin their work and how this was changed by alterations in the policy framework within which government science operated. This moves us away from a focus on the management of science at a structural level and towards a consideration of how its processes affected the everyday working worlds of the scientists charged with producing the results that policy makers sought. Here we argue that these interviews can be read as demonstrating that the governance of scientific civil servants in the immediate post-war period enmeshed them in a number of national services. However, whilst such services were a factor in the culture of the scientific civil service for those who joined during this period, they appear in interviews as contextual details – as obligations, motivations and satisfactions – more than as the explicit subject of debate. Instead, the interviews reflect the interviewees’ overriding day-to-day concerns with ‘doing the science’. We suggest that the way science was managed within the civil service when they joined it provided a context that allowed the interviewees to pursue their desired work as scientists whilst channelling their efforts toward



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serving national ends, making national service implicit in their work, although it was not always asserted as such. We then discuss how changes in the organisation and management of the scientific civil service as it was ‘reformed’ from the 1980s were experienced by individuals. Scientists negotiated what they often perceived as a different style of governance – a change in ethos as commercial concerns became an increasingly important goal of their work. For many, the perceived loss of an ability to pursue what they regarded as proper scientific work undermined their willingness to continue as government scientists. This suggests that this new form of governance required a new type of scientist, more attuned to commercial concerns than had previously been the case. Service and science During the Second World War the number of scientists and engineers employed by the British state expanded considerably, reaching an estimated 9,000 qualified scientists and engineers by the end of the conflict.5 Many of them were young scientists directed into this employment to fulfil wartime needs. For those who stayed afterwards it was the start of a long career in the system, creating a generation of individuals who not only retained and built on their wartime contacts throughout their working lives, but who had become government scientists under similar circumstances. During the Second World War conscription applied to all young men and, later, women, but rather than being drafted into the armed forces those with an aptitude for science or engineering found themselves provided with an accelerated university scientific education, sometimes funded by the state.6 They recalled being interviewed by C.P. Snow himself or one of his subordinates at the Central (Scientific and Technical) Register of the Ministry of Labour and National Service toward the end of their studies, before being drafted to wherever their talents were most needed. The experience of John Charnley (b. 1922), educated as a civil engineer at Liverpool University and expecting to be commissioned as a military engineer into the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME), seems typically arbitrary: The interviewers, two men, had obviously spoken with the staff and the point made was ‘we understand that you are good at s­ tructures,

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or interested in structures,’ and I said ‘yes’. ‘That you’re interested [in] hydraulics.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Then have you heard of a place called Farnborough?’ ‘No.’ ‘So you’ll be there after Christmas.’ That was it.

Yet, as Charnley continued, even being ordered to a military research centre such as the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) at Farnborough could bring mixed feelings, combining a sense of service to the nation with that of his good fortune at being spared service on the front line: How did you greet the prospect of being sent down to Farnborough? Initially, a concern that it looked as if I’d got a good chance of surviving the war where a lot of my chums and pals hadn’t, and did I like that or did I think that – could I persuade myself that someone knew better and that I was going to serve – damn it all, it sounds terrible doesn’t it – serve my country by doing that than by going into the REME.7

Others in the wartime generation describe a similar, seemingly arbitrary, process of being drafted as scientists, and the mark that this left on them. Metallurgist and future Chief Scientific Advisor Alan Cottrell (1991–2012) recounted how being assigned to work at the University of Birmingham researching tank armour, rather than joining the military, left him with a feeling of obligation: I felt that the country had held me back from having to go in and fight and so on and I felt that I – I owed something to the country in return [laughs] and – and that feeling of wanting my research to have something useful to the country about it, that’s lasted for the rest of my life really, it stems from that initial stage, yes.8

For those of the wartime generation, working on military projects fulfilled their obligations to the nation and they seem to have accepted that, during wartime, it was the prerogative of the state to direct their lives and careers in ways that they might not have chosen in different circumstances. In such recollections these interviewees present very little evidence of any sense of regret at missed opportunities. However, to a few, even service as a ‘boffin’ did not seem sufficient.9 Aeronautical engineer Dennis Higton (1921– 2012), for example, recalled three attempts to leave his position at RAE Farnborough and join the Air Force: And I did it for a third time and of course you have a medical every time you, and of course you’re absolutely fit as a flea and enthusias-



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tic. […] They told me if you do this again we’ll send you to prison because, you know, this is … you’re in a reserved occupation and that’s what you’re supposed to be doing, you can’t sort of dart off and do a different job because you want to.10

In wartime, service as a scientist became a substitute for service as a soldier, a different way of serving the nation and contributing to the war effort. Scientists were drafted to research establishments as surely as soldiers were to regiments, recruited to a national scientific effort to develop the tools needed to win the war. Many of this wartime generation subsequently enjoyed long careers in the service, remaining in what became jobs for life long after the initial reasons for their recruitment had gone. The post-war scientific civil service that interviewees describe offered a relatively secure career, with a well-defined promotion structure, annual increments and generous pension arrangements.11 It was a comparatively stable place to build a career and support a family. As Dennis Higton remarked when asked why he had turned down a job offer from industry to remain at the RAE: I made up my mind, I would have a secure career, I was on a decent wicket in spite of not having a degree. And John [Charnley] had often said you might have done better as an engineer in industry, but how would he know, I didn’t want to run the risk. I’d got a wife and we were all doing what we’ve talked about. And I could see blindly perhaps, that I had a way ahead.12

While this compulsion to national scientific service would have been the experience of only a generation, it was a generation propelled by early positions of responsibility into long and often senior civil service careers. Each of the interviewees mentioned above was serving in a headquarters post in London by the 1970s. The recollections of long-service members suggest a paternalistic culture of civil service life where senior staff are recalled as taking an interest in the careers of promising younger colleagues. Other interviewees suggest that this ethos of service was propagated far beyond the influential wartime generation. Westcott rocket scientist Bob Parkinson (b. 1941), who joined the establishment in 1965, suggests that this might in part at least be attributed to the experience of working on weapons for national security. His interview suggests that, with the Cold War looming in the background, there were parallels to this earlier period, but also some clear differences:

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How did you feel about working on weaponry? Oh [sighs], it wasn’t what I wanted to do but it – but there wasn’t a lot of opportunity to do what I wanted to do. If you go through the 1970s you’ll find there’s a certain degree of frustration, I didn’t want to work on military systems but it paid the mortgage, and you make compensations … We were in the middle of the Cold War, the prospect of the Russians coming over the border was, er, real, and so some of these things were things which you kind of said to yourself, they have to be done, I can’t … really avoid that. There might have been things I got more concerned about but – but yes, I mean I’d – for a decade I worked for the military, and it was just like being a soldier I guess.13

The notion that designing and developing munitions was an important contribution to the national military effort was a powerful trope in wartime and post-war popular culture, exemplified by Michael Redgrave’s portrayal of Barnes Wallis in The Dambusters (1955). As another government Cold War rocket scientist, Roy Dommett (1933–2015), recalled of his work with private contractors on the Chevaline upgrade to Polaris, a useful motivating factor was ‘the fact that I was doing it for Britain. I joke about it now, you know, but I mean it actually was a serious element, that people actually all thought that they were doing something for the country as well.’14 Interviews with private industry scientists who worked on military systems sometimes reveal similar patriotic sentiments.15 The link between weaponry and making a contribution to national security is a clear one, but the experience of involvement with important national projects was not restricted exclusively to those who worked on military systems. Interviewees from more benign research areas could find their work driven by one national need or another. Alan Cottrell, for example, described his reasons for wanting to work at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell in just such terms: In 1955 I was invited to go to the Atomic Energy Establishment at Harwell which I accepted, but I thought that they would have national problems there which fell into my field, and that was right.16

In the wake of the 1957 Windscale reactor fire, Cottrell went on to play an important part in establishing the safety of the Magnox nuclear reactor design. Another role which emerges is that of technical diplomat, in cases where interviewees were called upon to



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represent the nation’s interests in negotiations, international committees, joint projects or other settings. In 1969 Mike Forrest (b. 1934) was part of a British team of instrumentation specialists sent to the Soviet Union to verify the remarkable results of an experimental fusion reactor, Tokamak T3. Whilst Forrest stresses the scientific importance of the mission, the political ramifications of the British scientists’ actions in the context of the Cold War loom large in the background: ‘It was so political, I mean it had to – this had to work [laughs], I mean it was our prestige on the line and I think even more so the Russians, yes.’17 In another example, Dennis Higton found himself hurriedly despatched to the British technical mission at the Washington embassy in the 1960s to undertake a rather different kind of technical diplomacy. Here, building social relations with his American counterparts was apparently higher on the agenda than technical matters: The chap I was replacing had been thrown back home … I was told by the Foreign Office before I left. […] the real reason for getting you there, what they called the social side, was crashing fast, and your task is to put that straight, doesn’t matter what you do on the technical side.18

Later in the interview Dennis discussed some of his feelings about working in America building technical relations, suggesting how service to the nation was perhaps an implicit part of the work itself, something innate to the nature of the tasks involved rather than something explicitly asserted: What we were doing, are we patriotic? Erm, well yes we realised we were serving the crown as it were, and therefore your allegiance is to the Queen, but you don’t have – you don’t have a Union Jack flying […] [Duty was] uppermost in your mind sometimes, because what you are seeking might be a bit shaky, shaky technically, and yet you support the Queen as it were, if it’s needed.19

The recalled lives of government scientists are filled with these assorted forms of service to the nation. However, ‘duty’ and ‘service’ often seem quite elusive concepts to talk about directly in interviews. Experiences are often discussed in ways which do not actually use this language, however much the activities being described served wider national ends. This suggests that service was

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an implicit part of the context of the work of government scientists, a subject not constantly dwelt on, but providing a broader direction to their activities. It also seems that, as historians, we attach labels to our understandings of past events and of people’s everyday experiences that may not be ones shared by the people involved, whose individual personal experiences are often more nuanced. This is evident in the following discussion with Jenny Constant (b. 1946), who worked at the Royal Radar Establishment, Malvern and its successors: I was wondering, working as a civil servant, do you feel any sort of duty or anything to the country, or that sort of thing? Public service, that sort of idea. Oh well, I’ve – duty to the country, hmm, that might sound a bit pompous, but I’m aware how many times I must have used the word service when we’ve been talking. I used the word service when I was describing what I did for these groups of folks, didn’t I? So yes, sounds terribly pompous, but there was certainly this idea. You know, people would say, ‘I have got so many years’ service.’ So yes, serving who, I’m not quite sure. But yeah, definitely. […] Tell me a little bit more about it. It seems – I’ve noticed you were using these words as well, so … [Laughs] Yes. Erm … I’m not sure it was to do with being in government service so much, but certainly, and particularly as time went on, I thought, here you are on a pretty tidy salary – I suppose what I thought was, it was beholden on me to give good value for that. […] I don’t think I thought of it as serving the country. If I’d done work which had military applications, I think I might have thought that. But we were serving UK commerce by bringing in foreign investors to invest in science in this country. I was always very mindful of that.20

Constant’s reference to ‘serving UK commerce’ would seem like a service to the country at large, and reflects the extent to which from the mid-1960s onwards British government scientists were increasingly called upon to see their work in such terms. The ‘White Hot Technological Revolution’ sought to reorient government science away from defence requirements and towards projects with potential commercial applications as well as stimulating British firms to develop advanced technology and adopt new processes. Government research establishments were viewed as a potential source of innovations, staff members were encouraged to work



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on projects with potential civilian and commercial applications and new organisational structures were established to foster this process.21 Interviewee John Charnley, for example, spent eighteen months at the Ministry of Technology and recalled that his job ‘was to try to take some of these things that had come out of RAE; carbon fibres, some electronics, and stimulate the use of these in the non-defence areas’.22 While interviewees may remark on service within the broader context of their work as a motivation or satisfaction, the primary focus of the interviews is undoubtedly their activities as scientists; an overwhelming commitment to, and interest in, the technical and scientific work they were involved in. That these scientific tasks were performing some useful duty to the country is clear from discussing the context of their activities, but comes across as an implicit fact of the job they had chosen, rather than an explicit daily concern. By contrast, interviewees remark readily on the enjoyment and excitement of their work as scientists. They devote much of the time during interviews to explaining the development of projects and ideas, hinting at their own dominant preoccupations. When asked what they enjoyed about their work, doing the science, whatever it happened to involve, appears as the primary interest, albeit within contexts provided by government science. John Charnley exudes enthusiasm for his work when discussing his decision to remain at Farnborough after the end of the Second World War: I’ve come here, I think I’m going to like being an aeronautical engineer from what I’ve learned in a little bit here. It’s difficult and it’s new to me and I’ve got to learn, I’ve got to work at it, but boy, it’s so exciting that I think I know I’m going to enjoy it. Now, the end of the war comes in 1945 and I now have to ask myself that question, do I want to go back to civil engineering, and the answer is a positive no. There’s a bug there associated with aerospace, aerodynamics and aeroplanes now and I’m caught, I’m excited, I can’t get enough of it, I’m drugged.23

Speaking about what he enjoyed about is work in nuclear ­diagnostics at Culham, Mike Forrest commented: I suppose these days I was a nerd, I don’t know what we used in those days but, you know, playing with every gadget – we were, you know, right at the front edge of everything, all the latest technology we could have, […] school boy’s dream really to be able to do everything

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we wanted to. And I was lucky because […] this diagnostics was so important for fusion work, […] I’ve always had the luxury of having a blank cheque. We were never irresponsible about this and we just – I don’t recollect wasting much, and you made mistakes and ballsed it up occasionally, but never wilful overspend on – because you were always aware it was public money, you know.24

In something of a contrast to the assumption that government scientists had little control over their own research, which was held by some interviewees who left government science for careers in universities, several interviewees remark that they enjoyed a high degree of scientific freedom, within the wider aims of government science. RAE materials scientist Roger Moreton (b. 1935) recalled how the early development of carbon fibre owed much to William Watt’s continuing his research on the subject, in spite of their superior pressing them to work on other topics.25 Special merit promotions, awarded to some valuable specialists deemed to have made outstanding contributions to their scientific field, allowed recipients to carry on practising science whilst being promoted to grades that would normally see them acting as managers. This situation had advantages for doing science, as Desmond King-Hele (b. 1927) recalled: ‘And the interesting thing about that to me [laughs] is that it allowed me to do research without any further administrative chores.’26 While interviewees’ descriptions of working conditions reveal elements of civil service culture, notably the hierarchical promotion system, scientist, rather than civil servant, is the most commonly asserted identity. ‘“I never think of myself as being a civil servant.” Which I didn’t, I was a scientist employed by the government,’ neatly summed up Malvern physicist Cyril Hilsum (b. 1925), recalling the opening words of a piece written by him for a booklet on joining the scientific civil service.27 Service as a government scientist as remembered by interviewees, allowed them to pursue innovative scientific research, whilst at the same time performing a number of services to the country. Change Although students of government science policy have identified the second half of the 1960s and the 1970s as periods of change during which the machinery of government science was modified from the pattern established in the aftermath of the Second World



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War, the accounts of our interviewees indicate that from their perspective there was much continuity in terms of how they felt about their work during this period.28 Recollections of subsequent events during the 1980s and 1990s suggest that these later reorganisations had a much greater impact, particularly on their ability to pursue their scientific interests. These changes tended to be viewed as far more profound, and frequently, but not always, with distaste. Indeed, no single narrative emerges from interviewees’ recollections of this period. Amongst several there seems a reluctance, even an unease, to criticise at all in discussing the changes to the system. Speaking out to criticise was not part of the apparently politically neutral civil service culture. Some of the interview sessions coincided with major stories in the media of whistleblowing and releases of secret government documents, and a few interviewees remarked, unprompted, on how such actions were anathema to the way of thinking that the service had impressed on them. Nevertheless, whilst a few interviewees mentioned accepting or agreeing with the need for some sort of change in the way government science was done, pointing to sometimes bureaucratic procurement procedures and concern with ‘gold plated’ solutions, few seemed happy with the path it took. An underlying discontent flavours many recollections of this period, with a few examples of overt hostility. At Culham nuclear labs, for example, Mike Forrest recalled a change in the 1980s to operating in what he referred to as the ‘commercial phase’. He and other scientists were required to split their efforts between scientific research and finding ways of commercially exploiting that research, spending time visiting potential customers around the world and surveying the market. With this change came an exposure to quite different management cultures, a feature that other interviewees commented on as managers were brought in from outside the service, but that was experienced by Forrest as commercially focused training seminars: I was just wondering how did people actually take to working in that [commercial] mode? I think most of them were unhappy, I think was the right word, it was forced on people, and especially now given talks by people from – when you think – I think one talk was by a girl who came from – I think it was Mars, young girl in her twenties telling people how to be, you know, and telling all these seasoned experimentalists and theoreticians how to behave commercially. And she was just there,

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one of these whiz kids from Mars that, you know, parachuted in. So that didn’t go down very well.29

As Forrest remarked later in the interview, his early retirement, followed by a series of consultancy jobs in his old workplace (a path also taken by other interviewees at other government laboratories) brought a number of advantages. Not the least of these was that it allowed him to concentrate on doing the science again: Beauty is, I could just concentrate on [scientific work] instead of doing commercial work like as previously, so I was back – in fact I had no management responsibilities either [laughs] so it was 100 per cent on being creative.30

At Farnborough, Roger Moreton, who had earlier highlighted the benefits of the RAE as a place to do innovative research, recalled other implications from the changes in the sort of way that science was done. I think some of my colleagues and – I was certainly one who felt that we weren’t all that happy with the way things were going. Why do you say that? Well, it was becoming more – it was becoming less based on research, I think really, and I think eventually – this was much later but eventually they sold all their electron microscopes. I mean, this was after it had become QinetiQ but there was – it just was not the place I joined, if you see what I mean, where you felt you were doing real research, you might say, or something interesting rather than just assessing existing materials, embarking on a programme where you know the outcome before you start. […] I think basically the government wanted to get out of funding basic research for the defence side of things, or it was just continued cutbacks or they’d stop projects. […] Or maybe I was just getting old [laughs]. It just didn’t function the same way as it did. Everything had to be pinned down before anything was done.31

Farnborough satellite specialist Desmond King-Hele was even more vehement about what he saw as the destruction of RAE Farnborough, wrought by the imposition of what he called ‘Thatcherian’ values. ‘What happened was very sad really, that each of the scientific specialities in turn was destroyed in the RAE by all sorts of methods … and eventually it became the privatised QinetiQ Company … with very few scientists left in.’32 Unlike Mike



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Forrest, he chose to retire at the age of 61 and devoted his energy towards his literary and historical interests. In contrast Jenny Constant, who was nearly two decades younger than King-Hele, recalled a mix of good and bad coming out of the changes as most of the defence-related parts of the scientific civil service made the transition into the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency and, ultimately, QinetiQ. [Under MoD] [e]very decision was slow, buying something, ordering something, recruiting something. We didn’t think enough about the monetary value of things. We didn’t think enough about how we spent our time and who was paying for it. So there needed to be change. […] So there were good things about becoming an agency and later QinetiQ.33

Among the positive developments for Constant were new opportunities in posts that had not previously existed, and a flattening of old hierarchical bureaucracies. But, as she continued, it was a less benign, more competitive environment, with a different set of values. The senior management more and more became people who had no regard for the value of people’s experience. I know experience is very difficult to measure, but it became that your experience really counted for nothing. In monetary terms, yes, but in the way that you were regarded, so that there was I at fifty something – well, fifty, let’s say, and there would be someone who’d just come in at the age of twenty-five, and that – it would be said, ‘Well, this person’s got more value than you,’ which may or may not be right, but is a completely – no – it was a totally here and now environment, no value placed on people’s experience. And that became more and more so as time went on. I mean, something that was often said of people like me is, ‘Well, welcome to the real world, where …’ ‘Oh, the trouble with you folk,’ somebody said, ‘is that you always produce gold plated solutions for the customer. The customer doesn’t need gold plated solutions. What they need is the cheapest solution we can get away with.’ I précis, but that was the – the spirit of it.34

These wider changes coincided with a demographic shift in the scientific civil service. A junior scientific officer recruited to the service in their early twenties in the wartime boom of the 1940s, would be in their sixties and retiring in the 1980s. It is intriguing to speculate about how much changes in the culture of the service and

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the emergence of new kinds of scientist may have occurred with the passing of this generation, even without the organisational changes of this period. By the 1980s the new men of the 1940s and 1950s had become old men on the verge of retirement, often ones occupying senior positions. Amongst them was Malvern physicist Cyril Hilsum, who provides us with a valuable strategic perspective on the nature of the new managerial regime. In his view this involved the transformation of an organisation that retained long-term research capacity for the benefit of the country and British industry at large into one driven by short-term commercial objectives rather than scientific ends: I thought it was essentially a way in which what I and many colleagues had established as an inheritance was being passed to a company that had no history of involvement and where people would be making millions of pounds out of what we had really set a foundation for. And you will find that there are many people who feel like that, that QinetiQ essentially profited. […] But we could see it happening right at the beginning, in fact a group of us quite senior people […] tried to persuade them not to do it, to find a different way of simplifying the administration but not to actually form a Defence Research Agency, which was the beginning, we could see this as the thin end, thin end of the wedge, and that’s exactly what happened. […] What sort of reaction did you get to your appeal? None. Water under the bridge now. Nothing you can do about it. But essentially, you’ve seen what is happening, I mean for instance last year QinetiQ decided that it was going to stop all the research done on photonics, which is the word to describe the infrared photocell work and the liquid crystal work and things, and just stop it on the grounds it wasn’t profitable.35

The change to a model apparently more concerned with the fiscal bottom line than with doing the science was noted by Desmond King-Hele, who recalled how the values of the 1980s Conservative government clashed with those he saw at the RAE: [Margaret Thatcher] asked someone, a civil servant that had come down through the grapevine as it were, civil servant, ‘The RAE, the Royal Aircraft Establishment, how much money does that make?’ And he said, oh, it doesn’t make money, it’s scientific research, you know. And so it’s said in the story that she said, ‘Oh, well, we’ll have to gradually wipe that out, we want people who make money.’ And



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certainly from 1980 exact – I remember the year – we got a new head of department in 1980 and he was completely Thatcherian and he – I mean I remember the first thing he said when he addressed the department was that [adopts authoritative voice], ‘No one owes us a living, we’ve got to make money,’ or something like that.36

As noted above, King-Hele felt increasingly out of place in this world and chose to retire, unhappy with a working environment where the pursuit of science was subordinated to the pursuit of profit. This new form of governance, at least from his perspective, seemed to require a very different approach to science than the one that was integral to his own scientific identity. Conclusion Joining the scientific civil service between the 1940s and the 1970s placed scientists into a context where their work was often directed toward some form of national service, supporting strategically significant projects, or national industry, diplomatic or military efforts. Whilst this seems strongest in those who joined the scientific civil service in the wartime years, it was an ongoing feature of life in the system for several decades afterwards. However, service emerges from interviews as a topic not always uppermost in the mind, but as an implicit, perhaps constant, fact of life as a government scientist. Given the great attention that interviewees pay to discussing their scientific work, it is clear that an interest in the pursuit of their scientific research played at least as significant a role in motivating many of them as did ideas of national service. However, the environment they found themselves in offered many advantages for the practising scientist in return for their service, not the least of them a stable place to build a career and a potentially generous degree of scientific freedom. The reforms of the service in the 1980s were clearly felt by interviewees as bringing about a quite different ethos to the one that was familiar to them. Whilst no single, clear picture emerges of these years from interviews – and some interviewees seem reluctant to talk about them in detail – this is perhaps indicative of the rapid change of the period and their different perspectives on the fates of the research establishments in which they had spent their careers. Whilst some note that it was a world that needed some reform, few seem to be content with the end result of this process,

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regretting particularly the squandering of the scientific legacy they had worked so hard to create and in which they had invested their working lives. What comes across from the interviews, both spoken and unspoken, is a slightly nostalgic impression of how what had seemed to be a stable, if sometimes stuffy, world of science and national service was replaced by a brash new order, more corporate in its culture, more commercially orientated than its predecessor, with less scope for creative scientific research and which required a different type of scientist. Future interviews, exploring how this new breed of scientists related to their work – what they perceived to be its goals, satisfactions and rewards – will contribute further to our understanding of how governance regimes shaped the experience of scientists who worked for the state. Notes  1 David Edgerton, Warfare state: Britain 1920–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), ch. 4; Brian Balmer, Matthew Godwin and Jane Gregory, ‘The Royal Society and the “brain drain”: natural scientists meet social science’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 63 (2009), 339–53.  2 Examples of autobiographical writing include Michael Forrest, Lasers across the cherry orchards (Dr Michael Forrest, 2011); Joan Freeman, A passion for physics: the story of a woman physicist (Bristol: Institute of Physics Publishing, 1991).  3 Details of the project and information on the interview process can be found at www.bl.uk/voices-of-science/about-the-project and www. bl.uk/historyofscience.  4 Alessandro Portelli, ‘What makes oral history different?’, in Rob Perks and Alistair Thomson (eds), The oral history reader (London: Routledge, 1998), 63–74.  5 Cabinet papers, The National Archives, Kew, CAB 132/52. This is for qualified staff only. The full complement of research establishment staff was far higher.  6 H.M.D. Parker, Manpower: a study of war-time policy and administration (London: HMSO, 1957), pp. 318–33.  7 British Library, An Oral History of British Science (hereafter BL OHBS), C1379/30 track 4, John Charnley, interviewed by Thomas Lean, 2010. For a brief biography see www.bl.uk/voices-of-science/ interviewees/john-charnley.  8 BL OHBS, C1379/46 track 1, Alan Cottrell, interviewed by Thomas Lean, 2011, www.bl.uk/voices-of-science/interviewees/alan-cottrell.



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 9 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘boffin’ is a wartime term for a person engaged in scientific or technical research for military purposes, thought to have been applied first to scientists who worked on radar. 10 BL OHBS, C1379/41 track 5, Dennis Higton, interviewed by Thomas Lean, 2011, www.bl.uk/voices-of-science/interviewees/dennis-higton. 11 The creation of a Scientific Civil Service was the prototype for other specialist classes of civil servants established after the Second World War. See Rodney Lowe, The official history of the British civil service: reforming the civil service, volume 1: the Fulton Years, 1966–81 (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 409, n.53. Its foundation followed a White Paper, Reorganisation and Recruitment during the Reconstruction Period (Scientific Civil Service) (1945–46), Cmd. 6679. 12 Higton, track 24. 13 BL OHBS, C1379/05 track 6, Bob Parkinson, interviewed by Thomas Lean, 2010/11, www.bl.uk/voices-of-science/interviewees/ bob-parkinson. 14 BL OHBS, C1379/14, track 6, Roy Dommett, interviewed by Thomas Lean, 2010, www.bl.uk/voices-of-science/interviewees/roy-dommett. 15 See for example BL OHBS, C1379/32, John Scott-Scott (b. 1934), interviewed by Thomas Lean, www.bl.uk/voices-of-science/interviewees/ john-scott-scott. 16 Cottrell, track 1. 17 BL OHBS , C1379/48 track 8, Mike Forrest, interviewed by Thomas Lean, 2011, www.bl.uk/voices-of-science/interviewees/michael-forrest. 18 Higton, track 16. 19 Higton, track 19. 20 BL OHBS, C1379/98 track 6, Jenny Constant, interviewed by Thomas Lean, 2013, www.bl.uk/voices-of-science/interviewees/jenny-constant. 21 See for example Graham Spinardi, ‘Civil spinoff from the Defence Research Establishments’, in Robert Bud and Philip Gummett, (eds), Cold War, hot science (London: Science Museum, 2002), pp. 371–92; Richard Coopey, ‘The white heat of scientific revolution’, Contemporary Record, 5 (1991), 115–27; David Edgerton, ‘The “White Heat” revisited: the British government and technology in the 1960s’, Twentieth Century British History, 7 (1996), 53–82. 22 Charnley, track 16. 23 Charnley, track 4. 24 Forrest, track 9. 25 BL OHBS, C1379/49 track 3, Roger Moreton interviewed by Thomas Lean, 2011, www.bl.uk/voices-of-science/interviewees/roger-moreton. 26 BL OHBS, C1379/13 track 8, Desmond King-Hele, interviewed by

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Paul Merchant, 2010, www.bl.uk/voices-of-science/interviewees/des​ mond-king-hele. 27 BL OHBS, C1379/69 track 8, Cyril Hilsum, interviewed by Thomas Lean, 2012, www.bl.uk/voices-of-science/interviewees/cyril-hilsum. 28 Changes arising from the creation of the Ministry of Technology in the 1960s and from the ‘Rothschild Review’ in the early 1970s feature prominently in the literature on the history of science policy but do not appear as significantly in interviewees’ accounts. Overviews of these changes are provided in Philip Gummett, Scientists in Whitehall (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990); Tom Wilkie, British science and politics since 1945 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). Mary Henkel and Maurice Kogan, Government and research: the Rothschild experiment in a government department (London: Heinemann, 1983), examines the impact of the Rothschild Review on the Department of Health and Social Security. It is worth noting that the Rothschild proposals concentred on civil research and the Research Councils, not the defence research establishments where many of our interviewees worked. 29 Forrest, track 13. 30 Forrest, track 14. 31  Moreton, track 8. QinetiQ is a private defence technology company, established in 2001 by the separation of the Defence Evaluation Research Agency (DERA), formed in 1995 to oversee the work of the remaining and much reduced defence research establishments, into the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) and a private company. QinetiQ acquired around three-quarters of the staff and most of the facilities of the former agency. Prior to this separation DERA was the largest science and technology organisation in the UK. 32 King-Hele, track 12. 33 Constant, track 6. 34 Constant, track 6. 35 Hilsum, track 2. 36 King-Hele, track 12.

PART II

Governance by science

9

Geneticists on the farm: agriculture and the all-English loaf Berris Charnley

Bread – daily and sacramental – is an article of spiritual life in many of the world’s cultures. With circuses (panem et circenses), and on its own, bread has political meaning. Let them eat brioche, bread riots, corn laws: bread and its constituents have been at the top table for much of Western political history.1 And, of course, for much of the planet, for much of history, bread has been a key nutritional staple – staff of life. Bread’s ability to bear these metaphorical and literal meanings stems, at least partly, from the great variability of this near-ubiquitous foodstuff. Bread can be brown or white, baked or steamed, homemade or shop bought, artisanal or industrial, imported or home grown. Such diversity of meaning and material makes attempts to control or change bread ideal case studies of governance. This chapter addresses attempts by the first geneticists to govern agricultural practices around bread making. In Britain at the turn of the twentieth century, white and industrially produced bread was becoming more pervasive.2 However, if this was a period marked by the arrival of modern bread, many agricultural improvers were still preoccupied with pre-modern mercantilist worries about home production.3 Britain was importing the majority of its bread-making wheat while traditional arable farming areas were abandoned by farmers unable to compete with imports on quality or price. Assuming that producing more homegrown bread-making flour would be good for British farmers and millers, the first geneticists took up the challenge of producing new varieties that would increase home-grown wheat production, secure Britain’s white bread supply and stabilise its arable agriculture. When genetics arrived in Britain in the first years of the twentieth

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century the discipline was developed in the hands of a group of scientists who saw themselves as bringing new precision, accuracy and control to the old traditions embodied in the art of plant breeding.4 As a freshly minted discipline, genetics had no traditions to observe; it was claimed to be a modern science from the outset.5 There is a healthy debate in the history of genetics over how the discipline was governed and, furthermore, over how genetics did or did not change plant breeding.6 However, the question this latter debate implies, as to whether geneticists – through the release of new plant varieties – changed agricultural practices, is the subject addressed here in detail. One of the first geneticists, Rowland Biffen, Chair of Agricultural Botany at Cambridge University, was vociferous in his attempts to improve agriculture. Consider the following exchange between Biffen and Mr Patterson, at the London Farmers’ Club: Mr. Patterson made the point that it pays one to grow what I may call indifferent quality wheats merely for the purpose of chicken food. Do not for a moment go away with the impression that I want to teach you how to farm. I know nothing about farming, but I am going to make the suggestion that [high quality] Yeoman wheat may be as good for chickens, and therefore it might be worth trying the double event. If the chicken food trade does drop, then the human subject might be worth feeding.7

Despite Biffen’s feigned reticence, much of the paper he delivered that evening – which had sparked the exchange between himself and Patterson – was devoted to persuading farmers that they should grow his variety, Yeoman, to produce human-feeding bread-­making flour. However, as the evidence presented in this chapter demonstrates, Biffen’s varieties were popular with farmers and agriculturally important for reasons that Biffen did not principally intend. Mendelians – early geneticists who drew inspiration from the work of Gregor Mendel – who sought to develop agriculture in productive new directions were mostly concerned with improving quality. But, for their part, farmers adopted Mendelian varieties into two clear types of farming, neither of which prioritised quality. Before the First World War, farmers fitted Mendelian varieties into a pattern of farming that reduced expenditure on inputs, while aiming for lower-value outputs: chicken feed or thatching straw,



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for instance.8 After the war, when farms were larger and farmers relatively richer, Mendelian varieties were part of an increasingly intensive style of farming in which farmers increased expenditure so as to improve yields. The chapter begins with an overview of Biffen’s plans to tailor varieties for the British wheat industry. The popularity of Biffen’s varieties is then explored, along with their use, in a pair of sections which analyse the question of Mendelian wheat’s role in the field. The focus throughout the chapter is on commercial wheat farmers in the south-east of England, farmers such as McFarlane Grieve or Fred Hiam, who gifted whole farms to Biffen’s home Department of Agriculture at Cambridge University and the allied National Institute of Agricultural Botany at which Biffen was Chief Scientific Advisor. If this restriction of view seems unduly narrow, it is worth remembering that wheat was the principal crop of the period, and the south-east of England the centre of wheat production in the country. For many would-be agricultural improvers, the area was the faltering heart of Britain’s failing agricultural industry.9 Mendelian strategies for agricultural development Biffen believed that new plant varieties were the best way to combat problems faced by farmers as a result of the depression in wheat farming in the 1880s. As Biffen put it in an article written for The Times on the eve of the First World War, the best way forward was to ‘leave it to the plant-breeders to add to the value of the crop per acre by improving the varieties now grown’.10 Biffen worked on several strategies for adding value to crops. The following discussion concentrates on the three strategies which informed the creation of his two most popular varieties, Little Joss and Yeoman.11 When Biffen began plant breeding, in the years around 1901, he was convinced that the wheat plant had reached its yielding limit. Wheat yields in Britain were already three times higher than those in the New World. Most British farmers produced thirty bushels per acre, although occasionally, with good land and some skill or luck they might harvest sixty to eighty bushels from an acre. In America and Australia, ten to twenty bushels per acre was considered a good crop.12 With this in mind, Biffen intended his first variety, Little Joss, to increase yields indirectly. Little Joss was released and recommended to farmers in the years around 1910 as a variety that was

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resistant to yellow rust, a pathogen that attacked wheat. As Biffen sent out parcels of seed to local farmers Little Joss’s fame spread and the variety’s distribution was widely noted in the popular press.13 Biffen became interested in yellow rust early in his career. When he had studied botany under Henry Marshall Ward, mycology – the study of fungi – had formed the basis of the first papers he published.14 Biffen’s initial interest in the disease was academic; however, he quickly began promoting the economic benefits of resistance to yellow rust. Unfortunately, yellow rust was only one of the many pathogens that could attack wheat. Farmers also had to contend with bunt (or smut), stem rust and mildew; they considered yellow rust relatively unimportant in comparison. Despite farmers’ indifference to yellow rust resistance, Biffen continued believing that disease resistance was an important way of improving wheat yields.15 When he travelled to Kenya in the late 1920s as a special adviser, breeding new disease-resistant varieties of wheat was the strategy he recommended to the colonial government.16 In 1903, speaking to the Cambridge Philosophical Society, Biffen recalled beginning his wheat-breeding experiments in the summer of 1901; not just to test the wider applicability of ‘Mendel’s laws’ of heredity – which Biffen took to be the theoretical basis of the new discipline – but also ‘with the object of raising improved varieties from the point of view of the farmer and the miller’.17 Improving the bread-making quality of British wheat was Biffen’s most direct attempt to address arable farming’s problems. At the turn of the century Britain imported nearly 80% of the wheat used in the country.18 British wheat lacked ‘strength’ – the ability to produce a fluffy and voluminous ‘well piled [white] loaf’.19 Imported wheat was not only stronger, it was also cheaper to produce on the fertile prairies of the New World; imported wheat therefore commanded higher prices in a market which had generally fallen. Biffen argued that British farmers should look to improve the strength of their crop. The way to do this, Biffen suggested, was to breed stronger wheat varieties. The hope was to revive the industry by producing an ‘All-English’ loaf. Yeoman was Biffen’s solution to this problem: a British wheat variety of similar strength to imported wheat. The Board of Agriculture’s first announcement of the variety made clear that Yeoman ‘is sufficiently strong to produce a good quality loaf without the addition of imported flour’.20



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In 1913 Biffen’s supporters had already begun to claim early success for his strength-focused breeding programme. Walter Runciman, President of the Board of Agriculture at the time, laid out the promise of Biffen’s strong wheats to Parliament while arguing for increased funding for Biffen’s plant breeding: ‘At Cambridge, already Professor Biffen has proved he can grow wheat in large quantities of the [quality] of Canadian wheat and the fecundity of British wheat, and that cannot but be of great monetary advantage to the farmers of this country.’21 After the war the campaign drew further support and several newspapers, including the Daily Mail took up the All-English cause: When the home-grown loaf is made again in this country on a large and useful scale (as hopeful agriculturalists believe it will be made) it will be due in a great measure to the work of Professor R.H. Biffen head of the School of Agricultural Botany at Cambridge [sic].22

The All-English campaign reached a peak in 1923 with the release of the Linlithgow Committee’s interim report. The Committee whole-heartedly endorsed Yeoman and the All-English solution. The report also, however, contained a hint of the problems associated with this course of action, suggesting that it was not inevitable that strong wheat would be of ‘great monetary advantage’ to farmers as Runciman claimed. Some farmers, the Committee’s report noted, ‘inclined to blame the trade for much of the prejudice that exists on the part of the consuming public in favour of white highly aerated bread’.23 These farmers ‘assert[ed] that bakers are interested in encouraging the public taste in this direction’.24 The farmers’ suspicion was that this sort of flour was better suited for recently introduced milling processes, using heavy rollers, but did little for them.25 Ominously, for concerned farmers, the Committee concluded that, ‘the creation of an articulate demand [for white bread] is essential’ for the development of arable farming.26 Despite Biffen’s initial belief that the wheat plant had reached its yielding limit, he eventually did come to recommend more intensive cultivation. As cheaper artificial fertiliser became available from the Haber-Bosch process for ammonia production, farmers increasingly used fertiliser, hoping to increase yields.27 However, farmers who could afford this new source of nutrients ran into a significant problem. As the heads of their wheat plants grew bigger they were also more likely to fall over, dragging the plant into the ground and

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becoming ‘laid’.28 A laid crop could be ruinous to a farmer; it made harvesting much more difficult, especially as it meant mechanical harvesters could not be used; these would simply grind the crop further into the ground. Biffen’s solution was to breed new varieties with a shorter, thicker stem. As he put it to another post-war reconstruction meeting, the Selborne Committee, ‘Stiffer straws capable of carrying heavier crops … will have to be provided before the most can be made of intensive cultivation.’29 Biffen had already made some moves in this direction in 1910 with a variety called Burgoyne’s Fife. By Biffen’s own reckoning this was a ‘gentleman’s wheat’; it needed care, attention and intense fertilising to reach its full yielding capability.30 Burgoyne’s Fife swiftly disappeared, Biffen believed, because farmers in 1910 were unwilling to spend money on fertiliser and feared the losses that might ensue if a crop became laid. Although Biffen remained sceptical as to the point of growing more low-quality wheat, intensification was a secondary aim of Yeoman, which had a much shorter straw than Little Joss.31 To some extent Biffen ran these three strategies together, the aim being to build up an ideal wheat variety with disease resistance, strength and a higher yield. Biffen’s allies in government promoted this bold vision. Rowland Prothero, Runciman’s successor as President of the Board of Agriculture, while speaking to Parliament, and also arguing for more funding for Biffen’s work, explicitly linked the strategies together. He began by introducing Biffen’s work: It has been discovered that you can create a new variety of a plant by [combining] characteristics of other varieties of the plant. The result of this is most remarkable. Instead of having to wait for the chance discoveries of nature we can deliberately sit down and manufacture the kind of plant that we want.32

Prothero went on to describe the latest of Biffen’s new varieties: He has now produced a wheat which produces a high quality of straw – a fine, stiff, upstanding straw – and a high quality of yield of grain, so much so that without pushing it will produce forty-two bushels to the acre, and by pushing up to seventy-two bushels to the acre. It also possesses a very high quality of disease resistance, and it combines with these qualities the quality of strength which is so highly valued by both millers and bakers, and which is recognised in increased prices. 33



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The popularity of Mendelian varieties These sorts of projections of the possibilities of Mendelian varieties prompt two related questions. How popular were Biffen’s varieties? And how were they used? Little Joss and Yeoman were a staple feature at the Royal Horticultural and Agricultural Societies, the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Nature and The Times. When Biffen was awarded the Royal Society’s Darwin Medal in 1920, Nature reported: ‘Two of [Biffen’s] new wheats … are among the most popular in the country, and together account for something like a third, or even a half of the wheat crop of England.’34 But how popular where Biffen’s varieties with farmers? There is very little data available with which to answer this question, as crop returns from the period did not differentiate between varieties. However, figures from seed testing and the awards some farmers gave to Biffen point to a broad base of p ­ opularity – ­especially with farmers in south-eastern England – which really did live up to the claims made in more rarefied forums. At the turn of the century there were hundreds of varieties of wheat in Britain. In 1921 the National Institute of Agricultural Botany held at least 125 in its observation plots.35 Figures released in 1923 by the Official Seed Testing Station, housed at this point in the buildings of the National Institute of Agricultural Botany, indicate that out of these many varieties eight were grown extensively. Batches of seed sent to the station were tested for identity (as well as purity and germination), so it is possible to tabulate the amount of each variety tested. Although these figures reflect only the popularity of Biffen’s varieties with the types of farmers or dealers who had their seeds tested, they are instructive nonetheless; it was just these testing-minded farmers that Biffen was trying to reach. Of the varieties tested in 1923, Yeoman made up 20% and Little Joss 9%.36 Their main competitor, Red Standard, released by the commercial nursery Carters’, made up 24% of tested samples and Squarehead’s Master 11.5%. However, according to Biffen, these were one and the same variety, as Carters’ had simply renamed Squarehead’s Master.37 The rest of the samples were made up of Victor and Marshal Foch; Mendelian wheat varieties produced by another commercial nursery, Gartons’; and the original Squarehead and Rivet, two varieties from the middle of the previous century. In 1929, the first year in which the National Institute of Agricultural

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Botany produced lists of recommended varieties for farmers, Little Joss and Yeoman accounted for roughly 22% of the seeds tested by the Official Seed Testing Station. At the end of the Second World War, thirty years after they were released, Little Joss and Yeoman still made up 11% of the varieties in use by farmers who had their seeds tested. Statistics produced in 1933 by Britain’s leading agricultural economist of the day, J.A. Venn, suggest that in 1925 Little Joss and Yeoman occupied 25% of the wheat acreage in the south-eastern counties.38 Venn’s data was drawn from agricultural returns completed by farmers. On several occasions Biffen’s colleagues, F.L. Engledow and E.S. Beaven, asked farmers to complete questionnaires on the types of varieties they were growing.39 Farmers mostly resisted such requests; however, one further survey undertaken by the Ministry of Agriculture in the early 1920s supports the figure produced by Venn.40 In both Venn’s and the Ministry’s figures it is clear that Yeoman was mostly grown in the rich loam soils of Essex and eastern Hertfordshire. Little Joss was more popular in the fens around Cambridge, where soil was of poorer quality. One further mark of Yeoman’s popularity with farmers is noteworthy. On 16 December 1921 Biffen and Yeoman were awarded a silver bowl by the Essex Farmers’ Club. The bowl, weighing 82oz., was offered up and explained as recompense, as ‘this great research has been without any financial gain’.41 The nature of the occasion, held at the Shire Hall in Chelmsford on Christmas market day and pontificated over by the local dignitary Hon. E.G. Strutt, was a provincial affair to recognise the success of Yeoman on a local level, in Essex. The use of Mendelian varieties Considering how Biffen’s varieties were meant to be used, and their popularity with farmers, we might expect to see an increase in yields following the widespread adoption of Little Joss (as losses to disease were avoided) and an increase in price following the adoption of Yeoman as Runciman had promised.42 Instead, the acreage under cultivation and national production levels tracked each other pretty consistently through the period, indicating a consistent yield per acre. As to the promise of increased prices, small gains during the war can be attributed to the government’s offering guaran-



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teed prices for wheat from 1917.43 A decline in prices occurred in 1922 after the removal of these measures with the repeal of the Corn Production Act in 1921.44 Further slight gains in price in the mid-1920s were attributed by the Linlithgow Committee to bad weather. Despite the Committee’s hopes, these increases were not the result of millers’ offering more for Yeoman wheat. The few co-operatives established to grow and mill all-English flour had been unsuccessful.45 At the Farmers’ Club meeting in 1924, which this chapter began with, Biffen did not have the evening entirely his own way. Two farmers, Mr Patterson and Mr Sherwood, pointed to the success they were having growing wheat for chicken feed and straw. Patterson was growing Rivett for chicken feed and Sherwood was growing Little Joss for thatching straw. A glimpse of the tensions which underwrote this encounter can be seen in Biffen’s arch response about feeding the human subject, made in reply to Patterson’s assertion that he was making more money from growing wheat for chicken feed. Patterson snapped back at Biffen, ‘[Yeoman] will not do on my light land.’46 Finally, Alfred Amos, author of a report on the success of Yeoman published in the Journal of the Board of Agriculture, came to Biffen’s aid, pointing out that the mixing of wheat varieties on the farm and at the mill was actually the cause of millers’ reticence to pay a premium for Yeoman. Farmers such as Patterson and Sherwood were responding to a pre-war pattern of agricultural development. The total acreage of wheat in Britain was in decline; from 1885 to the start of the war half a million acres were lost.47 Faced with competition from abroad and government resistance to applying import tariffs (fearing the renewed free-trade movement), farmers moved to other crops. Those who continued to grow wheat often moved their crops onto poorer land, freeing up prime space for more remunerative, or less input-intensive, purposes such as rearing cattle. This move was encapsulated in the slogan, ‘Down Corn, Up Horn’.48 In this agricultural context, Little Joss came into its own not because of its disease resistance but because the variety flourished on poor soils without much fertiliser. The variety was good only for chicken feed or making biscuits, neither of which paid as highly as bread making, but if growing Little Joss required fewer inputs, then this loss of price was often acceptable to farmers. By 1919 the Ministry of Agriculture was recommending Little Joss on the basis that it

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was a ‘hardy variety’ that did well on poor soils, while ‘it is too weak in the straw for rich land’.49 The war also increased demand for biscuit flour and Little Joss was recognised as a variety which produced flour well suited to biscuit production.50 Furthermore, when compulsory ploughing-up of land for conversion to cereal crops was introduced by the government in 1917, large amounts of less-fertile land needed to be planted and Little Joss was often the variety of choice.51 Finally, Little Joss’s weak but lengthy straw was ideal for thatching, and this was another option for farmers such as Sherwood.52 Yeoman was also used by farmers in ways which were not principally intended by Biffen. Two of the most striking patterns of agricultural development in the first half of the twentieth century were increasing farm size and, after the war, increasing ownership of farms by farmers who had previously been tenants.53 Financially the war was a good thing for many farmers, as production increased and prices were fixed. As a result many farmers looked to own their own farms, increase their acreage and farm more intensively.54 Yeoman was well suited to this trend. Its shorter straw meant that farmers could use larger amounts of fertiliser without the increased weight causing the plant to fall over and become laid. As the Ministry of Agriculture put it in 1924, ‘Yeoman excels in milling quality, and also in strength of straw – an important consideration for the farmer who desires to make the best use of artificial fertiliser.’55 Despite millers’ unwillingness to pay a premium for Yeoman, larger crops still meant better profits, even if a farmer could sell his crop only for chicken-feed prices. In 1930, when the National Institute of Agricultural Botany released its list of recommended varieties, both Little Joss and Yeoman featured: ‘Little Joss should be chosen for the lighter wheat soils … or where fertility is low’, Yeoman was one of the ‘varieties to grow on the richest soils or under intensive manuring’.56 From the 1930s, tractors increasingly became a feature of intensive agricultural production. Tractors supplemented the labour needed to fertilise and harvest large crops after the war, when manpower and horses were in short supply.57 Although many farmers returned to draught power as horses became available again, the richest continued to use tractors. For those farmers who used tractors and combine harvesters, Yeoman was the wheat variety to choose. It was less likely to be laid and, furthermore, its short



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straw reduced the amount of by-product material that needed to be processed, helping the combine to run smoothly.58 Yeoman and mechanisation were part of the same system of intensive farming which was increasingly employed after the war. This, rather than the All-English solution, was the pattern of farming into which farmers integrated Yeoman.59 Biffen became sanguine about the failure of the All-English loaf towards the end of the 1920s. Writing for the Yearbook and Annual Report of the Essex County Farmers Union in 1930 he looked approvingly to a competition that had been held in Italy in the previous year.60 The idea behind the competition was to test the use of heroic quantities of fertiliser on wheat crops. Those involved, including Professor Gibertini, a ‘scientific propagandist’, had produced yields of up to eighty bushels per acre. This result inspired Biffen to revise his previous view that the wheat plant had reached its yielding capacity, ‘The fact that it is possible to produce such crops’, as indeed it was for some farmers in Essex, was for Biffen ‘clear indication that the wheat plant – using the word for once in a double capacity – is not often forced to run at its full capacity, and that more might be made of the uncanny machinery which produces grain from raw materials present in the air and soil’.61 Instead of advising farmers to grow stronger wheats, a strategy which disappeared from his public appearances, after 1926 Biffen began advising farmers to grow more intensively for greater yields. Conclusion Biffen’s Mendelian varieties were popular and agriculturally important, but not for the reasons Biffen had intended. Before the First World War, and for poorer farmers, Little Joss was used to lower production costs in response to competition from the New World. After the war, Yeoman allowed richer farmers to move to more intensive patterns of production. In contrast, the traits that Biffen aimed to improve – disease resistance and strength – remained secondary considerations for most farmers until the rust epidemics of the 1950s and the introduction of the Chorleywood bread-making process in the 1960s (which finally allowed the first home-grown white loaves to be produced).62 However, there is still much to be learnt about the choices farmers made. One way of getting closer to farmers’ motivations and thinking on how to farm wheat – which

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lies beyond the scope of the current chapter – might be to track the diffusion of Mendelian varieties through an analysis of farm account books.63 The ambiguity about who Biffen’s attempts at governance through science were serving and how – revealed at the Linlithgow Committee’s deliberations – is part of a familiar theme in the history of technology. Biffen’s varieties, aimed towards particular ends, chime with Langdon Winner’s description of the low overpasses on bridges to Long Island.64 Winner uses the example to argue that technologies are not politically neutral. Biffen’s varieties, aligned with a particular vision of agricultural development, are equally important, although less obvious, examples of politically charged technologies – something which they share with Monsanto’s new varieties in the twenty-first century. However, farmers’ ability to co-opt Biffen’s varieties to their own ends should remind us that users matter, often because of their local knowledge.65 Another way of charting the territory occupied by Biffen’s varieties is to contrast determinist views of technology, which posit that a technology determines its uses from a position somewhere outside of society, with social constructivist analyses which suggest that technology is socially shaped by user communities, and structuralist views of technology that suggest social structures determine a technology’s use. In the case of Biffen’s varieties all three views have some relevance. On the one hand, farmers could not use new varieties as communication devices, or telescopes, or airplanes. Their use of Biffen’s plants was at least partly bounded by biological reality. Furthermore, Biffen was ultimately responsible for the shorter straw of Yeoman or the hardiness of Little Joss, even if he did not take these to be the key features of the varieties. Finally, although farmers were creative with their use of Biffen’s varieties, they were themselves responding to the structural demands of an increasingly capitalised and industrial agricultural sector. To be sure, Biffen was an agrarian idealist; however, he was also committed to the industrialisation of agriculture, as his reference to the plant as machinery indicates.66 One suspects that the bread battle was a small loss for Biffen in the greater war to develop a modern agriculture. For historians of genetics the history of Biffen’s Mendelian varieties makes obvious geneticists’ desire to change agriculture, right from the start of the discipline. Debates in the twenty-first century over genetically modified organisms, biofuels and climate change



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have brought the political nature of land use back into the spotlight. The case of Biffen’s varieties and their use by farmers serves to remind us of the historical pedigree of such debates, but also of the contingent and unpredictable nature of technological fixes. Acknowledgement An early version of this paper was presented at the ESTER/ GLOBALEURONET Advanced Seminar 2009, whose participants I would like to thank, along with the members of the AHRC-funded Owning and Disowning Invention Project at the Universities of Leeds and Bristol, and the BIG reading group at the ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society (Egenis) at the University of Exeter. Research for this paper was completed with funding from the Griffith Law School Research Support Scheme. Notes  1 On historical food riots see E.P. Thompson, ‘The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century’, Past and Present, 50 (1971), 76–136. For analysis of the relationship between hunger and politics in the twentieth century see, James Vernon, Hunger: a modern history (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007); Nick Cullather, Hungry world: America’s Cold War battle against poverty in Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). The food riot is still with us; in 2008, on the heels of the global financial crisis, a series of food riots occurred in countries ranging from Italy to Haiti. See Raj Patel and Philip McMichael, ‘A political economy of the food riot’, Review (Fernand Braudel Center), 32 [Political economic perspectives on the world food crisis] (2009), 9–35.  2 On the rise of modern bread in the United States, see Aaron BobrowStrain, White bread: a social history of the store-bought loaf (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012). On French bread, see Steven Kaplan, Good bread is back: a contemporary history of French bread, the way it is made, and the people who make it, trans. Catherine Porter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). For a contemporary account of British bread from Cambridge University’s first Chair of Agriculture, see Thomas Wood, The story of a loaf of bread (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913). Finally, on white food, see Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and power: the place of sugar in modern history (London: Penguin, 1986).  3 See, for example, the agitations of the Home Grown Wheat Committee,

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regularly reported in The Times: ‘Home Grown Wheat Committee’, The Times (28 August 1911), 4.  4 See Berris Charnley and Gregory Radick, ‘Intellectual property, plant breeding and the making of Mendelian genetics’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science: Part A, 44 (2013), 222–33.  5 The standard source on science and modernity is Bruno Latour, We have never been modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1993). For an authoritative overview of some of the rest of the extensive literature on science and modernity in history of science and sociology, from a critical gender standpoint, see Sandra Harding, ‘Modernity, science and democracy’, Social Philosophy Today, 22 (2006), 17–42.  6 On this historiography, see Berris Charnley, ‘Agricultural science and the emergence of a Mendelian system in Britain, 1880–1930’ (PhD dissertation, University of Leeds, 2012).  7 R.H. Biffen, ‘Modern wheats’, Journal of the Farmers’ Club, 1 (1924), 1–18, esp. p. 18.  8 Paul Brassley, ‘Output and technical change in twentieth-century British agriculture’, Agricultural History Review, 48 (2000), 60–84.  9 On the depression, see Royal Commission on Agriculture: final report of Her Majesty’s commissioners appointed to inquire into the subject of agricultural depression (London: HMSO, 1897). For secondary analysis demonstrating the depression’s limitation to arable farming, see Joan Thirsk, Alternative agriculture: a history, from the Black Death to the present day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 10 R.H. Biffen, ‘British wheat: improved methods of cultivation’, The Times (8 June 1914), 16. 11 Biffen also experimented with wheat varieties that could be sown in spring, reducing time to harvest. See R.H. Biffen, ‘The selection of wheats for spring sowing’, Journal of the Board of Agriculture, 22 (1915), 867–71. 12 R.H. Biffen, ‘Mendel’s laws of inheritance and wheat breeding’, Journal of Agricultural Science, 1 (1905), 4–48, esp. p. 4. A bushel of wheat is roughly 27kg; this measure is still used on commodities markets. 13 See Berris Charnley, ‘Experiments in empire-building: Mendelian genetics as a national, imperial, and global agricultural enterprise’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science: Part A, 44 (2013), 292–300. 14 Biffen also served two terms as president of the British Mycological Society; one at the beginning and one at the end of his career. 15 See R.H. Biffen, ‘Bunted wheat’, Yearbook and Annual Report of the Essex County Farmers’ Union, (1924), 129–34; ‘Rust’, Yearbook and Annual Report of the Essex County Farmers’ Union, (1929), 120–9.



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16 Charnley, ‘Experiments in empire-building’, 298–9. 17 R.H. Biffen, ‘Wheat breeding: read by R.H. Biffen, M.A., Emmanuel College, [Read 9th Nov. 1903]’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, 12 (1904), 279–82, esp. p. 279. 18 Ministry of Farming and Fisheries, A century of agricultural statistics (London: HMSO, 1967), 48. 19 R.H. Biffen and A.E. Humphries, ‘The improvement of English wheats’, Journal of Agricultural Science, 2 (1907), 1–16, esp. p. 2. 20 ‘Official notices and circulars: new wheats’, Journal of the Ministry of Agriculture, 26 (1919), 457–66, esp. p. 458. 21 ‘Board of Agriculture and Fisheries (Class II. – VOTE 11.)’, Hansard, 55 (1913), 2320. 22 ‘Wheat wizard: Sir R.H. Biffen’s new grain’, Daily Mail (2 January 1925), reproduced in John Innes Archives, Norwich, Rowland Biffen Papers, Extracts from Newspapers on Wheat Research of Professor Sir Rowland Biffen MA FRS, Cambridge University. See also the articles on the All-English campaign collected at the National Institute of Agricultural Botany from newspapers as diverse as the Daily Mail, The Times, Macclesfield Courier, East Kent Gazette, Banbury Advertiser, Farmer and Stockbreeder and the Essex Weekly News, reproduced in NIAB-TAG, Cambridge, Newspaper Cuttings, NIAB Archives, main library section. 23 Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, Departmental Committee on Distribution and Prices of Agricultural Produce, Interim report on cereals, flour and bread, Cmd. 1971 (1923), p. 73. 24 Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, Interim report on cereals, flour and bread, 73. 25 For more on home-grown wheat and conflicts between millers, bakers and farmers, see S.L. Bensusan, ‘The staff of life’, Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, 152 (1931), 176–7. 26 Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, Interim report on cereals, flour and bread, 75. 27 On the Haber-Bosch process, see Thomas P. Hughes, ‘Technological momentum in history: hydrogenation in Germany 1898–1933’, Past and Present, 44 (1969), 106–32; David Edgerton, The shock of the old: technology and global history since 1900 (London: Profile Books, 2006), pp. 64 and 67. 28 See R.H. Biffen, ‘Systematised plant breeding’, in A.C. Seward (ed.), Science and the nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917), pp. 146–75, esp. p. 151; A. Amos, ‘A successful method of growing heavy crops of wheat’, Journal of the Board of Agriculture, 25 (1919), 1161–6. 29 Reconstruction Committee, Report of the Agricultural Policy

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S­ ub-Committee of the Committee on Reconstruction, Part 1, Cd. 8506 (1917–18), p. 28. 30 Biffen, ‘Systematised plant breeding’, pp. 173–5. 31 Standing capacity featured heavily in the 10th report of the Development Commissioners, Tenth Report of the Commissioners, for 1919–1920, 230 (London: HMSO, 1920), p. 35. 32 ‘Mr. Prothero’s statement’, Hansard, 108 (1918), 1265. 33 ‘Mr. Prothero’s statement’, Hansard, 108 (1918), 1265. 34 ‘Anniversary meeting of the Royal Society’, Nature, 106 (1920), 452–3, esp. p. 453; ‘Medals of the Royal Society’, Science, 52 (1920), 633. 35 NIAB-TAG, Cambridge, Boardroom Library, ‘Register Recording the Receipt of Seeds etc. by the Manager of Field Plots Commenced 1922’. 36 A similar figure is given in C. Thirtle, P. Bottomley, P. Palladino, D. Schimmelpfennig and R. Townsend, ‘The rise and fall of public sector plant breeding in the United Kingdom: a casual chain model of basic and applied research and diffusion’, Agricultural Economics, 19 (1998), 127–43, esp. p. 131. 37 P.S. Wellington and V. Silvey, Crop and seed improvement: a history of the National Institute of Agricultural Botany 1919 to 1996 (Cambridge: NIAB, 1997), p. 29. This analysis is based on yearly Official Seed Testing Station (OSTS) reports published sporadically in the Journal of the National Institute of Agricultural Botany, from 1922 onwards. NIAB-TAG, Cambridge, OSTS Reports. OSTS Archives. 38 J.A. Venn, The foundations of agricultural economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), p. 564. 39 See, for example, John Innes Archives, Norwich, A.D. Hall Papers, F.L. Engledow, ‘English wheat’ [pamphlet reprinted from the Essex Farmers’ Union Year Book 1927 by the Cambridge University School of Agriculture and Essex Weekly News], 188-8-61: p. 10. 40 The Ministry of Agriculture collected 107 samples from the Eastern Counties in 1926. Of these samples, twelve were Yeoman, thirteen were Little Joss and seven were Yeoman II. See ‘Seed wheat in the eastern counties’, Journal of the Ministry of Agriculture, 33 (1926), 15–19, esp. pp. 15–16. 41 John Innes Archives, Norwich, Rowland Biffen Papers, ‘Wheat wizard honoured by farmers grateful for fine harvests’, Daily Mail [1921], reproduced in Extracts from Newspapers on Wheat Research. 42 On wheat prices, see G. Clark, ‘The price history of English agriculture, 1209–1914’, Research in Economic History, 22 (2004), 41–124. 43 Corn Production Act, 1917 (7 and 8, Geo. 5, Ch. 46). 44 The repeal was mooted in 1919 but, after several amendments, was enacted in 1921, see Corn Production Acts (Repeal) Act, 1921 (11 and 12, Geo. 5, Ch. 48).



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45 Interim report on cereals, flour and bread, pp. 71–2. 46 Biffen ‘Modern wheats’, p. 17. 47 Ministry of Farming and Fisheries, A century of agricultural statistics, p. 37. 48 See A.D. Hall (ed.), English farming past and present (5th edn, London: Longmans, 1936), ch. 17 and p. 363; J. Boyd Orr, A short history of British agriculture (London: Oxford University Press, 1922), pp. 86–8. 49 ‘October on the farm: wheat varieties’, Journal of the Ministry of Agriculture, 31 (1924), 669–70, esp. p. 670. 50 F.L. Engledow, ‘Rowland Harry Biffen, 1874–1949’, Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society, 7 (1950), 9–25, esp. p. 17. 51 See also the plans, never realised, from William Wright, MP for Rutherglen, to ‘drain those extensive areas of land which are frequently under water for several months in the year, deteriorating the value of the land, and we can use the scientific knowledge of men like Sir Rowland Biffen, who are giving us new types of wheat year by year in this and other countries’. ‘Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries’, Hansard, 187 (1925), 1363. 52 Engledow, ‘Rowland Harry Biffen, 1874–1949’, p. 17. 53 H. Levy, Large and small holdings: a study of English agricultural economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), pp. 61–70. 54 P.E. Dewey, British agriculture in the First World War (London: Routledge, 1989). 55 ‘October on the Farm’, p. 670. 56 NIAB-TAG, Cambridge, NIAB Archive, First Recommended Variety List 1930. 57 For the continued use of horses after the war, see Edgerton, Shock of the old, pp. 32–6. 58 On government support for tractors see, Board of Trade, Reports, by the Standing Committee (and Sub-Committees) on the Investigation of Prices, relating to: agricultural implements and machinery, Cmd. 1315 (1921), p. 7. 59 In the 1970s the semi dwarf Norin-10 genes used in green revolution varieties – which had shorter, stiffer straws – were inserted into winter wheat by F.G.H. Lupton and John Bingham at the Plant Breeding Institute, Cambridge. See F.G.H. Lupton, ‘History of wheat breeding’, in F.G.H. Lupton (ed.), Wheat breeding: its scientific basis (London: Chapman and Hall, 1987), 51–70. 60 R.H. Biffen, ‘Intensive wheat cultivation’, Yearbook and Annual Report of the Essex County Farmers’ Union, (1930), 224–30, esp. pp. 225–6. 61 Biffen, ‘Intensive wheat cultivation’, p. 225.

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62 Stanley P. Cauvain and Linda S. Young, The Chorleywood bread process (Cambridge: Woodhead Publishing, 2006). 63 See Zvi Griliches, ‘Hybrid corn: an exploration in the economics of technological change’, Econometrica, 25 (1957), 501–22; ‘Hybrid corn and the economics of innovation’, Science, 132 (1960), 275–80. Many thanks to Francesco Lissoni for this idea. 64 Low bridges acted as a means of racial exclusion aimed at mostly black bus users – the bridges were deliberately built so that buses could not fit under them, L. Winner, ‘Upon opening the black box and finding it empty: social constructivism and the philosophy of technology’, Science, Technology, and Human Values, 18 (1993), 362–78, esp. p. 373. 65 On users see, N.E.J. Oudshoorn and Trevor J. Pinch (eds), How users matter: the co-construction of users and technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). On local knowledge, see Brian Wynne, ‘May the sheep safely graze?’ in B. Szerszynski, S. Lash and B. Wynne (eds), Risk, environment and modernity: towards a new ecology (London, Sage: 1996), pp. 44–83. 66 For a structuralist account of technology from a feminist viewpoint (to contrast with a Marxist one), see Cynthia Cockburn and Susan Ormrod, Gender and technology in the making (London: Sage, 1993). On the tensions between determinism, structuralism and constructivism, and the possibilities for their integration into a single coherent account, see M. Lohan, ‘Constructive tensions in feminist technology studies’, Social Studies of Science, 30 (2000), 895–916.

10

‘Man against disease’: the medical Left and the lessons of science, 1918–48 John Stewart

This chapter examines the ideas and aspirations of left-wing doctors and medical scientists from the end of the First World War to the inauguration of the National Health Service (NHS) in 1948. There were four underlying premises to these medical politicians’ social and political analyses. First, scientific and medical practice provided a model for social organisation. Doctors and medical scientists, it was argued, worked collaboratively and irrespective of national, racial or class boundaries for the good of humanity. Such practice thus showed the way towards a collectivist society wherein health services were organised for the common benefit. Second, scientific methodology was based on reason, logic and observed and observable natural phenomena. Medical science thus challenged the anarchy of free-market capitalism, which deliberately disregarded the need for rational planning; and explicitly irrationalist political movements such as Nazism whose claims to, for instance, racial superiority were manifestly unscientific. And while there were those, particularly among the clinical élite, who continued to maintain that medicine was at least in part an ‘art’ there was an increasing emphasis in the course of the twentieth century on its scientific credentials.1 In the inter-war era, when science enjoyed a high cultural status, such claims took on particular significance. Third, human evolution and the human body illustrated the advantages of co-operative working. In the healthy body all constituent parts worked harmoniously and collectively towards the greater ends of survival and growth. Should any constituent part be diseased or malfunctioning, however, this would be to the detriment of the whole organism. So too with society. Fourth, those

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practising medicine were uniquely placed to view humanity from both a scientific and a social standpoint. Medical practitioners dealt with real human beings in real situations and thereby acquired a broad, integrated knowledge. Doctors thus had a duty to play a leading and active role in social transformation. Socialised medicine would also promote a positive health message, particularly the idea that prevention was better than cure, and this was intimately linked with, for example, left-wing proposals for improved housing and nutritional standards – the total health of the individual was central to the total health of society. There was, therefore, more to medicine and medical science than laboratory or clinical work for their own sakes or for the mere curing of illness. Rather, medicine provided a model, a rationale, a knowledge base and key personnel for the socialist reorganisation of society. Of course some of these arguments could be, and were, put forward by non-socialists. What this chapter therefore shows is how socialist doctors and medical scientists promoted a coherent socialist case based on their scientific knowledge and practice. The creation of the NHS was a complex process involving a range of actors and the particular circumstances of post-war Britain and it is not being claimed here that our socialist doctors alone brought it into being. But it is suggested that their ideas significantly contributed to the intellectual and political context in which the post-war Labour government, in the face of opposition from, most notably, the vast majority of the medical profession, was able to pass the National Health Service Acts of the mid-1940s.2 We look first at certain key issues by way of the arguments of members of the Socialist Medical Association (SMA). The SMA was an organisation of left-wing medical personnel founded in 1930 and affiliated to the Labour Party. It argued for a socialised and integrated medical service, free at the point of consumption and available to all. Private practice was to disappear and doctors were to become salaried state employees. Primary care was to be organised around health centres wherein general practitioners and other primary care workers would work co-operatively in order not only to cure illness but also to promote positive health. All services, including hospitals, were to be under the control of democratically elected local bodies. The Association was, at least until the mid1940s and notwithstanding its relatively small size, a major influence on Labour’s health policies. This derived from its members’



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participation in party policy committees; by way of those elected to the House of Commons or to local authorities, and especially the powerful London County Council (LCC); and through their activities in professional bodies such as the British Medical Association (BMA) and the Association of Scientific Workers (AScW).3 The SMA thus has a genuine claim to be one of the originators of the NHS. We then focus on two individuals. The first is the pathologist David Stark Murray, prolific author, editor of the progressive medical journal Medicine Today and Tomorrow and leading member of the SMA. Murray also played an important role in the formulation of the Labour Party’s health policy in the early 1940s, being responsible, for example, for drafting the document ‘A National Service for Health’ which formed the basis of Labour’s health policy at the 1945 general election. Murray was later to claim, in an article whose title alludes to the purportedly scientific basis of their activities, that he and his SMA colleagues were the ‘Back-Room Boys of State Medicine’.4 Our second case study is John Ryle, when we initially encounter him Regius Professor of Physic at the University of Cambridge – and hence one of the clinical élite – and then first Director of the Institute of Social Medicine, University of Oxford. Ryle was effectively the founder, in Britain, of the discipline of social medicine. As he put it, social medicine was the same neither as socialised medicine nor as ‘preventive medicine as we now know it’. Rather, it dealt with ‘the group as well as the individuals composing the group, with the many and varied problems created by sickness in the family and the community as a whole’. Social medicine thus embodied ‘the idea of medicine applied to man … as fellow or comrade’ with the aim of better understanding and helping the individual in respect of ‘all his main and contributory troubles which are inimical to active health and not merely to removing or alleviating a present pathology’. More than this, though, it also embodied the ‘idea of medicine applied in the service of … the community of men’ so as to lower ‘the incidence of all preventable disease’ and so raise ‘the general level of human fitness’. As such, social medicine was a key factor in the development of a ‘philosophy of scientific humanism’. Those studying social medicine at Oxford were thus, for example, instructed not only by Ryle and his medical colleagues but also by local social workers and public health workers.5

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Social medicine thus adopted a holistic approach which located individuals in their broader socio-economic environment and utilised the skills and knowledge of a range of disciplines. Again, this was a position to which non-socialists might wholly or partly subscribe. The British biologist John Scott Haldane, for instance, was an early advocate of ‘biological holism’, which he used to justify his support for progressive Liberalism, while the American physiologists and proponents of holism Walter B. Cannon and L.J. Henderson took very different views of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.6 In Ryle’s case, though, his holistic approach must be seen in the specific context of his own political activism, notwithstanding his rather over-emphasised, if professionally understandable, distinction between social medicine and socialised health care. In fact Ryle was close to, while always denying membership of, the SMA. As we shall see, he spoke at Association meetings and collaborated with its members on bodies such as the Medical Peace Committee.7 He was undoubtedly a committed socialist.8 It is worth stressing that, notwithstanding contemporary debate over whether medicine was a science, an art or some combination of the two, both Murray and Ryle had no doubt about medicine’s scientific status.9 Ryle, for instance, addressed the AScW Cambridge branch in 1938 on ‘Clinical Science’. This was, he suggested, both a very old science, with observation going back to Hippocrates, and very new, in experimental mode, since ‘anatomists, physiologists, pathologists, pharmacologists, biochemists and psychologists have all had to develop their sciences before the foundations of Clinical Science could be laid’.10 This claim to science was accepted by the AScW itself. A leader in the edition of Scientific Worker which contained the report of Ryle’s talk, and which was devoted to science and medicine, remarked that while the medical profession was old and well-established there was a tendency for it to be taken for granted ‘without realising the part which science has played in its developments or the scope for greater co-operation which exists’. Doctors themselves were beginning to argue for greater state involvement in health service provision and when this came about ‘the need for collaboration by scientists will be greater still’. Indeed such re-organised services would come sooner – the clear implication being that they were indeed necessary – if scientists understood the ‘part we have to play as specialists and not as patients’ and if they realised that ‘our own and the nation’s interests in this field, as



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in others, are identical’.11 This last claim, that scientists’ – or more accurately politically aware scientists’ – and the national interests were the same is revealing in the light of contemporary SMA criticism of the BMA and its more backward members that they had, to the nation’s detriment, a ‘vested interest’ in ill-health. Medicine, socialism and society The activities and ideas of the left-wing doctors and medical scientists dealt with in this chapter were complementary to, and on occasion overlapped at both an individual and an organisational level with, the scientific Left analysed by Gary Werskey.12 How, though, were the doctors’ arguments articulated? In 1923 Somerville Hastings, physician, founder and future leader of the SMA, future Labour MP and future chair of the LCC Hospitals and Medical Services Committee, addressed new students at London’s Middlesex Hospital on ‘Team work in nature’. He started by recalling the work of Darwin and Wallace on the ‘struggle for existence’. But, he continued, Darwin had also emphasised ‘the interdependence of one organism on another’. Hastings then cited particular examples of how this operated, stressing that ‘those who would have us look upon Nature as a perpetual struggle for existence among half-starved individuals thirsting for each other’s blood are only showing us one-half of the picture’. Teamwork in nature was replicated at the Middlesex. Here, Hastings told his audience, ‘you will find physicians, surgeons, sisters, nurses, not to mention the humble specialists, all united in the single purpose of healing the sick’. Teamwork’s value ‘has been recognised from the earliest times’ by the profession, among whose other traditions was that medical discoveries were shared world-wide ‘to the benefit of both fellow-doctors and their patients’.13 Given the circumstances, Hastings unsurprisingly gave no overtly political gloss to this argument, although his overall message is clear. Five years later he was more explicit, claiming that the ‘provision by the State of some form of public medical service within the next few years seems to me inevitable’. This was partly because of the ‘increasing complexity of medical science’ and, by contrast, the ‘appalling housing conditions’ in both town and country. The medical profession could, in these circumstances, either resist such a move as it had done over National Insurance prior to the First

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World War or – and this was obviously the favoured option – it could ‘mould public opinion’ so that when the ‘new order’ arrived general practitioners in particular would be the ‘natural centre’ around which this state scheme revolved.14 These views – on teamwork in nature and medicine and the need for the reorganisation by the state of medical services and the active role of doctors – were complementary rather than separate dimensions of Hastings’ views. Our socialist doctors saw no boundaries between their medical and their political lives. That science and politics were indivisible was articulated by Hastings with respect to Fascist Italy’s genocidal attack on Ethiopia in 1935. As he told his local newspaper, it was undoubtedly the case that scientific progress had taken place, but ‘what is the use of science if it is employed to invent new forms of poison gas?’15 Others took up similar themes. In 1941 prominent gynaecologist and leading SMA activist Aleck Bourne told Association colleagues that state medicine of itself was neither good nor bad – Nazi Germany, after all, had such a system. Rather, it depended entirely on the ‘political system within which it operates’. What was thus necessary was a fundamental restructuring of every aspect of Britain’s social and political life.16 The following year Bourne told an SMA gathering that for too long health had been regarded simply as the absence of any obvious disease. Consequently, most people had never experienced that ‘positive feeling of well-being which is health’. Therefore so long as ‘physical ill health is tolerated, and the known causes of many diseases are allowed to operate our civilisation must be incomplete’. Such causes, he made clear, included ‘faulty nutrition and unsatisfactory living and working conditions’. This event went under the title of the ‘Frustration of medicine’, an allusion to the ‘Frustration of science’ meeting of the mid-1930s in which leading left-wing scientists such as J.D. Bernal had played a prominent role.17 In 1942, when debates about post-war social reconstruction were gathering momentum, Bourne asked, in his contribution to the influential ‘Penguin Specials’ series of paperbacks, whether greed could be ‘exorcized’ and whether the next phase in h ­ umanity’s development would be the ‘Man of Service’. Were this to come about, ‘the search for physical well-being will have a wide place’, since ‘only on its success can be built the rest of the structure of the Whole Man’. ‘A wider Medicine’, he continued, ‘will play a



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key part in the programme, but only if there be much scrapping of many of the ideas which animate the Medicine of to-day.’18 Then, in 1943, in a Fabian Society volume on post-war reconstruction, Bourne addressed the topic of European medical relief. He stressed the need for any measures to be underpinned by a ‘scientific food policy’. Bourne next suggested that ‘statesmen’ must ‘draw more of their strength from a familiarity with science and the scientific method’. Only through a ‘new attitude to the necessity for scientific training’ would these statesmen realise that ‘the effects of a healthy, well-fed population reach far beyond the immediate mere physical condition of their nationals’. The rationale for such an approach would be the ‘immensely serious aspect of the moral state’ of postwar Europe and ‘its close dependence on the rehabilitation of the physical state’. Properly conceived and executed, such policies would result in ‘that moral growth based on content out of which will spring a c­ o-operative reasonableness as a foundation of kindlier human relations’.19 Taken together, Bourne’s arguments highlighted the need for positive and scientific health policies embedded in, and contributing to, a broader and radical programme of political reform at home and abroad. The need for science to assert its right to demand social action was notably made by the socialist medical scientist John Marrack – another contributor to the Fabian volume – at an AScW meeting revealingly entitled ‘The utilization of science’ in the late 1930s. Marrack contrasted nineteenth-century government action on public health with the contemporary absence of official policy on nutrition, notwithstanding the knowledge by then available. In biological investigations, he suggested, when ‘we come across a louse or tape-worm we do not pretend not to see it’. The current failure to make best use of science was partly because ‘we fail to use the same realistic and detached method of speaking when … discussing social phenomena’. There was thus a ‘nasty, oily pretence that there is something peculiarly scientific in shutting one’s eyes or condoning social evils’.20 For Marrack, his frustration notwithstanding, science could and should engage with social issues and we can again identify an organic and symbiotic relationship between socialism, social reconstruction, scientific method and medical science and practice. As I have argued elsewhere, such ideas were embraced by the SMA from the outset.21

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But what of our case studies, Murray and Ryle? In an early article, one of a series published in the left-wing journal Scottish Co-Operator under the pseudonym ‘Medico’, Murray compared the human body and the state. At present the latter was ‘based on foolish, selfish, competitive methods’. The healthy body, on the other hand, was a ‘wonderfully balanced co-operative system’ wherein ‘every cell is important, every tissue has its function, and all are closely related’ – a model, that is, for a socialist society. The circulation of blood likewise provided a ‘valuable lesson’, since here was to be found ‘a perfect system of distribution, transportation, and co-ordination’.22 Like Hastings, Murray argued that human evolution in its early stages had probably been ‘a very cruel process’ and noted that some continued to claim that such cruelty was a necessary part of the evolutionary process. There was, however, ‘absolutely no reason why this should be so’. Indeed man was now the ‘highest animal’ in the ‘animal kingdom’, not least because he had ‘learned to work in co-operation with his fellow creatures’. Murray was at pains to emphasise the unity of all living beings and hence humanity’s relations ‘in innumerable ways to every other member of the animal world’.23 Racial ideology, meanwhile, was both ‘inimical to progress’ and based on ‘false theories that every medical student knows are genetically wrong’.24 The clear target here was Nazi racial doctrine, although it should be noted that Murray, like many on the Left at this time and including Ryle, was not immune to the claims of eugenics.25 As with Bourne and Marrack, Murray was convinced that scientific medicine was essential both for humanity in general and for the socialist project in particular, but might be ‘frustrated’. So, for example, one of his publications sought to show how ‘Medicine, through the action of Science and scientific workers, has learned to defeat the causes of disease’. Hence, as he further put it, ‘modern medicine in many of its aspects gives a picture of science in action which is unequalled in any other field’.26 Among the reasons to combat disease was that a ‘close study of history reveals that in many instances disease has had even greater effects on world history than all the intrigues of ambassadors and the bravery of soldiers’.27 Health itself was not a ‘haphazard thing’. Rather, with the



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‘aid of science we can make it truly the birthright of every citizen’.28 However, in the mid-1930s there was a paradox. On the one hand, it was a ‘scientific age’ wherein most people were aware and proud of scientific advance. On the other, there remained a prejudice against science, coupled with a fear of change which had prevented scientific advances from being fully utilised, and hence ‘a recent recognition of the “frustration of science”’ – a further reference to the meeting noted earlier.29 Nonetheless, it was evident that scientific advance in fields such as vitamins and diet had made it ‘quite feasible to put down exact amounts of each’ so that if an individual ‘took that quantity, no more and no less, he would have all his body needs’. Ultimately, disease prevention was ‘only possible by a combined effort of the community’ and the individuals therein.30 But science did have a key role to play and was constantly advancing. There was probably ‘no field of human endeavour’, Murray argued, which since the beginning of the century had made such gains as laboratory research. Armed with this progress it was ‘surely … the duty of the State’ to ‘carry out those biological and psychological studies of the people that will enable them to make full use, both for themselves and posterity, of the leisure and plenty with which scientific research applied to industry can supply the world’.31 Like Bourne, Murray produced a volume in the ‘Penguin Specials’ series in 1942, a tribute to the standing that each then enjoyed. In the chapter revealingly entitled ‘The Quest for Perfection’ Murray noted that among the major obstacles facing the achievement of good health was the ‘social background in which people live’. Many inhabited environments which did not provide the minimum standards regarded as necessary by ‘medical experts’. Similarly, it was ‘useless to speak of the value of certain foodstuffs if the price puts them beyond any section of the community, and hopeless to discuss the advantages of taking exercise among people living in large cities where the opportunities for such exercise are almost non-­existent’ – explicit references to the 1930s controversies over the nutritional intake of the unemployed and the National Government’s ill-­conceived national fitness campaign. It would, though, be impossible to persuade ‘the average citizen that health is one of the rights of man’ – the right to health was a fundamental SMA argument – unless that citizen was conscious ‘that everything which threatens his health from without is being removed by those responsible for the removal’. The task of improving the ­environment, Murray

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c­ontinued, must thus ‘be assumed by the medical profession’ – a further example of the political activism required of doctors by their socialist colleagues. The profession could no longer avoid this duty and if it was to ‘achieve full stature it should be in the forefront of those political and social changes and experiments’, instead of seeming to many people to potentially be ‘hindrance to progress’.32 As the last comment attests, Murray was well aware that doctors’ organisations were overwhelmingly opposed to socialised health care, something which would play out fully from 1945. Nonetheless, Murray was nothing if not optimistic. Medical scientists could of themselves provide a model for social organisation. A ‘scientific meeting of pathologists’ was often a ‘lesson in how co-operation for the one object, that of conquering disease, obliterates what some people would regard as normal commercial and international barriers’.33 And, as plans for post-war social reconstruction gathered pace, Murray argued that medicine could be the ‘basis and … the inspiration of an international system’. Medical science in its ‘highest expression’ recognised ‘only the human being who needs advice or treatment and recognises none of the artificial divisions existing in modern society’. Hence, in the ‘perfect medical service, and certainly in an international socialist system, citizenship, not nationality, is the only test’ – right-wing nationalism was to be trumped by socialist internationalism. Emphasising the interrelationship between politics and medicine, Murray continued that the current opposition to proposals for socialised medicine resulted from the ‘realisation that a system of medical care organised for social purposes must ultimately affect the whole of society if the health of individuals is to be fully protected’.34 Opposition to socialised medicine was thus of itself fundamentally political while, on the other hand, socialised medicine could thus be a bridge-head to a socialist society. John Ryle Turning to John Ryle, it is clear that his views counted and that his standing was acknowledged. He was, for example, a member of the BMA’s Medical Planning Committee, set up in 1941 to examine proposals for post-war health care reform. Among his fellow members were Hastings and Murray.35 And, as Charles Webster points out, Ministry of Health officials paid close attention to the



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pronouncements of leading medical figures, including Ryle.36 His status was further acknowledged when he chaired one of the influential Nuffield Reconstruction Conferences, that devoted to health care, in 1944.37 Ryle was also well known in broader left-wing circles. After Labour’s 1945 general election victory he participated in a weekend conference, set up by Labour MPs Evan Durbin and Stephen Taylor (a party adviser on health policy) and very much an intellectual event, to discuss the ‘psychological and sociological problems of modern socialism’. Other participants included the author of Labour’s 1945 election manifesto, Michael Young.38 But what views did Ryle hold? Again in the crucial year of 1942, the social scientist Richard Titmuss wrote to a friend of a ‘magnificent’ and crowded meeting he had attended at which Ryle had spoken about social medicine. Ryle had started, though, with a ‘sane, logical, quietly humorous’ and well-articulated case for a ‘State Salaried Service’.39 This meeting had been organised by the SMA and, as well as stating his more overtly political opinions, Ryle had outlined social medicine’s underlying rationale. As things presently stood, he argued, ‘medicine studies disease in the patient detached from his environment’. Preventive medicine, meanwhile, studied disease in the environment ‘detached from the patient’, while pathology studied ‘disease in the laboratory detached from the patient and the environment’. In future ‘the physician, the medical officer of health, and the pathologist must collaborate more closely’, the essential point being that all three ‘must have an interest in the patient in relation to his environment’. And one of the most important outcomes of social medicine would be ‘the education of the people in the meaning and processes of health and the maintenance of healthy lives and homes’.40 Ryle was in consequence, like his SMA associates, increasingly disappointed by the policies of the post-war Labour government’s Minister of Health, Aneurin Bevan. In a speech in 1947 he claimed that Bevan’s 1946 Act would offer a ‘sickness service but not a health service’.41 This was common usage on the medical Left which articulated the belief that Bevan had not gone far enough and was, for example, sacrificing preventive or social medicine to curative medicine and, thereby, failing to promote positive health.42 Ryle had no doubt, though, that it was part of the medical profession’s duty to, as he put it, ‘advise the politicians in the matter of planning a healthier community’, and not least in building a

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more ‘exalted and efficient structure’ for preventive medicine. In the course of his Galton Lecture to the Eugenics Society in the late 1930s he suggested that if politicians managed to avoid war and ‘translate to social services and reconstruction some of the vast sums at present expended on armaments’, then there would be improvements in health and physique by way of better nutrition, better housing and ‘other comparable measures brought within the purview of state medicine’. Hence, he continued, there would remain ‘a more fundamental lesson for statesmen, for communities and for individuals – the lesson proclaiming the importance of pedigree and pride of pedigree and the importance of encouraging an optimum fertility rate’. Consequently the ‘[s]cientific and humane planning for national health and efficiency are, or should be, in the hands of the three great applied sciences – medicine, eugenics and sociology’.43 Ryle advocated a holistic approach to health, medicine and society. The doctor’s three functions were, first, to ‘become a good student of human nature’, second, to invoke ‘all appropriate forms of scientific knowledge’ and, third, to develop a ‘rational plan of healing’ which of necessity takes ‘into proper account the needs of body and mind, of whole and part’.44 Such analysis extended to the social environment. All frequently occurring diseases, Ryle argued, had ‘a “social” as well as an “individual” pathology’. Indeed, in terms of preventive medicine ‘social pathology is clearly more important than human pathology in its more usual and restricted sense’ and the ‘two sciences’ should thus ‘be more closely integrated’. Taking a specific example, one to which he turned on several occasions, Ryle noted that in the case of rheumatic fever ‘[p]oor social circumstance, and especially the conditions accompanying working-class life in large cities, have been established in this country and elsewhere as having outstanding aetiological importance’. And, of the factors associated with poverty, ‘overcrowding is probably the most potent’.45 Ryle thus urged Cambridge medical students, early in the war, to develop a ‘social conscience’ and not, as doctors had previously done, to hold themselves ‘aloof from the larger social problems’. This was not, he claimed, to suggest that they should support ‘any particular creed’, but his general message was clear enough.46 Ryle also warned against over-specialisation in medicine. Specialisation was necessary, but so too was the rounded approach



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which embraced ‘knowledge of the general situation, which includes both organism and environment, part and whole’. Recent, rapid and important developments in medicine had deceived ‘both professional and lay minds into the belief that what derives from the laboratory is necessarily more scientific and nearer to the truth than what is observed at the bed-side’. The advantage of general medicine was that for its practitioners and teachers ‘[p]hilosophy, psychology and scientific thought’ made ‘common cause’ in their ‘daily affairs’. While Ryle was here specifically participating in a debate among the clinical élite about the role and function of the clinician – this particular piece of writing was based on his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor at Cambridge and he was as yet fully to make the transition to social medicine – he differed from many of his peers in his relentless stress on what he would later call ‘social pathology’. For Ryle, holism embraced social environment as well as the human organism.47 Ryle’s thoughts on medicine and society were brought together in the preface to the group of essays with the collective title Changing Disciplines, published just before the NHS’s inauguration in 1948. Reflecting on his own shift from a primarily clinical role to one which embraced ‘new ventures in the field of social medicine’, Ryle again characterised this transition as ‘from studies … in individual pathology to studies in social pathology’. He had come to realise that the ‘whole man and his family’ could no longer be considered separately from ‘their total environment or from the larger communities of which they are but a part’. Noting the imminent arrival of the NHS, he argued that ‘state medicine – like clinical medicine – must in the end be based upon scientific principles and humane understanding’. Thus a ‘good social medicine must in fact have its foundations in a sound social pathology’. Recalling his own student days, spent at Guy’s Hospital on the south bank of the Thames, he described the problems of the working -lass population of neighbouring Bermondsey. These included, in addition to the widespread occurrence of the diseases of poverty, ‘the prevalent fear of illness and the anxieties and ignorance which create so much of it’. The notion of working-class fear of illness, and the economic strains it brought, was a commonplace on the medical Left and is alluded to in the title of Bevan’s 1952 book, In place of fear. Ryle also recalled ‘tired doctors in practice and sick doctors in the waiting room’ who had done their best with inadequate resources to ‘stem the tide of

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disease’ but who seldom had the ‘time or encouragement to ponder just how much of it is unnecessary in our modern world’. Hence ‘[p]sychological and sociological studies’ had as much part to play in modern medicine as, for example, ‘increasingly elaborate pathological studies at the bedside’. Nonetheless it was ‘not as yet appreciated how intimately disease and social circumstance are related’ and more research was needed.48 We noted that Ryle sought to distinguish social medicine from socialised medicine. Ryle also claimed, as Dorothy Porter points out, that his advocacy of doctors’ and medical scientists’ leadership role within society did not constitute a form of party politics. Rather, it was to be generalised into advice upon which political decisions could be based and be the foundation of the scientific humanism to which he subscribed. But Ryle was being rather coy. For, as Porter further remarks, Ryle had from his early days seen a role for science in promoting human welfare and by the 1940s was, as she correctly puts it, ‘demonstrably political’. Ryle used his various professional positions to ‘promote his proposals for the nationalization of medicine – a cause he had always believed in’, despising as he did ‘the commercial principle of private practice’ and supporting ‘the salaried employment’ of doctors.49 This is borne out by, for example, the account of the meeting attended by Titmuss. Like his socialist comrades, Ryle, an influential if rather enigmatic figure by the 1940s, saw his ideas about medicine and health care and his political beliefs and practices as part of an organic whole and not as existing separately from one another. Conclusion For the socialist doctors whom we have examined much was gained by the creation of the NHS. Their arguments, based on professional expertise as well as political commitment and advanced in opposition to the vast majority of the medical profession, contributed positively to the debates over post-war reconstruction. And many left-wing doctors and medical scientists saw the NHS as an acceptable end in itself, eliminating as it did economic barriers to health care. But for others, a political opportunity had been wasted. Having argued for a comprehensive, integrated and holistic service based on science and potentially the bridge-head to a fully socialist society, they were now faced with a service which, in their view,



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conceded too much to the medical profession and which, equally importantly, was designed to deal with sickness rather than promote health – hence Ryle’s point about a sickness service rather than a health service. Ryle was, as Porter remarks, thereby ‘greatly disturbed by the absence of provision’ for health centres, with their preventive as well as curative medical functions, in the emerging NHS.50 These criticisms were shared by SMA leaders such as Murray and Hastings and the organisation continued to campaign for its original policies into the 1950s and beyond. At best, then, the medical Left gained only a partial victory. Nonetheless, our socialist doctors and medical scientists presented an intellectually coherent case for socialised medicine and health care which significantly contributed to the arguments for such measures from the 1920s onwards. Given the present trend towards the dismantling of the National Health Service, at least in England, those seeking to defend that institution could draw useful lessons from the arguments of the medical Left as described in this chapter. Notes  1 Steve Sturdy and Roger Cooter, ‘Science, scientific management, and the transformation of medicine in Britain c. 1870–1950’, History of Science, 36 (1998), 421–66.  2 For a short discussion of the creation of the National Health Service, John Stewart, ‘Ideology and process in the creation of the British National Health Service’, Journal of Policy History, 14 (2002), 113– 34; for a recent discussion of the historiography, Martin Gorsky, ‘The British National Health Service 1948–2008: a review of the historiography’, Social History of Medicine, 21 (2008), 437–60.  3 In 1946 the AScW identified a number of Members of Parliament as representing their interests, including leading SMA figures Richard Clitherow and Leslie Haden-Guest: Scientific Worker, 1 (1946), 13. On the SMA, see John Stewart, ‘The battle for health’: a political history of the Socialist Medical Association, 1930–1951 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999).  4 Stewart, ‘The battle for health’, pp. 153–4; I. Brown (D.S. Murray), Back-room boys of state medicine (London: Socialist Medical Association, 1948); on Murray see John Stewart, ‘David Stark Murray’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).  5 J.A. Ryle, ‘Social medicine: its meaning and scope’, British Medical Journal, 2 (1943), 633–6.

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 6 Steve Sturdy, ‘Biology as social theory: John Scott Haldane and physiological regulation’, British Journal for the History of Science, 21 (1988), 315–40; S.J. Cross and W.R. Albury, ‘Walter B. Cannon, L.J. Henderson, and the organic analogy’, Osiris, 3 (1987), 165–92.  7 D.S. Murray, Why a national health service? (London: Pemberton Books, 1971), pp. 41 and 58.  8 On Ryle see Dorothy Porter, ‘John Ryle’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).  9 For a sense of the art or science debate in which, confusingly, those in favour of holistic medicine can be found on both sides, see C. Lawrence, ‘Still incommunicable: clinical holists and medical knowledge in interwar Britain’, in C. Lawrence and G. Weisz (eds), Greater than the parts: holism in biomedicine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 94–111. 10 J.A. Ryle, ‘Clinical science’, Scientific Worker, 10 (1938), 78–9. 11 ‘Science and medicine’, Scientific Worker, 10 (1938), 70. 12 Gary Werskey, The visible college: a collective biography of British scientists and socialists of the 1930s (London: Free Association Books, 1988). 13 Somerville Hastings, ‘Team-work in nature’, The Lancet, 2 (1923), 774 and 776–7. 14 Somerville Hastings, ‘The future of medical practice in England’, The Lancet, 1 (1928), 69. The BMA had initially resisted the introduction of health insurance in 1911, as it was to resist the introduction of the NHS in the 1940s. 15 Archives of the Socialist Medical Association, Brynmor Jones Library, University of Hull, (hereafter SMA), SH 47, Cutting from Reading Citizen, September 1935. 16 Socialist Medical Association, Bulletin, 37 (1941), 1–2. In 1938 Bourne had received widespread publicity for carrying out a test-case abortion to challenge the existing law. 17 ‘Frustration of medicine’, The Lancet, 1 (1942), 713. 18 Aleck Bourne, Health of the future (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1942), pp. 15–16. 19 Aleck Bourne, ‘Post-war medical relief in Europe’, in Julian Huxley et al. (eds), When hostilities cease (London: Victor Gollancz, 1943), pp. 91 and 82. 20 ‘The utilization of science’, Scientific Worker, 9 (1937), 113–15. 21 Stewart, ‘The battle for health’, ch. 3 and passim. 22 SMA, DSM (2) 4, Cutting from Scottish Co-Operator, 23 May 1925. 23 David Stark Murray, Your body: how it is built and how it works (London: Watts and Co., 1936), pp. 114 and 3. 24 Medicine Today and Tomorrow, 1 (1938), 1.



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25 See further Diane Paul, ‘Eugenics and the Left’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 45, (1984), 567–90. 26 David Stark Murray, Man against disease (London: Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons, 1938), pp. 9–10. 27 David Stark Murray, Science fights death (London: Watts, 1936), p. 4. 28 SMA, DSM (2) 4, Cutting from Reynolds News, 5 May 1935. 29 SMA, DSM (2) 4, Cutting from Reynolds News, c.1936. 30 David Stark Murray, ‘The foundation of health’, The Millgate, 27 (1932), 680. 31 David Stark Murray, The laboratory: its place in the modern world (London: The Fenland Press, 1934), pp. 19 and 117. 32 David Stark Murray, The future of medicine (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1942), pp. 122–3. 33 SMA, DSM (2) 4, Cutting from The Highway, April 1938. 34 SMA, DSM (2) 4, Cutting from The Left News, July 1943. 35 Stewart, ‘The battle for health’, pp. 132ff. 36 Charles Webster, The health services since the war: volume I, problems of health care (London: HMSO, 1988), p. 37. 37 Stewart, ‘The battle for health’, p. 163. 38 Mathew Thomson, Psychological subjects: identity, culture and health in twentieth-century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 231–2. 39 Cited in Ann Oakley, Man and wife: Richard and Kay Titmuss (London: HarperCollins, 1996), p. 196. 40 SMA, SH, File 8, Cutting from The Medical Press and Circular, 11 November 1942, pp. 323–4. 41 Oxford University Archives, University of Oxford, UR6/MD/13/10, File 3, ‘Report of a Conference on Student Health in British Universities and Medical Schools’, July 1947. I am grateful to the Keeper of Archives, University of Oxford, for permission to quote from this material. 42 Stewart, ‘The battle for health’, ch. 9. 43 John A. Ryle, ‘Medicine and eugenics’, The Eugenics Review, 30 (1938), 9–10. 44 John A. Ryle, Fears may be liars (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1941), pp. 87–8. 45 John A. Ryle, The natural history of disease (2nd edn, London: Oxford University Press, 1948), pp. 446 and 458. 46 John A. Ryle, ‘Today and tomorrow’, British Medical Journal, 2 (1940), 657. 47 John A. Ryle, The aims and methods of medical science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), pp. 11–13 and 38. 48 John A. Ryle, Changing disciplines (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948), pp. vi–ix.

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49 Dorothy Porter, ‘John Ryle: doctor of revolution?’, in Dorothy Porter and Roy Porter (eds), Doctors, politics and society: historical essays (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), 255. 50 Porter, ‘John Ryle: doctor of revolution?’, 258.

11

Science as heterotopia: the British Interplanetary Society before the Second World War Charlotte Sleigh

In a night of wild drinking in 1941, Captain John (Jack) Happian Edwards, on leave from his Admiralty research post in Scotland, let slip his secret quest for an enormous emerald, stolen from a Burmese temple and whisked across international borders. In the course of tracing the gem Edwards had stumbled upon a gang of dope smugglers who, convinced that he was working for Scotland Yard, surrendered themselves to him. Of the emerald’s whereabouts he said nothing.1 Experienced historians might perhaps wish for more evidence than Edwards’ interlocutor’s hand-written jottings before taking his Tintinesque tale as fact. It highlights some of the challenges in writing a history of the British Interplanetary Society (BIS), of which Edwards was at that time research director. ‘Eccentric’ is the term for which one naturally reaches to describe the BIS’s members;2 moreover, as we shall see, the BIS’s fiction is an important yet methodologically challenging strand to weave into more standard, empirically verifiable events. But what would happen if we put aside such terms as ‘amateur’ and ‘eccentric’ as established after the fact, and examined the history of the BIS in its own right as a scientific phenomenon of the decade before the Second World War? In order to attempt this feat, I draw upon the concept of the heterotopia. Michel Foucault coined the term ‘heterotopia’ in his 1967 lecture ‘Of Other Spaces’.3 A utopia, as is well known, is a non-existent site where all is inverted or perfected; Foucault’s heterotopias are ‘something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which … real sites … are simultaneously represented, contested,

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and inverted’. Foucault makes an analogy with a mirror; the image that we see in it is not real – it is utopian – but the glass is a heterotopian device entailed in and by its production. ‘The glass is at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there.’ In terms of governance, a heterotopia is a space in which normal rules are suspended or subverted. This chapter examines the writings of scientifiction fans of the 1930s in order to examine the governance of science that they thereby rehearsed. This governance, and this science, turn out to be very different from those envisioned by the other group of that decade – the scholarly Visible College – that has most often been discussed by historians. Foucault’s lecture sprang from a conviction that his own culture was no longer focused upon time, but had become obsessed with space. This space, this obsession, finds its apotheosis in the deep space of cosmic science and science fiction. Although he does not acknowledge the cosmic designation of the ‘éspaces’ of his title, Foucault’s account of how space as medieval, ordered emplacement was transformed into an infinite potentiality of spatial extension is founded on a discussion of that astronomical hero, Galileo. One might say that ‘space’, in the cosmic sense, was implicated in space, in the heterotopian sense, from its inception (one need only think of the counter-site of the Starship Enterprise, first launched in the year before Foucault’s lecture). Certainly the interrelation between these two senses of space helps to make sense of the BIS. The BIS both was an attempt to organise science differently – a space for different membership, aims and rules – and also constructed this alterity through its interlocution with utopian accounts of space itself. In practice, the latter point means that one cannot, as previous historians have done, simply pass over the science fiction written by members of the BIS as peripheral to the happenings of the real world. Rather, reading and understanding it is absolutely crucial to understanding the heterotopia they were attempting to create. This essay also constitutes a change from extant accounts of science and communication, which make science-writing about ‘convey[ing] esoteric ideas to the general public’ or ‘publicising’ them.4 The written word is not treated as a communication tool for science, separately postulated, but as a means – textual and social – of its heterotopian



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modelling. Scientifiction is treated as rehearsal of the governance of science. Founding and re-finding the BIS The claim that a heterotopia is a space in which normal rules are suspended or subverted is not strictly true. Foucault’s heterotopias (most obviously asylums) are ultimately bounded by the terms of bio-power familiar from the rest of his oeuvre. Their very otherness underlines the power of the rules that usually apply. There is little in his lecture about how such sites are founded; his account is not so much a historic explanation as it is a structuralist description of function. Here my account departs from Foucault’s, since this is very much a story of intentionality and effort; of collected aims, however inchoate, to do science differently. The in-house history of the BIS (2008) is a narrative of struggle and progress towards the present and future of human space travel, in keeping with the BIS’s current identity as an organisation of advocacy and education.5 Its account of the foundation of the Society has been replicated without question in the few histories since then that have made reference to the BIS.6 This story attributes the foundation of the Society to the vision of one man, a structural engineer named Philip E. Cleator, combined with the publicity afforded to him by a journalist at the Daily Express. Thanks to the publicity afforded by a front-page article, so the story goes, Cleator was able to gather a circle of like-minded enthusiasts around him. However, if we widen our focus a little, a different emphasis emerges. One thing to note is the relative homogeneity of the group; mostly born before or during the Great War, they were a tight (and very young) generational group in the 1930s, largely northern (Leeds and Liverpool). They were also sociologically similar, working or lower middle class, often peripherally involved with engineering trades (e.g. as clerks or salesmen), or otherwise generally ‘pale youths in uncongenial positions’.7 The BIS was socially indistinguishable from similar self-organising groups that were springing up in this period, dedicated to science fiction. These groups came about through the contact that was facilitated by the full printing of addresses in US magazines such as Amazing Stories (f. 1926) and Wonder Stories (f. 1929). Fans wrote to one another outside the pages of the magazine as well as within, and then grouped together

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to swap, discuss and write stories of science. The first such group in Britain, the Ilford Circle, was formed in Essex in 1930.8 Another technique for recruiting members to new or established groups (besides letters in the US magazines) was the placement of printed slips inside imported magazines. Printed letters also allowed groups to make contact with one another. Thus it was that the Liverpool group, the Universal Science Circle (USC) was formed in 1931. Two of the USC’s core members (Colin H. Askham and Leslie Johnson) were also central to the foundation of the BIS, another Liverpudlian enterprise. Besides this, Cleator had many connections in the science fiction world, most notably Walter Gillings, founder of the Ilford Circle and editor of the first major science fiction magazine in the UK, Tales of Wonder (1937–42).9 The magazine mediation of the interplanetary movement continued in 1934, during the brief run of the boys’ science-orientated paper Scoops, which contained a column by Cleator entitled ‘To the planets’. The controversial writer and scientist-inventor A.M. Low knitted the connections tighter, having published Cleator in his magazine Armchair Science and later going on to both British Science Fiction Association membership and presidency of the BIS. These overlaps in personnel, combined with the USC’s conjunction of science and science fiction as intimately related projects, give strong grounds for considering the BIS, at the time of its foundation, as a kind of science fiction circle. Johnson recalled: ‘It appears that what I had started, more than an interplanetary society, was a Science Fiction movement.’10 He noted that there was, however, an asymmetry in the interests of the groups: ‘It is a strange thing that people who were interested in interplanetary travel were not necessarily interested in Science Fiction; more credibly those who were interested in Science Fiction were interested in interplanetary travel.’ After the London move, the connection between the BIS and the world of science fiction became entwined even more closely, with the flat shared by Arthur C. Clarke and William Temple becoming (from 1938) the headquarters for both the BIS and the Science Fiction Association (publisher of Novae Terrae). The stated aim of the USC was ‘to facilitate the distribution and use of modern scientific knowledge in all its branches – truly a worthy and magnificent object for any club!’ Similarly mixing advocacy for science and fiction, the first British chapter of the International Science Fiction League (in Leeds) had its base at



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the ‘Institute of Scientific Research’ (although this was in fact an invented name for its sixteen-year-old founder’s family home).11 In this light, the aims of the BIS begin to look quite familiar. The first constitution of the BIS (1933) stated: The immediate aims of the Society are the stimulation of public interest in the possibility of effecting an extra-terrestrial voyage, the dissemination of knowledge concerning the problems which at present hinder such an achievement, and the conducting of practical research in order that a solution for these problems may be sought and found with a minimum of delay.

The inextricability of scientific and imaginative ambitions for the BIS was illustrated by an early debate amongst Society members about whether it should not, as the German and US equivalents were, be named a ‘rocketry’ society rather than an interplanetary one. J.G. Strong, a de Havilland engineer and BIS member, suggested that the ‘interplanetary’ label was simply too ambitious. The matter was debated in October 1934 and the ‘interplanetary’ label was unanimously retained.12 Rocketry was far too narrow a label for the breadth of interests and ambitions represented by the group. The revised constitution of 1937 stated the participatory scientific element more clearly, prefacing a slightly revised version of the 1933 statement thus: The BIS is a scientific organisation whose activities embrace research in all problems pertaining to the conquest of space, and the realisation of man’s age-old dream of interplanetary travel.

Further to its inspirational aims, the BIS kept ‘scientifiction’ magazines and lent them out to its members, making a point of highlighting stories that were important or relevant to the Society. (Such magazines also reported on the meetings of the BIS.) Johnson’s Bulletin editorial ‘Scientifiction and Interplanetary Travel’ credited these magazines with an active role in science, acting through scientifically disciplined imagination.13 Johnson went on to construct a category of ‘writer-scientists’; H.G. Wells was mentioned, but noted as having been ‘far surpassed’ by US figures of the era. ‘These are doing perhaps far more than they realise to shape the world of tomorrow by influencing the thoughts of today. … I wonder how many members of the BIS were first introduced to the idea of space travel through the medium of science fiction?’

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The first major flush of fiction associated with BIS circles coincided with the Society’s London move and its consequent consolidation of the fan scene, together with the publication of Cleator’s Rockets through space (1936). Its stories were both about the content of science and about its organisation or execution. The intensity (and ruthlessness) of fan-mags’ discussion of scientifiction – and the fact that many fans both read and wrote it – meant that authors wrote in a knowing fashion, relating their stories intertextually to one another and to their readers’ world. In this context, authors’ depiction of scientists become a noteworthy heterotopic device, poised between the worlds of fiction and reality. One frequently encounters fictionalised versions of actual people. One such appeared in ‘Seeker of To-morrow’ (1937). The narrator explained: For many years my hobby had been the study of the work of McAndrew, popularly called ‘The Death-ray Man’. … He was the world’s most authoritative exponent of the space-time concept and, like many other geniuses, he died discredited by his contemporaries because he had asserted that it would be found possible to travel in time, to move through time into the future.14

Here the standard trope of the previously laughable becoming reality is coupled with a reference to Harry Grindell Matthews, supposed inventor of the death ray in the 1920s and fellow of the BIS. Around the time of writing he was supposed to be involved with top-secret rocketry experiments at an isolated laboratory in South Wales: the great white hope of the BIS. Clarke’s ‘How we went to Mars’ (1938), an account of Snoring-in-the-Hay Rocket Society and the British Rocket Society, contains several depictions of BIS colleagues including the soviet-loving Hector Heptane (J.B.S. Haldane) as well as Prof Swivel (Low) and Dr Sprocket (Cleator). The portrayal of Low in several stories (narrator of Clarke’s ‘Travel by Wire’ and elements of two characters in Russell’s ‘Sinister Barrier’) makes it almost tempting to regard him, historically, as a kind of fiction–flesh hybrid. Wells made use of the trick too, turning a version of himself into the central character of Star-Begotten (1937; adored by British fans), alongside a cast of other scientific authorities, real and imagined.15 Other fannish writers created a



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shared universe of fictional authority; Stapledon’s Odd John is cited and dismissed as old science in Benyon’s ‘Child of Power’ (1939), for example.16 The effect is to create a parallel body of knowledge, a self-consistent world, heterotopic to the realm of authoritative science. A very young Arthur C. Clarke wrote himself into this world; although he carried out wireless experimentation and more at home, it was his self-invention through the printed medium of the school magazine that enabled the construction of himself as scientist. In this magazine, his friend created an alter ego for him as the scientist, Professor ‘Archie’ Larke, M.D., A.S.S., which Clarke was more than happy to perpetuate.17 Clarke followed suit, signing his own articles as ARCH; in an unusually political article on the British Empire he wrote: The author of this article is, at the time of going to Press [1935], neither a Bolshevic, Fascist, Socialist, Nazi, Technocrat, Pacifist, Atheist, Communist or Anarchist. He has, however, been accused by numbers of people (more in sorrow than in anger) of being a Scientist.18

Thus Clarke, from the very earliest days, described himself as a ‘scientist’ in the context of his writerly identity. What he said was that he was a scientist; what he was doing was writing. If we treat BIS-related fan stories of the 1930s as a heterotopic device for creating desirable forms of science, then the nature of these fact-fiction scientists is worth exploring in some detail. As it turns out, the stories had a fairly stable construction of what looks, to contemporary eyes, like a kind of scientist-engineer hybrid as hero. Clarke’s ‘Travel by Wire’ (his first ‘published’ story, which appeared in a spirit-duplicated 1937 fan-mag), provides one such example. The un-named narrator has an ambiguous professional identity; if anything, he seems to be an engineer. He works in a 200-storey Research Foundation but invents a practical device (essentially a teleporter). Certainly, he looks down on disciplined scientists. ‘Chemists’ and ‘biologists’ attempt to thwart his research and are repaid with the narrator’s clever pranks (a dose of ‘mild cosmics’ and locks cracked by X-ray). The scientists’ helplessness in the face of these wheezes demonstrates their inferiority. The narrator notes that he quickly formed a company to sell the device, bids an ironically ‘reluctant’ farewell to the Foundation and speculates

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that he might ‘heap coals of fire’ on the remaining scientists by sending them a few million, thus, by the biblical reference, indicating his enmity with them. ‘Sinister Barrier’, Eric Frank Russell’s highly regarded story of 1939, has a whole host of scientist-engineer characters who all prove their worth by discovering things about how to fight the evil Vitons. ‘Beach’ is the most important of these, and is described as a ‘scientist … the man who designed the stereoscopic owl-eye camera … employed by the National Camera Company’. Thus invention elides unproblematically with science, moreover in a commercial context. The organisation that cooks up the weapon to defeat the Vitons is the ‘Faraday Electrical Equipment Co.’, a title that blends the British hero with an American model of commerce. ‘Sinister Barrier’ is interesting in the way that it assembles these individuals into a collective effort (even aided, at one point, by government intervention), thus providing an alternative to the solitary-scientist model that is rightly lambasted as unrealistic by historians and other scientific commentators. Russell was noted for his American style and, after the Second World War, entered into correspondence with a number of libertarian-minded writers, with whom he seemed to share a basic political outlook. The inventor-scientist, writer and sometime BIS president Archibald Low had long nursed similar thoughts to Russell’s about the governance of invention. In a 1930 editorial for Armchair Science he conceded that central oversight of research had perhaps been useful during the Great War, but was horrified to learn of a proposal for a Ministry of Science. ‘How can it be possible for a scientific bureau to do more than collate facts?’ he asked, noting that this task was, moreover, ‘already successfully accomplished by many educational establishments’. Not only would this proposal result in a duplication of effort, but it would also be a retarding force: since most ‘facts’ were eventually shown to be ‘fiction’, such an effort would set science in aspic. Low went on to wage what his biographer called ‘almost a one-man campaign against the high charges that were made by the Government for granting patents’, quoting Low’s opinion that ‘we stand a good chance of wrecking the most important industry in this country with the help of bureaucratic control’. New Worlds even extended the law of progress by commercial competition to fiction itself, projecting its readers forward in



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time by twelve years for an interview with the editor of Tales of Wonder (a real magazine, edited then as in the future by Walt Gillings). Finding science fiction everywhere, and the offices of Tales of Wonder itself filled with ‘electric lifts … trim girls in buttoned uniforms … enamelled passages … orange lights’, the author enquires as to the reasons for science fiction’s evident cultural ascent. Gillings explains how in 1940 (i.e. a year after the present) he had been commercially obliged to abandon reprinting stories from the US and pioneer new fiction instead, a strategy that caused his competitors to follow suit. ‘You mean’, I slowly said, ‘that the vast science fiction business of today came about through competition?’   [Gillings] nodded. ‘Exactly, it strained authors to their utmost. The least known line of literature leapt suddenly forward. From 1928 to ’38 it progressed visibly – from ’38 to ’50 all this happened.’   … I left him in rather a daze, took a quiet seat near the Thames Embankment and thought it out. I began to see – the law of progress.

During the early days of the BIS the world passed rapidly through two sets of crisis; the Great Depression was no sooner over than the clouds of a Second World War began to gather. Thus there was – for scientifiction fans – plenty of need for science to save civilisation, or to bring about progress. For a few, this would come through socialism, but not for many. The notion of commercially inspired progress, like that of the fictionalised Walt Gillings, was more common. There were a number of other, rather poorly articulated models for this progress: rationality, techno-fetishism or simple intrinsic phenomenon of life: something that would occur by default so long as it was not blocked: There comes to my mind the story of the foolish inventor who, blissfully unaware that he was attempting the impossible, quietly continued with his work – and did it! … there is one, and only one, logical way of viewing any desired achievement: for just as long as it remains unachieved, so there will always exist the possibility that it will be achieved.19

Such opinions about the mechanism of scientific progress were commonplace in science fiction and fan mags. A frequent line of argument pointed out how ordinary aeronautics had seemed absurd only a generation previously; implicitly proceeding by induction,

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these writers suggested that their own visions would become future fact. ‘For years men insisted that iron ships would not float, until some crank thought of putting the idea to the test’, wrote the editor of Tomorrow in 1938. ‘Today, however, there exists a class of people who, instead of opposing progress, actually support it’ – the readers, of course, of his magazine. Low proposed the motto: ‘What is good enough for today is much too bad for tomorrow.’ The colonisation of other planets, a frequent topic, yielded a utopian space for these re-governed futures (or, if progress was the natural default, ungoverned futures). ‘Seeker of To-morrow’ (a rather unoriginal Wellsian pastiche) took its hero through a world war and a Wellsian techno-future before depositing him on Venus, from whence he set forth to discover something as yet more perfect. Low’s Adrift in the Stratosphere sent its heroic chums on a voyage through stratospheric and etheric communities of the wise and ‘kindly’ – a kind of Gulliver’s Travels without the jokes or irony. The unfortunate explosion of the Mystery Mountain (which was on the point of yielding all the secrets of science and life) means that the travellers must return to Earth, inspired but not omnisciently informed – that is, in the exact position of scientists – to go on in the light of their experiences. On the whole, however, the 1930s generation of fans and writers were not particularly concerned with the sociological arrangements of new planets and colonies. Perhaps this was because they had been too young to serve in the Great War, and so had not experienced highly organised forms of life as had their fathers. Or perhaps they simply followed the lead of the American pulps in creating individual hero figures, albeit more British ones who exhibited ‘ordinary’ qualities transformed by extraordinary situations. By contrast there also existed a commonplace fear, developed from Wellsian themes, that technologised servitude to science would produce a race governed like ants. ‘If you want a parallel, just think of one of the warships of your own time – twelve hundred or more men working a great floating monster, just as these insects in their thousands work their scuttering metal machines.’20 The early Clarke story ‘Retreat from Earth’ (1938) is amongst many other pulp ant and termite stories of the period. As I have already noted, the belief that fiction and its media were the path to the future was central to science fans (as they sometimes called themselves). Perhaps the best place to start with the BIS is not



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its founder, Phil Cleator, but its secretary, Leslie Johnson, c­ o-author of ‘Seeker of To-morrow’ and proud owner of a typewriter. Technologies Leslie Johnson had a Dickensian start in life.21 His father contracted pneumonia whilst playing his euphonium in the cold to entertain poor children and died; Johnson’s typewritten memoir summarises gruffly in the margin ‘I go to my Father’s Funeral instead of starting work’. He began the next day instead, a junior clerk at the Liverpool Education Committee. In order to help her son get ahead, Johnson’s mother purchased him a typewriter at a cost of £5 – the equivalent of six weeks’ salary. Johnson’s typewriter was so old-fashioned that it had no shift key – separate buttons for upper and lower case22 – but it was enough, on its own, to secure him the role of secretary for both USC and BIS (the latter at the tender age of nineteen). Having the means to produce professional-looking correspondence and publications was what was needed. Histories of the typewriter tend to begin their analysis with Heidegger’s famously negative assessment of the machine,23 and assert with him that the typewriter diminished ‘the self-presence of the writing act as a creative process’ by removing the direct link between eye, hand and paper.24 However, if we think about the typewriter not as means of creativity, but as the producer of a material item for dissemination, then a very different picture emerges: a facilitation of writing for ‘publication’, and a much more direct connection between author and reader. Typewriters enabled amateurs to produce something that looked like professional text, to feel as though they had been published; they enabled, in short, the emergence of the fan-mag movement. For people like Leslie Johnson, the typewriter did not diminish the creative act so much as create a potential wormhole to participation in the world of print – something that was otherwise unthinkable for such ordinary persons. Thus, adverts such as those in Wonder Stories offered typewriters with a correspondence typing course included. ‘I will earn you money!’ they promised – perhaps not realistically, in most cases, but alluringly.25 It was not just the typewriter that was involved in this process. Typewriters could produce a small number of copies using carbon paper, but with the introduction of spirit duplicators in the

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1920s (best known by the Ditto brand in the US, and Banda in the UK), this rose to dozens.26 Despite the high cost of these machines (around $200 in the US), Amateur Science Stories took advantage of them to print and distribute its own content, creating circles of ‘publication’ and readers alternative to those of the established publishing industry.27 Other fan-mags used stencilling (mimeograph machines), a late nineteenth-century technology. As with spirit-duplication, stencil could be used to reproduce line drawings. Following a run of fan-mags through the 1930s and 1940s one often finds a variety of printing techniques within the same title; evidently quality, cost and convenience were fluid. Producing the Bulletin and Journal of the BIS was a practical and financial challenge, and reflexive consideration of the issues involved was at the forefront of the BIS and its publications throughout the whole of its first phase. It was difficult to obtain enough copy for it; it was time consuming to write, lay out and print; and it was expensive to produce. At times the Bulletin was forced to stand in for the Journal because one or more of these challenges had proved insurmountable. The titles also alternated between professional and amateur production. When typed at home, there was no option for correction, and all lay-out had to be correct first time (resulting in many articles broken strangely across pages). For a time Johnson double-justified all the type – an enormously tedious and time-­ consuming task – and apologised for eventually letting this drop. Fan-mag readers and writers were very aware of and concerned about the media of their passions. Difficulties in communication between fan groups shadowed their interest in advances in communication from a science fiction perspective. In summer of 1938, Ted Carnell and Les Johnson launched the ‘Science Fiction Service’ to distribute magazines on loan via the post. Fans also hotly debated the ethics and wisdom of the pulp business. Although many readers were too young and/or poor to pay full import prices for magazines, they feared that their consumption of cheap, remaindered literature would damage the economics of its future production.28 Participation in wireless technology was also very closely associated with the BIS and the world of fandom. Johnson and Russell both served as wireless mechanics for the RAF during the Second World War and Clarke – a childhood wireless maker – p ­ articipated in the development of Ground Controlled Approach radar.29 Formal publications in factual and fictional science (US and UK)



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typically carried advertisements for wireless kits and publications, while Practical Mechanics carried reports of the BIS in its pages. Like fans, wireless practitioners were involved in an activity mediated by both textual and face-to-face methods – as well, of course, by the wireless itself. The wireless, in some form, even offered to carry communications to space travellers when they were launched, or to such creatures as were already resident in space.30 Evolution to the next level of intelligence or civilisation was conjured up as a wireless brain in Benyon’s ‘Child of Power’ (1939). Its preternaturally talented protagonist could learn from radio stations, and tune in to the as-yet inchoate signals from beings in space. The narrator’s plans for the child’s education are thwarted by his conservative father, but the manifesto remains; the future of the race lies, in effect, in sending the wireless – the ordinary, youthful amateur – to college. Scientific and fictional concerns with the stratosphere were often focused upon the Heaviside Layer, a sort of earthly ceiling which both made wireless communication possible – by bouncing signals around the earth – and also represented its limit, since it prevented ordinary wavelength signals being sent into, or from, space.31 Low’s Aeronauticus in Adrift and its rocket siblings in other fiction are an obvious example of this concern with communication, as are time machines and travel-by-wire.32 But there are also the old-fashioned newspaper presses of ‘Sinister’, ‘clean, bright, [and] oiled’ (46); the strat-planes (47); and ‘the mikes and the tele­ type’ (80): a whole gamut of communication devices necessary to support the ‘thousand widely separated experimenters [that] are safer than a thousand in a bunch’, working together to defeat the common enemy. The typewriter and its duplicators, like its more glamorous cousin the wireless, were interplanetary devices no less potent than the hoped-for rocket, mediating the journeys to utopian scientific realms. Conclusion My aim in this chapter has been two-fold. First, I have reiterated the fan-dimension, or scientifiction dimension, of the BIS. Second, I have attempted to show how in their fiction, as well as in life, members of the BIS constructed a different model of science, governed differently, to that more commonly described by historians. They

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were idealistic, and most of them saw the social virtues of science playing out through the identification of science with invention and engineering, in a context of commerce and entrepreneurship. The world of fandom was a heterotopic rehearsal for how they fantasised science; open to all, responsive to imagination, and materially aspirational. The typewriter and spirit duplicator were, in Foucault’s terms, the mirror. They were media not of secondary conveyance, but of the construction of science. This chapter has not pretended to be a comprehensive correction to, or even alternative to, the more usual accounts that privilege pure science over applied or that treat communication as something that comes after knowledge creation. However, it does suggest some interesting questions about the extent to which the governance of science has gone on to govern the writing of science history. What would it mean to write a history of twentieth-century science that engaged seriously with the popular ‘myth’ of the eccentric scientist-engineer, working outside of academia and within a business setting? In our anxiety to avoid telling a whiggish story about the development of science, we historians may perhaps be missing a sense in which the twentieth century was a period in which some science was first conceived as imaginative feat and then executed.33 The BIS reformed after the Second World War and, although it did not achieve any great science directly, its goal of human space travel was realised, to the amazement of many. The governing effects of science fiction upon science may be generally more significant than we suspect. Notes  1 British Interplanetary Society, London (hereafter BIS), Val Cleaver, ‘Further notes on BIS personalities’, 5 May 1942. (Note: BIS is not formally catalogued.) On 20 June 2009, in its catalogue of ‘minor British institutions’ the Independent newspaper compared the BIS to ‘some eccentric sect’, www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/ minor-british-institutions-the-british-interplanetary-society-1707659. html  2 ‘[Edwards is] a mathematical genius, rattles off gigantic equations, computes speeds and heats and other essentials to Astronautics just like I would read a newspaper … completely in the lunatic fringe – if not quite over the border.’ Cleaver, quoted in Bob Parkinson (ed.), Interplanetary: a history of the British Interplanetary Society (London: British Interplanetary Society, 2008), p. 18.



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 3 Michel Foucault, ‘Of other spaces’ (translated by Jay Miskowiec), 1967/1984, http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html .  4 Peter Bowler, Science for all: the popularization of science in early twentieth-century Britain (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 175; William Macauley, ‘Crafting the future: envisioning space exploration in post-war Britain’, History and Technology, 28 (2012), 281–309. Macauley’s use of the phrase, to be fair, relates to a different period, i.e. after the Second World War.  5 Parkinson (ed.), Interplanetary.  6 Nigel Watson, ‘Reaching for the stars’, History Today, 63 (2013), www.historytoday.com/nigel-watson/reaching-stars; James Farry ‘“Far more to it than appears on the surface”: an historical investigation of the interface between space science and the British mass media’, (PhD dissertation, University of Manchester, 2011); Macauley, ‘Crafting the future’.  7 BIS, Cleaver notes, 1 February 1938.  8 Rob Hansen, Then (© Rob Hansen, 1988–94, unpaginated), vol. 1, ch. 1 ‘The 1930s: genesis’, www.ansible.co.uk/Then/then_1-1.html.  9 Other prominent scientifictionally inclined members of the BIS included Arthur C. Clarke, Eric Frank Russell, Walter Gillings, Edward John Carnell, G. Ken Chapman, F. Temple. John F. Burke, Dave McIlwain and Olaf Stapledon. Frank H. Winter notes the science-fiction connection in Prelude to the space age: the rocket societies, 1924–1940 (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983) but focuses on the technical challenges of rocketry. 10 Quoted in Hansen, Then, ‘The 1930s’. 11 Hansen, Then. Compare also the editorial policy of Tomorrow: ‘we are out to present a high-class progressive magazine, relaying to its readers news and views on science-fiction, science, scientific progress, rocketry, the future, and scientific-sociology’. 12 BIS, Philip Cleator, ‘editorial’, JBIS, 4 (1934), unpaginated. BIS, BIS Bulletin, 3:1 (October 1934), unpaginated. 13 BIS, BIS Bulletin, 1:2 (November 1934), 1–4. 14 Eric Frank Russell and Lesley Johnson, ‘Seeker of to-morrow’, Astounding Stories (July 1937), Kindle edition (2008-07-24), Kindle Locations 1392–1395, http://pulpfictionportal.com. 15 For an account of the truth-making function of stories-within-stories, see Charlotte Sleigh, Literature and science (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), pp. 18–20. 16 John Benyon, ‘Wanderers of time’, in Benyon, Wanderers of time (London: Coronet, 1973), p. 91. 17 ‘AGER’, ‘Interviews with celebrities VI’, in Arthur C. Clarke,

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Childhood ends: the earliest writing of Arthur C. Clarke (Rochester, MI: Portentous Press 1996), pp. 16–18. ASS was later the acronym of Clarke’s first magazine, Amateur Science Stories. 18 Clarke, Childhood ends, p. 47. 19 Philip Cleator, Rockets through space: the dawn of interplanetary travel (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1936), p. 201. 20 Benyon, ‘Wanderers of time’, p. 35. 21 Following details are from BIS, Lesley Johnson, ‘My personal history of the British Interplanetary Society’ (Liverpool, 1933–37), pp. A–F. 22 The machine was a Smith Premier; the model number is unclear. It should be noted that at least one Smith Premier advertisement from 1890 (US) proudly proclaimed the shift key system as ‘relegated to a past age’, www.antiquetypewriters.com/collection/periodad.asp?​img=​ pic-ad_​smith03.jpgandtypewritername=Smith Premier 1. 23 ‘The typewriter tears writing from the essential realm of the hand … [and] degrades the word to a means of communication’ – quoted in Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, film, typewriter (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 198. 24 Alex Goody, Technology, literature and culture (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), p. 110. Goody then goes on to give an enthusiastic account of cyborgian writing with digital technologies. 25 Wonder Stories, July 1937; back cover. 26 Luis Nadeau, ‘Office copying and printing processes’, ch. 16 excerpt from Guide to the identification of prints and photographs featuring a chronological history of reproduction technologies (New Brunswick, 2002; Internet edition v. 0.95, November 2002; http://cool.conserva​ tion-us.org/byauth/nadeau/copyingprocesses.pdf). 27 I have not been able to establish whether these groups possessed their own machines or whether there were centralised services which they used at, say, stationers. 28 Tomorrow, 1 (Spring 1937), 10–16. 29 Relapse, p. 11; Arthur C. Clarke, Glide path (London: Harcourt Brace, 1963). For a recent account of communications technologies and literature see David Trotter, Literature in the first media age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 30 Nicola Tesla, ‘Talking with planets’, Collier’s Weekly, 9 February 1901, www.tfcbooks.com/tesla/1901-02-09.htm. 31 Anon, ‘Stratosphere’, Popular Mechanics (September 1929), 435–9. Today, the portion of the atmosphere containing the Kenelly-Heaviside Layer is known as the ionosphere. 32 Rocket mail was another much-vaunted hybrid; see John Becklake, ‘The rocket in Britain 1900 to 1940: Part 1 – postal and amateur rockets’, Space Chronicle (JBIS, 62, supplement 2), 2009, 48–60.



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33 See, for example, the remarkably sci-fi road plans in Simon Gunn, ‘The Buchanan Report, environment and the problem of traffic in 1960s Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 22 (2011), 521–42; see also Christopher Frayling on the development of the rocket in Mad, bad and dangerous? The scientist and the cinema (London: Reaktion Books, 2005).

12

Governing science on BBC radio in 1930s Britain: religion, eugenics and war Ralph Desmarais

During the 1930s, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) aired hundreds of science-related radio talks in its evening programming schedule, most delivered by renowned scientists and scientific popularisers. In both authorship and content, these BBC scripted talks often overlapped with the wide range of non-specialist popular science books whose published titles had proliferated over the preceding decades to meet the British adult public’s increasing demand for self-improvement and general home education.1 The rationale, however, for BBC radio talks contrasted sharply with book publishers’ overriding commercial profitability incentives. The BBC was funded by radio-licence fees under the terms of its government-awarded charter, and permitted to broadcast nationally as an independent monopoly radio service, notionally free from government and other external interference. In return, the Corporation had to satisfy a public service remit to educate and inform the listening nation under the executive control of its pioneering director-general, John Reith. A key outcome of this obligation was a series of over 100 BBC science talks that specifically addressed the relations of science and society,2 talks whose internal BBC governance is the subject of this chapter. Three issues, each associated with Britain’s turbulent 1930s, are examined in detail: religion, eugenics and war. While these topics were also taken up by science book publishers, their BBC governance differed in three key respects. Firstly, BBC scientist speakers were primarily selected on the basis of their standing in the scientific community, rather than on the basis of popularity considerations. Secondly, although the BBC routinely sought advice



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from the scientific establishment, the Corporation alone decided how topics should be presented, and it retained editorial control of speakers’ scripted broadcasts. Last, and crucially, the BBC instated a policy of ‘balanced controversy’ to provide listeners with an appreciation of elite scientists’ diverse and often rival views on these issues. Together, these governance elements were put in place to uphold the disciplinary authority of the natural sciences and scientists in BBC science talks, while avoiding negative criticism from other institutions (e.g. the government and the established Church) that could jeopardise the BBC’s own standing and independence. In the main, and despite encountering a succession of difficulties arising from vested interests held by key BBC staff and by some members of the scientific community, the BBC largely satisfied its governance objectives during this period. By limiting the scope of controversy and by privileging science’s supporters over its detractors, the BBC helped to sustain modern science’s widely accepted stature and its reputation as a leading contributor to Britain’s public good. Background The overriding impetus behind 1930s science talks programming on BBC evening radio was Britain’s escalating adult education movement.3 Long-established and predominantly working-class, this movement had resulted from entrenched social inequalities whereby few adults continued their formal schooling beyond the age of twelve years. This situation persisted into the early decades of the twentieth century.4 Remedial scientific training was especially valued, not only by workers seeking better employment opportunities. Middle-class social reformers and progressive intellectuals, influenced by a vocal science lobby,5 believed that knowledge of scientific method and appreciation of scientific ‘spirit’ were essential as prerequisites for a responsible electorate and as urgent requirements for national efficiency imperatives underpinned by scientific rationalism. Some of these aims were clearly apparent when, in 1927, the BBC sponsored an eighteen-month inquiry to identify how adult education broadcasting could enable each listener to develop ‘his range of interests and character of … thought’, with programming that would ‘help him to make more of his life, both as an individual and

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as a member of society’.6 The ensuing Hadow Report determined that ‘scientific subjects … are capable of realistic descriptive treatment’, particularly those ‘which do not demand too much experimental, mathematical or diagrammatic illustration’. It concluded that whereas ‘such subjects as biology and nature study’ were particularly suitable topics, the abstract physical sciences should primarily be addressed in relation to ‘industry and the home’. Overall, the report stressed that, rather than ‘giving the listener a smattering of popular scientific knowledge’, science talks must ‘present a balanced view of the subject as a whole and an insight into the methods employed by the scientist’.7 Two further recommendations, subsequently implemented, also had a key bearing on science-related adult education. One was the formation of nationwide ‘wireless discussion groups’ whose members met weekly to hear and deliberate on educational programming. The second outcome was the weekly illustrated Listener journal, launched in 1929, which not only supplied ‘a background of general knowledge and information’ but also published scripts of the week’s broadcast talks. Underscoring the importance attached to science, the lead article of its first issue was penned by the physicist and scientific intellectual Sir Oliver Lodge; soon afterwards, a regular weekly column ‘Science Notes’ appeared, with articles by the chemist A.S. Russell addressing the methods, philosophy, history and social relations of science. The most salient Hadow Report recommendation, however, anticipated the Corporation’s later decision to broaden the scope of educational science programming beyond narrowly didactic talks, and to take seriously science’s intersection and engagement with political, ethical and social concerns. Critical of the government’s policy that had temporarily prohibited the BBC’s Board of Governors from allowing broadcast discussion of controversial matters, the Report’s authors expressed ‘in the strongest terms’ their ‘conviction that to cut out controversial subjects is to cut out all that is most stimulating and most important to men and women, both as individuals and as citizens’. ‘One of the most important functions of broadcasting’, they continued, is ‘that it can bring to the microphone leading exponents of many points of view … in all branches of thought’. ‘Fruitful discussion … sufficiently emphatic to provoke argument’, they concluded, ‘should have a wholesome effect on the nation as a whole.’8



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In 1930, alongside a gradual relaxation of this controversy ban, the BBC began airing an ambitious series of adult education talks programmes, all subject to a formal structure of governance. Significantly, as its principal historian Asa Briggs has stressed, it was not the British government, but ‘the BBC itself which determined programme policy’.9 As with talks in general, science talks were conceived, prepared and authorised within the BBC’s organisational hierarchy, at whose head were its Crown-appointed Board of Governors and its founding director-general, John Reith (1927–38). But whereas BBC governors retained responsibility for the Corporation’s compliance with its Charter terms, it was Reith himself who maintained overriding executive control, principally through an editorial Control Board that met weekly under his supervision.10 Beginning in 1935, Reith implemented a General Advisory Council (GAC) to provide his Control Board with a ‘wide range of advice on all programme activities’, and in 1937 a general Talks Advisory Committee was formed to advise controllers, programmers and producers alike on both general and adult-educational talks. Reith ensured that distinguished British scientists served on both advisory bodies: Lord (Ernest) Rutherford and Sir William Bragg were GAC members; and (later Sir) Julian Huxley served on the TAC.11 Eminent scientists and scientific intellectuals were also members of ad hoc advisory panels set up for important talks series: Oliver Lodge and J.J. Thomson were early advisers to Reith’s National Lectures (February 1929 onwards) and Sir Richard Gregory was principal adviser to the long-running science series This Surprising World (1930–32), hosted by the popular science writer Gerald Heard. Significantly, all of these advisers were elected members of the illustrious Royal Society, and most were one-time presidents of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, whose chief aim in this period was to promote the values of science; Gregory, editor of Britain’s foremost science journal, Nature, became a central figure in Britain’s well-historicised ‘social relations of science’ movement, which grew to prominence in the late 1930s.12 Reith’s influence also permeated the BBC’s Adult Education and Talks Departments, the units responsible for supplying educational science programmes. Usually hand-picked by Reith for BBC employment, talks directors and producers alike were highly

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e­ducated, middle-class progressives, often moral idealists who shared Reith’s ‘self-assured paternalism’, his public service ethos and his understanding of culture ‘as a form of self-improvement, a means of personal and social discipline’.13 As partial fulfilment of these ideals, they put into practice a key objective set by Reith in their talks programming, namely, a focus on ‘balanced controversy’. Through such programming, according to the BBC’s first specialist science producer, listeners would come to appreciate ‘the forces that are continually re-shaping the fabric of our social life’, acquire ‘a sense of social solidarity’ and realise ‘the function of science as a co-operative enterprise of mankind’.14 Talks producers, though permitted considerable latitude in their choice of topics, speakers and production styles, were nonetheless obliged to comply with three key BBC practices. Firstly, suggestions for topics were submitted for deliberation by a programme committee, who prepared each week’s talks schedule two months in advance. Secondly, science talks’ speakers were chosen on the basis of their relevant expertise and recognised stature within the scientific community, a practice which both helped to ensure authority of the talk content and, as contemporaries observed, helped to consolidate the BBC’s own reputational standing.15 Lastly, once Controller approval of topic and speaker was obtained, producers were obliged to ensure that their speakers’ written scripts complied with BBC policy guidelines, to oversee broadcast rehearsals and to deliver outcome feedback to their speakers and to Talks Department management. These measures were designed to enable the BBC to address controversial topics while avoiding adverse reaction, whether from a government sensitive to criticism of its political, industrial or economic policies or from a general public whose moral sensibilities Reith deemed to be vulnerable to extreme or unsavoury viewpoints. But, as elaborated below, discussion of science-and-society issues was to be a particularly risky undertaking for the BBC during the turbulent 1930s. Science and religion In the early twentieth century a growing number of high-profile British scientific intellectuals had begun to advance science-based philosophies concerning the nature of reality and the place of



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humankind in the universe, typically in religious or spiritual terms. For prominent physicists like James Jeans, the new physics implied that the universe had been designed by a mathematical God; while for Oliver Lodge, who remained wedded to late nineteenth-century ether physics, the ether was a non-material domain inhabited by deceased human spirits.16 Meanwhile, alongside growing public acceptance of Darwinian evolutionary theory, well-known biologists like Julian Huxley and E.W. MacBride had begun to regard human evolution as progressive and purposeful; others, like the palaeontologist Robert Broom, maintained that this phenomenon constituted evidence of a divine Creator. For the BBC, and for its director-general in particular, such overlaps between the domains of science and religion posed a severe problem. Religion during this period, as Briggs has pointed out, ‘was almost as controversial … as politics, and in religious matters Reith had strong, if not entirely orthodox, Christian feelings and beliefs of his own’.17 Indeed, from 1924 onwards, at Reith’s insistence, not only had Sunday religious services become a staple of BBC programming, but a formal Central Religious Advisory Committee had been created to guide him on religious matters. Most importantly, in early 1928, when Reith orchestrated a partial relaxation of the government’s ban on statements of controversy in broadcast talks, he and the BBC’s Board Of Governors ‘agreed to continue to exclude the discussion of certain subjects likely to offend religious or moral susceptibilities’.18 An unexpected shift in the BBC’s attitude concerning this exclusion, however, occurred in late 1929 following an educational ‘Points of View’ (September–November 1929) talks symposium in which three scientific intellectuals (H.G. Wells, J.B.S. Haldane and Oliver Lodge) had each offered ‘personal expressions of their respective philosophies of life’. Although their chosen themes were predominantly political, the scientists had also briefly spoken of their religious views. Crucially, the BBC encountered no objections to their talks, neither from the general public nor from the government; on the contrary, the symposium had promisingly ‘made a remarkable impression on public opinion’.19 Soon afterwards the heads of the BBC’s Adult Education Department felt emboldened to prepare a twelve-part, ground-breaking series, Science and Religion, broadcast in late 1930, designed ‘to present to thoughtful listeners a personal interpretation of the relation of science to

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religion by speakers eminent as churchmen, as scientists, and as philosophers’.20 Reith, remaining sceptical, undertook key governance precautions in advance of this series. He and the Board of Governors began by amending the BBC’s written policy, which prohibited any ‘direct or indirect attack on the Christian religion’, inserting the clause ‘that an exception be authorised for the Science and Religion series, subject to the Director-General’s personal attention in consultation with the Archbishop of York’.21 When Reith met the archbishop, William Temple, his principal aim was to garner advice on how to limit what speakers might be permitted to say. Temple, however, urged caution, warning Reith that ‘[n]othing can be more disastrous in the long run than to let the notion get around that religious people dare not let the case against their convictions be frankly stated’. Instead, Temple proposed a solution that was ultimately adopted by the series’ producers: the preponderance of speakers should be religious men, and all speakers must be ‘true thinkers, sincere lovers of and enquirers after the truth’.22 Identifying suitable speakers, however, proved considerably less troublesome than Reith had feared. For, as Peter Bowler has effectively argued, a climate of reconciliation between science and religion had taken hold in Britain during the late 1920s, and its effects would continue into the ensuing decade. The key outcome was a progressive, modernist wing of the Anglican Church which embraced the views of scientists such as those cited above.23 The BBC’s twelve selected speakers for Science and Religion included five eminent churchmen and four well-known scientists, all of whom reflected this conciliatory stance. One theologian reiterated the symposium moderator’s conviction that ‘it is the duty of religion to accept and assimilate scientific knowledge’.24 The physicist A.S. Eddington, already well known for his idealist philosophy that linked modern physics theory with the plausibility of belief in God, concluded that, armed ‘with this guidance, we may embark on the adventure of spiritual life uncharted though it may be. It is sufficient that we carry a compass.’25 Even Bronislaw Malinowski, the renowned anthropologist and self-declared religious agnostic, concluded that ‘all my scientific evidence tends to show that there are no reasons and no room for conflict between science and ­religion … Religion gives man the mastery of his fate, even as science gives him the control of natural forces …’.26



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While Science and Religion may be understood as a turning point, the BBC’s ban relaxation was not absolute. Pseudoscience topics like palmistry and phrenology, for example, were not considered ‘sufficiently respectable to be handled in talks’.27 More generally, any direct criticism of Christian beliefs in radio talks continued to be expressly forbidden. Hence, both the secularist Rationalist Press Association (RPA) and the National Secular Society (whose members included leading atheist scientists) would repeatedly fail in their campaigns to gain access to the BBC’s airwaves.28 Furthermore, when a near breach of this secularist ban did occur, repercussions ensued. The episode in question concerned the adult education series Web of Thought and Action (April–June 1934) when, during one talk Hyman Levy, a Marxist scientific intellectual and former RPA director, interviewed the Anglican dean of Exeter. Departing from the series’ explicit aim of examining the social significance of interviewees’ professional works, Levy instead chose to probe the theologian’s personal religious faith, interrogating him on scientific rationalist grounds.29 Levy’s apparent transgression almost certainly factored in his subsequent absence from BBC talks.30 Unquestionably the most historically significant, if unconventional, beneficiary of the BBC’s decision to relax its ban science-and-religion discussion was spiritualism, the belief that humans possess a soul which survives in a spirit-world after bodily death and communicates with the living. Several factors contributed to the BBC’s acceptance of spiritualist discussion on radio. Firstly, spiritualism enjoyed enormous appeal during the interwar years amongst the British general public, surpassing even its Victorian popularity.31 Moreover, since its adherents included leading churchmen and scientists, spiritualism could readily be construed by BBC administrators as a potentially constructive bridge between science and established religion. Most importantly, Sir Oliver Lodge, the nation’s leading exponent of spiritualism, was not only a distinguished physicist, wireless research pioneer and prolific writer, but a committed Christian who had developed and maintained a close relationship with Reith and the BBC since its inception.32 Nevertheless, although Lodge was permitted to explain and defend his spiritualist views in major talks symposia, the BBC ensured that his opinions were contrasted with those of other speakers. One instance was The Future Life (January–April 1933),

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where intellectuals ‘of distinguished eminence’ each offered ‘a statement of personal belief’ on life after death.33 In this series, theologians endorsed immortality from their Christian faith perspective, while a participating philosopher suggested that immortality was consistent with his belief in divine existence. Two scientists, both adherents of purposeful evolution, also offered nuanced views: the physiologist J.S. Haldane, though sympathetic to Christian theology, rejected the conception of individual mortality (which ‘puts man in the place of God’) in favour of collective humankind’s immortality; Julian Huxley, reflecting his humanist creed, warned that undue concern with immortality (for which ‘there is no proof or scientific evidence’) could reduce attempts ‘to improve this world by concentrating on the next’.34 But for Oliver Lodge, the committed ethereal spiritualist, the existence of an after-life was scientifically irrefutable: the dead exist ‘in an etheric environment instead of a material one’; and, Lodge insisted, ‘of the fact that it is themselves with whom I converse I am certain’.35 A second example involving Lodge was Inquiry Into the Unknown (January–March 1934), a twelve-part series introduced by the self-styled mystic and frequent broadcaster Gerald Heard, where speakers recounted their varied experiences of paranormal phenomena. Once again, the BBC adopted measures to placate the scientific and religious establishments. In this case, the chosen speakers, including Lodge, were all active members of the Society for Psychical Research, a reputable body whose investigations were explicitly undertaken ‘in the same spirit of exact and unimpassioned enquiry which has enabled Science to solve so many problems …’.36 Invited participants, moreover, were pillars of British society and, judging by their scripts, each had been instructed to refrain from any reference to established religion.37 Science and eugenics Religion was not the only belief system that impinged on the social and ethical implications of science. Historians have amply demonstrated the broad appeal of the eugenics movement in interwar Britain, highlighting that its supporters ranged from political conservatives to progressives, and included many prominent scientific intellectuals.38 Ideologically, these eugenists believed that the planned control of human breeding was not only scientifically



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feasible but socially desirable. Leading their cause was the British Eugenics Society, which advocated state adoption of two eugenic initiatives: encouraging breeding amongst people endowed with the most favourable intellectual and physical characteristics (‘positive’ eugenics); and discouraging it amongst those least endowed (‘negative’ eugenics). In the late 1920s, citing mounting evidence that ‘feeble-mindedness’ was endemic within Britain’s majority working-class population, and noting that working-class family ­ sizes far outnumbered those of the middle classes, the Eugenics Society launched a concerted campaign pressing the government to enact ‘negative’ eugenic legislation for sterilisation of the mentally ‘unfit’. Although the Society successfully engineered the introduction of a private member’s Bill into the House of Commons in 1931, it failed to secure a majority vote.39 Nonetheless, for the remainder of the decade, sterilisation and other eugenic measures continued to be vigorously debated amongst geneticists and other scientists, notably in the journal Nature’s editorials and correspondence. The BBC’s handling of eugenics was deeply contentious, not least because its advocacy on radio risked offending working-class listeners, potentially the BBC’s largest audience. An early example, broadcast soon after the ban on statements of controversy had been lifted, was the Points of View (February–March 1930) symposium where speakers promoted eugenic measures in thinly veiled class terms. The economist Josiah Stamp opined that ‘multiplication of the stock from this section of the population’ must be discouraged ‘in every possible way’, while the physicist James Jeans stated that ‘our first duty is, at all costs, to prevent the moral, mental and physical wreckage of today from reproducing itself’.40 In a talk the following year, the theologian Dean Inge insisted, ‘Science teaches us … that no progress can be permanently secure without an intrinsic improvement in the race itself.’41 A more serious charge, however, is that the BBC, over the course of several years of science talks programming, essentially endorsed the Eugenics Society’s legalised sterilisation aims. These talks were the brainchild of the BBC’s science producer Mary Adams,42 herself a Eugenics Society member, and involved a suite of biologist speakers, notably Julian Huxley and John R. Baker, who were likewise active Society members. The lead-up to this episode began in early 1930, when the Eugenics Society council unanimously approved a recommendation that the Society ‘take an initiative in getting voluntary s­ terilisation

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legalised’. Julian Huxley, one of its five signatories, was consequently appointed to the Society’s Committee for Legalising Eugenic Sterilisation, which, in July 1930, published a pamphlet setting out arguments for a draft Bill.43 Meanwhile, Mary Adams, recently hired as a BBC Adult Education Department producer, had begun developing her inaugural biology talks series, A1 or C3?: The Future of the Race (November–December 1930).44 Subsequently published in the Listener with accompanying photos and tables, and purportedly an educational series, A1 or C3? was nonetheless highly partisan. Introducing the series, a former Eugenics Society president, Major Leonard Darwin, cited a recent report that 300,000 ‘persons in this country …, on account of mental defect, are incapable of managing their own affairs’. Darwin expressed grave concern that ‘a slow deterioration is now actually taking place’; he concluded that only ‘by taking the laws of heredity fully into account’ could ‘our future be safeguarded’.45 In her ensuing talks, after outlining evolutionary theory of acquired characteristics, Adams explained how Mendelian theory of genetic mutations accounted for some parents’ ‘mentally defective’ offspring. By her fourth talk, ‘Shall the Unfit Survive?’, Adams was explicitly arguing the case for sterilisation of the ‘unfit’, remarkably using text drawn from the Eugenics Society’s pamphlet noted above. After the Eugenics Society’s failed attempt at legalising sterilisation in July 1931, Adams became enmeshed in the organisation’s renewed campaigning efforts. Now elected to the Society’s Sterilisation Committee, Adams launched another BBC science talks series, What is Man? (November–December 1931), where the Society’s aims were vociferously promoted. Adams’s principal speaker was John R. Baker, an Oxford zoology lecturer, spermicidal contraception researcher and right-wing Eugenics Society Fellow.46 In the series’ fifth talk, ‘The Control of Development’ (December 1931), Baker maintained that although ‘in pure science there are no values … nevertheless I cannot help feeling that mental defect is fundamentally bad, and to allow congenital mental defectives to produce children seems sheer madness’. ‘Unless something is done about it’, he continued, ‘we shall before very long find ourselves in grave danger, as they are among the most fertile people.’ Baker lamented that, had it been passed, the Society’s sterilisation Bill ‘would have begun a new era in the treatment of mental defectives’. He concluded by requesting that listeners ‘get a copy of Hansard’



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and inform him of ‘any legitimate arguments which might be put forward that did not find a place in the discussion in Parliament’.47 In 1933, following a management shake-up in its Adult Education Department, the BBC undertook a radical departure from its prior eugenics-related talks programming. As two symposium examples illustrate, speakers’ pro-sterilisation views were met for the first time with opposing argument, usually from the scientific Left. First, in the Biology in Everyday Life (March–April 1933) symposium, John Baker reiterated his demand for sterilisation legislation. But in the final talk the left-wing geneticist J.B.S. Haldane pointed out that feeble-mindedness is neither strongly inherited nor incurable. Rebutting Baker, he warned that ‘a policy of wholesale sterilisation … would certainly not be applied impartially as between different social classes’. ‘The attempt to justify such measures on biological grounds’, Haldane concluded, ‘is a prostitution of science….We biologists cannot prevent statesmen from doing these things, but we can most emphatically protest against their being done in the name of biology.’48 The second instance occurred in early 1934, in the final episode of a talks series addressing the application of scientific research to social needs. Julian Huxley, still a staunch eugenist, asked his interviewee, Hyman Levy, whether scientists ought to study ‘the methods by which populations can be either checked or encouraged’. ‘You will agree’, he continued, ‘that eugenics is a vital problem’ that deserves ‘intensive study, instead of being entirely neglected by the powers that be’. Levy strongly disagreed, insisting that exercising ‘control over the social background’ was a necessary prerequisite to any population control measures. But, he added, such control would entail deciding ‘what kind of society we want’, a question which, he insisted, it was not for science to answer.49 Eugenics was not discussed on BBC radio for the next six years, a period during which a sequence of key events led to eugenics’ severely compromised reputation; by the decade’s end it had become a scientifically discredited ideology. In the mid-1930s, when it implemented a more conservative programming regime in its Talks Department, the BBC reassigned its science producer Mary Adams, and ‘dropped’ John R. Baker from its speakers’ roster.50 Externally, a growing body of ‘reform’ eugenists were in the ascendancy, swayed by the scientific Left’s political argument that ‘feeble-mindedness’ and other ‘inferior’ human characteristics were as much a consequence of debilitating social and e­nvironmental

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factors as of genetic inheritance. Somewhat surprisingly, a leading light amongst these reformists was Julian Huxley, described by one historian as ‘the agent and symbol of ideological change’ in the eugenics community.51 It was Huxley as well who played a key role in the BBC’s return to the eugenics topic: in 1937 he became the BBC’s scientific advisor on its Talks Advisory Committee, and he was likely instrumental in the BBC Control Board chairman’s request in 1938 for ‘a series on Heredity’. The assigned BBC science producer contacted Huxley for assistance and the outcome was the six-part series What is Inheritance? (April–May 1939); its principal speaker, the animal geneticist F.A.E. Crew, was one of Huxley’s closest associates. Crew, like Huxley, was a long-standing Eugenics Society member and a previously committed negative eugenist; but, over the course of the 1930s, he too had become a vocal reformer. In Crew’s concluding BBC talk he stressed that mental deficiency resulted from a combination of genetic and environmental factors; a geneticist could therefore not be expected ‘to support a denial of parentage’ to those suffering from this deficiency. And even in cases where environmental factors could be ruled out, ‘the imposition of non-propagation’ would necessitate knowledge of ‘the exact hereditary nature of the condition’, an understanding which as yet, he pointed out, ‘has not been clearly demonstrated’ by science.52 The BBC’s handling of eugenics further illustrates the complexity and shifting terrain of science governance during the 1930s. However unpalatable by contemporary standards, the BBC’s early one-sided endorsement of the Eugenics Society’s efforts to legalise sterilisation of the unfit was, in actuality, an accurate reflection of the British scientific community’s eugenics stance, notwithstanding isolated critics like J.B.S. Haldane. Likewise, through its attentiveness to scientists’ reformist views on the subject, by the decade’s end the BBC ensured that they were heard on the domestic airwaves. Science and war Almost certainly the one issue which most galvanised the general public’s ambivalence towards science was its association with warfare. From the Great War onwards, critics in Britain had increasingly warned that scientists’ development of ever-more destructive military weapons posed an unprecedented danger to the future of humankind. In the politically charged atmosphere of the 1930s, the



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Corporation was confronted with the challenge of balancing two apparently conflicting aims: educating Britain’s listening public in science’s positive, beneficial contribution to human knowledge and material progress, while also satisfying its public service requirement to air controversial views in broadcast talks. In the main, the BBC resolved this governance dilemma by privileging the views of scientists over non-scientists on this issue. From a variety of ideological perspectives, the BBC’s scientist speakers argued that primary responsibility for the harmful applications of science to warfare lay beyond the scientific community; science itself was ethically neutral. In an October 1931 Listener article, ‘The Uses and Abuses of Science’, the philosopher and public intellectual Cyril Joad inverted the widely reported argument expressed by E.A. Burroughs, bishop of Ripon, four years earlier at the British Association’s annual conference. Burroughs, arguing that mankind’s moral progress had outpaced that of science, had proposed that science take a ten-year holiday to eradicate this ‘moral lag’.53 Joad, on the contrary, argued that civilisation ‘is only skin deep’. ‘Scratch the modern man’, he wrote, ‘and as the Great War showed, the savage appears…. he is within measurable distance of exterminating himself.’ He stressed that mankind must ‘learn to control the powers which the scientists have won for him’. Scientists, for their part, ‘must emerge from their isolation and realise their social responsibilities’; they ‘must enquire into the uses to which society proposes to put their work, before they consent to do it’. Joad concluded by quoting Albert Einstein’s recent statement: ‘I appeal to my fellow scientists to refuse to co-operate in research for war purposes!’54 An early rebuttal to Joad’s thesis, one which exposed the BBC to charges of left-wing bias, was broadcast two years later in a scripted dialogue between the aforementioned scientific socialist Hyman Levy and his interviewer, Julian Huxley. Levy maintained that the root problem lay neither with science nor scientists, but with nationalism and capitalism. He speculated that much scientific research was being conducted in secret ‘in order that British industrialists and British war departments may compete nationally against the foreigner’. If this was true, Levy continued, ‘we must give up all this clap-trap about science always being the benefactor of humanity at large and international in its aspect’. Reflecting his Marxist convictions, Levy concluded that ‘war follows naturally

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out of the struggle for markets, [where] science is being used to intensify the one and prepare for the other’.55 The BBC faced an even greater dilemma concerning leftist scientists when, in August 1934, it invited the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane to participate in its forthcoming Cause of War (October–December 1934) talks series. Haldane, rather than preparing ‘a quite dispassionate scientific statement’ on the biological causes of war as his producer had anticipated, instead dealt with ‘the technical and economic side’ in his script. Britain could avoid war, he argued, by strengthening its defences (gas-masks, bomb-proof shelters, etc.) and curtailing its rearmament programme: ‘If we can make ourselves less vulnerable, and at the same time less alarming to others, we shall be helping the cause of peace.’ In passing, Haldane inserted a barbed critique of Britain’s arms manufacturers: ‘If you want to catch war-raisers find out who is making money out of wars and rumours of wars.’56 When Haldane refused to revise his script, remarking ‘I cannot see that biology has any relevance to the causes of war’,57 the BBC cancelled his talk. Although the Corporation accepted full blame for the ‘unfortunate misunderstanding’, the incident provoked a vocal backlash: H.G. Wells cancelled an agreed BBC talk in protest, angry letters to the press ensued and the Daily Herald published Haldane’s script in full.58 Yet, when the BBC gave voice to non-left scientists in adult education talks series, they too were defensive of science’s relationship to war. In ‘The Humanity of Science’ (December 1936), the politically conservative physiologist A.V. Hill began by noting that ‘bombing aeroplanes and poison gas are regarded by many as the most significant products of the scientific age’. On the contrary, Hill argued, ‘science can scarcely be blamed for the misuse which non-scientific people … make of certain scientific discoveries’; rather, ‘it is government … which decides on the use or abuse of any particular discoveries: and the number of … Prime Ministers, or even Members of Parliament who have acquaintance with science is still – to put it mildly – insignificant’.59 Another representative non-left speaker was Julian Huxley, who, in ‘Science and War’ (November 1933), noted that scientific fruits of war also ‘conferred permanent gifts on peace’, citing aviation and caterpillar (off-road) tractors as important examples. Huxley further argued that science could even ‘make war as unlikely as possible’, speculating that ‘it might well be that scientific devices will make future



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warfare so intensely horrible as to bring about an overwhelming pressure towards peace and disarmament’.60 By the late 1930s, radio discussions concerning the relations between science and war assumed an altogether different tone. A key turning point occurred in September 1938 when, amidst the Munich crisis and looming war, the BBC’s deputy director-general invited Sir William Bragg, a pillar of the scientific establishment, to prepare a Sunday evening radio ‘sermon’. He specifically requested that Bragg address ‘the ideas and ideals implicit in the [recently published Times] Letter’ to which Bragg had been a signatory. The letter in question, which had attracted considerable public attention, was an urgent appeal ‘for acceptance of moral and spiritual rearmament as the fundamental force for peace’.61 In Bragg’s ensuing talk, ‘Moral Rearmament. The Need of the Day’ (October 1938), he proposed that science, a model of ‘sound humility’ and experiment, ‘can give us great help when we work for our neighbours’ to attain spiritual ‘reconcilement’. ‘The nearer we come to internal reconcilement’, Bragg concluded, ‘the more effective we shall be in arranging a reconcilement which is external and international … It is for this [purpose] that moral rearmament is necessary.’62 Bragg’s 1938 talk, a conspicuous departure from the BBC’s prior handling of ‘science and war’ in its domestic programming, hinted at the stance the Corporation would soon adopt under actual wartime conditions, when it would become subject to the Ministry of Information’s government oversight. In the Second World War, BBC science governance would primarily involve supporting homefront morale by highlighting science and scientists’ contribution to the war effort, a pronounced shift from the BBC’s prior, decade-long endeavour to expose listeners to the multifaceted nature of science’s socio-political and ethical ramifications. Conclusion When the fledgling BBC began its adult educational programming in 1930, it could not have anticipated the range and types of problems that it would encounter in relation to its governance of science and society talks. Three main interrelated factors presented unexpected difficulties. Firstly, within science itself, ongoing theoretical advances in the physical and biological sciences had profound implications for extra-scientific beliefs, notably religious and

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eugenic. Secondly, the scientific community was becoming increasingly politicised, adopting rival ideological stances on social concerns. Thirdly, the general public expressed growing discomfort with dangers posed by science, not least in the military sphere. Compounding these concerns were issues arising from within the Corporation itself: vested interests (e.g., Mary Adams’s promotion of eugenics), acute moral sensibilities (e.g., John Reith’s religiosity) and personnel blunders (e.g., Haldane’s ‘banned broadcast’ debacle) are striking examples. On the question of how well the BBC satisfied its public service remit, two criticisms might be levelled. Firstly, with few exceptions, scientism permeated the content of BBC science and society talks; clearly, the BBC’s conception of balanced controversy was one favouring scientists’ outlooks. Secondly, class bias, especially in the case of eugenics, was strongly in evidence. But these phenomena were symptomatic of Britain’s wider intellectual milieu and its class-ridden society: as such, the BBC was unexceptional. More problematic was the BBC’s inattention to the impact of its programming on the listening public, a shortcoming that would be only partially remedied in the ensuing decade.63 Perhaps the ultimate measure of the BBC’s governance success is a comparison with contemporary English-speaking broadcast networks abroad, where the American case is most apposite. There, where commercial radio was paramount, science programmes, as Marcel LaFollette has pointed out, ‘formed only a miniscule portion’ of overall schedules. Moreover, unlike their British counterpart, ‘the scientific community as a whole remained uneasy and suspicious of the mass media’.64 The principal historical conclusion is that, by enabling intellectuals to express conflicting views on the place of science in society, and during a particularly tumultuous era, the BBC established a forum for ideas of change, albeit within safe limits. As such, its governance ethos set a precedent for the Corporation in the decades to follow. The internal governance mechanisms of the BBC ­determined – that is to say governed – the very nature of science so far as the British listening public, and the next generation of scientists, were concerned.



Governing science on BBC radio in 1930s Britain 251 Notes

 1 Peter Bowler, Science for all: the popularization of science in early twentieth-century Britain (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009).  2 Ralph Desmarais, ‘Promoting science: the BBC, scientists, and the British public, 1930–1945’ (MA dissertation, University of London, 2004), p. 52.  3 Thomas Kelly, A history of adult education in Great Britain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1992), ch. 16.  4 A.H. Halsey (ed.), Twentieth-century British social trends (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), p. 194.  5 Cf. F.M. Turner, ‘Public science in Britain, 1880–1919’, Isis, 71 (1980), 589–608.  6 W.H. Hadow et al., New ventures in broadcasting: a study in adult education (London: BBC, 1928), p. xv.  7 Hadow et al., New ventures, p. 38.  8 Hadow et al., New ventures, p. 42.  9 Asa Briggs, The history of broadcasting in the UK (5 vols, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), vol. 2, p. 53. 10 Andrew Crisell, An introductory history of British broadcasting (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 25. 11 John Robinson, Learning over the air: 60 years of partnership in adult learning (London: BBC, 1982), pp. 53–75 and passim. 12 Peter Collins, ‘The British Association as public apologist for science, 1919–1946’, in Roy MacLeod and Peter Collins (eds), The parliament of science (Northwood: Science Reviews, 1981), pp. 211–36; Gary Werskey, The visible college: a collective biography of British scientists and socialists of the 1930s (London: Allen Lane, 1978), pp. 30–9. 13 D.L. LeMahieu, A culture for democracy: mass communication and the cultivated mind in Britain between the wars (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), p. 144. 14 BBC Written Archives Centre (hereafter BBCWAC) S322/43/1, ‘Mary Adams – programme suggestions’, February 1937. 15 R.S. Lambert, Ariel and all his quality: an impression of the BBC from within (London: Gollancz, 1940), p. 65. 16 James Jeans, Physics and philosophy (New York: Dover, 1981); W.P. Jolly, Sir Oliver Lodge (London: Constable, 1974). 17 Asa Briggs, The history of broadcasting in the UK, vol. 1, p. 248. 18 BBCWAC R1/1/1, BoG Minute 22, ‘Removal of ban on controversy’, 14 March 1928. 19 BBCWAC R34/317/2, BBC controversial broadcasting (1929–1957), ‘Policy’, pp. 7–10. The BBC received, and rebuffed, only one complaint, from the Conservative Party, maintaining that the opening

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talk had been party political, requiring an opposing statement. S.A. Moseley, Broadcasting in my time (London: Rich and Cowan, 1935), p. 105. 20 Radio Times, 7 November 1930, p. 372. 21 BBCWAC R1/1/1, Minutes 53, 66, ‘Religion’, 29 May 1930, 2 July 1930. 22 K.M. Wolfe, The churches and the British Broadcasting Corporation, 1922–1956: the politics of broadcast religion (London: SCM, 1984), p. 30. 23 Peter Bowler, Reconciling science and religion: the debate in early twentieth-century Britain (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001). 24 Julian Huxley, Science and religion: a symposium (London: Howe, 1931), p. 95. 25 Matthew Stanley, Practical mystic: religion, science and A.S. Eddington (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007); Huxley, Science and religion, p. 130. 26 Huxley, Science and religion, pp. 80–1. 27 BBCWAC R51/397/2, Memorandum, Maconachie to Cox, 7 April 1938. 28 Prominent RPA scientist members included Arthur Keith, Julian Huxley, and J.B.S. Haldane; see Wolfe, Churches, p. 339. 29 The Listener, 16 May 1934, p. 831. 30 For increased BBC caution concerning controversial talks, see D. Cardiff, ‘The serious and the popular: aspects of the evolution of style in the radio talk’, Media, Culture and Society, 2 (1980), 29–47; p. 34. 31 C.f. Jenny Hazelgrove, Spiritualism and British society between the wars (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); Georgina Byrne, Modern spiritualism and the Church of England, 1850–1939 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010). 32 For Lodge’s Christian beliefs, see J.D. Root, ‘Science, religion, and psychical research: the monistic thought of Sir Oliver Lodge’, Harvard Theological Review, 71 (1978), 263. 33 G. Seligman et al., The future life: a symposium (London: Hopkinson, 1933), p. v. 34 The Listener, 22 March 1933, pp. 438–9. 35 The Listener, 15 March 1933, pp. 403–4. 36 Alan Gauld, The founders of psychical research (London: Routledge, 1968), p. 138. 37 Guests included Sir Ernest Bennett, MP, Dame Edith Lyttelton and Lord Charles Hope. 38 Cf. P.M.H. Mazumdar, Eugenics, human genetics and human failings: the Eugenics Society, its sources and its critics in Britain (London:



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Routledge, 1992); Diane B. Paul, ‘Eugenics and the Left’, Journal for the History of Ideas, 45 (1984), 567–90. 39 John Macnicol, ‘Eugenics and the campaign for voluntary sterilisation in Britain between the wars’, Social History of Medicine, 2 (1989), 147–69. 40 The Listener, 19 March 1930, p. 516; The Listener, 5 March 1930, p. 397. 41 The Listener, 30 September 1931, p. 534, italics in the original. 42 Allan Jones, ‘Mary Adams and the producer’s role in early BBC science broadcasts’, Public Understanding of Science, 21 (2011), 968–83. 43 ‘A proposed sterilization bill’, Eugenics Review, 22 (1930), 122–6. 44 A1 and C3 were the British Army’s highest and lowest fitness grades for military service during the First World War. 45 The Listener, 12 November 1930, p. 795. 46 Cf. M.G. Kenny, ‘Racial science in social context: John R. Baker on eugenics, race, and the public role of the scientist’, Isis, 95 (2004), 394–419. 47 The Listener, 16 December 1931, p. 1053. 48 J.R. Baker and J.B.S. Haldane, Biology in everyday life (London: Allen and Unwin, 1933), pp. 108–9. 49 The Listener, 3 January 1934, p. 24. 50 BBCWAC ‘J.R. Baker RCONT’, Memorandum, Adams to Barnes, 27 March 1945. 51 P.G. Werskey, ‘British scientists and “outsider” politics, 1931–1945’, Science Studies, 1, 67–83; p. 73. Huxley’s shifting eugenics views were primarily due to the influence of his friend Lancelot Hogben who, from the early 1930s, had mounted ‘a fierce attack upon the social Darwinism latent in the thinking of most eugenists’, Werskey, ‘British scientists’. See also Mazumdar, Eugenics, ch. 4. 52 The Listener, 18 May 1939, pp. 1043–4. 53 ‘British Association: Bishop of Ripon’s address’, The Times, 5 September 1927, p. 15. See also Anna-K. Mayer, ‘“A combative sense of duty”: Englishness and the scientists’, in C. Lawrence and Anna-K. Mayer (eds), Regenerating England (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 70–5. 54 The Listener, 9 September 1931, pp. 410–11. 55 The Listener, 11 October 1933, 525–7, esp. p. 545. 56 J.B.S. Haldane, A banned broadcast and other essays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1946), pp. 18–25. 57 BBCWAC ‘Haldane RCONT’, Letter, Haldane to Siepmann, 24 October 1934. 58 ‘Professor Haldane’s cancelled talk: protest by Mr H.G. Wells to the BBC’, The Times, 3 November 1934, p. 14; Daily Herald, 3 November 1934, p. 10.

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59 The Listener, 30 December 1936, pp. 1239–40. 60 The Listener, 29 November 1933, pp. 821–3 and p. 848. 61 BBCWAC ‘William Bragg RCONT’, Letter, Graves to Bragg, 23 September 1938; ‘“The rule of law”: moral rearmament’, The Times, 1 September 1938, p. 7. 62 The Listener, 20 October 1938, pp. 837–8. 63 Robert Silvey, Who’s listening? The story of BBC audience research (London: Allen and Unwin, 1974). 64 M.C. LaFollette, Science on the air: popularisers and personalities on radio and early television (Chicago: Chicago: University Press, 2008), pp. 3–4.

13

Governing the science of selection: the psychological sciences, 1921–45 Alice White

Can leaders be picked and if so, how?1

During the Second World War, this deceptively simple question caused a furore, with heated debates in Parliament and letters to the editor in most major newspapers; everyone from the clergyman to the schoolmaster weighed in on the subject.2 As well as those from these established professions, those working in the field of psychological science sought to have their voices heard on the matter: psychiatrists and psychologists argued that their study of human science gave them the expertise to help govern who was best suited to perform the role of leadership. After years of working in industrial management they made the case that their work had relevance for the British military. This case was eventually accepted, and psychological science was given a role in establishing methods of selecting men for roles in conjunction with each of the armed forces. This chapter examines how emergent expertise in psychological science was forged in the armed forces, and how psychological scientists attempted to create a space for their expertise, working within and without military systems of governance to shape scientific and non-scientific practices concerning leadership. The psychologists and psychiatrists who worked with the military would have to prove not only their specialised knowledge, but also its operative nature; knowledge had to be put to work and to be proved as useful to its patrons in order for it to become expertise.3 In his analysis of the historical phenomenon of expertise, Eric Ash notes that Pierre-Paul Riquet, who came to be considered an early modern expert in canals, presumably had knowledge and

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confidence in his abilities that pre-dated his proposal to construct a canal, but that ‘his expertise only became tangible – in effect real – once [he] had marshalled it into productive use in the monarch’s service’. As with the psychological scientists, is unclear at exactly what point they became ‘experts’ in governance, but by the end of the war, having seemingly delivered on their promises to control knowledge and innovate, they were clearly considered to fit this definition.4 Psychologists’ early claims to expertise faced resistance, though; in proposing to choose leaders ‘objectively’, based on their minds rather than their status, psychologists represented a threat to traditional, class-based systems, which were strongly represented in the military and, particularly, in the Army. Those who developed methods of allocating men to roles and to measuring and picking out leaders implicitly made a statement about who was most suitable to govern, and what form that governance should take. The battle that was played out between the traditionalists and the scientists in the military was a microcosm of that in British society more generally between those advocating for the preservation of conservative systems and those favouring a liberal meritocracy. The military, particularly during a time of ‘total war’, also presented a microcosm in the sense that it offered unprecedented opportunities for those in the psychological sciences to experiment in a securely funded, ordered military ‘laboratory’ where experiments might be conducted that held relevance for society as a whole. In most instances, psychologists’ collaborations with the military would last only until the conclusion of the war. However, groups such as the Tavistock would take lessons learned in wartime and apply them to society more broadly in the post-war period, where more slowly established links with industry would prove to have greater endurance, if not such vast scope and funding. Governing work From the turn of the century, attempts had been made to expand the boundaries of the psychological sciences from the study of the peripheral deviant, the insane, to the central matters of everyday life such as matters of employment. The study of selection was approached from a number of psychological lineages.5 A brief examination of three institutions during the interwar period pre-



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sents a point of comparison for analysing how governance was shaped, the different paths that led to interaction with structures of governance and the subjects of their science. Some, such as Sir Frederic C. Bartlett and his experimental psychology colleagues at Cambridge University, were academics associated with developing theoretical techniques, who preferred to pursue ‘pure’ experimental laboratory science. Before the First World War, Bartlett had worked at Cambridge under Charles S. Myers, who had secured the money for the first experimental psychology laboratory in the country, and W.H.R. Rivers.6 Both of his seniors then went to work for the Royal Army Medical Corps, but Bartlett was unfit for military service and thus became ‘caretaker’ of the laboratory, teaching and publishing on a number of topics, including The psychology of the soldier. In this text, Bartlett encouraged men to govern themselves as well as their subordinates, noting ‘that a leader should take trouble to know his own character and capacity, and understand clearly what it is that maintains his own authority over his men’.7 Bartlett’s statement about the benefits to the leader of learning psychology reflected an understanding of psychological science as providing general laws, the learning of which could achieve self-improvement, a tradition dating back to the 1859 book Self-help.8 Following the war, Myers departed from Cambridge. Rivers returned ‘full of general schemes and activity’, but died suddenly in 1922, leaving Bartlett as the permanent custodian of the laboratory. He developed Rivers’ plans and contributed his own, growing the department into a respectable part of Cambridge University: a Chair of Experimental Psychology was established in 1931, and Bartlett had three lecturers assisting him by 1933.9 He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1932. Bartlett followed the established paths legitimating science by engaging in experiments within an academic institution, publishing findings, achieving recognition from scientific governing bodies like the Royal Society and generally operating within the traditionalist structures of internal scientific governance. After departing from Cambridge, Myers took an almost diametrically opposed approach to Bartlett’s; he established the National Institute of Industrial Psychology (NIIP), an organisation oriented towards applying psychology in industry. Bartlett considered that ‘practical interests’ had diverted Myers ‘from what might have been a brilliant experimental career’.10

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State involvement in governing management in industry had begun at the end of the nineteenth century, with the passing of the Factory and Workshop Acts. The earliest regulations dealt with physical health and the ages of workers and their hours of work, but from 1901 legislation was ‘also directed against the evils of “sweating”’, condemned alike by ‘the best class of employers of labour and by social reformers’.11 This move against demanding hard work for low wages as well as towards providing a ‘healthy’ workplace presented opportunities for the psychological sciences to find a niche in industry, promoting rationalisation of manpower as an alternative method of ensuring output but meeting welfare requirements. Colonel E.G. Wace attempted to introduce similar scientific direction of manpower during the First World War, with limited success. Although he had the support of the Army, which put him in command of the new Directorate of Labour in 1917, junior officers ‘could not resist the temptation to depart from strictly outlined structures and schedules’.12 Increased scientific governance of the workplace was further promoted at the end of the First World War when, shortly after the dissolution of the Health of Munition Workers’ Committee in July 1918, the Home Office encouraged the Medical Research Committee (now Medical Research Council) and the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research to appoint the Industrial Fatigue Research Board.13 The NIIP ‘came into existence in 1921, partly in order to apply the principles set forth by the Industrial Health Research Board’ and in part to remedy the problems that Myers saw in society.14 It asserted its scientific credentials through some of the traditional society links, beginning with Myers’ procurement of industry contracts by giving lectures at the Royal Institution, where the science was targeted at its potential consumers. To circumvent the resistance that Wace had encountered, the NIIP more explicitly promoted the benefits of using its science to govern a workplace, aiming to ‘promote by systematic scientific methods a more effective application of human energy in occupational life and a correspondingly higher standard of comfort and welfare for the workers’.15 Members of the NIIP worked as consultants, their programme of work focused upon vocational guidance, studies of temperament and motor ability and studies of influences upon occupational choices and efficiency.16 This work followed a tradition of studies



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which looked at work through a mechanical metaphor; one proponent claimed, for instance, that ‘scientific management as applied to workmen moves with the smoothness of a well-oiled and perfected machine, in which each one performs his part with the accuracy of a mechanically and mathematically perfect tooth on a gear wheel, when it meshes with the teeth of another wheel in transmitting power’.17 As this claim suggests, issues of power were built into this science, with self-governance informed by science seen as a positive step by some, who saw ‘qualities of individual character as key determinants of social possibility’ and therefore the ability to measure and manage character as liberating.18 Many people, adolescents particularly, sought out the NIIP’s vocational services. Others were critical of the transmission of power up towards owners and managers and away from an increasingly de-skilled workforce. Experiments comparing allocations of boys based on psychological methods with selection based on old management style ‘showed the clear superiority of the former’, with the scientific approach seeming to trump the ‘common sense’ knowledge of masters who had known the boys for some time.19 In this case, it was the middle management whose claimed expertise was usurped in favour of scientific governance. Cambridge had its laboratory, the NIIP was in the workplace; but before the Second World War, the psychiatrists affiliated with the Tavistock Clinic remained in the clinic. Like the NIIP, the Tavistock Clinic was set up in 1920, as a response to social problems such as shell-shock, by neurologist Dr Hugh Crichton-Miller, who aimed to provide care to those of limited means. Although they were engaged in work with the National Council for Mental Hygiene (which aimed to focus on promoting well-being as well as curbing mental illness), psychiatrists found it more difficult than their psychological compatriots during the interwar period to expand beyond a perception of their work as associated with mental illness, deviancy and taboo. Psychologist Millais Culpin noted that few doctors would mention an interest in analysis ‘without the verbal equivalent of spitting three times over the left shoulder, and even to speak about the revival of war memories carried the risk of being accused of advocating free fornication for everyone’.20 The Tavistock Clinic initially had difficulty even in securing premises because of landlords’ fears that its would be dealing with ‘wildly disturbed lunatics!’21 It had made efforts to obtain academic

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recognition, but with limited success, and had problematic relations with the British Psycho-Analytical Society, the official body of its discipline, because of disagreements over how closely to follow Freud.22 In the 1930s, the Tavistock continued to primarily work with individuals and their problems, although it did embark on a methodological expansion, with funding and recognition from the Rockefeller Foundation, training medics and social workers in how to incorporate psychological techniques into their working practices.23 The psychological scientists thus complicate historian David Edgerton’s call for twentieth-century history of science to focus on ‘regular work’, because even a single institution could operate both within and without government-funded hierarchies.24 Much of the work outside of academia was not published, either because of corporate sensitivity or patient confidentiality, or because acquiring the relevant expertise was seen as requiring training or analysis. Yet links with established scientific bodies were utilised to lend legitimacy to work by establishing its scientific nature. Although pursuing different methods of doing so, the Cambridge laboratory, the NIIP and the Tavistock all claimed to investigate the underlying processes of the mind, and to produce from this a distillation of theory and the ability to quantify and potentially control; psychologists offered the armed forces the promise of fundamental knowledge that could help them to innovate and improve their systems of governing men.25 Establishing collaborations and governing leadership The academic laboratory, the factory and the clinic had become established as legitimate sites for the psychologists’ and psychiatrists’ work during the interwar period; however, the relationship between the scientists and the military was far more turbulent. Dramatic and fast-paced change occurred over the course of the Second World War, during which each of these psychological institutions, with their differing approaches to matters of selection, developed a relationship with a branch of the British armed forces. Those who had taken the traditional route to scientific credibility via the academy, the Cambridge psychologists under Bartlett, worked with the force that attracted the highest grade of men, the Royal Air Force (RAF). The NIIP worked with the Royal Navy.



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The Tavistock, which deviated from traditional measures and practices of scientific credibility, worked in association with the ‘hidebound’ British Army. The approaches deployed and the respective relationships of these institutes with the forces reveal the role of factors such as culture and social networks in shaping governance of science and governance by science. Despite psychological scientists’ work in industry in the interwar period, their expertise was looked on with contempt by many. The matter of how and by whom men should be governed was lent a greater urgency by the tide of war; Blitzkrieg and the impressive, rapid expansion and success of the Luftwaffe suggested that Germany was organising its men effectively, and that Britain, in retreat, was not. After the various collaborations with the military arms had been set in motion, the scientists developed methods of selection for their respective forces. The scientists’ own views of what governance should entail were illuminated through the creation of tests and theories, and the varying relationships that the different scientists negotiated with the military reflected their experiences of science practices in the civil world. Experimental psychologists of Cambridge and the RAF Perhaps because the aeroplane was seen as such a modern and complex technology, selection was incorporated into the RAF earlier than in any other force. The RAF had not pursued the aviation psychology developed during the First World War, and had no selection techniques beyond interviewing at the outbreak of the Second World War. By early 1940, however, tests were introduced under the supervision of the Cambridge University Psychology Department, where Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) personnel were trained to carry out the testing. Despite this early adoption, Vernon and Parry noted, the introduction of selection in the RAF ‘was more gradual and less unified than in either the Army or Navy’.26 Psychological tests based upon ‘skills’ were perceived as operating in the domain of science, and proved to be uncontroversial. As early as the First World War publication The psychology of the soldier, Bartlett had noted that in the military ‘the groups with which we are concerned, in any case, all possess a firmly established and finely graded system of official leadership. They are already at

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the stage at which leadership as an institution is able to take over some of the functions and authority of the leader as a person.’27 He believed that whilst a knowledge of a man’s skill was useful, it was not crucial, as the institution had sufficient ability to govern its men: they would do as commanded by someone who represented the prestige of the RAF, so the role of individual leaders was less important. The results of the Second World War RAF intelligence tests were ‘available for the guidance of board presidents, but no cut-off levels were laid down’, echoing the assumption that the institution was free to take or leave scientific guidance.28 In ­addition to a fifteen-minute verbal intelligence test, there were a fifteen-minute mathematical test to establish educational level and two fifty-word essays to hint at expression and alertness to current affairs, although little emphasis was placed on this ‘subjective’ test. The short and simple ‘Bartlett Tests’ remained the selection procedure for three years and were seen as helping to make the Service ‘test-conscious’, if not achieving a better fit of men to roles in themselves.29 Interview remained the technique by which officers were chosen until Army War Office Selection Board (WOSB) methods were adopted in 1945. Most work was instead focused on more physical aspects of selection: the problems of fatigue and how to use caffeine and amphetamines appropriately ‘according to the type of individual … in correct dosage the dull appeared somewhat brighter, the average was perceptibly enlivened, while the above average who was normally a “live wire” became “hay-wire” with frayed nerves’.30 The work, like Bartlett’s pre-war work, was defined by the laboratory and a type of psychology very closely linked with the more established expertise of biology. It focused largely upon the limits of men beyond which control was lost, rather than venturing to quantify the capabilities of men. By maintaining the appearance of producing objective science, Cambridge psychology was free of RAF interference; it remained contained within the scientific world rather than attempting to extend its boundaries to encompass governing the social world. The NIIP and the Navy With war on the horizon in 1939, and concerned that their work might be ignored by the forces it could benefit, the directors of the



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NIIP and Tavistock collaborated in promoting their work in a letter offering their services to the War Office. In the spring of 1939, the state did not perceive a need or use for scientific governance of its troops, and the letter remained unanswered. It would be more than a year before NIIP and Tavistock expertise was put to use in military selection. Selection in the Royal Navy was introduced in 1941, with the establishment of the Senior Psychologists Department of the Admiralty. The primary task of this department was to assist with  the selection and allocation of recruits to technical roles. Although the Navy was able to reject four out of five applicants, failure rates for special jobs like torpedomen were high; difficulties with technology were used as a justification for applying scientific management techniques. Most of the qualified personnel were civilians, with eight psychologists provided by the NIIP forming the core: psychologists ‘had no executive authority in the Royal Navy, but acted throughout as technical advisers [so] there was far less frustration than is common when Psychologists work … under non-­professional direction’.31 This thus maintained a separation between the military state and civilian science, although the application of work was carried out by the Women’s Royal Naval Service. As the small number of psychologists suggests, psychological science provided policy and administrative guidance on how to govern, based on its scientific principles, as opposed to taking an active role in the process. Most of the testing staff , numbering 300 at the peak period, had no scientific training before the war, so efforts were made to ensure that methods were ‘as simple and foolproof as possible in order to hand them over’.32 Selection was eventually expanded to involve support staff in depots, barracks, specialist schools and mechanics. As with Bartlett and the RAF, the NIIP saw its role as ‘supplying the recruiters with factual information on the basis of which they could more effectively decide the suitability or otherwise of candidates’.33 Tests included a biographical questionnaire ‘to bring out educational and occupational history, leisure interests and experience of leadership’, a non-verbal intelligence test, colour-blindness tests and an interview to detect recruits who might need to be referred for psychiatric examination.34 Again, no pass-mark was fixed, and the decision was left to those traditionally responsible for governing whether or not to act on the apparently objective

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scientific information with which they were provided. A second round of tests involved further mechanical and mathematical comprehension and spatial-awareness tests, but also took great pains to provide information to recruits on roles via posters, photographs, bulletins, films and sometimes trade test pieces. A talk from a psychologist emphasised to men ‘that it was up to every recruit to do the most difficult job of which he was capable, and not merely one which he thought would give him a pleasant time’, and emphasis was placed on the individual’s choice of role, echoing the ideal that management science was supposed to benefit those governed as much as those governing.35 In being provided a choice of role (albeit in conditions of conscription), men were given the opportunity to opt-in and to see psychology as providing increased freedom and democracy. To the NIIP, leadership was not only a quality desirable in actual leaders but was sought in everyone: ‘leadership experience was advantageous, not only among seamen and officer candidates, but in diverse employments … Scouts, members of Boys’ Brigade, and the like, and of organisations such as the A.T.C. and Sea Cadets showed similar superiority.’36 These measures of leadership, based on experience and involvement in established organisations, were notably similar to what the military already valued and sought, and therefore less threatening than measures of ‘potential’ that the Tavistock group would implement. However, by the end of the war, the NIIP was also looking to more radical meritocratic measures, noting that tests of aptitude were validated against qualifications, not ‘skills on the job’, and hoping that the future would ‘see the isolation and measurement of some of the special qualities possessed by successful officers and leaders of men, by executives and administrators, by teachers, research workers, salesmen, interviewers, and so forth’.37 The Tavistock group and the Army The Army had the biggest problems with allocation of personnel, because it had the least governance over who entered its force; unlike the RAF and Royal Navy, which could select their recruits, the Army had to accept anyone deemed medically fit enough. In 1939, the Army Council agreed to experiment with intelligence testing so as to ensure that technical and fighting staff were capa-



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ble. Psychiatrists conducting their own experiments had obtained promising results, and an advisory committee was appointed, one of whose members was Myers, expanding his influence beyond the Navy and working in affiliation with the Tavistock once more. As a result of their recommendations, the Army Directorate for Selection of Personnel (DSP) was created in 1941, with widespread selection testing for all recruits being implemented through the General Service Scheme in summer 1942. In early 1941, unofficial experiments in officer selection were carried out in Edinburgh by the Tavistock staff. They proved particularly adept at infiltrating the bodies which governed the application of selection science, managing to secure support for their new methods of officer selection from the General Officer Commanding, Sir Andrew Thorne (who had been berated by army colleagues as being ‘bloody Freud of the British Army!’ for suggesting the use of scientific selection), and the influential General Sir Ronald Adam. The psychoanalyst Adrian Stephen, brother of Virginia Woolf, noted that the Tavistock staff ‘can teach us something in the way of practical psychology … in the tactful handling of negotiations’.38 By 1942, the public were baying for a change in how men were selected for commission and politicians were echoing their calls. It was considered that the more technical approach to war used by the Germans was beating the ‘old school tie’ method of governance used in Britain, which chose leaders based on whether they had attended schools in the Headmasters’ Conference.39 The press also noted the hypocrisy of fighting ‘for democracy’ with such an undemocratic Army leadership; arguments over how to govern the Army were representative of broader questions of how to govern a nation, or even the world.40 With all of this popular support for change, in 1942 the first experimental WOSBs were set up, and by autumn there were more than a dozen. The psychological approach was successful at fulfilling Ash’s criterion of expertise as being knowledge which enabled its patrons to take ‘action at a distance’; the principles developed enabled the establishment of boards on the same lines for the Auxiliary Territorial Service and troops abroad in the Middle East, India, Italy and Western Europe. By the end of war, ‘some 140,000 candidates had been through the new procedure, of whom 60,000 passed’.41 Psychology was co-opted by the British government and the military at a time of crisis, using science to combat problems seen as

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being caused by modern science and technological warfare, and in order to shore up moral claims to a ‘good’ democratic form of governance. Military interest in scientific methods of governing the forces was contingent upon factors such as the course of the war and the public’s perception of military institutions. Yet it also arose as a result of practitioners foreseeing a need and seeking solutions to problems before they were officially raised, placing themselves in the natural position to enter the military organisational machine when eventually solutions were sought. It took different forms according to the specific different needs of the forces commissioning the collaboration and the involvement of individuals within those forces. These different forms were informed by the theories and practices of the scientists and their attitudes towards the organisation. As with Navy selection, the selection staff were mainly auxiliary military personnel, but unlike in the Navy the scientists were not self-governing civilians, but located within the hierarchy of the Army, in the ambiguous space of medics in the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), ‘mainly because it was thought that only a scheme run by soldiers would be acceptable to soldiers’.42 At the peak period there were nineteen psychologists (five women), thirty-one officers with some training, and nearly 600 non-technical officers and 700 Non Commissioned Officers (of whom about 50 and 200 respectively were women). The lack of scientific training in the governing ranks was specifically noted as problematic, because the low prestige of the scientists meant that ‘policies which they advocated as scientifically sound were often rejected, and the methods they devised were often misapplied and misinterpreted by insufficiently trained personnel’.43 Scientists complained that intelligent teachers and graduates ‘were liable to be put on to cutting the grass’ at the whim of a Commissioned Officer, a clear suggestion that their technocratic view of how the Army should be governed was not coming to fruition.44 They concluded that: Presumably the lesson to be drawn is that psychologists cannot expect a complex institution like the Army to accept novel procedures merely on scientific grounds, that gradual education and infiltration rather than the imposition of technically valid methods are needed.45

Because of their analytical focus, the psychiatrists working with the Army on the WOSBs saw the organisation itself as being disturbed;



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they treated it as their ‘patient’ and the subject of their techniques of scientific management. As such, they sought to work more actively with it than the other psychologists had with their respective forces, in order to make the changes to selection something which came from within the Army itself: It would have been possible to construct a scheme for officer selection in which psychologists and psychiatrists applied their methods to the problem while the Army made use of their results, but to do so would have been to introduce a ‘foreign body’ into the tissues of the Army which would have provoked an inevitable defense reaction.46

The psychological approach was therefore a more active component in the choosing of Army officers, and aimed at a view of the man as a whole, rather than passively presenting objective data on skills that might make a man suitable. The General Service Scheme that applied basic intelligence and mechanical tests to all conscripts encountered few problems of military resistance, but the WOSBs were beset with conflict and renegotiation of the proper role of scientists and science. Intelligence tests were also used in WOSBs, and much was made of the use of non-verbal tests to measure potential rather than what had been attained through education. Unlike in the RAF and Navy, some scores did rule out certain roles and eliminated men from being considered for officer training, excluding those who ‘would fall in the middle 40% of the general Army population and would not therefore, be more intelligent than the average “other rank” soldier’.47 The scientists made judgements about what a leader should be, and in the view of this highly educated group, those leading should be more intelligent than those they governed. Likewise, whilst the non-verbal intelligence tests were supposed to be blind to education and it was not supposed to matter whether a man had attended a public school, a preference was expressed for the university-educated man as more widely experienced.48 Other tests were designed ‘not so much to reveal officer traits (e.g. leadership) or abilities, as to bring out the candidates’ social reactions under conditions of strain’.49 They included word association, which was used in order to suggest attitudes to others, and anxiety or inner conflict where very short answers or blanks occurred, and Murray’s Thematic Apperception Test, which was used to explore unconscious relations to others by getting candidates to describe what was happening in a picture. The most

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vaunted test developed for WOSBs was the leaderless group test, where candidates were put in groups without allocated leaders and had to complete a task, thus exposing tensions between wanting to do well for oneself and wanting to succeed as a group, and demonstrating the ability of men to manage these tensions. It was considered that the task itself, such as building a bridge, was a disguise for the real psychiatric purpose of the test: observing interaction between men. It may be noted that, unlike the tests used with the RAF and Navy, the outputs of these tests were not quantitative but qualitative. Results were graded on the ‘GABI’ scale, but this technical name belied a straightforward rating of ‘good, average, borderline, inadequate’. The other psychologists were critical of the methodology, but not of the results: ‘whether their methods were entirely technically sound or not – they won the confidence of the Army and stimulated a continuous flow of good material’.50 Although this approach initially won confidence, problems arose, from the psychiatrists’ perspective, from army staff’s beginning to act the ‘amateur psychiatrist’; they struggled to defend the boundaries of their profession from those who thought that they were equally able to interpret the results of the tests. Similarly, some military men ‘found it difficult to accept that an apparently competent man would be rated too low in the intelligence tests for the arm of his choice or when some psychiatric features were uncovered which cast doubts on the man’s stability despite an apparently good impression’.51 Psychological science faced particular challenges with regard to governance; on the one hand, this science was seen as such common sense that a layman with no training might be able to do it, and on the other hand, it was so bound up in theories that the scientifically untrained could not fathom its conclusions. In focusing to such a large extent on the social rather than ‘skills’ or reactions to physical stimuli, the psychiatrists were vulnerable to the imposition of outsiders who had their own perceptions of what was being measured. In addition, they were actively involved in decision making. They therefore could be construed as a threat to some members of the Army, who saw them as ‘dominating the selection procedure by virtue of their technical knowledge and ability to present evidence’, threatening traditional authority with scientific authority.52



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Conclusion At the beginning of the Second World War, psychological science claimed expertise relevant to governance of the armed forces, based upon a comprehension of underlying processes in leadership and theories distilled from this. Each institution aimed to establish the legitimacy of its science as a way of rendering human character visible, quantifiable and thus governable, and often pursued similar methods of achieving this legitimation, such as publications and links with scholarly societies and government committees. Pre-war concepts about how science should work in relation to an organisation carried over into the military collaborations of the Second World War, shaping the psychologists’ view of the objects of their science, as well as how they themselves fitted into structures of governance. The more closely the psychological approach was engaged with the object of study, the more active the governing role they sought to negotiate for themselves with the military during war. The Cambridge psychologists continued to experiment and produce data, focusing on producing general principles of their science, with little concern about its application by those who paid for it. The NIIP acted as it had as industry consultants, offering tests to govern and methods of easing their acceptance by those to whom they were applied, although ultimately not making judgements about what form governance should take. The Tavistock, by contrast, viewed the organisation itself as a poorly functioning organism, and sought to work with it as a psychiatrist would with a patient in order that it should recognise its failings and implement more long-term improvements. By establishing the operative nature of their work, psychologists built their expertise over the course of the war. After the war ended, the Tavistock group was able to codify its expert status, establishing the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations to continue work in this field. This organisation found employment in both private and newly nationalised industry, and increasingly found legitimation through publication and academic links. The war had also opened up new avenues for the experimental psychologists at Cambridge. In 1944, an Applied Psychology Unit was established at Cambridge, and Bartlett embarked upon ‘a line of investigation on complex human abilities’, which some consider to be his ‘most outstanding’ work, culminating in his monograph, Thinking (1958).53 Myers passed away shortly after the end of the war, but

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the NIIP c­ ontinued in its work. In the 1950s, under the directorship of C.B. Frisby, the NIIP shifted its focus from practical application to science, for instance by seeking status as an industrial research association in order to ‘encourage and develop the science of industrial and Occupational Psychology’.54 This organisation would expand further in the 1960s, with support from the Ministry of Technology. Beyond these institutions, however, the role of psychological expertise in governance had been established more generally during the war years; in 1950, the civil service category of ‘Psychologist’ was established, integrating psychological knowledge into the formal governance of Britain. Ironically, applicants were not required to undergo a rigorous selection process.55 Notes  1 Henry Harris, The group approach to leadership-testing (London: Routledge and Paul, 1949), p. 1.  2 The ‘Letters to the Editor’ section of The Times, between 15 and 28 January 1941.  3 For more on the historiography of expertise and the importance of application of knowledge, see the Osiris special issue on this theme, and particularly the introduction: Eric H. Ash, ‘Introduction: expertise and the early modern state’, Osiris, 25 (2010), 1–24.  4 Ash, ‘Introduction’, 5.  5 The terms ‘psychology’, ‘psychiatry’, and ‘psychoanalysis’ were not as clearly demarcated during the mid-twentieth century as they have come to be, and the term ‘psychology’ often used to encompass the latter. Despite this permeable nomenclature, and even somewhat flexible boundaries of practices and theories, institutional groups with different approaches to the psychological sciences can be differentiated.  6 Ben Shephard, Headhunters: the search for a science of the mind (New York: Random House, 2014).  7 F.C. Bartlett, The psychology of the soldier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927), p. 138.  8 Samuel Smiles, Self-help (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).  9 D.E. Broadbent, ‘Frederic Charles Bartlett. 1886–1969’, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 16 (1970), 1–13, esp. p. 3. 10 Geoff Bunn, ‘Charlie and the chocolate factory: C.S. Myers memorial lecture’, The Psychologist, 14 (2001), 579. 11 Charles E. Musgrave, The Factory and Workshop Act, 1901: its general effect and parliamentary history (London: Effingham Wilson and Alan Stuart, Carthusian Press, 1902), p. 9.



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12 Nicholas J. Griffin, ‘Scientific management in the direction of Britain’s military labour establishment during World War I’, Military Affairs, 42 (1978), 198. 13 R.S.F. Schilling, ‘Industrial health research: the work of the Industrial Health Research Board, 1918–44’, British Journal of Industrial Medicine, 1 (1944), 145–52, esp. p. 145. 14 ‘Rationalization and psychology’, The British Medical Journal, 1 (1931), 716. 15 Welch and Myers, Ten years of industrial psychology (1932), p. 5, quoted in Bunn, ‘Charlie and the chocolate factory’, p. 576. 16 H. Ward, ‘National Institute of Industrial Psychology, London: its program of research’, Journal of Educational Sociology, 4 (1930), 163–6. 17 John Frey, ‘The relation of scientific management to labor’, American Federationist, 20 (1913), 297, quoted in Maarten Derksen, ‘Turning men into machines: scientific management, industrial psychology and the “human factor”’, Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences, 50 (2014), 148–65. 18 Roger Smith, ‘Biology and values in interwar Britain: C.S. Sherrington, Julian Huxley and the vision of progress’, Past and Present, (2003), 210–42, esp. p. 241. 19 L.S Hearnshaw, A short history of British psychology, 1840–1940 (London: Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1964), p. 278. 20 Frederick Mott, Neurosis and shell shock (London, 1919), p. 131, quoted in Roger Chickering and Stig Forster, The shadows of total war: Europe, East Asia and the United States, 1919–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 21 H.V. Dicks, Fifty years of the Tavistock Clinic (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 14. 22 For more on the early struggles of the Tavistock and this conflict, see Edgar Jones, ‘War and the practice of psychotherapy: the UK experience, 1939–1960’, Medical History, 48 (2004), 493–510; Pearl King and Riccardo Steiner, The Freud–Klein controversies, 1941–45 (London: Routledge, 2005). 23 Dicks, Tavistock Clinic. 24 David Edgerton, Warfare state: Britain, 1920–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 25 As with Riquet’s canal expertise, the psychologists’ expertise was linked with their claims to control over a body of knowledge that could be put to use in new ways. Ash, ‘Introduction’, pp. 7–8. 26 Philip Ewart Vernon and John B. Parry, Personnel selection in the British forces (London: University of London Press, 1949), p. 68. 27 Bartlett, Psychology of the soldier, p. 138. 28 Vernon and Parry, Personnel selection, p. 69.

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29 Vernon and Parry, Personnel selection, p. 69. 30 Harold E. Whittingham, ‘Medical science and problems of flying’, The British Medical Journal, 1 (1955), 303–9, esp. p. 305. 31 Vernon and Parry, Personnel selection, p. 28. 32 Vernon and Parry, Personnel selection, p. 28. 33 Vernon and Parry, Personnel selection, p. 29. 34 Vernon and Parry, Personnel selection, p. 29. 35 Vernon and Parry, Personnel selection, p. 31. 36 Vernon and Parry, Personnel selection, p. 138. 37 Vernon and Parry, Personnel selection, pp. 209–10. These groups, which they saw as having special qualities of leadership, are notable for their similarity to the composition of the members of the NIIP, just as the qualities which the Tavistock group would highlight were ones they considered themselves to possess. Those who favoured a continuation of the class-based system of governance and considered the psychologists to be usurpers were right; at the very least, psychologists considered that men very like themselves should lead. 38 Statement made during a Business Meeting of the British PsychoAnalytical Society (1943), quoted in Pearl King, ‘Activities of British psychoanalysts during the Second World War and the influence of their inter-disciplinary collaboration on the development of psychoanalysis in Great Britain’, International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 16 (1989), 14–33, esp. 17. 39 The Headmasters’ Conference was a group of élite, exclusive fee-paying public schools. Examples of politicians’ calls for change, with reference to German superiority and the British educational class-system, can be seen in Hansard, 377 (19 February 1942), cols. 1924–99. 40 In particular, the impassioned speech of Thomas Horabin, MP for Cornwall North, Hansard, 377 (19 February 1942), cols. 1924–99. 41 Vernon and Parry, Personnel selection, p. 53; Ash, ‘Introduction’, p. 16. 42 Vernon and Parry, Personnel selection, p. 41. 43 Vernon and Parry, Personnel selection, p. 42. 44 Vernon and Parry, Personnel selection, p. 42. 45 Vernon and Parry, Personnel selection, p. 42. This suggests the continued relevance in the twentieth century of Ash’s contention that in the early modern period, ‘the ability to wrangle recognition and favour from political patrons … could be at least as important as the possession of technical knowledge itself.’ Ash, ‘Introduction’, p. 11 46 J.D. Sutherland and G.A. Fitzpatrick, ‘Some approaches to group problems in the British Army’, Sociometry, 8 (1945), 205–17, esp. p. 208. 47 Tavistock Archives, Box 205802225, WOSBs Write-Up MSS, p. 16.



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48 As with the NIIP psychologists, the Tavistock group’s measures of good leaders (success with intelligence tests, university education) bear notable resemblance to their own qualities. 49 Vernon and Parry, Personnel selection, p. 52. 50 Vernon and Parry, Personnel selection, p. 52. 51 Malcolm Pines, Bion and group psychotherapy (London: Jessica Kingsley, 2000), p. 48. 52 Jeremy A. Crang, The British Army and the people’s war, 1939–1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 35. 53 Alberto Rosa, ‘Sir Fredrick Bartlett (1886–1969): an intellectual biography’ (Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, 2012), www.bartlett.psychol.cam.ac.uk/Intellectual%20Biography.htm (acc­ es­sed 14 April 2014). 54 Richard Kwiatkowski, David C. Duncan and Sylvia Shimmin, ‘What have we forgotten – and why?’, Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 79 (2006), 185. 55 Lara Zibarras and Rachel Lewis, ‘What is occupational psychology?’, in Work and occupational psychology: integrating theory and practice (London: Sage, 2013), p. 7.

14

Governing for happiness: Mark Abrams, subjective social indicators and the post-war explosion of ‘middle-opinion’ Scott Anthony Mark Abrams (1906–94) was an influential and important social scientist; he was also one of the first researchers to interrogate and theorise what might be happening in the post-war period, among baby boomers, to the ‘middle opinion’ in favour of government intervention and social democracy that Arthur Marwick suggests emerged in 1930s Britain.1 One key initiative that Abrams developed to track these changes – and which has been of lasting interest and influence – was a project he led at the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Survey Unit in the 1970s to develop a set of subjective social indicators. Subjective social indicators are statistical devices for measuring individual perceptions (and evaluations) of a wide range of social conditions. They are an attempt to measure subjective evaluations of social change. This was a long-gestating project born of many motivations. Throughout his career Abrams had been motivated by the example of the great nineteenth-century social statisticians whose work not only documented poverty but led to new understandings of it and, by propagating the facts about poverty (rather than making moral judgements), helped to counter it. However, by the end of the 1960s the limits of ‘objective’ statistical survey methods could no longer be ignored.2 Subjective social indicators were posited as a way of improving the development, monitoring and evaluation of policies. Statistical quantification may be a ‘technology of distance’, but this was an effort to help synthesise arm’s-length objective analysis of social problems with public understandings of those problems.3 They were a strategy for rearticulating a new notion of the common good. Subjective social indicators were developed both



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to support the work of the Central Statistical Office and to help resituate social researchers in relation to their subjects. By examining the work of the social scientist Mark Abrams in the 1970s, this essay makes a contribution towards understanding one of the key questions of this collection: how the British state influenced the scope and conduct of scientific research during the period 1914–79. There are further reasons why Abrams’ work at the SSRC should be particularly attractive to historians. Abrams’ work on subjective social indicators at the SSRC was something of a legacy project; it was both an intellectual quest and a personal one. By the 1970s, Abrams was nearing the end of a working life that had encompassed the rapid expansion of the social sciences. His career arc is instructive: after studying at the London School of Economics (LSE) he built a career in the private sector – the interwar period marking a moment when Marks & Spencer employed more statisticians than the British state – notably at the London Press Exchange advertising agency, where he devised the ABC1 classification system for the National Readership Survey. Work for the BBC and the Ministry of Information brought Abrams into closer contact with Britain’s expanding state, although his post-war career remained entrepreneurially skewed towards the private sector as he developed his own consultancy, Research Services, at London Press Exchange. However, in addition to his professional pre-eminence and longevity, Abrams is an attractive figure because he enables debates about the social applications of science to be related back into political decision making. His affiliation to the Labour Party sheds further light on how the rhetoric of scientific governance influenced the process and presentation of party politics between the 1930s and the 1970s. First aligned with the ‘modernising’ Gaitskell Group in the Labour Party, Abrams became an influential adviser to Harold Wilson during the ‘white heat’ years and remained an occasional consultant to the party until the close of the 1970s.4 One further source of his interest in subjective social indicators was a frustration that objectively measureable improvements made by the Wilson administration had not translated into an equally large subjective growth in national well-being. By examining this paradox the second half of this essay thus tackles the second question posed by the volume: how various arms of the state attempted to apply the lessons of ‘science’ to the problems of governance. Lastly, narrating the trajectory of the public and personal facets

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of Abrams’ career alongside the development of subjective social indicators can provide us with a historically grounded insight into the interrelationship between the measurement of social values, the evolution of those values and the social, cultural and political meanings more widely accorded to those changes. How and why should happiness be measured? In 1971 Abrams resigned from Research Services to become head of a specially created Survey Unit at the SSRC – the state body then responsible for the funding of training and research in the social sciences – in a planned step towards retirement.5 He accepted the post on the proviso that he was allowed to experiment with the development of so-called subjective social indicators. The rationale for this research was simple: ever more social data was being collated and statisticians were making ever-greater claims for the uses of this data. But as these local statistics were harvested upwards to the British Central Statistical Office, Abrams felt important interpretative details were being lost.6 Firstly, he stressed that such statistics required intelligent interpretation – a high crime rate, he argued, might actually indicate low levels of unreported crime and reflect widespread confidence in the justice system. Secondly, he became sceptical about the comparisons that scholars and bureaucracies used such data to make.7 Subjective social indicators were an innovation whose form was forged in a trial-and-error process of testing, tweaking and then retesting group surveys. Rather confusingly, Abrams and his team could use ‘happiness’, ‘wellbeing’ and ‘quality of life’ interchangeably as well as with self-defined precision. A series of ‘quality of life’ surveys directed by Abrams and John Hall at the SSRC Survey Unit accelerated the development of a testable set of subjective social indicators. Two pilot surveys were conducted in 1971, three in 1973 and one in 1975. The design of the pilot surveys followed an exploratory series of interviews which asked people how they defined ‘happiness’ and ‘quality of life’, combined with a literature review of contemporary scholarship. Partly determined by areas of social policy concern, partly by what the SSRC researchers simply presumed to be the components of happiness, the surveys would measure ‘quality of life’ by aggregating a number of ‘life domains’. For each domain (such as housing, neighbourhood, health, job,



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financial situation) respondents were asked about changes that would make them more or less satisfied with their lives. Each domain also included questions designed to locate respondents’ actual situation relative to the rest of the sample (for example by demographics, job details and housing situation). The satisfaction question formats used 0–10 ladder scales that were supplemented by a number of more imaginative questions. For example, respondents were asked to think of the person they would ‘most like to be’ and ‘least like to be’. One man replied that the person he would most like to be was ‘my ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend’.8 On the face of it, the results of the pilot survey made for unremarkable reading. Wealthier participants were generally happier than poorer participants. All sections of British society felt that they had materially less than they deserved, but the ‘working class’ and the ‘poor’ felt most aggrieved. The pilot was tweaked ahead of the first ‘official’ quality-of-life survey conducted in November 1971, when the questions were re-ordered so that respondents’ sense of economic well-being was not tackled until the end of the survey (because it was felt that this had dominated the interviews conducted for the first pilot). For this first survey 593 people were interviewed (all of whom were living in one of Britain’s seven largest conurbations). To allow comparisons to be made with a concurrent research project being carried out in the United States, the ladder scale was reduced from 0–10 to 0–7. The top-line findings of this second attempt to survey the quality of life in Britain again showed that wealthier people were happier with their quality of life than poorer people, and that all sectors of society believed they deserved more (a characteristic replicated in the United States). Participants in the second survey were repeatedly asked not only to rate life domains but to prioritise them. Researchers noticed that there was a correlation between the life domains that the public said were most important and those that they scored highly – such as family, marriage and health. Meanwhile, the domains accorded low satisfaction – such as education, religion and democratic institutions – were usually rated least important. ‘One possible explanation of this relationship’, wrote Abrams ‘is that in an attempt to adjust to what is realistically available many people write off as unimportant those areas of life which have yielded them disappointment and frustration.’9 Despite the fact that the findings of the ‘quality of life’ surveys

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appear modest, pioneering in their ambition and range rather than the recovery of any prodigious insight, they provoked a considerable number of intellectual disagreements. In particular, SSRC researchers would use ‘quality of life’ data to interrogate Ronald Inglehart’s silent revolution thesis.10 Inglehart’s argument was that Western Europe was in the midst of a crucial demographic and intellectual shift as a new ‘postbourgeois’ generation, who had benefited from investment in public education and pursued ‘higher’ democratic values, began to clash with a materialistic, ‘acquisitive’ older generation whose values were shaped by the Great Depression. Over the course of the next twenty years, he predicted, this radical and highly educated younger generation would enact ‘a silent revolution’ as they came to control Western Europe’s administrative, legal, political and cultural levers. Reviewing the quality of life survey data, staff at the SSRC Survey Unit were able to classify 7% of their sample as ‘postbourgeois’ and 35% as part of the older ‘acquisitive’ demographic. What struck Abrams was that not only were the British ‘postbourgeois’ dissatisfied with the ‘higher’ conduct of national life but they were also much more unhappy with their material circumstances. Despite having considerably larger incomes and higher employment status than their immediate peers, the British ‘postbourgeois’ were more prone to material dissatisfaction and status anxiety than were their supposedly more conservative forebears. Rejecting the silent revolution thesis, Abrams’ team posited the possibility that (in Britain at least) the overt, asserted ideological difference between the ‘postbourgeois’ youth that had benefited from the economic, social and educational investment of the immediate post-war period and the older generation of ‘acquisitives’ might not amount to much more than a wish to hasten the retirement of the existing élite. Or, at the  very least, that the new ‘higher’ demands of youth came in addition to the material demands of the existing élite rather than at the expense of them. Here it is worth pausing to remember that Abrams (unlike Inglehart, who was born in 1934) was part of the generation whose values had supposedly been shaped by the Great Depression. He came to professional pre-eminence in the mid-1930s. During this period much of Abrams’ innovative, socially purposeful, survey work had been subsidised, or sponsored by, enlightened patrons in the private sector – such as Cadburys and the Gas, Light and



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Coke Company. Although he remained in awe of the ‘great figures’ he had been taught by at the LSE – such as Harold Laski, R.H. Tawney and William Beveridge – many of the innovations with which he had made his name had been developed working in creative partnership with commercial organisations.11 These innovations had then been fed back into an expanding public sector, for example through publications such as Social surveys and social action (1951) – which became a key teaching text for trainee social workers at Barnett House, Oxford. Contemporary commentators in the 1970s had begun to see Abrams’ research interests as rooted in that historical moment. The journalist Michael Davie (1924–2005), for example, described Abrams and Claud Moser (then Head of the British Central Statistical Office) as: Cosmopolitan, relaxed, unpompous, cultivated, humorous … Belong[ing] to a generation now in its fifties that matured during the war: Lib-Lab, undoctrinaire, part of a cultural elite who not only wanted to extend the benefits of (roughly) middle-class culture to all, but were confident it could be done – by sensible town-planning, careful and humane social-engineering, educational reform, modest nationalisation, public support for the arts.12

The portrait of the pair that emerged in the following pages of the Observer Review exhibited the kind of fondness that might be reserved for an eccentric uncle. Repeatedly asked to explain why Britain was in the grip of a social, political and moral malaise, the pair good-naturedly explained, using a variety of objective measurements, why it was not the case. Statistics for suicide, divorce, alcoholism, crime, illegitimacy, lunacy or strikes were by international comparisons low they argued, and by historical standards extremely low. ‘What would you have concluded from the 1875 figures of child prostitution in London?’ asked Moser at one point. Media perception of ‘crises’ was not supported by evidence, they claimed.13 Far from its being in crisis, Abrams and Moser retained a belief in the essential soundness of British society and the possibility that problems could be overcome through persuasion, co-operation and the sensitive application of new scientific thinking. This beleaguered optimism is tempered, however, by their fears of the existence of a widespread misperception of reality, a misperception that is used to explain Abrams’ work on subjective social indicators. Abrams’ argues that the public perception that life in

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Britain was worse than in Australia, Germany, Sweden and Holland (a perception which he said was without precedent), coupled with a desire for more populist politics, for stronger law and order and the demand for money before social justice, represented an enormous social change. ‘Put these things together’, said Abrams gloomily, ‘and you have the kind of psychological background that produced Hitler.’ This bleak judgement on the values of the post-war generation apparently coloured his ambiguous attitude towards the practices of a new generation of researchers. For example, Abrams would later sign up to the thesis (developed by his son) that Britain’s tradition of political statistics had drawn what would have been strong sociological material toward the less elevated field of survey research.14 This was a state of intellectual affairs that he was far from displeased about. ‘Who the hell cares about two or three more sociologists of world renown,’ he argued, ‘when it comes to being able to document poverty so clearly and unambiguously that you could make people shut up talking about it?’15 Throughout his career Abrams had benefited from the growth of the social sciences, although by the 1970s he was becoming uneasy about elements of its state-sponsored expansion. Or to restate the point in the parlance of this volume, the controversies around Abrams’ work at the SSRC provide an example of how competing arms of the state sector attempted to articulate and assert their own vision of what the ideals, models and infrastructures of ‘scientific governance’ should be. These occasional bursts of frustration were exacerbated by the politically complex nature of the appointment at the SSRC. He had been recruited at the Survey Unit to raise the methodological standard of research carried out in an expanded university sector. However, in the decades since Abrams had come to prominence the university sector had grown exponentially, and that growth was accompanied by an expanding sense of institutional self-confidence that Abrams was wary of. He recalled: Even before I came the SSRC was rejecting 70% of all applications, on the grounds that they didn’t think, usually, the people sending in the applications were capable of doing the research they wanted the money for. Now, when the figure stayed at that after my appointment, they said ‘Ah, it’s because Mark said thumbs down on that.’ And that was the kiss of death you see. They thought, ‘Why? We’ve



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been in this chair for fifteen years running a highly successful department and they tell us we’ve got to go and get him to tell us how to do surveys.’16

Thus Abrams’ role at the SSRC Survey Unit balanced precariously on a number of generational and institutional fault lines. Appropriately, the conduct of quality of life surveys raised questions about the values of both the researchers and the research sanctioned by the state. Abrams’ personal patronage of research on subjective social indicators could also make discussion of his work serve as a proxy for debates about the academic status of the SSRC Survey Unit (apparently viewed with distrust and distaste by a number of sociologists), its methodological apparatus (in the context of, for example, the growth of anti-empiricism) and a number of academic rivalries (universities versus polytechnics, British researchers in competition with North American and European researchers). The wider reception of subjective social indicators was further complicated by shifts in the methods, and market for, survey research outside of the public sector. Abrams had risen to prominence in a period where practitioners had to work creatively across both public and private sectors. For instance, his weekly seminars on the psychology of food consumption were the outcomes of sponsorship from brands such as Bovril, Bournvita and Ovaltine.17 However, more instrumental winds were beginning to blow by the end of the 1960s. Abrams’ move to the SSRC Survey Unit represented a conscious decision to swap wages for the promise that he could pursue more wide-ranging research. Research Services had just been told (for illustrative example) that its political consultancy work was no longer profitable enough.18 Freedom to pursue new lines of research in the university sector also proved more restricted than Abrams supposed; he had perhaps not fully understood that the values and working practices of both sectors were increasingly out of synch. Abrams took a general respect for successful commercial enterprises, and optimism about the potential of consumer sovereignty, into a sector where such convictions were being replaced by a concern about the rise of global corporate power and the threat that this growth posed to individual liberty and the workings of mass democracy.19 Similarly, the no-nonsense investigative expertise provided by Abrams was not always welcomed

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in institutions where the very idea of ‘knowledge’ was being questioned, problematised and even reconceptualised as little more than a type of discourse that existed to normalise a certain set of unequal power relations.20 Abrams left the SSRC Survey Unit as quickly as he could. It had been straightforward to move between private and public organisations but it was less easy to slot his polymorphous approach to social research into the cultures of either.21 Abrams’ last research projects were funded by the charitable sector and by philanthropic donations from the Sainsburys. Given the personal, generational, institutional and intellectual differences outlined between Abrams and his new academic peers outlined above, it is no surprise that his work on subjective social indicators would lead him towards a different interpretation of the direction of social change in Britain than the one expressed by Inglehart. Abrams was temperamentally less interested in the difference between different polarities of élite opinion; instead he simply pointed to the widening gap between ‘elite’ and ‘public’ perceptions of British society. He theorised that the ‘failure’ of low-skilled or unskilled families to take advantage of the new opportunities that post-war economic expansion offered was creating new kinds of fissures in British society; cultural gaps between the educated and uneducated were filling the space formerly occupied by chronic economic inequality. As the relative spending power of the uneducated grew, and became visible (he had long argued) in the popularity of commercial television, the football pools and the tabloid press, so did the anxiety of the nation’s educated élites.22 Part of the role of subjective social indicators was to help to address this cultural gap: to devise a mechanism that would compel policy makers to respond to popular concerns. However, while Abrams hoped that subjective social indicators might be able to inform the making, explanation and execution of a more democratic process of policy making, this practical orientation also sat alongside a concerned, if not slightly censorious, judgement about the mind-set of the rising post-war generation. Indeed, winning popular support for emerging environmental concerns, and propagating an understanding of future ‘limits to growth’ such as over-population and resource depletion, led Abrams to privately ponder how politicians and policy makers could overcome the implications of the ‘quality of life’ research.23 ‘I am now much more depressed about the quality of democracy than I was 10 years ago’,



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Abrams confided gloomily, ‘it has become a matter of: give us more money and we will vote for you.’24 Here spoke the anxieties of a modernist who had come of age in the era of what Dan LeMahieu termed ‘a culture for democracy’; the inter-war moment where a broad coalition of social activists, academics and political figures had attempted to forge a new national culture that both responded to new democratic freedoms but also sought to protect values and practices of aesthetic and intellectual merit that were not widely popular or commercially viable.25 A point in time where politicians from across the spectrum imagined a future built on a mixed economy with the state delegated a legitimate (though limited) role in the pursuit of a number of social goals. (It’s also important to keep in mind that the kind of state intervention favoured by Abrams meant something looser, as well as larger, than central government control.) In the context of this volume it is tempting to characterise this mid-century period as the heyday of scientific governance, with the expansion of state welfare provision, particularly in education and health, along with high levels of military spending, sponsoring a significant, and sustained, growth in scientific capacity, knowledge and expertise.26 As the 1970s progressed this social and intellectual coalition would come under sustained attack. Abrams’ development of subjective social indicators illustrates the extent to which his working life was embedded in both the moment of peak scientific governance and what James Vernon called ‘the short life of social democracy’.27 How to talk about happiness Although this volume is primarily concerned with the governance of scientific research and the problems of governing through scientific research, Abrams’ work on subjective social indicators also touches upon the way the vocabulary of scientific research could seep into party political rhetoric. While easy social morals do not appear to jump out from the results of the quality of life surveys conducted by Abrams in the 1970s he was not afraid to articulate them in the bluntest of terms (as the ‘put these things together and you have the kind of psychological background that produced Hitler’ quip demonstrates). In particular, Abrams would make free interpretative use of the SSRC Survey Unit’s findings in two large state-of-the-­nation features in Encounter magazine. The first of these, ‘Changing Values:

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A Report on Britain Today’, was published in October 1974 and contrasted attitudes expressed by the British public in the quality of life surveys with analysis of the appeal of advertising conducted by Abrams when he was at the London Press Exchange in the 1930s.28 ‘Changing Values’ argued that a rising sense of relative deprivation had developed in the forty years since the Great Depression – British people now believed they were entitled to much more than they had. Abrams’ conclusion followed the lead of the economist Richard Easterlin (b. 1926), who had influentially argued that in a modern affluent society the question was not how much people had, but how much they had relative to everyone else.29 Abrams concluded by stressing the importance of restoring ‘the more civilised values of the inherited Protestant ethic’ and the need to ‘create greater equality in the pursuit and enjoyment of non-economic ends’.30 For a non-practising Jew, and convinced atheist, brought up in a radical anarchist family, this was an unexpected lament.31 Very broadly speaking, Abrams’ work can be understood as part of a shift in the post-war Labour Party towards ‘second stage’ socialism – building an emancipatory, participatory society on the foundations laid in 1945.32 In the 1960s Abrams had helped to persuade Harold Wilson to present the party as a future-orientated advocate of progress rather than as guardians of specifically ­working-class interests.33 Under Abrams’ guidance, for example, by the time of the 1964 election Labour had replaced slogans such as ‘Ask Your Dad’ – a reference to inter-war unemployment – with the more upbeat ‘Let’s Go With Labour’. As one of Abrams’ collaborators put it, a reformist, ‘mortgaged’ middle class was eclipsing a radical, ‘incomed’ middle class.34 Abrams’ opinion polls were credited with persuading Harold Wilson that he had a popular mandate for resisting American attempts to bring Britain into the Vietnam war and also for warning the leadership that the British youth were not as radical (or as likely to vote Labour) as the party supposed.35 In respect of his continuing influence on the Labour Party leadership, Abrams’ next feature for Encounter, ‘The British Middle Class Socialist’, was to prove to be of even greater sagacity.36 While Abrams had been a key figure in harnessing the rhetorics of ‘progress’, especially scientific progress, to Labour’s electoral appeal, ‘The British Middle Class Socialist’ contained implicit recognition that greater attention now needed to be paid to understanding the economic, social and cultural consequences of this progress.



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In the first section of his 1975 article, the values of middle-class Labour voters are compared with those of working-class Labour voters. Abrams found that Labour’s middle-class supporters were younger (indeed many were the children of working-class Labour voters), better educated, more likely to holiday abroad, more likely to be atheists or Jewish, less likely to believe in luck and sceptical of trade unions, while well-disposed to government. More revealingly, the second half of the article compared middle-class Labour voters with middle-class Conservative voters and found that the value differences between them were extremely small. Labour voters were slightly more generous to groups of people that the SSRC categorised as ‘poor’ or ‘coloured immigrants’, but both middle-class Conservative and Labour voters believed themselves entitled to much more than they already had. Indeed, even including their relative generosity to the ‘poor’, if the preferences of middle-class Labour voters were enacted, then British society would become more unequal because of the size of increases they wanted for themselves and professions such as teaching. Abrams proceeded to spell out the political consequences of this research: One possibility is that there will be no change in their loyalties and votes, and that we are now witnessing the emergence of a new kind of ‘middle class’ – one with middle class status and working-class politics. [But] [t]here is very little in their present life-styles and social values to stop at least half of them (over the years, and as their working-class origins fade) from resolving their present class/politics inconsistency – either by becoming ‘independents’ or even by voting Tory.37

This quote illustrates the extent to which the search for subjective social indicators had been propped up by the intellectual conviction that modern opinion polls had to be reconfigured to take greater account of the functional role of personal opinion: the ways in which opinions can bolster personal identity and express personal values.38 Abrams’ concern, which he would retrospectively justify after the rise of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), was that functional ‘higher’ purposes were beginning to plaster over increasingly ‘acquisitive’ behaviour.39 Popular accounts of Britain in the 1970s tend to focus on either the rise of monetarism and New Right ideology or the socio-political impact of greater working-class prosperity and suburbanisation.40

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Having left the city centres for new towns and commuter settlements, so this second argument goes, these upwardly mobile workers were impatient for further material progress. Rupert Murdoch’s relaunch of the Sun newspaper in 1969, tougher on crime and immigration, more abrasive and pointed in the demands it made for its readers, is seen as symbolic of deeper underlying changes.41 This narrative reflects a generalised impression of what many social scientists of the 1960s understood to be the changes occurring around them.42 It is worth underlining that Abrams’ work on subjective social indicators stood apart from such generalisations about the embourgeoisement of the British working class. His work on subjective social indicators led him to posit that the threat to the postwar settlement came at least as much from changes in the values of the Labour-voting middle class. Governing through happiness Social Trends, an enormous compendium of social statistics first published by the Central Statistical Office (now the Office of National Statistics) in 1970, was to be a key mechanism for getting information garnered by subjective social indicators into the orbit of policy makers.43 It was an ambitious initiative in step with the efforts of the Conference of European Statisticians and the United Nations Statistical Commission. Its motivation was a growing belief among civil service statisticians that for too long statistics had been a by-product of government administration, tending to measure problems that were already being attended to rather than problems that were not. By bringing together statistics logging social conditions, the existing deployment of state resources and the flows of people through various activities and institutions, Social Trends would shed light on the links between economic and social change and (most ambitiously) the relationships between social investments and social conditions. Of course, this visionary motivating ambition outstripped the actuality (as Moser and Abrams were always aware that it would). In the event, Social Trends did not offer its readers an overarching single statistical model of British society, but a series of interrelated subsystems. There were also significant practical barriers to the utilisation of such data. Policy makers, of course, worked in different time-frames from government statisticians. Moreover, they not only needed frequent, regular and quick



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information to inform or evaluate policy, but the direction of a political and social theory (or theories) through which the interrelationships between various social characteristics and the causes of change could be comprehended and then responded to. A particular impetus of the SSRC Survey Unit’s work on quality of life directed by Abrams was a Department of Environment survey of conditions in cities, such as Stoke-on-Trent and Sunderland, struggling to adapt to industrial decline.44 But its investigation into how local leisure services could be reconfigured to protect the standard of living (and even create wealth) was perhaps not the social end that Abrams had anticipated. Indeed, while Abrams’ much-discussed surveys helped to embed ‘quality of life’ into the lexicon of British, European and North American policy makers, Abrams was less successful in influencing the short-term ends to which such measurements were put. Instead of expanding the imaginative range of Britain’s bureaucratic machinery, quality of life measurements were more likely to be used by civil servants to provide baselines for investment into assisted regions. It could be argued that the most important long-term market for such research has been the collating of such statistics by bodies such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development into global league tables of places to invest.45 The degree of misperception that existed between Abrams’ experiments and popular understandings of them can be tracked in the media coverage they generated. The Economist reported on Abrams’ findings from the perspective of the forthcoming general election of 1974, using the SSRC Survey Unit’s findings to bolster an editorial that encouraged party leaders to address the disillusionment of young and well-educated voters.46 The Times, by contrast, took the fact that Abrams had recorded relatively high levels of satisfaction, despite the country’s being in a national state of emergency, as evidence of Britain’s enduring spirit. ‘Grumbling may be a way of life but people are satisfied and generally happy with their jobs: The “bulldog spirit” surfaces again as Britain faces crisis,’ as its headline had it.47 The Northern Echo saw the research as hastening the redevelopment of Sunderland into one of the nation’s ‘leisure capitals’.48

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It has been argued that the economic and political crisis of 1931 led to a broad acceptance of the need for concerted collective action so that man-made depressions could no longer blight a world of plenty.49 The arrival of this world of plenty, however, segmented as well as grew the coalescence of ‘middle-opinion’ that had made such interventions possible: demographic change and professional competition and differentiation limiting the ability of strands of middle-opinion to agree and thus shape public discourse. These changes made it difficult for figures who had established their authority in the earlier post-war period to retain the broad-based coalition of industrialists, intellectuals and state officials that provided the platform for their rise to prominence in a technocratic ‘scientific’ state. The uses that the quality of life surveys were put to are illustrative of this. Abrams’ surveys successfully enlarged the parameters of what could be measured, and their methodological insights migrated with key researchers from the SSRC Survey Unit (which was closed in 1976) to initiatives such as the British Social Attitudes Survey and the European Social Survey. Interest in the kinds of social knowledge to which the ‘quality of life’ surveys had given momentum migrated across borders and travelled great bureaucratic distances; however, there’s also a sense that such innovations were almost entirely institutionalised. ‘The shock of data’ paralysed some of Abrams’ older methods and apparently limited the scope for personal interventions.50 As computerisation took hold, eroding the place of the imaginative human interpreter that Abrams’ believed had historically done so much to improve political culture in Britain, ‘quality of life’ research became an important stream in the ‘big data’ banks of transnational institutions and a precursor of Facebook sociology. 51 This essay began by positing that the trajectory of Mark Abrams’ career could be used to exemplify key developments of the social sciences in the mid-twentieth century and the ways in which they were applied (or not) to the governance of the United Kingdom. An underlying theme was the connection between the trajectory of a certain kind of reformist, modernising, ‘middle-opinion’ that Marwick so persuasively located as emerging from the crises of the 1930s, and the emergence of a scientific and technologically sophisticated mode of governance.52 Mark Abrams was particu-



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larly well suited to this role because of his high professional standing and the considerable influence he exerted in the commercial, intellectual and political spheres. He was also well suited to the role because he had spent so much of his career anticipating the effect of demographic shifts in the post-war period. The Teenage Consumer, which anticipated the rise of youth culture, was published in 1958. People in Their Sixties, which considered the personal and social challenges facing an ageing society, was published in 1983. To a great extent, then, Abrams’ work can be seen to foreshadow the changes in attitudes, employment and life experiences of the baby boomer generation.53 His research can also be understood as part of the broader efforts of a preceding generation to adapt, engage with and sometimes resist their demands as the baton of ‘governance’ was passed down. A historical account of the early measurement of values in Britain offers an insight into the complex relationship between changes in how social values were measured and how they were constructed, monetised and politicised. Such an account further illustrates how these changes informed projections of the self during the late twentieth century, as a modernism which thought of itself as governing for democracy became a postmodernism which thought of itself as being of it. Acknowledgement This essay could not have been written without the support of the Leverhulme Trust and the ‘Economics in the Public Sphere’ (ECONPUBLIC) project funded by the European Research Council FP7 (2007–13)/ERC grant agreement 283754. It also rests on the help, advice and assistance of John Hall, Dominic Abrams and the Churchill College archivists. Michael Bycroft, Eve Colpus, John Corner, Claire Langhamer, Peter Mandler, Martin Stollery and my ECONPUBLIC colleagues gave helpful feedback on an earlier draft. Notes  1 Arthur Marwick, ‘Middle opinion in the thirties: planning, progress and political “agreement”’, The English Historical Review, 79 (1964), 285–98.  2 There had, of course, been people suspicious of ‘objective’ statistics for a long time before the 1970s – one celebrated example is the critique

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of Seebohm Rowntree’s poverty survey of York by Helen Bosanquet. See Bosanquet, ‘The “poverty line”’, Charity Organisation Review, 8 (1903), 321–5.  3 As argued in Theodore Porter, Trust in numbers: the pursuit of objectivity in science and public life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).  4 For more on the Gaitskell Group see Guy Ortolano, The two cultures controversy: science, literature and cultural politics in postwar Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 174–8.  5 In 1965 the Wilson government established the SSRC as a national centre for research into the social sciences. It became the Economic and Social Research Council in 1983 as the Thatcher administration attempted to guide its research agenda towards its own priorities and enforce greater focus on research of ‘more public concern’.  6 Here Abrams’ dialogue with American social scientists at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan becomes evident, as the impact of the enthusiastic wave of social research jump-started by civil unrest in US cities during the 1960s began to be more critically scrutinised. This process is detailed in Daniel Rodgers, Age of fracture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).  7 See, for example, Churchill College Archives Centre, Mark Abrams papers (hereafter Abrams papers), Box 31, ‘Difficult to gauge the quality of life’, Medical Technologist, March 1975, p. 7.  8 Email correspondence with author, ‘Hall to Anthony’, 19 January 2011.  9 Abrams papers, Box 33, Mark Abrams, ‘Subjective social indicators’, Social Trends No. 4 (HMSO, 1973), p. 26. 10 See Alan Marsh, ‘“The silent revolution:” value priorities and the quality of life in Britain’, American Political Science Review, 69 (1975), 21–30. The original thesis can be found in Ronald Inglehart, ‘The silent revolution in Europe: intergenerational change in post-industrial societies’, The American Political Science Review, 65 (1971), 991–1017. 11 ‘Quality of life’ was an idea in the ether since the 1930s. Sir Arthur Steel-Maitland, for example, delivered a lecture on ‘Economics and happiness’ at LSE in 1921. See Ian Gazeley and Claire Langhamer, ‘The meanings of happiness in Mass Observation’s Bolton’, History Workshop Journal, 75 (2013), 159–89. 12 Abrams papers, Box 31, M. Davie, ‘But what’s going on in our heads?’, Observer Review, 14 December 1975, p. 30. 13 For the most part, the piece makes a contribution to a strand of opinion stating the case for the objective virtues of Britain in the 1970s that had been all but forgotten until a 2004 New Economics Foundation report claimed that the zenith of overall national economic, social and envi-



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ronmental well-being had been reached in 1976. Tim Jackson, Chasing progress: beyond measuring economic growth (New Economics Foundation, 2004). See www.neweconomics.org/publications/entry/ chasing-progress. 14 See Philip Abrams, The origins of British sociology: 1834–1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). 15 Dominic Abrams, ‘An interview with Mark Abrams’, 19 September 1984, p. 79. This interview can now be accessed here: http://academia. edu/1463663/An_interview_with_Mark_Abrams. 16 D. Abrams, ‘An interview with Mark Abrams’, p. 82. 17 D. Abrams, ‘An interview with Mark Abrams’, p. 44. Such arrangements permeated the sector during the inter-war period. Even an organisation as sui generis as Mass Observation undertook work for producers of soap and frozen fish, alongside commissions from more temperamentally sympathetic bodies such as the Council of Industrial Design and the Voluntary Social Services Inquiry. M. Goot, ‘“Inchoate and uncontrolled”: Mass-Observation, Mark Abrams, and market research’, Draft paper, 10 December 2012. 18 The British Institute of Public Opinion ran up against similar issues at the same time. See M. Roodhouse, ‘“Fish-and-chip intelligence”: Henry Durant and the British Institute of Public Opinion, 1936–63’, Twentieth Century British History, 34 (2013), 224–48. 19 See, for example, Lawrence Black, Redefining British politics: culture, consumerism and participation, 1954–70 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 20 This trend continues in contemporary efforts to slot discussions of ‘wellbeing’ into discourses of ‘govermentality.’ For example, Professor Sam Binkley, ‘Happiness as enterprise: a meditation on governmentality and neoliberal life’, MA Psychosocial Studies Annual Lecture, Birkbeck College, University of London, 26 June 2012. 21 See Martin Bulmer (ed.), Essays on the history of British sociological research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 22 See, for example, Abrams papers, Box 33, ‘Social change in modern Britain’, The Political Quarterly, 30:2 (April 1959), 159. 23 Interestingly, the ‘Action for Happiness’ think-tank, launched in 2011 by intellectuals including Richard Layard and Anthony Seldon, appears to have collapsed the means of the pursuit of ‘quality of life’ into the ends. See www.actionforhappiness.org/. 24 Information passed to the author from Sir David Butler, 25 February 2011. 25 See Dan LeMahieu, A culture for democracy: mass communication and the cultivated mind in Britain between the wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

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26 See David Edgerton, Warfare state: Britain, 1920–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 27 See Laura Nym Mayhall, Susan Pedersen, Philippa Levine and James Vernon, ‘Roundtable: twentieth-century British history in North America’, Twentieth Century British History, 21 (2010), 375–418; esp. Vernon, ‘The local, the imperial and the global: repositioning twentieth-century Britain and the brief life of its social democracy’, 404–18. 28 Mark Abrams, ‘Changing values: a report on Britain today’, Encounter, March 1975, pp. 29–38. 29 Richard Easterlin, ‘Does economic growth improve the human lot? Some empirical evidence’, in P.A. David and M.W. Reder (eds), Nations and households in economic growth: essays in honor of Moses Abramovitz (Academic Press, 1974), pp. 89–125. 30 M. Abrams, ‘Changing values’, p. 29. 31 Abrams’ family had come to England from the Baltic in 1891. His father was an anarchist and partly attracted to the East End of London by its radical politics. Abrams remembered growing up in a house decorated by pictures of Emile Zola and Kropotkin. D. Abrams, ‘An interview with Mark Abrams’, pp. 6–13. 32 See Jeremy Nuttall, ‘Pluralism, the people, and time in Labour Party history, 1931–1964’, The Historical Journal, 56 (2013), 729–56. 33 See, for example, D. Mitchell, ‘Research for the truth: obituary of Mark Abrams’, Guardian, 27 September 1994. Abrams died just as Tony Blair, advised by Phillip Gould, was about to abandon the Labour Party’s commitment to Clause IV. The echo of Gaitskell and Abrams proved irresistible to journalists although the parallels are somewhat misleading. See D. Godson, ‘Blair’s future: the man who saw changes coming, Dean Godson on the death of Mark Abrams, a pioneer who spotted the end of the cloth cap era’, The Sunday Telegraph, 2 October 1994, p. 21. 34 This was the transition Professor Richard Rose believed Abrams’ work was tracing. Interview conducted by author with Richard Rose, 10 January 2013. 35 D. Abrams, ‘An interview with Mark Abrams’, p. 76 ; N. Williamson, ‘Wilson wanted to send British troops to fight in Vietnam’, The Times, 1 January 1996, p. 6. 36 M. Abrams, ‘The British middle-class socialist’, Encounter, March 1975, pp. 7–15. 37 M. Abrams, ‘The British middle-class socialist’, p. 15. 38 An idea apparently informed by the research of Daniel Katz, an important figure at Michigan. See Katz, ‘The functional approach to the study of attitudes’, Political Opinion Quarterly, 24 (1960), 163–204.



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39 Two highly suggestive clippings (with notes) are in the Abrams papers. Abrams papers, Box 33, R. Samuel, ‘The SDP and the new political class’, New Society, 22 April 1982, pp. 124–7, and R. Samuel, ‘The SDP and the working class’, New Society, 29 April 1982, pp. 189–91. 40 See, for example Andy Beckett, When the lights went out: Britain in the seventies (London: Faber, 2009) and Dominic Sandbrook, State of emergency: the way we were: Britain, 1970–1974 (London: Allen Lane, 2010) and Seasons in the sun: the battle for Britain, 1974–79 (London: Allen Lane, 2012). 41 Here it’s interesting to pause for a moment to note that Abrams had worked for Cecil King and Hugh Cudlipp on the initial plans for remodelling The Daily Herald into The Sun in 1964. Abrams had advised them that geographical and social mobility, improving educational standards and a consumer-orientated lifestyle were making the home the central pivot of people’s lives ‘where they spent most of their leisure’. He advised them to aim The Sun at ‘a middle class couple, aged 28, with two children and living in Reading’. See R. Greenslade, ‘The middle class are the mass market now’, Guardian, 6 November 1988, p. 7 and R. Greenslade, ‘Watching the sun rise: forty years of The Sun’, Guardian, 6 September 2004, p. 4 42 See Mike Savage, Identities and social change in Britain since 1940: the politics of method (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). On social scientists’ ‘rediscovery of working-class affluence’, see Jon Lawrence, ‘Class, “affluence” and the study of everyday life in Britain, c. 1930– 64’, Cultural and Social History, 10 (2013), 273–99. 43 C. Moser, ‘Measuring the quality of life’, New Society, 10 December 1970, pp. 1042–3. 44 See National Archives, AT51/85, ‘Department of Environment Steering Group on the Quality of life’, and AT51/121, ‘Department of Environment Steering Group on the Quality of life’. See also Leisure and the quality of life: the report of a central steering group of officials on four local experiments (HMSO, 1977). 45 To this extent, aspects of Abrams’ story mesh with story about the advance of ‘bounded reason’ in American post-war social science told by Hunter Heyck. Hunter Heyck, ‘Producing reason’, in Hamilton Cravens and Mark Solovey (eds), Cold War social science: knowledge production, liberal democracy, and human nature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), pp. 99–116. 46 ‘The statistics of satisfaction’, The Economist, 15 December 1973, p. 28. 47 P. Healy, ‘The “bulldog” spirit surfaces again as Britain faces crises’, The Times, 13 December 1973, p. 6.

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48 National Archives, AT51/85, ‘It’s all work now as town gets leisure centre go-ahead’, Northern Echo, 25 October 1973. 49 Richard Denman, Political sketches (Carlisle: Thurnam, 1948), p. 6; Marwick, ‘Middle opinion’, p. 289. 50 ‘I was the first full time appointment to the new Survey Unit, set up in 1970 with Mark Abrams as (part-time) Director. Prior to that I had a tenured Lectureship at Birmingham and had a lot of experience of survey fieldwork and computing … My first job was ploughing through a stack of computer output from a survey for the SSRC Next Thirty Years Committee. There must be a report somewhere, and there was some overlap in coverage.’ ‘Hall to Anthony’, 7 January 2011. 51 Contemporary political justifications for quality of life in Britain further rest on blending the rhetoric of Robert Kennedy, the intellectual sweep of Joseph Stiglitz and the statistics marshalled by figures such as Paul Allin – one of several pivotal figures currently at the Office of National Statistics who have connections to the SSRC Survey Unit’s pioneering work of the 1970s. ‘The wheel turns once in how many years?’ as John Hall put it when interviewed. Email correspondence with former SSRC Survey Unit staff, including ‘Allin to Anthony’, 13 January 2012 and ‘Hall to Anthony’, 2 February 2012. 52 See Marwick, ‘Middle opinion’. Alternatively, see Frank Trentmann, Free trade nation: Commerce, consumption, and civil society in modern Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 53 Other key publications included The condition of the British people, 1911–1946 (London: Gollancz, 1945), Social surveys and social action (London: Heinemann, 1951) and Beyond three score and ten (Age Concern, 1978).

15

Governance through education: Herman Bondi, Karl Popper and the making of scientific citizens Neil Calver

‘Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man’, runs the famous Jesuit adage. The notion that governance is most powerfully exerted at an early stage has long informed scientists’ ambitions for the education of children. The cosmologist Sir Hermann Bondi was one such scientist, and through his presidency of the Association for Science Education (ASE) he was able to articulate and advance his ambitions. Bondi was a disciple of Sir Karl Popper and, as such, he sought to place a vision of Popperianism at the heart of scientific education. As I have described elsewhere, Popperianism meant different things, and served different purposes, for the scientific community in Britain through the twentieth century. For Bondi, and for his fellow ‘Popperian Knight’ Sir Peter Medawar, the ideals of creativity, imagination, purity and scepticism were central. These helped them in their attempts to increase funding for science, with (and through) the enhancement of its autonomy and prestige. When it came to school-age education, Bondi additionally highlighted falsification and hypothetico-­deductivism in his account of a liberal scientific education.1 Bondi’s effort to secure science as the basis for a liberal education was both timely and difficult. He was troubled by a post-war education system that seemed designed to entrench the sciences and the humanities in opposing camps. Given that politicians and senior civil servants had in the main received a classical education, this meant that fundamental misunderstandings between Westminster, Whitehall and scientists echoed on into future policy. However, the early 1960s was a fertile time for educational change. It was the Robbins Report of 1963 that expanded absolute numbers of

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undergraduate places in science and engineering and, moreover, put in place the principle that the number of places should depend on the size of the able population, rather than being artificially constrained. All this was music to Bondi’s ears. On the other side of the fence, traditionalists feared that this approach would reduce the role of the universities merely to serving the needs of commerce and industry. There were concerns about schools, too. Six years after the Robbins Report, an unofficial series of pamphlets known as the Black Papers brought the governance of schools into mainstream debate. These raised bogeys of ‘progressive’ education; the unwarranted educational progression of the stupid, and the inculcation of Marxist militancy by educationists. Thus, in the early 1970s stakeholders in education – parents, teachers and local authorities – were divided over not only the different categories of school but also what they taught. Against this background, Popperian science was proposed by Bondi as a solution: a common language through which science could be understood by all disciplines and uncontroversially inculcated in the young. Bondi interpreted Popper’s liberal political philosophy, expounded in The open society and its enemies (1945), as the model for an all-encompassing higher education, whether the subject matter was science or the humanities. Not only was its fundamental worth satisfying to both traditionalists and progressives, but it was one that required the debate, discussion and disputation that the education system still considered solely the preserve of the humanities. This falsificationist programme was therefore wholly suited to challenge, as Bondi put it, the ‘growing dialogue of the deaf’ between scientists and politicians in the overall governance of science. The broad utility of the programme meant that by the late 1970s a generalised scientific conceptual understanding that was Popperian in all but name became the template that helped to shape scientific education. Through the ASE, science teachers advanced their own pedagogic approach: it was broadly and explicitly Popperian in that it demanded the highest qualities of creative insight and imagination. This was particularly welcome to the Association because it considered Popper offered pupils a far more intellectually exhilarating educational experience than did Thomas Kuhn. As the ASE’s consultations with Bondi revealed, Popper’s was the preferred approach of the scientific community, and therefore wholly appropriate for schools.



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Moreover, the Royal Society’s Public Understanding of Science (PUS) initiative in 1985 drew heavily on Bondi and the ASE, placing his Popperian vision at the heart of education for the nation as a whole. The Royal Society began to consider education in depth at the dawn of the 1980s and soon extended its boundaries beyond the usual definitions, deciding that targeting the universities would be far too late. An understanding of the processes that lie behind scientific investigation had to be engendered among all children. The Royal Society turned to Bondi, a choice that was given particular emphasis when he became the president of the ASE in 1982. As such, this paper addresses the historiographical hiatus in scholarship on public science between the Visible College and the foundation of PUS; it proposes that the Royal Society’s public understanding of science was essentially a version of Popperianism. A timely and timeless philosophy Unless they read German, British readers of Karl Popper received the two key elements of his developing philosophy in reverse order. The interplay between the abstract ideas implicit in the origination of a hypothesis and the concrete application of the critical method of falsification were central to Popper’s Logik der Forschung, which was published in Austria in 1934. Yet this did not appear in an English translation until 1959, under the title of The Logic of Scientific Discovery. After developing these ideas with regard to the natural sciences, Popper decided that their implications for the social sciences were also compelling. Applying the same framework of thought, Popper attempted to show that the ideal of an ‘open society’ could be expressed in much the same terms as that of the progress of science – namely, by the piecemeal rejection of unsatisfactory hypotheses or, to put it in political terms, unworkable policies. This resulted in The open society and its enemies, an intellectual defence of liberal democracy against totalitarianism, published in 1945 and the first Popperian text encountered by most British scientists.2 Bondi in particular was profoundly influenced at a personal level by Popper’s formulation for creating and sustaining a society that was an association of free individuals respecting one another’s rights within a framework of law. Like Popper, Bondi was from Vienna and of Jewish descent, but was born 17 years after his philosophical mentor, in 1919, the son

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of a well-to-do doctor. He grew up in a city emerging from defeat in war and the wreckage of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Bondi’s grandfather, who had been a gun-runner for Garibaldi, the liberator of Italy, had been Orthodox, but his parents came to abandon the faith. Throughout his life Bondi, like Popper, never much identified with his Jewishness, yet he shared a similar position to Popper’s in one of Europe’s most viscerally anti-Semitic cities. He was destined, even before his teenage years were out, to a lifelong exile.3 Bondi threw himself into mathematical physics, which resulted in his securing a place at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1937 – joining that generation that has been called, with painful irony, ‘Hitler’s Gift’.4 It is therefore hardly surprising that Bondi would readily identify with the central aims of Popper’s Open society. Arriving at Cambridge intent on ‘co-operating with his scientific colleagues’, Bondi delighted in Popperian science simply because he believed that it too was attuned to the basic human characteristic of fallibility, thereby offering a haven of universality within which people of different cultures, ideologies and races were able to collaborate.5 The trinity of angry young astronomers of the 1950s, Bondi, Gold and Hoyle, were once judged enfants terribles raging around the ‘ivory towers of Cambridge, upsetting the established order by putting God in his place by advocating a better way of ordering the Universe that He had not been smart enough to dream of’. But Bondi transmuted from ‘a distant mathematical genius with a strong foreign accent, the professor out of Tintin comics’, to Director-General of the European Space Research Organisation in 1967 and Chief Scientist to the Ministry of Defence four years later.6 When the ultimate recognition of his metamorphosis from enfant terrible to establishment figure came in the form of a knighthood in 1973, Hoyle considered that it would provide ‘a bit of armour-plating in Whitehall’; not that he imagined his old sparring partner needed it.7 That Hoyle thought it necessary to pass such tongue-in-cheek comment was due to several factors. Although considered a truly brilliant scientist, Bondi was, even to fellow academics, something of a surprising choice to be anointed as ‘architect of the European space effort’.8 His reputation as an outsider loomed large at the start of his time at the Ministry of Defence: ‘He is not likely to be a popular choice in Whitehall … some civil servants fear that the outspoken, extrovert Bondi, who gives chatty press briefings in off-



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beat restaurants, will create a big bang if he goes into Whitehall.’9 Yet Lord Carrington, to whom Bondi provided advice and who was therefore well placed to give an assessment, reckoned that he had been an outstanding success: ‘Everyone who worked with him understood and enjoyed him and, above all, respected his judgement.’10 With infectious enthusiasm, Bondi moved to the Department of Energy as Chief Scientist in 1977, and three years later took up the chair of the Natural Environment Research Council. A lifelong passion for education, coupled with his determination not to fall into a rut – he joked that the only thing distinguishing ruts from graves was their length – led him to a seven-year term as Master of Churchill College, Cambridge from 1983. Unbowed and undeterred by the line of fire between Whitehall and the scientific establishment, Bondi had a knack of communicating with civil servants, politicians, military strategists and scientists that allowed that ‘rare creature, an outsider’ not only to stride the corridors of Whitehall but also to draw respect from commentators.11 As an extremely prominent spokesman for Popperianism, Bondi had an unequivocal message. If his vision of a Whitehall steeped in scientific understanding was to become a reality, it was necessary for scientists, politicians and the public alike to be grounded in the harsh realities of Popperian science. In other words, scientists’ efforts were towards disproving their hypotheses rather than sheltering them. Up to and including his involvement in the PUS, Bondi was adamant that what was required was a fundamental convergence in the outlook of scientists and the outlook of politicians when it came to matters of government policy. In particular, the different shades of scientific certainty remained peculiarly difficult for the scientist to convey to the non-scientist in such instances. Where hard knowledge was available, problems were not so likely to occur, but political necessity often meant that policy decisions had to be taken on the basis of incomplete scientific evidence. Bondi’s view was that such difficulties would be ameliorated if science was given greater prominence in general education, rather than being regarded as part of professional training.12

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With ministers becoming fully conversant with the practice of science being the end to Bondi’s quest, the Robbins Report of 1963 provided him with the initial means. A core theme of the report was that there were two ways of identifying the future size and intake of the universities: either by the number of highly educated people needed to meet societal and national needs, or by a consideration of the likely demand for places in higher education. To Bondi’s delight, Robbins decisively rejected the first option, since any view limiting education to external demand was, to his mind, simply preposterous. It would be similar to any view holding that only a fraction of the population should be taught basic numeracy and literacy because, after all, many of them would later find themselves in occupations that did not require reading or writing. No right-minded person would advance such a view, Bondi thundered. Nor, his argument went, would an estimate of this kind be likely to be of the least value even when viewed within its own context, because the defining feature of the early 1960s was, in conjunction with its technological characteristic, its rapid rate of change. It was therefore something of a futile exercise to try to predict what qualifications would be required in the future. The one thing that could be said with a reasonable degree of certainty was that we will need people with flexible minds, people who are capable of changing, who are capable of take changes in their stride and contribute towards them, people who will not be left stranded high and dry by further developments of technology that may make particular occupations unnecessary and create a need for others. If higher education does anything at all, then it must surely increase the flexibility of mind, the ability to change and preserve this well into the career of people.13

In Bondi’s view, the report’s recommendations would not lead to the lowering of standards or change in the whole ethos of the universities that anti-expansionists – F.R. Leavis, for instance – feared. Their implementation would actively encourage a liberal education while maintaining the most rigorous of academic standards at existing and future universities. In fact, it would be a disservice to Robbins and his committee to suggest that simply calling for broader courses and an expansion in student numbers would result



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in a lowering of standards. Bondi believed the Robbins report to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to overthrow the existing uninspiring, deeply conservative education system that decreed that the ‘one true and correct answer to scientific problems lay at the back of a text book’, where science was reduced to a dry collection of facts.14 Instead: The most important characteristic of science from the educational point of view is its imaginative nature. The originality of thought, the sheer magnitude of some of the feats of imagination, are probably without compare in the whole field of human endeavour. Faraday and Maxwell in their work on the electro-magnetic field envisaging lines of force, a state of tension, a real stress, in what is palpably empty space; Einstein cutting us off from the concept of absolute rest; Darwin thinking up the notion of natural selection; these and countless others are the bricks of which science is made.15

Bondi sought to establish the Popperian nature of the scientific process within the education system regardless of whether the subject matter was science or the humanities. He argued that Popperian science bore all the characteristics that marked a subject among the humanities, with its outlook and method so keenly attuned to human nature: its stress on human fallibility, its dependence on human communication, its progress so markedly steered by a rare spark of originality, its critical dependence on judgement of how far human design and foresight can be trusted before testing and trials become necessary.16 All students would therefore come to realise that science did not advance ‘like a steamroller’ but, rather, in a constant and bewildering ‘toing and ‘froing’, through proposition, debate, examination and falsification. Science did not benefit, Bondi continued, from individual ideas considered ‘ahead of their time’ in the sense that they were unintelligible to contemporaries – although they might have borne a likeness to a picture that would emerge later. The only setting in which an individual could participate and thus contribute to science was through interaction with others working in the field. No Popperian scientist was a seer or visionary, but a social animal participating in the activity of his community.17 Popperian science revealed its humanity as the subject of current debate, discussion and seminar. There would be no room for certainty, only disputation. The ability to debate and be forced to at least listen to

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the ideas of others was as important as the knowledge itself. The Popperian yardstick of refutation and disputation was, it could also be argued, a yardstick appropriate to any context, independent of political, ideological or national prejudices. Such thoughts had a particular resonance at this time of Cold War tensions.18 It is in this readiness to co-operate, in this readiness to listen to criticism and to agree that one’s point of view may be wrong, however sincerely it may be felt, that the distinguishing feature of scientific work lies. The enormous flexibility of the human mind is what should be emphasised in scientific education. What goes with it is an essential and necessary part and that is the ability to communicate ideas – ideas that may be shockingly original and highly abstract. But in thus teaching the human mind to be co-operative, to be flexible, to be original and to be receptive, science has, in my view, an education to give that is second to none.19

The furore surrounding the publication of the 1969 pamphlet Fight for Education (the first of five so-called Black Papers) demonstrated that schooling had become a locus for fierce debate, not only about ambition and idealism, but between conservatives and progressives.20 What the papers confirmed, after the heady expansion of the 1960s, was that the Labour Party’s determination to achieve an entirely comprehensive system had broken a form of laissez-faire consensus. Edward Short, Secretary of State for Education and Science, described their publication as ‘one of the blackest days for education in the last 100 years’. For Dominic Sandbrook, what was also clear was that the argument about education in the early 1970s was not just about the different kinds of schools but about what was taught. For at least a decade, ‘progressive’ theories had become widespread in teacher training colleges. The traditional system of rote learning was now considered old fashioned; instead, educationists endorsed a model of learning that was child centred – one that emphasised group projects and actively encouraged children to learn independently. There was, nonetheless, a misunderstanding surrounding progressive schooling: that it needed less planning and less structure than traditional models. In fact, it needed a lot more.21 The ASE’s own recommendations showed a leaning towards a more progressive approach. The depth to which a science course could be studied should depend on the interests and abilities of the



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pupils and not only on the demands of future specialisations; pupils below the age of 15 should not be segregated into arts and science groups; neither should there be too much specialisation within the science subjects available as this could lead to the exclusion of a study of biology or chemistry or physics.22 The ASE’s philosophy also incorporated some familiar broad Popperian themes: the progress of science and technology was a record of individual and social endeavour, and of success and frustration, illustrating the perennial problems of the human situation just as well as other subjects that had been traditionally regarded as humanities. Therefore a vitally important function of the science teacher was: To help all those who will become scientists and technologists to see science as more than a collection of facts or a game of ‘getting the right answer’ but as a field demanding the highest qualities of creative insight and imagination.23

It was envisaged that this approach would embrace the dramatic changes of the time. The ASE was careful, however, to make clear that any future modernisation of course content would not lead to a lowering of standards. After all, the intellectual development of the modern science teacher necessitated a rigorous examination of the historical and philosophical thinking that had shaped the sciences, together with a deep-rooted awareness of the interplay between theory and experiment in scientific practice.24 By the mid-1970s, the rhetoric of the Black Papers had seeped deep into the public consciousness, resulting in the populist belief that teachers were far too militant. Socialists were ‘increasingly preoccupied’ with producing children that were equal, almost regardless of educational attainment, roared the Conservative manifesto, The Right Approach, published in the same year.25 When James Callaghan became prime minister in March 1976, one of his priorities was to ensure that his was the voice of decency and moderation, one that was in obvious contrast to the extreme ambitions of the far Left. So, from Callaghan’s perspective, moving into the education debate was also canny politics, since education would provide the springboard for the restoration of responsible values across society.26 According to his sympathetic biographer, the initiative that really captured public attention was Callaghan’s speech at Ruskin

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College, Oxford on 18 October 1976. Supporters hailed it as the prime minister initiating a ‘great debate’ on education, moving away from divisive arguments and toward fundamental concerns over educational standards.27 Callaghan had, though, helped to set a far more conservative educational agenda, in which teachers were more tightly policed and had to offer a no-frills curriculum with the emphasis firmly on higher standards all round.28 Bondi had his own interpretation of such an egalitarian model. Since all stakeholders in education, but particularly employers, were prioritising the assemblage of a workforce with requisite good communication, co-operation and leadership skills, then all the more reason for the system to be based on fundamental Popperian principles: that the production of knowledge is a human activity tailored to human abilities and disabilities, totally dependent on co-operation and communication, full of human-centred, interested trial and error and following many false tracks before making any progress. Yet, to Bondi’s continuing incredulity, many pupils at the critical stage of choice of subject ‘perceived science to be a collection of results faultlessly (and therefore inhumanely) derived by quite extraordinary (and hence rather unattractive) people’.29 The nexus of the Royal Society, ASE and Bondi But even before Bondi became its president in 1982, it was evident that the ASE was growing ever more aware of the significance and potential of Popperianism. It was generally held that, until the mid1970s, science teachers had not subscribed to explicit psychological and sociological models when devising teaching and learning schemes. Previously, teaching had been based on a range of tacit values and assumptions concerning psychological development, the nature of learning and the nature of knowledge in general, and scientific knowledge in particular. Traditional school science teaching, referred to as ‘chalk-and-talk’, was a general stimulus-response psychological model – all pupils of a given age and ability range responded similarly to the intellectual stimulus of the teacher. Such assumptions revealed themselves in a particular layout and design of teaching laboratories, carefully selected and graded textbooks, and an emphasis on the selection and rigid streaming of pupils.30 In 1979 the ASE looked to supersede such outmoded traditions with a combination of lecture demonstration and practical class



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work as a means of transmitting the same scientific content. Two dominant theoretical assumptions underpinned this alternative strategy: ‘Learning by doing was more effective than learning by listening; and that learning by doing was more inherently interesting for the pupils.’31 Looking to circumvent resistance from a potential Conservative administration that could judge its pedagogic approach as too progressive, the ASE insisted that it reflected the manner in which scientists approached their work. Having a ‘profound influence on scientists who recognise in his writings an accurate and illuminating description of the essence of their craft’, was Popper. His philosophy was ‘sensed and respected by many scientists’, as it possessed that ‘quality of all great insight which seems only to uncover what one already knew’. Tellingly, the ASE was able to report that scientific research was therefore a study no less ‘creative, emotionally engaging and intuitive than artistic studies’. Popper’s was a philosophy that scientists ‘now recognised as their own way of working since it did justice to their creative qualities’. The ASE therefore envisaged that Popper ‘will have a similar influence upon our approaches to science work with children in the future’. This was wholly in line with the theoretical methodology of learning by doing.32 Pupils were also to be made aware of the Kuhnian process of science. While Popper’s process was heralded as adept at describing those scientific enquiries that are made for their own sake, fundamentally to advance understanding, Kuhn’s outline related to a situation in which more ‘modest’ and more immediate problems are the target of ‘less adventurous and more tried hypotheses’. The ASE was keen to make use of both Kuhn’s paradigm view of science and the skills described by Popper – creating falsifiable hypotheses and devising experiments intended to disprove rather than to verify. The contributions that each made were judged to vary at different stages of education. Nonetheless, it was clear which was considered the more intellectually challenging and dynamic experience: How far do we want to be concerned in reinforcing, for pupils, the paradigm – our accepted understanding of the natural world – by offering them situations in which to apply it; and how far do we want children to be engaged in the process of creating their own science and modifying it by collaborating with their peers in critical testing?33

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In its turn, the Royal Society convened a conference in November 1979 that was concerned with the priorities for science education in the 1980s. The mood was sombre, with delegates airing grave concerns. C.C. Butler, the outgoing chairman of its Education Committee, reported to Royal Society News: We need a review at the beginning of the 1980s because science education shows signs of slipping downhill; we are not sure of our objectives, we do not know how to deploy our present resources to the best advantage of all pupils or where we should be aiming for by the 1990s. These issues merit a very thorough examination by an independent committee, which should be asked to carry out its work within the next two years.34

It was Bondi to whom the Society turned, and he decisively shaped the committee’s thinking. His initial suggestion was a method of approach designed to make all children more aware of the achievements of science but one that also made clear that science could not always give a firm answer to every question.35 And when subsequently called on, for the most part, he reaffirmed the views and ideas with which we have come to associate him: that the present system was not providing a ‘clear picture of what science is all about’ and questions remained as to whether the ‘right people’ were undertaking careers in science. Moreover, many pupils appeared to lose contact with science in their early years at secondary school and courses were wrong to suggest that answers to questions could be found in a textbook. This all led to the majority of pupils who would not go on to become scientists being unable to recognise the arduous work needed to make progress in advancing science; and those who would choose such a career failing to understand that their future professional life would not involve studying only issues to which there were answers. The committee was ­persuaded.36 Its report of November 1982 recommended that this principle be established in education: They [children] should be conscious of the limitations of science as well as its power, for science is not a repository of absolute truth, but an imperfect, incomplete and changeable model of physical reality from which we must never expect to derive certainty or finality.37

The report suggested that the Society’s Council should establish a small working group to investigate ways in which ‘public under-



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standing of science might be enhanced’. While accepting that the basis for PUS must be the teaching of science in schools, it was the committee’s view that ‘a sensible and balanced public view about science education is dependent on the development of much greater awareness and enlightenment about science and its role in society’.38 Royal Society News made clear the significance of the new inclusive approach: While the aim and concern of the Society is the protection and encouragement of scientific activity at the highest level, it has long been apparent that this must include the education (in school, further and higher education) of all those who are likely to follow careers in science whether as laboratory technicians or Nobel laureates. Moreover, this concern is not likely to be constructive or realistic unless it is based on the plain fact that the education of this relatively small group is embedded in the educational process as a whole and cannot be considered in isolation and without appreciation of the problems of teaching the rest of the school population, which includes able children whose inclinations lie in the humanities as well as the larger group of children whose formal education will end at school.39

In December 1982 Council, responding to the ‘immensely complex educational system’, accepted the recommendation of the education committee and approached Sir Walter Bodmer to chair the Committee on the Public Understanding of Science (COPUS). The committee first met in April 1983, with Bondi present, and what is particularly striking is that within a relatively short period a consensus emerged regarding the importance of highlighting the limits of the scientific approach. Too little heed was currently paid to the unpredictable character and tentative nature of knowledge. In the promotion of public understanding, it should be emphasised that facts themselves were not as important as the ability to understand the concepts. Science was too frequently presented as undisputed fact and ignored the disagreements between scientists over the interpretation of the data.40 COPUS agreed that it was important not only to disseminate scientific knowledge in schools but also to teach about science – how it was conducted and what degree of certainty could be conferred by a theory or hypothesis. In particular, it would be important to stress the more or less tentative nature of scientific knowledge. The problem was that at school science was taught dogmatically, as a

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body of received knowledge to be assimilated rather than criticised. By contrast, much teaching of the humanities was expressly concerned with criticism. Teaching about science, if not teaching of science, provided scope for developing the critical approach.41 And at the launch of PUS in April 1985, Bondi’s long-held ideals found expression in Bodmer’s oration: We realise that teaching science – which I shall say more about later – is extremely important; it is the essential basis on which any understanding can be built. In fact, we were set up after a Royal Society ad hoc committee rather like ours considered the teaching of science at school and felt that an important aspect that should be looked at further was the understanding of science – partly, of course, in relation to the media, but by no means only that. We see ourselves very clearly as not just a group looking at science and the media … ‘Understanding’ again is a difficult word to define in this sense. What does one mean by ‘understanding’? It is obviously different understanding for different levels of the public. The one point we would make is that we want people not only to have some knowledge of the facts of science, but to understand something about the processes that lie behind scientific investigations, and the ideas behind science and the way it progresses and its limitations. We feel that it is as important, if not more so, than the facts of science, and it obviously has to play into the way that science is taught at school.42

In his Bernal Lecture, Bodmer referenced Bondi’s recent talk to the Royal Society of Arts on the making of a scientist, notably the Popperian’s lament that education eschewed the fundamentals of imagination and creativity in the scientific process. 43 Almost in the same breath, Bodmer decreed that all pupils under the age of sixteen should be made aware of the limitations of the scientific method, especially its inability to provide unequivocal answers. ‘It should be shown to have its limitations, so that when scientists turn out to be wrong, the public is in a better position to understand how that may happen.’44 In the wake of the Society’s PUS initiative, The Times called for an increase in teachers’ remuneration, so as to enable ‘a large proportion of them with the insight and ability to impart the excitement of science to be attracted into the profession’.45 The Guardian agreed that all pupils should be made aware that any one forward step in science is dependent on many previous advances.46 As early as November 1985, there were clearly discernible outcomes.



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The Inner London Education Authority reported that 180 schools and 3,000 pupils had embarked on general science courses. The Associated Examining Board endorsed such courses because they provided a good basis for A-level specialisation in that the emphasis was on teachers putting over the principles and applications of science instead of simply feeding pupils masses of facts.47 The ASE called again for a philosophical debate concerning elevento sixteen-year-olds, with the major consideration to be borne in mind that a good scientific theory should not be regarded as true in some absolute sense, but that it should be coherent, have extensive explanatory scope and stimulate further enquiry.48 Conclusion This chapter has set out how Sir Hermann Bondi sought to introduce Popperian principles – with an emphasis on refutation – throughout the education syllabus. Yet there was no common language shared by those concerned with the governance of science education – teachers, lecturers, scientists and politicians – in which reasoned debate could be conducted. For the educationists and the scientists, however, this void was gradually filled by the ASE, heavily influenced as it was by Bondi’s Popper. The Royal Society came to realise that it too would have to set out its own radical, ­all-encompassing programme, going on to endorse a teaching of science that recognised the subject’s creative and taxing nature. It was down to the Bodmer report to make the tax-paying ­population – most especially parents – amenable to the idea of giving scientists such a degree of influence over their lives and those of their children. Bondi himself was most insistent that any development of such a scientific citizen had to start as early as possible in the education system – echoing the adage with which this chapter opens: ‘Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man’. Bodmer echoed Bondi’s Popperian lament that education had, until recently, failed sufficiently to emphasise the imagination and creativity required of the scientific process. Future citizens needed to learn science, and to learn it as the creative centrepiece of a liberal education. To what extent Popperianism has subsequently inflected primary and secondary school science education must surely be worthy of further research.

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  1 Popper emphasises that falsifiability is the demarcation between science and non-science. Bondi and Medawar, however, saw in the encompassing Popperian approach that the process of hypothesis creation and its subsequent creative destruction was on a par with the creative thinking traditionally ascribed to the humanities. Calver, ‘Popper: hero of British science, 1934–1994’ (PhD dissertation, University of Kent, 2014); ‘Sir Peter Medawar: science, creativity and the popularization of Karl Popper’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 67 (2013), 301–14.  2 Karl Popper, The open society and its enemies (London: Routledge, 1945). I am indebted to Bryan Magee for his expositions of Popper’s philosophy.  3 Mark Goldie, ‘Hermann Bondi, third master of Churchill College’, an expanded version of a talk given at a memorial concert at Churchill College on 26 November 2005. Papers of Sir Hermann Bondi, Churchill College Archive Centre (hereafter, BOND). See also: BOND.5.73, Transcript of Bondi interviewed for Profile, BBC, 19 November 1976; BOND.2.6B, Transcript of interview with Bondi by D.H. De Vorkin of the Centre for the History of Physics, American Institute of Physics, July 1979.  4 Jean Medawar and David Pyke, Hitler’s gift: the true story of the scientists expelled by the Nazi regime (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2001).  5 Bondi, ‘Free thought and science’, Freethinker, Centenary Issue, 1981. I am extremely grateful to the late Lady Bondi for access to the family’s papers.  6 BOND.2.8, G.T. Bath, ‘Maturing Astronomy’, review of Cosmology and Astrophysics: Essays in Honour of Thomas Gold, Nature, 10 November 1983.  7 BOND.2.2A, Hoyle to Bondi, 8 January 1973.  8 ‘Enfant terrible into establishment man’, New Scientist, 1 July 1971.  9 BOND.2.9, ‘Big Bang in Whitehall’, press clipping likely to be from 1970–71. 10 Peter Carrington, Reflection on things past – the memoirs of Lord Carrington (London: Harper Collins, 1988), p. 182. 11 BOND.2.8, ‘Sir Hermann Bondi, enfant terrible of science’, The Times, 18 August 1980. 12 BOND.5.58, Bondi, ‘Education, industry and government’, Operational Research Quarterly, 23:3 (July 1972), 245–50; BOND.5.53, ‘Science and defence: contrasts and similarities’, Lee Knowles Lecture, University of Cambridge, 17 October 1974; BOND.5.68, ‘The crisis



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in science education’, Lecture to British Humanist Society, April 1975. 13 BOND.5.58, Bondi, ‘The well-designed camel’, Isis, 6 November 1963, p. 9. 14 BOND.4.45B, Bondi to the Department of Education and Science, 20 September 1972. 15 BOND.5.58, Bondi, ‘Turning a training into an education’, Observer, 7 January 1962. 16 BOND.5.58, Bondi, ‘The new humanities: technology and science’, Gerald Walters Lecture, University of Bath, 13 May 1976. BOND.5.58; ‘Education and science’, Encyclopaedia Britannica Lecture, Edinburgh, April 1982. 17 BOND.5.59, Bondi, ‘Likely developments in science and technology’, Lecture at NATO Defence College, Rome, 25 January 1974. BOND.5.53; ‘Science teaching: the false prospectus’, Times Higher Educational Supplement, 10 September 1982. 18 BOND.5.78, Bondi, ‘Is science human?’, Physics logic and history (London: Plenum Press, 1970); BOND.5.78, ‘Why does science hide its human face?’ Question, January 1977, pp. 44–5. 19 BOND.5.58, Bondi, ‘An education second to none’, British Association Granada Lecture, 1961. 20 The first Black Paper (1969) was ‘mainly concerned with combating left-wing student interference with traditional academic freedoms’. Charles (C.B.) Cox and Anthony Dyson (eds), ‘Introduction’, The Black Papers on education (London: Davis-Poynter, 1971), p. 9. Dominic Sandbrook, Seasons in the sun: the battle for Britain, 1974– 1979 (London: Allen Lane, 2012), p. 197. 21 And for my introductory remarks regarding the Black Papers, Sandbrook, Seasons in the sun, pp. 200–2. 22 ASE, Science and general education 1971 (Hatfield: ASE, 1971), p. 12. 23 ASE, Science and general education. 24 ASE, Science and general education. 25 The Conservative Party, The right approach: a statement of Conservative aims (London: Conservative Party Press, 1976). Sandbrook, Seasons in the sun, p. 684. 26 Sandbrook, Seasons in the sun, p. 684. 27 Kenneth O. Morgan, Callaghan: a life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 540. 28 Sandbrook, Seasons in the sun, p. 687. 29 BOND.4.48B, Bondi, ‘The new challenge to education’, lecture, University of Liverpool, 3 January 1977. 30 ASE, Alternative for science education (Hatfield: ASE, 1979), p. 21. 31 ASE, Science and general education.

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32 ASE, Science and general education, p. 22. 33 ASE, Science and general education, p. 23. 34 C.C. Butler, ‘Science education in secondary schools priorities for the 1980s’, Royal Society News, 1 January 1980. From when Sir Keith Joseph entered the Department of Education and Science in 1981, he struggled with the first principles of education. It was against a backdrop of ideological gridlock and political procrastination that the Society adopted a notable change in emphasis and direction. Calver, ‘Popper’s Progress’, in Calver, Popper, ch. 5. 35 Royal Society (hereafter RS) CMB.169, The Royal Society Study Group on Science Education, 16 June 1981. 36 RS.CMB.169, The Royal Society Study Group on Science Education, 15 February 1982. 37 RS.CMB.169, ‘Science Education 11–18 in England and Wales’: The Report of a Study Group’, The Royal Society, November 1982. 38 Walter Bodmer, ‘Public understanding of science: the BA, The Royal Society and COPUS’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 64 (September 2010), 152. 39 Sir Henry Pitt, ‘Science in secondary education’, Royal Society News, 9 May 1981. 40 RS.CMB.356A, Ad-hoc Committee on the Public Understanding of Science, 15 April 1983, 21 November 1983, 6 June 1984. The Committee included three other research scientists, Roger Blin-Stoyle, Sir John Mason and Lord Swann. Members who were not professional scientists in the conventional sense were R.E. Artus (economist and a director of Prudential Assurance); Sir David Attenborough; Sir Kenneth Durham (Chairman of Unilever); M.J Savory (head teacher of a secondary school); Professor Dorothy Wedderburn (industrial sociologist and economist and Principal of Bedford College); and Dame Margaret Weston (Director of the Science Museum). 41 RS.CMB.356A, Ad-hoc Committee on the Public Understanding of Science, 29 January 1984. 42 Walter Bodmer, ‘Introduction and summary’, Joint Conference of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and Royal Society, 29 April 1985. 43 BOND.5.59, Bondi, ‘The making of a scientist’, Royal Society of the Arts, 28 February 1983. 44 Bodmer, ‘The public understanding of science’, The Bernal Lecture, 15 October 1986. 45 Thomson Prentice, ‘Scientists are urged to drop jargon and learn to communicate – Royal Society report’, The Times, 12 September 1985. 46 Anthony Tucker, ‘Scientist know thyself’, Guardian, 12 September 1985.



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47 Christopher Rowlands, ‘Schools find new way to teach science’, Daily Mail, 4 November 1985. 48 ASE, Rethinking science? Teaching science in its social context (Hatfield: ASE, 1984), pp. 40–1.

Index

Abadan Crisis (1951) 149 Abrams, Mark 18, 274–89 Adam, Sir Ronald 265 Adams, Mary 243–5, 250 Adrian, Edgar 84, 89, 92–4 adult education movement 235–7, 249 ‘adviser’, definition of 63–4 Advisory Council for Scientific Policy (ACSP) 65–7, 70, 89, 101 affluent society 284 Agar, Jon vii, 4, 15–16, 27; author of Chapter 5 and co‑author of Chapter 6 Alexander, A.V. 66 Amos, Alfred 189 Andrade, Edward 87, 91 Andrews, Kay 28–9 Anthony, Scott vii, 18; author of Chapter 14 Appleton, Edward 48–9 applied science 145, 153, 157–9 Arapostathis, Stathis 2 architecture 12 Armchair Science (magazine) 220, 224 Arms Control and Disarmament Research Unit (ACDRU) 122–3 Ash, Eric 255–6, 265 ash cloud emergency (2010) xi

Ashburner, Michael 128 Ashby, Lord 127 Ashworth, John 70, 123–4, 128–32 Asilomar conference (1975) 125, 127 Askham, Colin H. 220 Asquith, Herbert 29, 36 Associated Examining Board 309 Association for Science Education (ASE) 95–6, 302–5, 309 Association of Scientific Workers (AScW) 201–2 Atomic Energy Authority (AEA) 66 Atomic Energy Research Establishment, Harwell 166 Attlee, Clement 12, 65–6, 75, 88 Babbage, Charles 45 Bacon, Thomas Francis 109 Baker, J. 91 Baker, John R. 243–5 ‘balanced controversy’ policy at the BBC 235, 238, 250 Balfour, Arthur 29–30, 33–7, 41 Balmer, Brian vii, 15–16; co‑author of Chapter 6 Baltimore, David 126 Barlow, Alan (and Barlow Report, 1945) 12, 51, 65 see also Committee on Future Scientific Policy



Index

Barroso, José Manuel xvi Bartlett, Sir Frederick (and ‘Bartlett tests’) 257, 260–3, 269 basic science see ‘pure’ science Beaven, E.S. 188 Bebbington, Alan 135–6 Beddington, Sir John vii; author of Foreword Benyon, John 223, 229 Berg, Paul 124–6 Bernal, J.D. 5–6, 10–11, 18, 55, 57, 89–92, 204 Bernal Lecture (1985) 308 ‘Bernalism’ 91 Berrill, Sir Kenneth 130 beryllium research 114 Bevan, Aneurin 93, 209, 211 Beveridge, William 279 Biffen, Rowland 182–93 biological warfare, research on 122–6, 129, 134, 138 see also chemical and biological weapons Biological Weapons Convention (BWC, 1972) 124, 126, 133–8 Black Papers on education 296, 302–3 Blackett, Patrick (and Blackett Review) xviii–xix, 48–59, 92 Blair, Tony 18 Blue Streak 103 Board of Invention and Research (BIR) 14, 27–41 Bodmer, Walter (and Bodmer Report) 19, 129, 307–9 Bondi, Sir Hermann 19, 103, 105, 115, 295–301, 304–9 Bourne, Aleck 204–7 bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) 3 Bowler, Peter 240 Boyer, Herbert 125 Bragg, Sir William 29, 32–6, 237, 249 bread-making 181, 184 Chorleywood process for 191

315

Briggs, Asa 237, 239 British Army 261, 264–7 British Association for the Advancement of Science 237 British Association of Scientific Workers 10–11 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 18, 96, 234–50 Board of Governors 236–40 British Commonwealth Scientific Official Conference (1946) 85–7 British Interplanetary Society (BIS) 17–18, 217–30 Bulletin and Journal of 228 constitution of 221 foundation of 219–20 British Medical Association (BMA) 201, 203, 208 British Psycho-Analytical Society 260 British Science Guild 8–9 Broom, Robert 239 Brundrett, Sir Frederick (and Brundrett Report, 1964) 66–7, 70–5, 101, 146–8 Brunt, David 84 Bullard, Edward Crisp 93, 115 Burroughs, E.A. 247 Butler, C.C. 306 Callaghan, James 70, 132, 303–4 Calver, Neil vii–viii, 19; author of Chapter 15 Cameron, David xvii Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) 103 Cannon, Walter B. 202 Carnegie meetings xv Carnell, Ted 228 Carrington, Lord 299 Carroll, Sir John 102 Carter, Gradon 134–7 Central Advisory Council on Science and Technology 72 Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS) 69, 73, 130, 132

316

Index

Central Statistical Office 274–6, 279, 286 Chamberlain, Neville 51 Charnley, Berris viii, 17; author of Chapter 9 Charnley, John 163–4, 169 chemical and biological weapons (CBW) 101, 104–5, 108, 111–12 Chemical Defence Establishment (CDE) 132, 135 Cherwell Viscount 64–75 see also Lindemann, Frederick chief scientific advisers (CSAs) xii–xvi, 11, 65–74, 183 Christianity 240–2 Churchill Winston 1–2, 14–15, 30, 48–50, 63–8, 74 citizenship education 19 Civil Contingencies Secretariat xiii civil service culture 170–4 Clark, Ronald 47 Clarke, Arthur C. 220–3, 226, 228 class divisions 284–5 Cleator, Philip E. 219–22, 226–7 COBRA Committee xiii–xv Cockburn, Sir Robert 106, 108 Cockcroft, Sir John 66–7, 70–4, 101, 146 Code of Practice on Scientific Advisory Committees (CoPSAC) xvii–xviii Cohen, Stanley 125 Cold War 15–16, 67–8, 71, 74, 101–5, 112–13, 144–5, 153, 165–7, 302 collectivist societies 199 Committee on Future Scientific Policy (Barlow Committee) 65, 74–5, 88 Committee on the Public Understanding of Science (COPUS) 307 Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence (CSSAD) 48–52

committees as a focus of analysis 100, 116–17 Conference on Scientific Information (1948) 90–2 Conservative Party 93, 174, 285, 305 Constant, Jenny 168, 173 Cook, Sir William 105 Cornford, E.C. 105, 111 Cottrell, Alan 69, 73, 105, 164, 166 Council for Science and Technology (CST) xvi Crease, Captain 31 Crew, F.A.E. 246 Crichton-Miller, Hugh 259 Cripps, Stafford 85–8, 93 Crowther, J.G. 47 Culpin, Millais 259 Daily Herald 248 Dalby, William Ernest 35–6 Dale, Henry 83–4, 89 Dambusters, The (film) 166 Darlington, Cyril 94 Darwin, Charles 203, 301 Darwin, Charles G. 55 Darwin, Leonard 244 Davie, Michael 279 Defence Research Committee (DRC) 15, 100–17 as gatekeeper 107–10 terms of reference 104 Defence Research Policy Committee (DRPC) 65–7, 89, 100–3, 107–10 Defence Scientific Advisory Council (DSAC) 103, 107, 112–17 Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) 67, 146–7 Desmarais, Ralph viii, 18; author of Chapter 12 Director General (DG) of Research and Innovation xvi–xvii Dixon, Bernard 126



Index

doctors, functions and social role of (according to Ryle) 210, 212 Dommett, Roy 166 Douglas, Sholto 49, 53 Drayton, Richard 4 Duff, Sir Gordon xiii Dunham, Sir Kingsley 145, 148, 152–8 Durbin, Evan 209 Easterlin, Richard 284 Economist, The 287 Eddington, A.S. 240 Edgerton, David 6–8, 41, 45, 115, 260 education system 295–7, 300–9 Edwards, John Happian 217 Egerton, Alfred 36–8, 84–5, 89–90 Einstein, Albert 247, 301 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 71 embourgeoisement 286 Empire Scientific Conference (1946) 85–6, 95 Encounter (magazine) 283–4 Engledow, F.L. 188 eugenics 206, 210, 242–6, 249–50 European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) 131 evolutionary processes 206, 239 Eyjafjallajökull volcanic eruption xiv falsificationism 295–7, 301, 305 Faraday, Michael 301 farming, intensive 191 Fellows of the Royal Society (FRSs) 87–96, 148, 257 Finch, Dame Janet xvii ‘Firebar’ air crash (Berlin, 1966) 102–3, 113 First World War 9–11, 14, 27–8, 47, 226, 246–7 Fisher, John 30–6 Flowers, Brian 103, 115 Forbes, D.N. 111 Foresight team xix

317

Forman, Paul 106 Forrest, Mike 167–73 Foucault, Michel 217–19 Freud, Sigmund 260 Frisby, C.B. 270 fuel cell research 109–10 Fukushima Dai Ichi explosion xiv ‘G8’ and ‘G8+5’ groups xv Galileo 218 Garibaldi, Giuseppe 298 Geddes, Eric 39 genetic engineering 16, 22–4, 125–38 definition of 128–30 Genetic Manipulation Advisory Group (GMAG) 127 genetics 181–2, 192 geological survey work 144–59 pure and applied 157 Gibertini, Professor 191 Gillings, Walter 220, 225 Glover, Ann xvi Godber Committee 127 Gooday, Graeme 2 Goodchild, James viii, xiii, 14–16; author of Chapter 3 governance of science 218–19, 230 as opposed to governance by science 2–3, 6, 8, 14, 17 Government Chief Scientific Adviser (GCSA) characteristics needed in 72, 75 role of xii–xix, 63–75 Government Office for Science xii–xiii, xviii–xix government scientists 161–76 Gregory, Sir Richard 237 Grieve, McFarlane 183 Griffith Davies, John 84–5, 89 Guardian 308 Gummett, Phillip 47 Gusewelle, John 28 Guy’s Hospital 211 Hadow Report (1928) 236 Hailsham, Lord 72–3

318

Index

Haldane, J.B.S. 11, 18, 202, 222, 239, 242, 245–50 ‘Haldane principle’ xvi, 2 Hale, George Ellery 27 Hall, John 276 Hankey, Maurice 36, 51 happiness, definition and measurement of 18, 276–7 Hastings, Somerville 203–8, 213 Hawthorne, W.R. 116 Healey, Denis 68 health education 209 health promotion 200 Health and Safety Executive (HSE) 128–9, 132 Heard, Gerald 237, 242 Heath, Edward 70, 145, 152, 157 Heavyside Layer 229 Heidegger, Martin 227 Henderson, L.J. 202 ‘heterotopias’ 217–19, 223 Hiam, Fred 183 Higton, Dennis 164–7 Hill, A.V. 45–57, 84, 95, 248 Hilsum, Cyril 170, 174 Hinshelwood, Cyril 94 Hitler, Adolf 280, 283 Holder, Douglas William 115 Holdren, John xvi Holland, Sothern 36–8 horizon scanning xix Horrocks, Sally viii, 16–17 co‑author of Chapter 8 House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology 69 Howard, Michael 122–4, 132–8 Hughes, Jeff viii–ix, 15, 19; author of Chapter 4 ‘human factors’ research 111–12 Hunt, John 130 Huxley, Sir Julian 237, 239, 242–8 hydrophone research 34–5 Ilford Circle 220 Inge, Dean 243

Inglehart, Ronald 278, 282 Inner London Education Authority 309 Institute of Geological Sciences (IGS) 16, 144–8, 151–8 intelligence tests 262–8 interplanetary movement 220–1 see also British Interplanetary Society Jasanoff, Sheila 3 Jeans, James 239, 243 Joad, Cyril 247 Johnson, Alan xvii Johnson, Leslie 220–1, 226–8 Jones, R.V. 58 Joyce, Patrick 5 Juncker, Jean-Claude xvi Kendrew, John 54, 90, 103, 115, 131 Kennedy, John F. 71 King, Alexander 85, 88–9 King, Sir David xix King-Hele, Desmond 170–5 Krohn, Peter 111–12, 115 Kuhn, Thomas (and Kuhnian view of science) 296, 305 Labour Party 12, 14–15, 64, 73, 82, 92, 146, 151, 201, 275, 284–6, 302 LaFollette, Marcel 250 laser-damage weapons 114 Laski, Harold 81, 95–6, 279 Latour, Bruno 27 Law, Andrew Bonar 36 Lawson, Nigel 13 leadership qualities 264, 267–8 Lean, Thomas ix, 16–17; co-author of Chapter 8 Leavis, F.R. 300 Lederberg, Joshua 126, 137 left-wing doctors and medical scientists 199–200, 203–4, 209–13



Index

Leggett, Don ix, 14; author of Chapter 1, co‑author of Introduction and co-editor LeMahieu, Dan 283 Levin, Jeremy 122–3 Levy, Hyman 9, 241, 245–8 Lindemann, Frederick xiii, 14–15, 48–50, 58–9, 63–4 see also Cherwell, Viscount Linlithgow Committee and Report (1923) 185, 189, 192 Listener, The (journal) 236, 244, 247 ‘Little Joss’ variety of wheat 183–92 Lodge, Sir Oliver 236–42 Lord, W.B.H. 108 Low, A.M. 220–6, 229 MacBride, E.W. 239 McGucken, William 47 MacLeod, Roy 28–9 mad cow disease 3 Malinowski, Bronislaw 240 marketisation of knowledge 13 Marrack, John 205–6 Martin, David 89–96 Marwick, Arthur 274, 288 Matthews, Harry Grindell 222 Maxwell, James Clerk 301 May, Lord xix Medawar, Sir Peter 295 Mendel, Gregor 182, 184 Merton, Thomas 84 Merz, Charles 32, 38–9 Microbiological Research Establishment (MRE) 123–4, 127–33, 138 Mikulak, Robert 136 military-industrial-academic complex 16 Mineral Resources Consultative Committee (MRCC) 152–3, 155–6 Ministerial Code xvii Ministry of Technology (Mintech) 103–5, 110–11, 152, 155–6, 270

319

Mond, Alfred 10 Monsanto (company) 192 Moreton, Roger 170, 172 Morgan, Morien 108 Morrison, Herbert 65, 86–93 Morrison, J.L.M. 103, 115 Moser, Claus 279, 286 motorway construction 151 Mountbatten, Lord Louis 71 Murdoch, Rupert 286 Murray, David Stark 201–2, 206–8, 213 Myers, Charles S. 257–8, 265, 269–70 National Health Service (NHS) 12, 17, 200–1, 211–13 National Institute of Industrial Psychology (NIIP) 258–64, 269–70 National Physical Laboratory (NPL) 27, 35 National Research Development Corporation (NRDC) 103–4, 109 National Risk Register xiii–xv National Secular Society 241 National Union of Scientific Workers (NUSW) 10 Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) 147–8, 152, 154, 299 Nature (journal) 243 Newton, Isaac 86–8 Nicholson, Max 93 Nicholson, Robin 69, 75 non-interference, principle of 7 North Sea Operators’ Committee 156 North Sea resources 16, 145–6, 149–58 Northern Echo, The 287 Northern Ireland 102, 112 nuclear research and development 65–8, 101, 103

320 Nuffield Reconstruction Conference on health care (1944) 209 Nutt, David xvii oil supplies 148–9 O’Nions, Sir Keith xvi operational research 11, 14, 45–7, 52–8 definition of 54 use of the term 52–3 Oral History of British Science (OHBS) project 16, 161–2 O’Reilly, Sir John xvii Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 111 Ortolano, Guy 13 Owen, David 131 pandemics xiii Parkinson, Bob 165–6 Parry, John B. 261 Parsons, Charles 34, 36 patents 8, 224 pathology, social and individual 210–11 Penney, William 68 Polanyi, Michael 92 Polaris missile system 103, 166 politics of science 7 Popper, Sir Karl (and Popperian science) 295–305, 308–9 Portelli, Alessandro 162 Porter, Dorothy 212–13 Porton Down see Chemical Defence Establishment; Microbiological Research Establishment Press, Robert 69, 130–2 preventive medicine 209–10, 213 Proctor, P.D. 90 project champions 108–9, 115 Prothero, Rowland 186 psychological sciences applied to military selection 255–70

Index ‘public intellectuals’ 6, 247 ‘public understanding of science’ movement 19, 297, 306–8 ‘pure’ science 38–41, 145, 153, 157–9, 230, 257 QinetiQ (company) 172–3 ‘quality of life’ surveys 276–8, 281–4, 287–8 Queen, The 87 radio broadcasts see British Broadcasting Corporation; science talks on radio Rationalist Press Association (RPA) 241 Rattray-Taylor, Gordon 126 Redgrave, Michael 166 Reith, John 234, 237–41, 250 religion 238–42, 249 research councils xvi, 7, 83, 146, 157 Richmond, Mark H. 128 Riquet, Pierre-Paul 255–6 Rivers, W.H.R. 9, 257 Robbins Report (1963) 12–13, 295–6, 300–1 Robinson, Robert 84, 87–95 Rockefeller Foundation 260 Rodgers, William 131 Roosevelt, Franklin 202 Rose, Hilary 47 Rose, Steven 47 Rothschild, Victor 13, 74, 130 Rothschild Report (1971) 2, 69, 157 Rothwell, Dame Nancy xvii Royal Air Force (RAF) 260–4, 267–8 Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE), Farnborough 172–5 Royal Institution 1, 258 Royal Navy 260, 263–8 Royal Society (RS) 15, 19, 48–51, 69–70, 81–96, 148, 187, 237, 257, 297, 306–9



Index

annual Anniversary Dinner 88, 92, 94 Council 84 Information Services Committee 91 presidency 84, 95 Royal Society of Arts 308 Runciman, Walter 185, 188 Russell, A.S. 236 Russell, Eric Frank 222, 224, 228 Rutherford, Ernest (Lord) 29, 32, 38, 40, 237 Ryle, John 201–2, 206–13 Salisbury, Edward 84 Salisbury, Marquess of 94 Sampson, Anthony 96 Sandys, Duncan 103–4 Schaffer, Simon 4 Science Centre, planned 93, 95 science fiction 218–21, 225, 228, 230 Science and Innovation Network (SIN) xv science policy 7, 14, 45–7, 58–9, 65–8, 71, 148, 170 Science Progress (journal) 9 science talks on radio 234–8, 243 Science and Technology Ministerial (STM) Committee 131–2 Science and Technology (S&T) research 3–4, 65, 70 Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) xiii–xiv scientific civil service 12, 162–5, 173–5 scientific freedom in government service 170, 175 scientific governance 2–16, 28–9, 40, 73, 81–3, 144, 257–8, 275, 280 heyday of 283 history of 8–13 Scientific and Industrial Research Council 67 ‘scientific management’ 259 scientific medicine 206

321

scientific method 39, 47, 64, 205, 235, 308 scientifiction 218–19, 222, 225, 229 Second World War 11, 14, 18, 67, 81, 148, 163, 225, 249, 255, 260, 269 Selborne Committee 186 selection procedures for the armed forces 255, 261–70 service to the nation 164–70, 175–6 Seward, A.C. 9 Shapin, Steven 4 Short, Edward 302 Sinclair, Sir Archibald 50 Skinner, Ross 36–8 Skybolt missile 103 Sleigh, Charlotte ix, 17–18; author of Chapter 11, co‑author of Introduction and co‑editor Smith, Sir Adrian xvi–xvii Smith, Alan 116 Snow, C.P. 6, 13, 47, 58, 71, 163 social medicine 201–2, 209–12 social order 3–4 Social Science Research Council Survey Unit 18, 274–83, 287–8 social shaping of technology 192 Social Trends 286 socialised medicine and health care 200, 208, 212–13 socialism 200, 204–8, 212–13, 225 Socialist Medical Association (SMA) 17–18, 200–9, 213 Society for Psychical Research 242 Soviet technology 102–3, 113, 134 specialisation in medicine 210–11 Spinks, Alfred 131 spiritualism 241 Stamp, Josiah 243 Stapledon, Olaf 223 Stephen, Adrian 265 sterilisation debate 243–6

322

Index

Stewart, John ix, 17; author of Chapter 10 Strong, J.G. 221 structuralist view of technology 192 Strutt, E.G. 188 Stubblefield, Sir James 145, 148 subjective social indicators 274–6, 279–86 Suez Crisis (1956) 149 Sun, The (newspaper) 286 Sunderland 287 swine flu outbreak (2009) xiii

Todd, Alexander 67, 70, 72, 92 Trend, Sir Burke 59, 74, 146–7 typewriters, use of 227, 230

Tales of Wonder (magazine) 220, 224–5 Tansley, Arthur 10, 91 Tavistock Clinic 256, 259–65, 269 Tavistock Institute of Human Relations 269 Tawney, R.H. 279 Taylor, G.I. 93 Taylor, Stephen 209 technocracy 4–5, 266, 288 Temple, William (Archbishop of York) 240 Temple, William (science fiction writer) 220 tests used for military selection 261–9 Thatcher, Margaret 13, 69–70, 174–5 Therlfall, Richard 38, 40 Thoday, J.M. 128 Thomas, William ix, 14; author of Chapter 2 Thomson, G. 57, 93 Thomson, J.J. 30–1, 34–40, 237 Thorne, Sir Andrew 265 Thorneycroft, Peter 68 Times, The 287, 308 Titmuss, Richard 209 Tizard, Sir Henry xiii, 14–15, 46–59, 63–75, 84–5, 89, 91, 101, 146

Veneer, Leucha x, 16; author of Chapter 7 Venn, J.A. 188 Vernon, James 283 Vernon, Philip Ewart 261 Vienna 297–8 ‘von Karman’ reviews 107

United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) 149–50 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) 82, 86, 89–90 Universal Science Circle 220, 227

Wace, E.G. 258 Wallace, Alfred Russel 203 Wallis, Barnes 166 Walport, Sir Mark xix Wansborough-Jones, Owen 90 War Office Selection Board (WOSB) 262, 265–8 war in relation to science 27–8, 41, 246–9 Ward, Henry Marshall 184 ‘warfare state’ thesis (Edgerton) 7–8, 41 Watkinson, Harold 68 Watson Watt, Robert 49, 53–4 Watt, William 170 Weapons Development Committee (WDC) 104–5, 113 Webb, Sidney 1 Webster, Charles 208–9 Weisner, Jerry 71 Wellcome Research Laboratories 132–3 Wells, H.G. 1–10, 29, 221, 239, 248 Werskey, Gary 10–11, 203

wheat Mendelian varieties of 182–3, 187–92 yields of 181–93 White, Alice x, 18; author of Chapter 13 Wilkie, Tom 47 Willetts, David xvii Williams, Sir Robert 127–8 Williams, Shirley 128 Wilson, Harold 18, 67, 70, 103–4, 110, 145–6, 152, 275, 284

Index

323

Wilson, Woodrow 27 Winner, Langdon 192 wireless technology 228–9 Wright, Susan 125 Wykeham, Sir Peter 110 Yarrow, Alfred 35, 38 ‘Yeoman’ variety of wheat 184–92 Young, Michael 209 Zuckerman, Solly 14–15, 51, 57, 59, 63–75, 101, 105, 108, 111, 114–15