A sketch passed around Combined Operations in 1943, probably drawn by Sandy Wedderburn (note the sole disadvantage, ‘Pi’ being shorthand for ‘Pyke’)
To his credit, Mountbatten took this obituary notice well and later joked with Pyke about it. He was certainly used to these epistolary outbursts. As Pyke reassured him: ‘I have always been, as I think you know, one of your, I hope, most discerning critics, and at the same time one of your greatest admirers.’ But it is hard to imagine an episode like this doing anything to improve Pyke’s chances of being invited out to India.
Though Mountbatten left Combined Operations in October 1943, Pyke managed to hang on for more than a year in Richmond Terrace. Soon after D-Day he was told by the Admiralty, on whose books he had been since they had assumed responsibility for Habbakuk, that his pay would be halved. Pyke protested to the Association of Scientific Workers, and to Bernal, Amery and Mountbatten – to whom he was, as usual, at his liveliest. ‘Though – damn it – I want to work on war problems, and think I still have something to contribute, I am not accepting a reduction in salary for two reasons: private and public. One, that over the last 30 years I have given away to public causes three inheritances and also what I have made [. . .], in all, a considerable packet. For health and other reasons I have now got to bother about my future. (The right time to bother about one’s future is, of course, when one has no future to bother about.)’ Yet Mountbatten did not intervene and, because Pyke refused the pay cut, he was now out of a job. Though he stubbornly went in to work each day, in spite of receiving no salary, by the end of 1944 the sentries guarding Combined Operations were instructed not to allow him back into the building. One of the strangest Whitehall appointments of the Second World War had come to an end.
Geoffrey Pyke’s career as a civil servant – to add to those as war correspondent, amateur spy, magazine publisher, advertising copywriter, educationalist, metals-market speculator, pioneering charity worker, pollster, suspected propagandist and military inventor – had been provocative and productive. He was responsible for a glut of ideas including, it seems, one of the inventions most often associated with D-Day.
The traditional story of PLUTO – the oil pipeline laid beneath the English Channel to supply the invading Allied forces – goes roughly as follows: in 1942 Mountbatten was asked to provide a list of items he required for the Normandy landings, and in April of that year he told Geoffrey Lloyd MP, Minister in charge of the Petroleum Warfare Department, that he would like an oil pipeline under the Channel. Several years later this was what he got. But was this idea originally Mountbatten’s?
It appears not, based on the fact that Pyke had had precisely the same idea in 1934. ‘I put it up to one of the big oil companies [Shell] suggesting not that they should build one straight away, but that they should appoint a small bureau to collect the results of any research which might be relative to its eventual construction and, perhaps, to subsidise and stimulate such research.’ Nothing came of it, nor does this prove definitively that Pyke conceived PLUTO. However, given his desire to regale Mountbatten with every passing idea of his, and the amount of time he spent talking to him during and before April 1942 – so much that colleagues tampered with the locks on the CCO’s door – it seems more than likely that he would have mentioned the idea to Mountbatten shortly before it was put forward.
Pyke’s greatest achievement in Combined Operations, about which there is no question of authorship, was Plough. This scheme led to the formation of the American-Canadian First Special Service Force (FSSF), later described as a ‘group of individualists and outcasts [and] probably the best fighting force this continent ever produced’. Mountbatten told Pyke at one point that they had ‘become such a vital necessity in the coming stage of the war that General Eisenhower and the C-in-C. Middle East are vying between them to try and obtain the services of this force’, later praising Plough as ‘probably the most bold and imaginative scheme of this war’.
The FSSF was an elite, maverick unit capable of demolition work, amphibious warfare, mountain warfare and operations on snowy terrain. It first saw action on the Aleutian Islands and more famously in Italy and southern France. In the winter of 1943 the FSSF broke the German’s ‘Winter Line’ by capturing Monte La Difensa. They were legendary night-fighters, known for operating behind enemy lines with a minimum of equipment. Faces blackened, they would attack using knives and their bare hands and leave ‘death stickers’ bearing the unit’s insignia on the foreheads of their victims – a red spear with the words USA and CANADA entwined – above the legend DAS DICKE ENDE KOMMT NOCH! – roughly, ‘the worst is still to come’. During one of these night-time operations a diary was found on a dead German officer in which he had written: ‘We never hear these black devils when they come.’ This provided the unit with its nickname, ‘The Devil’s Brigade’, also the title of the 1968 Hollywood film telling a version of their story.
Even the Weasel, or M-29 Tracked Cargo Carrier, a watered-down version of the snowmobile that Pyke had first envisaged, made workable thanks to his protests, was considered a success. Weasels were used in 1944 to keep the Nijmegen bridgehead open and, when German forces flooded the Ardennes to halt the Allied advance, the first vehicles to get through the German lines were Weasels. Even Vannevar Bush admitted that this machine ‘accomplished fine things’ and by the end of the war 12,000 had been built with plans for a further 10,000.
Yet one of the most important contributions Pyke made in Combined Operations was the least tangible. On their return from an inspection of the D-Day landings, Churchill, Brooke, Marshall and King had collectively cabled Mountbatten: ‘We realise that much of this remarkable technique and therefore the success of the venture has its origins in developments effected by you and your staff of Combined Operations.’ They were referring to the ingenious inventions which had come out of Richmond Terrace, such as the Mulberry harbours and PLUTO pipelines. What they may not have known was that most of these innovations were conceived during a surprisingly short period. ‘It is true to say that almost every novel idea which was later used in “Operation Overlord” [. . .] originated in COHQ during April 1942’, wrote Captain John Hughes-Hallett, Naval Adviser at Combined Operations.
The M-29 Weasel in action
April 1942 was the golden age of Pyke’s career in Richmond Terrace. It was the apogee of his efforts to get his colleagues to look at the world upside down, ask pertinent questions, think more about anything which made them laugh and otherwise be imaginatively iconoclastic towards every sacred cow. He became, in some ways, the flintlock in this firing mechanism, constantly solving problems and imparting his principles of radical innovation. Without this, some of those ‘novel ideas’ which played a part in D-Day might not have come about when they did, or at all.
Though Mountbatten assured Pyke ‘that the original thoughts which you have contributed to the Headquarters have been of the utmost value to the war effort’ this strand of his work would never lend itself to blue plaques, statues or street names. The history of invention is less interested in those who produce ideas and open the minds of others than the individuals who finish things off. We are not taught in school about Paolo Toscanelli, the mathematician and astrologer who had the idea of sailing across the Atlantic to reach the East Indies, but, rather, the explorer who acted on Toscanelli’s letter, Christopher Columbus. Douglas Engelbart was the visionary who came up with the idea of a computer mouse, but the man famous today for turning it into a successful commercial product is Steve Jobs. The victors in the history of innovation are the Columbuses and Jobses, not the Toscanellis, Engelbarts and Pykes. While one can talk about the FSSF, PLUTO and Weasel as palpable results of Pyke’s innovation in Combined Operations, it is the invisible fruits of his labour which are so remarkable – the creative atmosphere he encouraged as well as his creation of Habbakuk.
In an alternative world, one in which we celebrate spectacular ideas whether or not they are seen through to completion, where
there would be no end of streets, avenues and cul-de-sacs named after Geoffrey Pyke – especially cul-de-sacs – Habbakuk would be seen as his wartime masterpiece. In the real world, its legacy was more troubled. Indeed, Pyke never really came to terms with what he saw as his failure to turn Habbakuk into a military reality and the fact that it had taken him until 1942 to come up with the idea.
HOW TO LIVE
ON A DRY Spring morning in 1945 a man in Primrose Hill left for work, unaware that he was being followed. His pursuer was used to ghosting after Londoners as they made their way through the raggedy, bomb-scarred streets of the capital, past craters that had become overgrown since the Blitz and the fresher, deeper holes where a V1 or V2 had arrowed recently into the ground. He found it easy to tell if his quarry was familiar with basic counter-surveillance tradecraft. He or she might stop suddenly, forcing him to continue past, or turn back on themselves and otherwise take circuitous routes. The man ahead of him did none of these things. Of course, there was always a chance that this in itself was a small deception.
As the two men continued towards Chalk Farm Tube Station in lonely procession, the pursuer made a mental sketch of his subject. He was taller than average, of medium build and carried a brown leather briefcase. He had several newspapers under his arm, including the Daily Worker, and wore a belted, teak-coloured raincoat, dirty flannel trousers and a grey Homburg. Below the brim you could see his ears protruding like handles on a trophy, and when he turned it was possible to glimpse horn-rimmed spectacles, a longish nose and the tuft of a goatee beard.
Geoffrey Pyke got off the Tube at King’s Cross, after which he was seen to act suspiciously. He paced up and down the platform, looking beneath the carriages as they rattled past, before moving upstairs to the overground station. Again he took an unusual interest in the rolling stock. His ghost remained close. Pyke left the station and continued on foot to Stratton Street, in Mayfair, where he entered the offices of the Ministry of War Transport. The Special Branch officer who had been in pursuit began to wait outside.
At 5:30 p.m. Pyke reappeared and was followed back to No. 30 Steele’s Road where Heinz Kamnitzer also lived. Several days later the same thing happened – same officer from Special Branch, same journey, same interest in trains – and not long after, in early April 1945, a report on Pyke’s movements was passed on to the Security Service. MI5 had rediscovered its interest in this itinerant innovator and possible Soviet agent.
Pyke had a number of homes during the war. He had based himself in Great Ormond Street, Albany, St James’s Square and now Steele’s Road, but perhaps the happiest building he had inhabited was the Hampstead home of Margaret Gardiner, a former Cambridge Heretic and more recently Bernal’s lover. Like many affluent Londoners without vital jobs, Gardiner had moved out of the capital and in her absence No. 35 Downshire Hill had become an upmarket hostel for her acquaintances and friends. Pyke had spent the middle years of the war here in what was the prettiest house he would ever live in, as well as the most sociable.
Not since his days as a Cambridge undergraduate had he had so many friends nearby, including several with young children. Indeed, there were times in the long, slow months which followed the demise of Habbakuk when it seemed that he was at his happiest ambling around a garden with an infant in his arms, or having pillow fights with older children. Among the stream of visitors to Downshire Hill were Bobby and Deborah Carter and their houseguest Rolf Rünkel – living in nearby Keat’s Grove – as well as the playwright Elias Canetti, then having an affair with one of Pyke’s housemates, Friedl Benedikt. Canetti called on Pyke when he came to see his mistress and remembered him being forever caught up in his work and battling an illness, yet always eager to talk. ‘He was a clever and articulate speaker, who liked to regale me with literary ideas of a satirical-didactic nature,’ recalled Canetti. ‘His voice had a mellifluous quality that only became apparent when he was quoting from Shaw. It was as though – in this refined way – he was acting as a sort of agent on Shaw’s behalf, which, at this time of his greatest fame, Shaw certainly didn’t need.’ Canetti went on: ‘There would be a torrent of ideas about Shaw, or some comparable idea of his own. Friedl listened, you couldn’t interrupt him. She was mesmerised by his voice, and his paradoxes made her laugh. Without any access to science herself, she could still sense his mind and his inventiveness. Then, after about ten minutes, he would suddenly interrupt himself, and she would step away. He never asked her into his room. When he was lying ill in bed, he would allow food – very little – to be brought to him. But, as she said, he always kept his frontiers.’
Canetti went on to suggest that Pyke had an ‘insuperable’ suspicion of women, which could be traced back to the breakdown of his marriage. This was not quite right. He was merely suspicious of falling in love. He continued to hold Margaret, his wife, in the highest esteem and they never divorced. In New York, before going to observe the Canadian Habbakuk experiments, he had bought her cosmetics and clothes, and on her fiftieth birthday sent her a note calling her ‘innately beautiful’ and ‘the handsomest woman of your decade due to your inner magnificence’. He kept up long correspondences with Margaret Edwards, Margaret Lloyd, Elsie Myers and Maud Joachim, the one-time militant suffragette, and had at least one sexual relationship during the war which only reinforced his wariness of allowing himself to be hurt. In his notebook from September 1940 Pyke sketched out an angry letter to his lover, accusing her of having ‘something which compels you to bite people who try to help you’, adding that ‘it takes time to make love’ and that ‘I have one desire only – to clear you completely out of my life and for ever’.
Life on Steele’s Road was different from what he had known on Downshire Hill. He did not have such an easy rapport with Kamnitzer, the devout Stalinist, and geographically was that little bit further away from many of his friends. With his hearing in decline, he became less sociable.
‘I now restrict myself to those friends to whose voices I am accustomed, leaving others – if they are sufficiently interested – to obtain news of me from gossip,’ of which, he added, there was always plenty. Yet by 1945 many of those whose voices he recognised had either left London or were in the process of doing so.
David, his son, would soon be in Germany to complete his national service as an Army physician; German communist friends such as Rünkel and Kuczynski were about to return home; the Carters would move to Paris; while one of his closest friends, Leo Myers, had recently committed suicide. ‘Several times I had imaginary conversations with him,’ he wrote to Myers’s widow, Elsie. ‘He would just hit the nail on the head as easily as he would write a good sentence. An added pleasure was that we both laughed at the same jokes, even though the jokes were silly jokes. Indeed, that made them all the funnier.’ Nor did he see Bernal any more, not because he had moved away or died but because a bitter feud had broken out between them.
There had always been an intense rivalry simmering just below the surface of their relationship, but for years it had been sublimated into lively exchanges on science, war and the future of society. When Bernal agreed with Mountbatten in 1943 that Pyke should not come out to the US, before turning against the scheme entirely, this tension exploded. Although Bernal let it be known that he considered Pyke ‘the greatest inventive genius of his time’, his former friend was convinced that he had harboured a grudge for years. He accused Bernal of needing to be ‘number one man’ and ‘“telling stories” about my past – true, distorted and invented for the purpose of satisfying your ignoble psychological desires’. In one letter Pyke referred to a writ for libel that he had issued in the late 1930s about a defamatory story which he was now certain had originated with Bernal. Pyke blamed him for his dismissal from Combined Operations HQ – it was Bernal who had advised him not to accept the pay cut – and began to shut him out of his life. This was not enough. Pyke later threatened to kill himself in Bernal’s garden shed, to which he retained a key, prompting Bernal to change the lock.
For all this, he never stamped out what remained of his friendship with Pyke, and nor did Margaret Gardiner, who had come to accept his capacity for turning on those closest to him. ‘I have a very vivid picture of you walking about the garden of 35 with the six-months-old Martin [Gardiner and Bernal’s son] in your arms, showing him things – and it is that picture and all that it implies that I try to hold in my mind during the violent squalls and buffetings that, it seems, must inevitably be encountered in the course of a friendship with you.’
As he was being shadowed around London towards the end of the Second World War, Geoffrey Pyke was increasingly alone. This may explain something of the intensity with which he threw himself into his new project. When Margaret Gardiner asked him to move the last of his furniture out of Downshire Hill now that her friend, the artist Ben Nicholson, wanted to use his room as a studio, Pyke’s response was blunt and a little pompous. His new work must take precedence. ‘It is out of the question to put my personal interests or I fear yours before a public interest of such importance and urgency.’ Once more, Pyke had foreseen what appeared to be an epic disaster to which he hoped to find a solution.
Shortly before coming under surveillance by Special Branch, Pyke had thought about the possible effects of Hitler’s defeat on a war-ravaged European continent. Based on extensive research he estimated that in the coming winter there would be a major shortage of coal that would put countless lives at risk. Pyke then persuaded Philip Noel-Baker, a Labour MP who became the only man to win both an Olympic medal and a Nobel Peace Prize, to lend him a desk in the Ministry of War Transport where he could solve the problem.
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