Churchill's Iceman_The True Story of Geoffrey Pyke_Genius, Fugitive, Spy

by Henry Hemming

  In late 1922, having sublet his Bloomsbury flat at 41 Gordon Square to Maynard Keynes, the renowned economist who had recently made and lost a fortune in currency trades, Pyke began a meticulous and what he called ‘highly scientific’ study of the financial markets. This was where he hoped to make his money. While it is tempting to imagine him discussing some of his ideas with his new tenant, Keynes, the economic heavyweight of the twentieth century, there is no evidence of this. Nor did he consult any of his cousins who worked in the City, preferring instead to come at this subject as an outsider, a scientific samurai in search of an original insight.

  The Pykes had moved from Gordon Square to Cambridge where they got to know one of Keynes’s protégés, a brilliant yet hormonally charged undergraduate named Frank Ramsey. Earlier that year, aged nineteen and already a member of the Cambridge Apostles, perhaps the best known of all university secret societies, Ramsey had produced the first English translation of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a feat made even more remarkable by the fact that he was then studying mathematics (and would later be awarded a stunning First). Ramsey was owlish and precocious, a prodigy for whom the solution of philosophical and mathematical problems came easily. Social relations were more confusing, and none more so than those which involved women.

  Frank Ramsey

  During the first few months of 1923 Ramsey saw the Pykes daily and at the same time became a close friend of Pyke’s brother Richard, then reading Economics at King’s College. Indeed, Ramsey got to know Geoffrey and Margaret so well that they asked him to become David’s godfather – meant in a strictly non-religious sense for the Pykes and Ramsey were determined atheists. Whether or not Ramsey accepted, he was keen to maintain his close relationship with the Pyke family. By that stage of his life Frank Ramsey had become infatuated with Margaret Pyke.

  Unaware of his feelings, the Pykes invited him to come away with them over Easter to Lake Orta, in the foothills of the Italian Alps. Noting with approval that Pyke claimed no ‘proprietary rights’ over his wife, so that if she ‘announced she was going off with someone else he would be pleased because she was going to be happy’, Ramsey accepted.

  Pyke’s study of the markets was acquiring greater focus. He had homed in on commodities futures and in particular the metals market, where he studied the relationship between the prices of tin, copper and lead as if they were the movements of the Ruhleben sentries. He wanted to know everything about them. He drew graphs charting their fluctuations and discussed these with friends from the London School of Economics. Yet by the time he set off for Italy no patterns had emerged and he appeared to be no closer to generating the fortune he needed for his pioneering school.

  In the romantic setting of Lake Orta, Ramsey’s feelings for Margaret became overwhelming until at last he decided to act. One hot afternoon the two of them went out together on the lake before settling down to read. Unable to concentrate on his book, Ramsey gazed over at Margaret, thinking to himself how ‘superlatively beautiful’ she looked in her horn glasses. At last he broke the silence.

  ‘Margaret, will you fuck with me?’ he asked.

  Either she did not hear or, more likely, could not believe what he had said. Ramsey repeated the question.

  ‘Do you want me to say yes or no?’

  ‘Yes,’ he exclaimed, ‘or I wouldn’t ask you!’

  ‘Do you think once would make any difference?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know, perhaps that is the question[.] I haven’t thought it out,’ he admitted. ‘I just want to frightfully.’

  Margaret was both open-minded and inoffensive. She said she needed time to think it over. Ramsey’s response was to tell her that his psychoanalyst had warned him that if he did sleep with her he would probably be unable to perform. Relieved at having got this off his chest, Ramsey then went for a walk by the lake feeling ‘awfully pleased at having some chance’.

  On his return Margaret’s response was a polite no. But this was not a total rejection. Back in Cambridge he kissed her for the first time and ‘then came a wonderful afternoon when she let me touch her breasts, partly (I discovered) because she thought it was genuine curiosity’. Sadly we do not have Margaret’s version of events.

  Just before setting off for Austria that summer to find Ludwig Wittgenstein and talk him out of philosophical retirement – a trip that would change the course of twentieth-century philosophy – Frank Ramsey went to stay with the Pykes. He was dismayed to find that Margaret ignored him entirely, until ‘Geoff told me as it were fortuitously that he probably only had two years to live and I understood M’s behaviour and felt full of love for G and pity.’

  There are no other references to Pyke’s life-threatening illness except for a note he wrote around this time explaining how the news of his death should be relayed to David. ‘The adaptation should be gradual and unaccompanied by any shock.’ His son ‘will tend to feel it tragic just so much [. . .] as the matter is treated tragically by those [with] whom he comes in contact’.

  This tells us something about how the news of his own father’s death was conveyed. Even at the end of his life, those close to Pyke suggested that he had never fully recovered from the shock of losing his father and it seems that the way this news was handled played a major part in this. As for his illness, all we know is that by the time Ramsey returned from Austria several months later Pyke had recovered. Yet Ramsey’s infatuation with Margaret had, if anything, become worse.

  The young philosopher decided to clear things up with a letter. ‘I wrote and asked her if (1) I might caress her breasts (2) see her private parts (3) if she would masturbate me.’ Margaret was not won over by this bullet-point approach – indeed, she found Ramsey’s letter deeply upsetting – and for now he was forced to keep his distance.

  Meanwhile Pyke put the finishing touches to his financial model. After months of painstaking research, he had developed a ‘tentative hypothesis’ about the relationship between the prices of copper and tin, two staples of the London Metal Exchange. He had found an inverse correlation between the two prices. Put simply, if the price of one went up, the other tended to go down. Within any futures market a mathematical relationship of this simplicity was the philosopher’s stone. If accurate, he stood to earn a fortune.

  Using money he had been left by a relative and some of the proceeds from his book, in the second half of 1923 Geoffrey Pyke took the greatest financial gamble of his life. As a newcomer to the metals market he gambled his savings on the basis of a home-made financial model.

  During March 1924 three versions of an unusual advertisement appeared in successive issues of the New Statesman and Nation. ‘WANTED—’, each one began, ‘an Educated Young Woman with honours degree – preferably first class – or equivalent, to conduct the education of a small group of children aged 2½–7, as a piece of scientific work and research.’ The successful applicant, it went on, would receive a ‘liberal salary’.

  Pyke’s financial model had worked. During the first six months of trading he was said to have earned £20,000 (more than £600,000 in today’s money); Ramsey noted that Pyke ‘now made £500 for every £1 the price rose, and so expected to make much more’. To generate these spectacular returns he had acquired debt, some of which was unsecured by real assets, but this was in the nature of this kind of speculation and in itself was not worrying. Far more important, just then, was the business of finding the right head teacher for David’s new school.

  The notices in the ‘Staggers and Naggers’ worked in the sense that they caused a stir. By 1924 the supply of teachers far outstripped the demand, so to have a teaching position advertised in this way was remarkable. Several readers of Nature, where a similar version of the notice had appeared, assumed that it was the work of white-slave traders planning to sell the unwitting applicants into bondage. Others were intrigued by the lines about preference being ‘given to those who do not hold any form of religious belief’, and that work wou
ld be preceded by six to eight months of paid training. Training in what, exactly?

  Nathan Isaacs, a precocious and self-effacing German Jew who had fought for the British during the war and been gassed at Passchendaele, found his curiosity piqued by a different line. The advertisement had called for a woman who had ‘hitherto considered herself too good for teaching’. Isaacs thought immediately of his wife, Susie.

  She took one look and dismissed it as the work of a crank. Yet in the weeks that followed she spoke by chance to Dr James Glover, the psychoanalyst who had tried to analyse Pyke and was now on the school’s board. He suggested that at the very least Susie should meet with Pyke. She looked at the advertisement again.

  Susie Isaacs, then thirty-nine, was a wiry Lancastrian with thick blonde hair and a pale complexion who had a habit of jutting out her chin when animated. She was intelligent, bookish and driven. She had a rebellious streak. After her mother had died when she was six, she was raised by her father, an imposing Methodist preacher, who took her out of school when he heard that she had become a Fabian and an atheist. Following his death in 1909, independent at last, she went to the University of Manchester and was awarded a First in Philosophy before taking her Master’s degree at Newnham College, Cambridge. The following year she married the botanist William Brierley, but the marriage soon broke down, whereupon she went to London to develop her interest in psychoanalysis and write what would become a bestselling introduction to psychology. In 1921 she was psychoanalysed in Vienna by Otto Rank, a follower of Freud (whom she had hoped to be analysed by), before giving a lecture later that year that would change her life.

  It had taken place at the Workers’ Educational Association, in London, and in the audience had been Nathan Isaacs, ten years her junior. He pursued her, and soon they fell in love. Though the teacher-student dynamic never really disappeared, they became a tight fit intellectually, with Nathan more accommodating and perhaps lighter on his feet. Even if it meant that her teaching position had to end, Susie agreed to marriage.

  Several years later they both went to meet Pyke for the first time. The three of them clicked almost immediately. The subject of that first conversation ranged from the boundaries of self-understanding and repressed sexual urges to the impact of childhood on one’s adult psyche. Each one was fluent in the language of psychoanalysis, and over the following months Pyke ‘lived almost as one of us’, wrote Nathan, who went on to call him ‘undoubtedly an educational genius!’ Susie’s feelings were more complicated.

  As ever, Pyke did not imagine that he had all the answers. He wanted Susie and Nathan to help fill in the gaps and provide fresh angles on the existing problems, and out of these passionate, lively conversations during the summer of 1924 came Susie’s appointment as Principal of the new school. Several months later, on 7 October, the three-year-old David Pyke was joined in a gabled former oast house in Cambridge by nine boys between the ages of two and four. Girls would soon follow. It was the first day of term at Malting House School, one of the boldest experiments in pre-school education anywhere in the world.

  Imagine yourself to be one of those children. What would you have noticed as you began to explore the new school for the first time? For one thing, a lack of classrooms. Instead you would have ventured into a vast play area dominated by a piano (which you could play whenever you liked) and a space beyond filled with nothing but cushions and mattresses where you could take a nap. You would have also found that all the shelves and cupboards had been lowered to be at your height, something you had probably never seen before. Otherwise you might have been amazed by the piles of books, bulbs, beads, shells, counters and wooden blocks for you to investigate whenever you liked, as well as the mechanical lathe, two-handled saw, Bunsen burners, gramophone player and tools for dissecting animals – all of which you could use with the minimum of supervision. As you would soon find out, from an improbably early age children at the Malting House were to become familiar with both the principles and reality of scientific experimentation.

  The area you would have been most intrigued by – the one which children at Malting House spent more time in than any other – was the garden. Following Rousseau’s idea that the most beneficial child development takes place outside, in nature, which was why early Malting House literature referred to the children as ‘plants’, the garden had been transformed over the summer into an edenic playground. You could climb the trees and look after the hens, rabbits, mice, salamanders, silkworms and snakes. You were given a garden plot to look after and could make bonfires to see how different matter burned. You could also clamber over a state-of-the-art climbing frame, which had been shipped in from abroad, or jump around on the lopsided see-saw with adjustable weights (to illustrate mechanical balance). If all this failed to capture your imagination you could always play in the giant sandpit which was sometimes flooded and turned into a pond.

  If you were a particularly observant child, you might have noticed that in each room, at a level which you could not reach, there were books which the adults liked to write in. The Malting House was a scientific experiment as much as a school, and as such everything was to be recorded. Which child played with what, when, how, and the questions they asked, all of this was jotted down during the day and typed up later on. Too often in the past, felt Pyke, judgements about child development had been made first and supporting evidence found later. He wanted to spin this round. His school would be an environment in which almost all adult influences were removed, leaving children to be observed in their ‘natural’ state. This decision to record everything would be significant, and explains why Malting House went on to have such a lasting impact on British education. Yet what really distinguished it from other pre-schools and explains why it attracted the brightest toddlers in Cambridge, including the grandson of the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Sir Ernest Rutherford and the children of the philosopher G. E. Moore, had to do with what happened when a child asked a question.

  Early on in the school’s history one of the children asked the name of the funny-looking box into which adults sometimes talked. He was not told that it was a telephone. Instead it was suggested that together they call it ‘a telephone’. Great emphasis was placed on allowing the children to feel as though they were discovering the world for themselves, even if they were often being steered towards the correct answers. Having worked out what to call it one of the children asked what it was for. The staff at Malting House never responded to a question like this with a straightforward statement of fact, and instead had been drilled to say, ‘What do you think?’ or, their favourite, ‘Let’s find out!’ So rather than being told what this so-called ‘telephone’ was for, the children were asked to think of all the practical uses to which it could be put.

  Here was another thread in the school’s philosophy: discovery must be allied to utility. This was probably inspired by H. E. Armstrong’s theory of heuristics, in which effective learning was associated with discovery as well as action. Rather than be told that it was important to learn, say, how to write, because that was what you were meant to do, the children were encouraged to see that writing would allow them to send letters to their friends or let the cook know what they wanted on the lunch menu. (Once they had learnt how to write they ordered almost nothing but chicken.) Later they would be encouraged to budget these weekly menus, do the washing-up, make their own clothes or repaint tables and chairs. As well as helping them to discover the world for themselves, there was a desire to give the children as much autonomy as possible.

  On the day that one of the children asked about the telephone, it was agreed that this strange box could be used to invite their friends from outside the school over for tea. Now that they had an incentive to master it, they set about calling these friends and learning how to keep records of their numbers. Without any timetable to get in the way, they spent the rest of the day tackling further questions about the telephone, at one point following the wire which came out of it round the school and out to
the street. Later they went on an outing to the local telephone exchange to meet the operator and solve the riddle of why there was a female voice stuck in the receiver.

  Wherever possible, the direction and speed of learning was generated by the children. Indeed there were no ‘teachers’ at Malting House, just ‘co-investigators’. It was a learning environment without timetables or formal instruction, one in which curiosity and fantasy were rewarded. The contrast to most 1920s kindergartens was acute. At Malting House each child was seen as ‘a distinguished foreign visitor who knows little or nothing of our language or customs’, as Pyke put it. ‘If we invited a distinguished stranger to tea and he spilled his cup on the best tablecloth or consumed more than his share of cake, we should not upbraid him and send him out of the room,’ he explained. ‘We should hasten to reassure him that all was well.’ In other words, there were to be no punishments, a reminder of the influence of Freud on the school.

  Sigmund Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis was seen by those in Bloomsbury and beyond as the defining scientific discovery of the age. At its heart was the idea that we bury in our unconscious the memory of shocking or traumatic experiences, only for these memories to resurface later as nervous conditions. The effect of Freud’s theory could already be seen in contemporary literature, philosophy and the treatment of post-traumatic stress, yet by 1920 nobody had thought to apply Freudian psychoanalysis to education. Around the time of David Pyke’s birth in 1921 this began to change. The Institute of Psychoneurology’s ‘Children’s Home’ had opened in Moscow – Stalin’s son Vasily was one of the first pupils – and later that year A. S. Neill’s Summerhill school opened in Germany. Like the innovators behind both of these institutions, Pyke wanted the children at his school to come away without traumatic memories to suppress, nor any association between punishment and either sexuality or the natural function of their bodies. Yet by 1924 neither Summerhill nor the Moscow institute had written up the results of their endeavours. By recording everything at Malting House, Pyke had gone further than either school. His was the first valid experiment into the idea of reorganising education in the light of Freud.