Blackett's War

by Stephen Budiansky

  In little over two years he had not only fulfilled the task Rutherford had assigned him but achieved a triumph at the forefront of physics. His cloud chamber image of a nitrogen atom being transformed by a nuclear collision into an oxygen atom would become famous—literally—when it was published the following year, 1925, in a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society reporting the work. A tribute to Blackett that appeared on his death in 1974 noted that this photograph had appeared in virtually every physics textbook in the half century since. “Patrick’s transformation from a young naval officer who had been under fire into a university man whose scientific genius immediately became apparent was, I should say, unique,” said Solly Zuckerman. “I certainly do not know of any similar case in the academic history of Great Britain.”26 It was a measure of his precocious success that he never bothered to obtain a Ph.D. degree, a fact that he took slightly wry pride in throughout his life.27

  IN MAY 1924 Blackett married Costanza Bayon, a free-spirited and unconventional young woman who was studying modern languages at Cambridge. The daughter of an English mother and an Italian father, she had been raised by an English couple in Florence who had renamed her Dora Higgs. On arriving in England she rebelliously resumed her old name. But she was known to everyone by the nickname she had given herself in childhood, Pat. To their close friends, the newlyweds were “the two Pats.”28

  They spent their honeymoon in Italy that spring; eager to return to the continent for a longer sojourn, Blackett proposed to Rutherford that he take a sabbatical in the 1925–1926 academic year at the University of Göttingen in Germany. Göttingen had emerged as a leading center of the new quantum theory, and the scientists who would pass through its Institute for Theoretical Physics as students, visiting lecturers, or faculty in the 1920s would be a veritable Who’s Who of twentieth-century nuclear science: Robert Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, John von Neumann, Eugene Wigner, Wolfgang Pauli. Heisenberg and Max Born, the institute’s director, had just developed the matrix mathematics representation of quantum mechanics that would win them each a Nobel Prize in physics (though twenty-two years apart). But quantum mechanics focused more on the electronic structure of the atom than on its nuclear core, and Rutherford was not enthusiastic about the idea of Blackett’s proposed sabbatical. “I remember vividly the rather grudging permission from Rutherford for me to leave the Cavendish for a year (my first sin) and to study the outside of the atom rather than the nucleus (my second sin),” Blackett wrote.29 It was the first indication of a perhaps inevitable rift between the two men. Blackett spent the year at Göttingen working with the experimental physicist James Franck, who would receive the Nobel Prize that year for his work on the electron, and who would later be one of the first prominent academics in Germany to protest the Nazis’ racial laws by resigning his position in April 1933. A colleague of Blackett’s at the time of the Nazi takeover would recall him speaking of his year in Germany and “his strong affection for its people and its culture … listening to him one could feel all his nostalgia for a Germany he could no longer accept.”30

  Blackett had never given much thought to politics. His father had been a Liberal who drifted Conservative in his later years; Patrick had voted Conservative in the 1918 election, he later said, because it was the “natural” thing for a naval officer to do.31 His service at sea during the war had already begun to plant doubts, though. He would later tell a colleague that he had instinctively disliked the class distinctions maintained between officers and men, and the rituals intended to reinforce them; he had found particularly ridiculous the way he had been taught as an officer to walk several yards away from the men before turning and shouting his orders to them.32 The war, and even more the first few years of peace, were a radicalizing experience for many Britons as their hopes for a better world were inevitably disappointed. The historian Robert Wohl in his book The Generation of 1914 notes that “the famed cynicism and disillusionment of the survivors” of the trenches “were, to a great extent, a product of the first few years of peace,” and of the unrealistic expectations soldiers had brought back with them:

  Many soldiers had … come to think that the war must have a secret meaning that only the future would reveal; they found it necessary to believe that their sacrifice and suffering would not be in vain; and they clung to the hope that the war would turn out to have been a rite of purification with positive results.… It was said, and widely believed, that class barriers would fall; that selfishness would give way to cooperation; that harmony would reign; that conflict among nations would cease; and that everyone’s sacrifice and suffering would somehow be compensated.33

  The year 1919, the army veteran and war poet Siegfried Sassoon observed, “laboured under a pervasive disadvantage. Too much was expected of it. It was a year of rootless rebeginnings and steadily developing disillusion-ments.”34 Great Britain entered the war as one of the world’s major suppliers of coal, ships, textiles, and iron and steel. The cotton mills of Lancashire produced half the world’s yarn and cloth, the shipyards of the northeast a third of the world’s ships. These traditional industries accounted for three quarters of Britain’s exports and a quarter of all jobs. The war not only cost Britain £11 billion and transformed her from a creditor to a debtor nation but saw the permanent loss of many important markets to producers in the United States and Japan. Industries such as shipbuilding that had boomed to meet the demands of war crashed in the first few years of the peace. A speculative craze in the textile industry led to 42 percent of the Lancashire cotton spinning capacity changing hands in 1919 and 1920, followed by a similar implosion. In 1922 exports of cotton textiles were less than half their immediate prewar levels. Coal exports were one third the previous figure. Unemployment hit 2 million by the summer of 1921. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed were, in Britain, less a bolt from the blue that brought a halt to a boom of the Roaring Twenties than a continuation of “the Slump” that had afflicted the country ever since the end of the war.35 As the writer and war veteran Robert Graves put it, for returning soldiers the standard topic of conversation simply changed from “this bloody fucking war” to “this rag-time fucking peace.”36

  For much of Britain’s working class, the world they returned to remained gray, closed, and grim. The government promised “homes fit for heroes,” but millions of workers in Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, and other urban slums continued to live in Dickensian squalor, crammed two or more to a room in run-down tenements with a shared water tap and WC in the backyard. (A Liverpool tenant who moved into new government housing in the 1930s marveled at realizing the “dream” of indoor plumbing: “Having a toilet next to your bedroom, especially in winter, you felt like the Queen.”) Even in areas that had escaped the worst of the slump, seasonal unemployment was a fact of life as builders, seaside resorts, and even carmakers and other manufacturers regularly laid off thousands of workers every winter as demand slackened. Two and a half million men, permanently disabled by the war, received meanly computed pensions based on the precise extent of their injuries (loss of an entire right arm was worth 16 shillings a week, but only 14s. if the arm had been severed between the elbow and shoulder, 11s. 6d. if below the elbow), relegating many once skilled workers to begging or jobs barely much better, selling newspapers, bootlaces, and matches on the street. In more hard-hit regions, particularly the coalfields and industrial centers of Scotland, Wales, and northern England, entire communities packed up and migrated to London, the Midlands, and the South seeking work. Working-class families trying to make ends meet crowded pawnshops; a Lancaster factory worker remembered “queues a mile long on a Monday morning” as women waited to pledge items for a few odd shillings.37

  Working-class fertility rates declined dramatically as married women sought to limit the size of their families, but ignorance and embarrassment about birth control methods remained widespread. The most commonly used method by married couples was
still withdrawal, which surely added to the frustrations of returning soldiers for whom the war in France had offered at least a peek at more adventurous sexuality. (A young newly married man recalled receiving coyly phrased advice about coitus interruptus as contraception from a bus conductor friend, who admonished him, “Don’t forget, always get off the bus at South Shore, don’t go all the way to Blackpool.”)38

  But throughout Britain, not just among working stiffs and their gloomy privations, there was a powerful sense of dislocation, of society having come adrift from its familiar moorings: a sense that something needed radical fixing. “The old order is doomed,” declared the Duke of Marlborough. He was commenting specifically about the millions of acres of venerable estates broken up and sold in the first few years after the war, in part a result of the higher taxes and death duties to pay for the war. He might have been talking about everything. The poet Richard Aldington recorded the disconcerting sensation that the war had left Britain a meaner place:

  In a very short time I realised that the London I had come back to was a very different place from the London I had left in 1914, let alone prewar London. Everything seemed askew. The streets were dirty and shabby—there were no men to clean them and nothing had been repaired or repainted for years. There were holes even in the main thoroughfares. The decent, orderly, good-natured Londoners had become as snappy and selfish as the far more sorely tried French. There was a shortage of everything except returning soldiers and debts. People fought for places in the inadequate transport system—a man who was accustomed to make way for women could not get on a bus. Food was scanty and very dear. Lodgings or apartments were almost impossible to find, because London was crowded with enormous numbers of “war workers,” who still clung to their jobs like limpets. There was a devil-take-the-hindmost scramble for money and position in the new world, and an extravagance which seemed incredible to me who had known the old sober England. I stood aghast at this degeneration of my people.39

  A small straw in the wind was the first appearance, in 1919, of P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie and Jeeves; Wodehouse’s “lyrical-ludicrous style” (Robert Graves’s description) and the extraordinary gentleness of his uproarious humor could not conceal the fact that this satire upon British upper-crust society would have fallen flat a generation earlier.40 Much space was devoted by that reliable voice of the establishment The Times to pointing out the many ways, large and small, that everything was going to hell in Olde England. A particular case in point was the invasion of “the jazz,” which The Times called “one of those American peculiarities which threaten to make life a nightmare,” and which a certain Canon Drummond of the Maidenhead Preventive and Rescue Association denounced as “one of the most degrading symptoms of the present day … the dance of low niggers in America.”41 The first London theater season since the return of peace had created the expectation of “better plays,” The Times predicted, now that theatrical managers could no longer count on the wartime crowds of London visitors who had reliably filled their theaters no matter what was on. But the autumn of 1919 brought a wallowing in nostalgia, revivals, and old standards that itself said something about a public looking hard for reassurance: there was Gilbert and Sullivan (Iolanthe and The Gondoliers) at the Princes Theatre, Cyrano at the Duke of York’s, and Shakespeare at the Aldwych, the Old Vic, and the Court—the last presenting a Merchant of Venice whose Shylock was portrayed by one Mr. Moscovitch (“said to be a Russian Jew”) with such fidelity to every hoary anti-Semitic stereotype as to earn The Times reviewer’s effusive praise along with the observation, “We do not excuse, but begin to understand, pogroms.”42

  The tragic myth of a “lost” or “missing” generation that had been created by the war, and the concomitant belief that the war itself had been a sort of cruel and cynical joke perpetrated on the patriotism and courage of a doomed and idealistic youth, would actually arise only about ten years later in a spate of memoirs, novels, and plays in Britain. It became a way of explaining the disappointments, romanticizing the past, assuaging the guilt of the survivors.43 The war dead amounted to 7 percent of the male population aged fifteen to forty-nine in England and Wales: a terrible toll, but hardly the elimination of an entire generation, or even “the best” of a generation.

  There was nonetheless a kernel of truth to the feeling that the war had taken a disproportionate toll on the educated elite. “The emphasis on the recruitment of ‘gentlemen’ into the officer corps at the outbreak of the war … tended to draw the officers from the existing social elites,” notes the social historian James Stevenson. The good health of members of the upper classes compared to that of many manual laborers, moreover, made it far more likely that they ended up in frontline infantry units: “Of the 13,403 students from Oxford who served in the war, 2,569, almost one in five, were killed. Cambridge showed virtually identical figures (13,126 served; 2,364 killed).”44 At the universities, a sense of obligation to make that sacrifice mean something intruded insistently on the prewar tranquillity of splendid scholarly isolation.

  CAMBRIDGE IN THE 1920S was far from a hotbed of left-wing politics. Rutherford pointedly frowned on political activity, believing that science, and scientists, should stay out of the political arena (and public controversy) altogether.

  But through those friends of his first night at Magdalene, Kingsley Martin and Geoffrey Webb, Blackett was introduced to a growing circle of prominent left-wing intellectuals. Notable among them were Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, the Marxist political economist Harold Laski, the psychiatrists Adrian and Karin Stephen (Virginia Woolf’s brother and sister-in-law) and W. H. R. Rivers (a Cambridge don who had pioneered the psychiatric treatment of “shell shock” and figured prominently in the 1917 saga of Siegfried Sassoon when that by then much decorated war hero refused to return to the front as a protest), and the zoologist Solly Zuckerman. Through Ivor Richards, Blackett and Martin became enthusiastic members of a Cambridge society known as the “Heretics,” who met for discussions and debates about philosophy and art and who were dedicated to the proposition of rejecting “all appeal to Authority in the discussion of religious questions.” The Heretics also brought Blackett into the Bloomsbury orbit, including Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Roger Fry, and Lytton Strachey.

  The 1926 General Strike would prove a watershed in the emerging political consciousness of the British intellectual left in the 1920s. The strike was the culmination of a long developing crisis that brought together many of the festering ills of Britain’s postwar social and economic malaise. As one of his first acts as the new chancellor of the exchequer in 1925, Winston Churchill, without any public debate, announced that he had returned Britain to the gold standard. The immediate effect was to increase the cost of British exports by about 10 percent, a disaster for the coal mining industry in particular. The mine owners declared they would have to cut wages; the 1,250,000 miners threatened to go on strike, and the Labour Party and the umbrella Trades Union Congress pledged to support them; at the last minute the government announced that it would subsidize the mine owners to maintain wages while a commission studied the problem.

  That only postponed the inevitable confrontation. The commission reported the following spring that the owners had taken huge profits and failed to invest in new equipment to keep the British mines competitive, but concluded that in the short run the only alternatives were a wage cut, or indefinite continuation of government support. To Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin it was self-evident that it was the workers who needed to make the sacrifice for the greater good: “All the workers of this country have got to take reductions in wages in order to help put industry on its feet,” he said. On May Day, 1926—impropitious timing if ever there was—the mine owners announced that unless the workers agreed to an immediate reduction in pay they would be locked out. Two days later the Trades Union Congress declared a general strike of all 6 million of its members, from printers to steelworkers to train porters.

  The government responded wi
th a call for volunteers, and thousands of middle-and upper-class men and women lined up to drive delivery trucks, operate power plants and gas works, and keep food supplies flowing. Buses crawled through the streets of London with barbed wire wrapped over their radiators and a policeman seated next to the driver, while armored cars and squads of soldiers guarded bus garages. In Hyde Park dozens of huts served as the headquarters of a huge operation to receive and distribute milk.

  Many in the Cambridge and Oxford communities volunteered to serve with the strikebreakers (there is a minor but memorable scene in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited of Charles Ryder and his Oxford friends forming a “high-spirited, male party” that signs up for duty with a volunteer militia, convoying milk deliveries around London and “looking for trouble”). Blackett was one of the few members of his university who visibly took a stand on the other side, driving to London to pick up and distribute copies of the strikers’ newspaper, the British Worker.

  After ten days the strike fizzled out. Churchill, who had built a remarkably progressive record on social policy in his years in public office even as a member of Conservative governments, had been strongly sympathetic with the miners and supported their right to strike; he had confidentially dispatched fellow Conservative MP Harold Macmillan to Newcastle to investigate the situation and had been deeply moved by Macmillan’s account of the deplorable living conditions and suffering of the workers and their families. But he saw a general strike as a revolutionary challenge to the rule of law and was determined to see it crushed. With the newspapers not publishing, the government stepped in to print its own official paper; if the British Gazette was little better than propaganda it was largely because of the man who leapt in to edit it. Churchill threw himself into the job with his trademark gusto. “He butts in at the busiest hours and insists on changing commas and full stops until the staff is furious,” noted one bemused observer. But he also dictated lengthy editorials and ordered up stories accusing the strikers of fomenting revolution, referring to them as “the enemy,” calling a Labour MP who spoke up to support the strike “a wild Socialist.” Kingsley Martin triumphantly declared that Churchill had been “discredited” once and for all by this fusillade of belligerent and often dishonest rhetoric. The episode left a residue of bad blood between Churchill and the intellectual left that never completely vanished.45