Knighted 1918.
Sir William Jury (1870–1944) Cinema distributor
Pre-war: one of the first cinema distributors in Britain; by 1914 his company, Jury’s Imperial Pictures, was a leading film exhibition company.
1915: chair of the Topical Committee for War Films. 1916: supervised the editing of documentary The Battle of the Somme. 1918: chair of the Film Committee of the Ministry of Information.
Post-war: President of the Cinematograph Trade Benevolent Fund.
Knighted 1918.
Dilwyn ‘Dilly’ Knox (1884–1943) Classicist and code breaker
Born: Oxford, son of tutor of Merton College, later Bishop of Manchester; one of four famous brothers.
Educ: Eton; King’s College, Cambridge (1903–7).
1909: Fellow of King’s College and classicist deciphering fragmentary texts of Herodas; lover of puzzles.
1915: code breaker at Room 40; broke the German admirals’ flag code.
Post-war: continued at Government Code and Cypher School which moved to Bletchley Park 1939.
WW2: worked on understanding functioning of German Enigma machine; broke the Italian naval code. Died of cancer while still at Bletchley Park.
Frederick William Lanchester (1868–1946) Engineer, inventor, car and aircraft designer
Born: Lewisham, south-east London, son of an architect.
Educ: Brighton primary and secondary schools; Hartley College (later part of the University of Southampton); Royal College of Science.
1888: before finishing his education offered job of assistant works manager of Forward Gas Engine Company of Birmingham; constantly inventing new mechanical devices and techniques. 1894: built first British motor boat. 1895: built first British four-wheeled petrol driven motor car. 1899: established Lanchester Engine Company, Birmingham, reconstructed as Lanchester Motor Company 1904; worked on technology that led to the first gearbox. 1909: worked for Daimler Motor Company.
1907–8: fascinated by aeronautics, published two books on aerial flight and aircraft design. 1909: joined government advisory committee on aeronautics and predicted major role aircraft would play in war; encouraged new designs in aircraft production throughout the war; later frustrated by lack of official recognition for his war work.
Post-war: moved back to Birmingham, worked on several pioneering engine designs including those for Malcolm Campbell’s record-breaking Bluebird; lost money in several business ventures and ended his life in poverty, with a charity taking over payment of his mortgage.
Registered 426 patents.
Pres Inst of Automobile Engineers 1910. FRAS 1917. FRS 1922.
Alfred Leete (1882–1933) Graphic artist
Born: Northamptonshire, son of a farmer.
Educ: Kingsholme School, Weston-super-Mare, and School of Science and Art.
Pre-war: cartoonist and commercial graphic artist working for several daily papers, Pick Me Up magazine, Punch, Strand Magazine, Tatler and the Pall Mall Gazette; also designed advertising posters.
Sept 1914: designed the Kitchener ‘Your Country Needs You’ poster later described as ‘one of the most famous posters of all time’, copied in America (‘Uncle Sam wants you’) and in many other countries.
1915: joined Artists’ Rifles and fought on Western Front.
Post-war: produced advertising designs for London Underground, Guinness, Youngers’ Ales, Bovril and Rowntrees, for whom he created the character ‘Mr York of York’.
Often returned to Weston-super-Mare and designed adverts for local businesses.
Frederick Lindemann, Viscount Cherwell (1886–1957) Physicist and scientific adviser to Winston Churchill
Born: Baden-Baden, Germany, where his mother was ‘taking the cure’, of German Alsatian father and American mother.
Educ: Blair Lodge Scotland; from 1900 at Darmstadt, Germany, in Gymnasium and Hochschule. 1908–14: studied in Berlin under Prof Nernst, met some of the leading scientists of the day inc. Albert Einstein and Max Planck.
August 1914: returned to England. 1915: joined Physics Dept of Royal Aircraft Factory, Farnborough where he formed part of the Chudleigh Mess with other young scientists. 1917: purposefully flew aircraft into spins to calculate the mathematics and prove the theory of getting out of a spin.
Post-war: 1919: Prof of Experimental Philosophy (Physics) at Oxford; lived in rooms at Christ Church College; made the Clarendon Laboratory into highly respected institution; recruited new generation of young scientists; became good friends with and informal adviser to Winston Churchill. 1934: argued there should be a scientific committee to explore possibilities of future air defence; took great offence when he discovered Henry Tizard [q.v.] was already chairing such a committee. 1937: defeated in by-election as MP for Oxford Univ.
Sept 1939: to Admiralty with Churchill. May 1940: to Downing Street with Churchill as scientific adviser; at centre of decision making for rest of war. 1942: argued for increase in bombing offensive once navigational aids had been improved; supported development of atomic weapons. 1944: sceptical about intelligence claims the Germans had developed missile technology. 1942–5: Paymaster General.
Post-WW2: 1945–51 returned to Oxford; member of Conservative Shadow Cabinet in House of Lords. 1951–3 Paymaster General. 1956 retired from Oxford professorship.
1920 FRS. Created Baron Cherwell 1941. CH1953. Created Viscount Cherwell 1956.
Geoffrey Malins (1886–1940) Film cameraman
Born: Hastings, son of a hairdresser.
Educ: unknown but assumed locally.
1906: photographer’s assistant in portrait studio, Weymouth. 1910: cameraman with Clarendon Film Company, Croydon; shot several features.
1914–15: news cameraman with Gaumont Graphic; filmed with Belgian army. Nov 1915-June 1918: Official Kinematograph Operator at the front; filmed many of the scenes for The Battle of the Somme (1916). 1918: left due to ill health.
Post-war: wrote How I Filmed the War (1919); continued writing and producing fiction films and exploration documentaries. 1932: moved to South Africa.
1918 OBE.
Charles Masterman (1874–1927) Liberal politician and propagandist
Born: Wimbledon, fourth son of evangelical Quaker parents.
Educ: St Aubyn House, Brighton; Weymouth College and Christ’s College, Cambridge.
1900: Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge; associated mostly with liberals and Christian socialists; lived in a tenement in Camberwell, south London, and wrote about the contrast between the squalor of the slums and the luxury of the West End. 1906: elected as Liberal MP and became junior minister in the reforming Liberal government. 1911: as leading reformer was appointed chair of the National Insurance Commission with responsibility to introduce NI to employers and workers.
1914: Asquith placed him in charge of official propaganda at Wellington House; brought together a strong team of writers, pamphleteers, filmmakers and artists to promote the British line in the war.
1917: demoted and put under John Buchan in Dept and later Min of Information; services dispensed with at the end of the war.
Post-war: continued to write prolifically in the Guardian and the Sunday Express on liberal subjects but never reconciled with the demise of the Liberal Party, nor did he become a member of the Labour Party.
Sir William Mills (1856–1932) Engineer and inventor of the Mills grenade
Born: Sunderland, son of a joiner in shipbuilding yard.
Educ: unknown but assumed locally.
1870s and 1880s: marine engineer, repaired underwater telegraph cables, designed lifeboat disengaging gear.
1885: established an aluminium foundry, Sunderland; later established a second foundry in Birmingham; produced castings for motor cars and later aircraft.
1915: took up Belgian design for a hand grenade and adapted it to what became the Mills grenade or bomb; 75 million produced by 1918.
Knighted 1922.
John Moore-Brabazon (1884–1964) Aviator
&
nbsp; Born: London, to parents from the Anglo-Irish aristocracy.
Educ: Harrow School; Trinity College, Cambridge (1901–3); left without taking a degree.
Pre-war: racing driver; first Briton to make a powered flight in Britain (Apr 1909); won aviation prizes from the Daily Mail. July 1910: gave up flying temporarily on the death of his friend Charles Rolls in an air accident.
1914–18: served in the RFC, mostly in the development of aerial photography and reconnaissance; worked closely with Hugh Trenchard; awarded MC.
Post-war: MP (1918–42). 1919–22: Parliamentary Private Sec to Winston Churchill, Secretary of State for War and Air. Parliamentary Sec to Min of Transport (1923–4 and 1924–7); supporter of Churchill’s policy of re-armament in late 1930s.
Oct 1940: Minister of Transport in Churchill’s wartime coalition. 1941: Minister of Aircraft Production, replacing Lord Beaverbrook [q.v.]. Feb 1942: resigned after making a speech calling for Russian and German armies to annihilate each other.
Post-WW2: became father figure to British aviation, encouraging new ideas like the jet engine; chaired the committee that planned construction of civil aircraft, inc. the ‘Brabazon’, a huge airliner that never flew and was cancelled in 1953; Pres Royal Aero Club; Pres Royal Institution.
Created Baron Brabazon of Tara, 1942.
Charles Samuel Myers (1873–1946) Psychologist
Born: London, of wealthy merchant parents.
Educ: City of London School; Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge; St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London.
1898: joined a pioneering anthropological expedition to study the natives of New Guinea but returned to Psychology Dept at Cambridge to study the minds of Britons.
1912: established the first Experimental Laboratory for Psychology in Cambridge.
Early 1915: coined the phrase ‘shell shock’ and believed the condition was treatable; commissioned into the RAMC. 1916: appointed consulting psychologist on Western Front, but eventually disillusioned with the army’s harsh response to victims of nervous breakdowns and returned to Cambridge.
Post-war: left Cambridge and set up National Institute of Industrial Psychology (1921), became the first president of British Psychological Society and editor of British Journal of Psychology. 1920s and 1930s: wrote and lectured extensively; carried out a great deal of laboratory experimental work contributing to the development of the science of psychology.
FRS 1915
Sir Lewis Namier (1888–1960) Historian
Born: Wola Okrzejska in Russian Poland of Polish-Jewish gentry parents, surname Niemirowski.
Educ: Lvov University (1906); LSE, London (1907); Balliol College, Oxford (1908–11).
1910: changed name by deed poll to Namier.
1914: worked for Charles Masterman [q.v.] at Wellington House as expert on Germany, Austro-Hungary and eastern Europe. 1918: Min of Information, worked on propaganda to assist break up of Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Post-war: worked at Oxford, Vienna and Prague; became committed Zionist after meeting Chaim Weizmann [q.v.]; wrote two major tomes on eighteenth-century British politics (1929–30). 1931–53: Prof of History at Manchester University; during late 1940s and 1950s respected as leading historian and ‘Namierism’ became shorthand for detailed structural analysis of people and power systems, the opposite of historical narrative.
FBA1944. Knighted 1952.
Viscount Northcliffe (Alfred Harmsworth) (1865–1922) Newspaper baron and propagandist
Born: Dublin, grew up in north London, eldest son of a barrister who took to drink and an Anglo-Irish mother.
Educ: Stamford Grammar School; Henley House, Hampstead.
1880s: freelance journalist with gift for popularising. 1886: editor Bicycling News. 1888: established his own Amalgamated Press (later Associated Newspapers) with brother Harold, to publish a series of popular papers and journals using new printing technology and new layouts. 1894: bought Evening News. 1896: launched Daily Mail bringing all his innovations into one new daily paper. 1900: circulation peaked at over 1 million copies. 1903: launched Daily Mirror. 1905: bought the Observer. 1908: bought The Times in a deal that initially kept his ownership secret; his papers campaigned on many issues inc. warning about the threat from Germany and in favour of new technologies, especially aviation; mixed in high political circles.
1914: his papers helped whip up anti-German fever. 1915: exposed the shells scandal. Dec 1916: replacement of Asquith by Lloyd George enhanced his reputation as a king-maker.
1917: head of British War Mission in USA.
March 1918: head of enemy propaganda in Min of Information; led effective campaign against Austria-Hungary and Germany. Nov 1918: resigned.
Post-war: campaigned for a punitive settlement on Germany at Versailles; Lloyd George denounced his ‘diseased vanity’. 1920–1: his behaviour became erratic and rude. Aug 1922: died of a blood infection that was wrongly thought to be syphilis.
Created Baron Northcliffe 1905; Viscount Northcliffe 1917.
Baron Rayleigh (John William Strutt) (1842–1919) Physicist
Born: Langford Grove, Maldon, Essex, son of 2nd Baron Rayleigh.
Educ: Eton, Wimbledon, Harrow and Torquay (moved due to ill health); Trinity College, Cambridge (1861–5).
1866: Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge; set up a laboratory at his family home, Terling Place, Witham, Essex, where he worked throughout his life.
1870s: studied psychic phenomena, acoustics, optics, physics. 1879: Cavendish Prof of Physics at Cambridge. 1880s: studied electromagnetism, thermodynamics and acoustics for the telephone. 1890s: helped calculate exact values for the ohm, ampere and volt. 1895: announced the discovery of argon, an inert gas (with William Ramsay); won Nobel Prize for this discovery (1904).
1896–1911: chief adviser to Trinity House and helped design foghorns. 1905–9: chair of War Office Explosives Committee. 1909–14: Pres of War Office Advisory Committee on Aeronautics. 1914–18: member War Committee of RS.
Inherited baronetcy 1873. FRS 1873. Pres RS 1905–8. Chancellor Cambridge University 1908–19.
Dr William Halse Rivers (1864–1922) Psychologist and anthropologist
Born: Chatham, Kent, eldest son of a curate.
Educ: Tonbridge School; London University; St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, qualified 1888.
1891: house physician at National Hospital for Paralysed and Epilectic. 1892: assistant at Bethlem Royal Hospital. 1897: lecturer in Psychology at Cambridge University. 1898: part of the Cambridge anthropological expedition to Torres Strait with among others Charles Samuel Myers [q.v.]. 1900–15: took part in anthropological expeditions to South India, Melanesia and New Hebrides in between work at Cambridge.
1915: joined Maghull Military Hospital to work on shell shock with among others Grafton Elliot Smith [q.v.]. 1916: commissioned as capt in RAMC and sent to Craiglockhart Hospital, Edinburgh to help officers recover from shell shock where he developed a close relationship with Siegfried Sassoon. 1918: RFC Central Hospital, Hampstead.
Post-war: wrote on the interpretation of dreams and on social anthropology.
FRS 1908. Pres Royal Anthropological Inst 1921–2.
Sir Ernest Rutherford, Baron Rutherford (1871–1937) Nuclear physicist
Born: Brightwater, Nelson, New Zealand, the son of a farmer who had emigrated from Scotland.
Educ: Havelock School; Nelson College; Canterbury College, University of New Zealand, 1890–94.
Pre-war: 1895 to Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge; worked under Prof J.J. Thomson, carried out early work on sound waves but was overshadowed by Guglielmo Marconi. 1898 to McGill University, Montreal, Canada, carried out pioneering work on radioactivity, understanding how much energy could be released by a single atom. 1907 to Manchester University as Prof of Physics, discovered atomic nuclei.
1915: appointed to the Admiralty Board of Invention, worked on underwater sound waves and the detection of submarines with William Bragg (senior);
1916:
joined the Dept of Scientific and Industrial Research under Sir Frank Heath [q.v]
1917: led Anglo-French delegation to USA to share with Americans Allied scientific advances in war.
Post-war: 1919 to Cambridge as Dir Cavendish Laboratory; split the atom, 1919; discovery of the neutron by James Chadwick, 1931; Rutherford was known as the ‘father of nuclear physics’ but continued to insist that it was impossible to harness the power released in an atomic bomb.
FRS 1903. Nobel Prize 1908. Knighted 1914. Pres RS 1925–30. Created Baron Rutherford 1931.
Robert William Seton-Watson (1879–1951) Historian and specialist on central Europe
Born: London, to Scottish parents with wealth from India.
Educ: Winchester; New College, Oxford.
Pre-war: travelled to Berlin, Vienna and Budapest; learned Hungarian, Croat and Czech: published Racial Problems in Hungary (1908).
1918: called in to become co-director of Austro-Hungarian section of Crewe House in Min of Information, helped organise the highly successful propaganda campaign against Austria-Hungary.
Post-war: helped to establish what is now the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, a faculty of University College, London.
WW2: served briefly in Political Intelligence Bureau of the Foreign Office.
Post-WW2: as a great friend of Czechoslovakia he was upset by that country’s absorption into the Communist Eastern bloc in the Cold War.
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