The Party line was clear: Britain and Germany were engaged in an imperialist war; the British proletariat should rise up against the British bourgeoisie rather than fight the Germans. Pyke’s Plough idea flew in the face of this. It was a solution to a military problem faced by the British Army. So why did Pyke press it upon senior political and military figures with such enthusiasm?
This illustrates one of the most powerful contradictions within Geoffrey Pyke. His newfound identification with communism could be at odds with the character he had made for himself over the last four decades. One part of him was internationalist in outlook, radical and all for sweeping, systemic change which might usher in a new world informed by science. Another side of him was more English, if that is the right word – it was in thrall to Shaw, it was non-conformist, inconsistent and incapable of toeing a particular line. He felt the pull of Moscow but at the same time he was determined to tackle the great problems of his age. What made him unusual was his ability to maintain this internal conflict in balance rather than succumb to one part of it. In May 1940 this found him in the bizarre position of being a communist propagandist who was promoting a scheme to help Britain defeat Germany.
The chalk-shelter campaign embodied this paradox. It was a practical solution to an urgent wartime problem which happened to be taken up by the CPGB. For once both sides of his personality were aligned.
Yet even as he began to pull away from his propaganda work, Pyke was either unable or unwilling to divorce himself from the informal networks he had joined, and during the summer of 1940 he appears to have agreed to push for the release of Rünkel and Kamnitzer on behalf of the KPD. At the time it was customary for communists to use ‘British subjects to do work which it might be embarrassing for foreigners to handle’; we also know that most Soviet agents dispatched to Britain were assigned a CPGB member.
In this case it seems that they had been assigned a man who ‘stood close to the English Party’, as Kuczynski put it, rather than a fully fledged member. It is an important distinction. Pyke was prepared to help the Party, just as the Party had helped him, but temperamentally he was unsuited to full membership and never joined.
Any moral difficulties he might have felt during those early stages of the war vanished after Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. At last his political consciences were united in the battle against fascism, and he began to promote the Plough scheme again, possibly on the advice of Rünkel, then working for Pyke.
At the time, the USSR desperately needed the British to open a second front against Germany and, given that the Plough scheme was designed to divert German troops away to Norway, it is not inconceivable that Rünkel encouraged Pyke to have another go at selling the idea to the British military. If so, it would seem that the origin of the US and Canadian Special Forces lies in a suggestion made by a Soviet agent.
Having joined Combined Operations, Pyke was candid about his desire for greater collaboration with the Russians – and for this same reason he passed information to Smollett. Just as he never joined the CPGB, Pyke did not become a ‘recruited agent’ for the Soviet Union. Instead he was merely what was known as a ‘confidential contact’ of Smollett’s and was probably used on just a handful of occasions. In this he was not alone. Following the German invasion of Russia, Moscow was deluged with intelligence from Britain. As Douglas Hyde at the Daily Worker wrote, it poured in ‘from factories and the Forces, from civil servants and scientists. Those who did it were not professional spies, they took big risks in most cases, received no payment whatever and, this is doubly important, did not see themselves as spies and still less traitors. As Party members they would have felt that they were being untrue to themselves and untrustworthy of the name of communist if they had not done it.’ Geoffrey Pyke was one of these men and women – a source of information, but not a spy. The only time he was technically a spy stealing military intelligence from an enemy nation was in 1914 when he slipped into Germany disguised as an American and tried to smuggle a report on enemy troop movements back to London.
Though MI5 later received intelligence to intimate that Pyke might have been given a Party mission to carry out while in the United States during 1942, including an intercepted letter to Otto Katz which referred to ‘an English professor of the name of Peake’ who had gone to America ‘to push the Communist movement there’, there is no evidence of Pyke actually doing so. The Superman comic strip featuring a customised iceberg appears to have been a startling coincidence, or, for Pyke, a cute reminder that radical military ideas were not the preserve of military planners.
As his communist activities tailed off, MI5’s interest in him bubbled over. They were told that Pyke was a senior Comintern official codenamed ‘Professor P.’, and that he ran communist ‘action propaganda’. Both allegations were untrue. While he might have supplied foreign press cuttings to Tommy Bell and others, there is no evidence that he ran CPGB action propaganda, or that he undertook any propaganda work during his time in Combined Operations. Nor was he ‘Professor P.’ – though he appears to have been in touch with him.
‘Professor P.’ was almost certainly the man Pyke was seen having lunch with in King’s Cross: Jürgen Kuczynski. Kuczynski’s cover name in correspondence between senior KPD figures was often ‘Peter’. He was an academic, professorial figure, so ‘Professor Peter’ and ‘Professor P.’ both make sense as cover names; moreover, Kuczynski was in Berlin when Professor P. was, he was connected to Varga, and was known to be a fine propagandist.
Unaware of this, MI5’s suspicions regarding Pyke did not go away, and as late as April 1945 he was under surveillance again. This is a reminder of his uncanny ability to attract suspicion, a trait illustrated so well by Lord Rothschild’s judgement and its emphasis on his ‘erratic’ character. Rothschild’s close friend Anthony Blunt, then haemorrhaging secrets to Moscow, never elicited the same kind of suspicion for he did not possess that unbalanced quality which so many saw in Pyke – an electric, frenetic energy which made him stand out in almost any situation and might have been exaggerated by Addison’s Disease.
There was also his Jewishness, so prominent in MI5 accounts of him – except for Rothschild’s – which for some in the Security Service only added to Pyke’s aura of suspicion. It is interesting that throughout his life most of the men to be won over by him – Teddy Falk, Nathan Isaacs, J. D. Bernal, Leo Amery, Jürgen Kuczynski, Oscar Cox, Isidor Lubin, Max Perutz, Herman Mark, John Cohen – were either Jewish or of Jewish origin, with the notable exception of Mountbatten. Those who found him suspicious or took against him – the Wellingtonians who chased him down the corridors yelling ‘Jew Hunt’, W. S. Hadley, Vannevar Bush, Lord Cherwell, the MI5 officers who worked on his case – tended not to be.
The English society he inhabited was not exactly anti-Semitic, but it was one in which an individual’s Jewishness could become part of the reason why he or she was disliked. As is the case all over the world, those who feel that they have something to lose or are in any way insecure in their social standing tend to be more susceptible to this prejudice – which might explain why Mountbatten, so confident of his aristocratic provenance, seemed incapable of anti-Semitic sentiment. This was also a society which did not lend itself easily to personal reinvention and could be suspicious of those who appeared to disguise their social origins. For some MI5 officers, many of whom did not have Jewish friends, the combination of Pyke’s Jewish appearance and his refined English manner would exaggerate any initial suspicions they might have had.
While he helped the Communist Party during the first two years of the war and gave information to a Soviet agent on at least two occasions, Geoffrey Pyke was neither a communist nor a Russian spy. There is just one political conversion which makes sense of the last fourteen years of his life: the moment in 1934 when his analysis of the situation in Nazi Germany convinced him that fascism was the great danger of his age.
After the war, an American journalist contacted him about the
story of Plough. In his letter he described Pyke as an ‘inventor’. ‘This reveals to me that you have got the story wrong,’ came the reply. ‘I am not in the least interested in inventing. I did not care 2d. what sort of machine would do the work to give us mastery of the snows. For all I cared the thing could hop like a kangaroo.’ He did not see himself as an inventor. He did not see himself as a communist. ‘I am primarily an anti-fascist.’
EPILOGUE, OR, HOW TO THINK LIKE A GENIUS
‘I’d like everything concerning me to be destroyed and to be forgotten as if I’d never lived,’ wrote Pyke in his final letter to his son. Yet David Pyke chose to keep his father’s papers. Even if he had thrown them away, it would have been impossible to delete Geoffrey Pyke’s imprint on the world, to undo the conversations, speeches, articles and inventions, as well as the universe of ideas which he had sung into being during his fifty-four years, and which had covered such an astonishing range. Pyke’s Zelig-like journey through the early twentieth century encompassed a landscape of different fields – from the molecular constitution of ice through to Gallup Surveys, exotic investment models and the application of Freudian psychoanalysis to kindergarten design. He would tackle the problem of European anti-Semitism with the same imaginative, scientific rigour as the question of how to adapt a motorcycle sidecar for the Spanish Republicans. Also he had the remarkable ability to conceive complex technical ideas in spite of having no scientific training. What is interesting today is to see how his various ideas have aged, and the extent to which he was ahead of his time.
Pyke’s work on NHS recruitment was included by John Cohen in a Minority Report that went out under both their names and has been described recently as ‘one of the most radical critiques of nurse recruitment and education’. It foreshadowed many of the problems which would plague the NHS over the following decades.
His letters to The Times about the government’s decision not to donate to UNICEF or abolish the death penalty were no less prescient. The latter was abolished in 1965, and today the British government gives roughly 0.7 per cent of the Gross National Income in foreign aid and to organisations like UNICEF.
His hopes for pedal-powered devices and, as he rather clunkily put it, ‘the utilisation of muscle-power’ are no less relevant today as energy prices soar, along with levels of obesity. Now there are charities and companies which adapt bicycles to power everything from water pumps to threshers, grinders, cinemas, kettles and even laptops. There is also a version of Pyke’s cyclo-tractor in use, admittedly not the farm vehicle that Pyke had in mind but a pedal-powered bar in which you and your friends can cycle down the street while getting drunk.
His discovery of Pykrete proved to be a significant development in our understanding of ice, and for Professor Mark the results of the Habbakuk experiments ‘have been put to good use ever since in all permanent constructions (roads, airstrips, bridges, and habitats) in Arctic and Antarctic regions.’ While the idea of using Pykrete to build an enormous berg-ship has captured many people’s imaginations – there has been a radio play on the subject, as well as one book and many television documentaries – to date this ship has not been built. Yet if the price of steel ever again becomes prohibitively high, as it was during the war, we may yet see berg-ships moving cargo around the world.
The Weasel tracked carrier, which emerged from the Plough proposal, was later used at the South Pole and in Canada’s North-western Territories for scientific research and mineral prospecting.
As we know, the First Special Service Force, which also emerged from Plough, later evolved into the Canadian and US Special Forces.
Pyke’s idea for an underwater oil pipeline, PLUTO, which he had first proposed in 1934, has since been replicated all over the world.
The pioneering concept behind Voluntary Industrial Aid for Spain of organising groups of factory workers to produce material aid in their spare time remains largely untouched, and in Britain today there are no charities using this model, possibly for a similar reason to the one Pyke encountered at the time: the unions would not stand for it.
The principle behind Pyke’s 1936 suggestion of an ‘anthropology of ourselves’, which resulted in the Mass Observation movement, has since become an accepted and important tool in the way we analyse British society. The Office for National Statistics collects a dizzying range of data on how we live, while the British Social Attitudes survey, among others, gauges our attitudes to major political and cultural questions just as Pyke had once proposed.
A decade after he began to raise money for an institute designed to eradicate anti-Semitism from Nazi Germany, lest there be a genocide on the scale of what had happened to the Armenians in Turkey, the horror of the Nazi Holocaust became clear. Sixty-six years later the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism opened in Britain, at Birkbeck College, University of London, with aims similar to the organisation which had been once proposed by Pyke.
The legacy of Malting House School has since been described as ‘out of all proportion to its three-year life span and the limited numbers of pupils with which it dealt’. For Pyke its great achievement was the role it played in raising his son, David, who could later reflect that ‘one of the factors of my life has been a distinct absence of revelations. People usually find that some adult experience awakens them to an aspect of life previously closed to them; I have never had that. Everything was always open to me.’ Elsewhere it has been suggested that Malting House ‘played a key role in contesting and reconfiguring understandings of the “nature” of the English child’. By recording in such minute detail how the children reacted to this unfettered existence Pyke produced a longitudinal study of enormous value. Again, many of the school’s underlying principles became widely accepted in educational theory after his death.
Yet the strand of Pyke’s thought which has aged better than perhaps any other is one not easily associated with a particular period of his life – it is what he said and wrote about innovation. Inventing radical ideas was his metier. In the millions of words he wrote during his life he was at his most lucid on the history of stunningly original ideas and, as he told Mountbatten and others, he planned to write a history of Habbakuk to serve ‘as a serious sociological study of the Dynamics of Innovation in our time’. Right up to his death he was gathering material for this book, focusing on where radical ideas came from and why so many fell on stony ground. ‘Should this country go to war again it might be as well that such studies should exist and have been absorbed by both the public and the official mind.’ This book was to be the last word on innovation, an exploration of radical ideas written by a man who had been described repeatedly as a brilliant problem-solver. It would be an everyman guide to thinking like a genius – for he believed that anyone could think as he did.
‘What made Pyke so extraordinary,’ ran his obituary in Time magazine, ‘was his consistent belief that a human being could reason his way through any problem. That belief rammed Geoffrey Pyke’s bald head into – and sometimes through – one stone wall after another.’ But like so many books that are described at length by their author before being written, this one never materialised. We can still imagine what it would have contained. If you look at the way Pyke approached problems during his life, whether it was getting out of Ruhleben or winning the Battle of the Atlantic, there are clear patterns that emerge. Rather than waiting for moments of divine inspiration Pyke had a robust problem-solving technique. His method for coming up with radical new ideas can be broken down into a series of stages. They go roughly as follows:
A Pykean Guide to Innovation
His first step, simple as it may sound, was to be adventurous. Adventurousness could be defined as ‘a readiness to make a fool of oneself’ – something he called ‘the first duty of a citizen’. He lived by Dostoyevsky’s maxim that ‘the cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month’. Any mistakes you made were ‘the social and purposive equivalent of Nature’s mutations’,
without which there can be no progress. In other words, to be adventurous one must also be prepared to look silly or be laughed at and that requires courage. Without this it is almost impossible to come up with a truly radical idea.
The next step followed on from the first. A by-product of being intellectually adventurous was to develop a more sceptical attitude to what you were told. Pyke trained himself to question accepted truths, and to keep doing so until he had found the one which did not ring true – for there was always at least one. ‘It is easier to solve a problem than it is to spot what is the problem (as the whole history of science and technology shows). Almost any fool can solve a problem and quite a number do. To detect the right problem – at least so I have found – requires what Wells calls the daily agony of scrutinising accepted facts.’ Challenging everything like this was not just a ‘daily agony’ but a form of impertinence. In Ruhleben it felt rude to question the accepted fact that nobody could escape – rude but essential. ‘My technique, whose results sometimes give me a spurious appearance of brilliance, consists of nothing more than having enough intellectual courage to think in terms which our social environment has decided are nonsense and to see if after all our epoch is right . . . in every particular. It is not. And that is all there is in the trick. And I can teach anyone young enough in heart to do the same.’
Once this ‘daily agony’ had provided him with an interesting problem, Pyke would pause to refine it. This was a key step, for the wording of the question had to be right. He often found that tiny adjustments to the formulation of a problem could unlock a torrent of fresh ideas. He got nowhere by asking himself what disguise he and Falk should adopt to get from Ruhleben to London undetected; instead the question was how they would like to come across in the eyes of those they encountered. ‘The correct formulation of a problem is more than halfway to its solution,’ he insisted. ‘If anybody says he has nothing to say it only means that the problem has been put to him inappropriately.’
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