Most Secret War

by R. V. Jones

  We therefore waited about twenty minutes and then I telephoned Gerald Touch’s digs. Before anyone could answer I rang off again, and repeated this procedure several times, in order to create the impression that someone was trying to ring the number but that something must be wrong. After this spell of induction, I dialled the number again, and heard a voice which I recognized as belonging to a very able research student in chemistry—in fact he had won the Senior Scholarship in Chemistry in the whole University that year. Reverting to the tongue that was my second language, the Cockney that came from my early schooling, I explained that I was the telephone engineer and had just received a complaint from a subscriber who was trying to dial the number and who had failed to get through. From the symptoms that he described I would say that either his dial was running a bit too fast or there was a leak to earth somewhere at the receiving end. I added that we would send a man round in the morning to check the insulation, but it was just possible that the fault could be cleared from the telephone exchange if only we could be quite sure what it was. A few simple tests would check whether this were so, and if the victim would be good enough to help us with these tests, whoever it was who wanted to get through might be able to do so the same evening. Would the victim therefore help with the tests? Immediately, of course, he expressed a readiness to do so, and I explained that I would have to keep him waiting while I got out the appropriate manual so that we could go through the correct test sequence.

  I realized that he was so firmly ‘hooked’ that I could even afford to clown, and I persuaded him to sing loudly into the telephone on the pretext that its carbon granules had seized up. By this time, of course, all the residents of the household had now been alerted, and watched with some amazement the rest of his performance. I told him that his last effort had cleared the microphone and that we were now in a position to trace the leak to earth.

  I explained that I would put on a testing signal, and that every time he heard the signal that particular test had proved okay. The appropriate signal was very simply generated by applying my own receiver to its mouthpiece, which resulted in a tremendous squawk. As I had also asked him to listen very carefully for it, he was nearly deafened the first time I did it. I then asked him to place the receiver on the table beside him and touch it. I could, of course, hear the noise of his finger making contact, and immediately I repeated the squawk. When he picked up the receiver I told him that that test had been satisfactory and that we must now try some others, and I led him through a series of antics which involved him holding the receiver by the flex, and as far away from his body as possible, at the same time standing first on one leg and then on the other. When I had given him time to reach each position I duly transmitted the squawk, and thus got him engrossed in listening for it. After this series of tests I told him that we were now getting fairly near the source of the trouble, and that all we now needed was a good ‘earth’.

  When he asked what that would be I said, ‘Well, sir, have you got such a thing as a bucket of water?’ He said that he would try to find one, and within a minute or two he came back with the bucket. When he said, ‘Well, what do we do now?’ I told him to place the bucket on the table beside the telephone and to put his hand into the water to make sure that he was well earthed and then to touch the telephone again. When he did this, he duly heard the appropriate squawk; and when he picked up the receiver again I told him that there was now only one final test and we would have it clinched. When he asked what this was I asked him to pick up the receiver gently by the flex, and hold it over the bucket and then gently lower it into the water. He was quite ready to do so when Gerald Touch, who had been rolling on the floor with agonized laughter, thought the joke had gone far enough, and struggled to his feet. While not wishing to give the game away, he thought that he ought to stop our victim from doing any further damage, and he started to remonstrate, saying that putting the telephone into the water would irretrievably damage it. Our victim then said to me, ‘I’m very sorry about this but I’m having some difficulty. There is a chap here who is a physicist who says that if I put the telephone into the water it will ruin it!’ I could not resist saying, ‘Oh, aphysicist is he, sir. We know his kind—they think they know everything about electricity. They’re always trying to put telephones right by themselves and wrecking them. Don’t you worry about him, sir, it’s all in my book here.’ There was a great guffaw at the other end of the telephone while the victim said to Gerald Touch, ‘Ha, ha, you hear that—the engineer said you physicists are always ruining telephones because you think you know all about them.’ ‘I’m going to do what he tells me.’ As he tried to put the telephone into the water Gerald Touch seized his two wrists so as to try to stop him. They stood, swaying in a trial of strength over the bucket and the victim being the stronger man was on the point of succeeding. I heard Touch’s voice saying ‘It’s Jones, you fool!’, and our victim, a manifest sportsman, collapsed in laughter.

  Bosch and I collaborated on several further occasions. On one we had Leo Szilard go to call on the Daily Express in Fleet Street because I had faked a telephone call from the editor asking Szilard to confirm that he had recently invented a radioactive death ray. We were astonished at the strength of Szilard’s reaction—it was not until long after World War II that I found that he had just taken out a secret patent on the possibility of a uranium chain reaction and had assigned the patent to the British Admiralty. Telephone hoaxes were easy to play because one had only to produce a convincing impression in the single communications channel of the telephone: a hoax which had to appear genuine to the victim’s eye as well as his ear was much more difficult. Telephone hoaxes were so easy, in fact, that I ultimately graduated from the practical joke to the theoretical, being content to work out the various moves without trying them on the prospective victim, in the near-certainty that he would have fallen for them. Moreover, it was not very sporting to play jokes which had no chance of rebounding; and I sometimes aimed at creating a comic situation from which I could only extricate myself by thinking more quickly than the victim. Trobridge Horton, my lodgings mate, once remarked that he could not understand why I took such risks: my reply was that an academic life gave us no exercise in quick thinking, and that I had a hunch that the practice that jokes gave in quick thinking would one day come in useful.

  Arising from my friendship with Carl Bosch, an opportunity for quick thinking soon arose. He was as much interested in military matters as I was myself, and he told me that the Maginot Line was not as impregnable as it was supposed to be because corrupt contractors had put in considerably less concrete than they had been paid for. On Friday 1st November 1935 he told me that he was off to London for the weekend. I was staying in Oxford until Monday, when I would have to go to Farnborough for the vital infra-red trials about the exhaust gases, but of course I did not tell him about this. My Saturday was normal up to teatime, which I spent with others from the Clarendon, as usual, in Elliston and Cavell’s. On our return we found a tall stranger, a German, in the Laboratory and he explained that he was looking for Carl Bosch; he himself was Dr. Hans W. Thost, the correspondent of the Völkische Beobachter (the People’s Observer). I said that I was pretty sure that Bosch had gone to London, but that I would telephone his digs. Returning from the telephone I found that one of my colleagues had taken Thost into my room, where my infra-red detecting equipment was assembled ready for packing. Now a newspaper correspondent might easily be a cover-occupation for a spy, and here he was in the room along with equipment which was about to be used in a secret trial. If he spotted it, and started to ask questions, it could be awkward. I therefore thought that it would be a good idea to give him something to think about, and generally distract his attention. So on the spur of the moment I invented a preposterous story which seemed harmless enough at the time, but could have had unforeseen and unhappy consequences if we had lost the coming war.

  I told Thost that I had a certain amount of sympathy with Hitler, and could see wh
y he had pushed out the Jews. Thost almost clicked his heels together with an ‘Ach, so!’ and said that if it were not for the Nazis he would not have his present job. But I went on to wonder whether Hitler had done such a good thing for Germany after all. ‘What do you mean?’ asked Thost. ‘Well’, I replied, ‘they are very clever and if they started to plot against Germany there could be trouble. For example’, I added, ‘I know that there is a great anti-Nazi organization run by the Jewish refugees in Britain.’ With a highly sibilant ‘Sso!’ Thost pulled out a pencil, stretched his arm to expose a stiff white cuff and started to write notes upon it. ‘Oh yes’, I went on, ‘I thought everyone knew about it. Why, the headquarters are here in Oxford!’ ‘So, here in Oxford!’ repeated Thost at the same time inscribing it on his cuff. ‘Not only that’, I added, ‘but here in this Laboratory. The headquarters is in that room over there, and Franz Simon is the head of it.’ ‘Franz Simon’ wrote down Thost. I then said that any friend of Bosch’s was a friend of mine, and since Bosch was away I would be delighted to offer him dinner. ‘No, no’, said Thost, ‘I must get back to London at once!’ And off he went.

  Three weeks later I read on the placards as I went to dinner ‘R.A.F. SPY SCARE’. Being interested in both spies and the R.A.F., I bought a paper but the story conveyed nothing to me—it concerned a Dr. Goertz who had been arrested for making a sketch of the aerodrome at Manston in Kent. Two days later I had a letter from my mother, who had the same interest in spies, saying how glad she was that they had got Dr. Goertz and how sorry she was that Dr. Thost had got away. I was puzzled because there was no mention of Thost in my paper, and I could not remember having told her that he had visited me in Oxford. So I wrote home asking her how she knew about Thost.

  She replied that if only I would read a decent paper like the Daily Sketch instead of The Times, I should be better informed. She sent me the article from The Sketch and there undoubtedly was Thost’s photograph alongside that of Goertz. It turned out that Thost was one of Goertz’s acquaintances, at the least, and that he had been made persona non grata by the Home Office, because the security authorities were convinced that he was a spy without having enough evidence to convict him. So this was round No. 2 of the escapade—I really had had a German spy in the room, and had distracted him from the infra-red apparatus with this cock-and-bull story about the anti-Nazi organization.

  We thought no more of it for the next two years; but in August 1937 there was a bout of expulsion of newspaper correspondents between Britain and Germany. We had expelled three correspondents, the Germans retaliated, and this had raised the question of whether newspaper correspondents were really spies or not. As I later heard the story Simon and Nicholas Kurti were over in Paris doing some low temperature experiments with the big electro-magnet at Bellevue, when they were astonished by an article in a paper published by the Jewish emigrés (probably the Pariser Tageszeitung), which said that the British had been thoroughly justified in their action. One of their own reporters had somehow obtained a copy of Thost’s report back to his masters on how he had come to be so unsuccessful as to be expelled from Britain. In it he said that while he was in London he had obtained evidence of a great anti-Nazi organization run by the Jewish refugees in Britain, with its headquarters in Oxford and headed by the Jew Simon. Thost had gone up to Oxford to investigate the matter and had succeeded in penetrating the headquarters where he had spoken to two Englishmen. One had immediately gone to the telephone to warn the Jew Simon of Thost’s presence, and Simon had clearly used his influence with the English police to get Thost thrown out of the country.

  Simon and Kurti came back to Oxford with this astonishing story, having no idea of the true explanation. At least, this is how I heard the story at the time, although it must be mentioned that Nicholas Kurti has no recollection of reading the newspaper in Paris. But Thost certainly published in 1939 a book A National Socialist in England 1930-1935 in which he stated that he had reported on the activities of Jewish emigrés in England. Fortunately, all ended very well; but when, at the end of the war I was shown a list of all the men to be rounded up by the Nazis if their invasion was successful, there was Simon’s name.

  Carl Bosch left Oxford on 31st July 1936; as we said goodbye at Oxford station, I remarked that we might next meet again in our respective front lines. We were not in fact to see one another again for forty years, but in a way we were to meet long before that, for Bosch was to design the radio beam system that guided some of the V-2 rockets, and he was frequently to be called in by the German Air Force to help unravel the latest radio devices that we had fitted to our bombers.

  The next member of the Clarendon who was subsequently to affect my own career in World War II was James Tuck, who joined the Laboratory from Manchester in October 1937, and who at that time was a remarkable combination of social naϊveté and technical astuteness. In the later stages of the war he was to work at Los Alamos, and one of his American colleagues told me that without Tuck’s contribution to the fusing mechanism it is doubtful whether the atomic bombs of 1945 could have been exploded. But in 1937, he seemed to be an innocent who had unwittingly strayed into a den of practical jokers. At first, with his attempts to be ‘more Oxford than Oxford’ with coloured shirts and corduroy trousers, we did not know whether he was genuinely sophisticated or not. And then he almost took our breath away by asking us at tea time whether any of us had ever made any money at horse racing. We were so taken aback that we said ‘No’ and he proceeded to tell us why he had asked. It turned out that he had recently married, and was trying to keep himself and his wife on a normal research studentship. This was obviously going to be difficult, but he had been following a tipster in the Daily Express with some such name as ‘Jubilee’ or ‘Captain Juniper’ and the newspaper from time to time published details of his score for the season, from which it appeared to Tuck that all he had to do was to distribute his grant on ‘Jubilee’s’ various tips and he would make a very useful profit by the end of the year. Unfortunately, Tuck said, as soon as he had started to do this, the tipster’s rate of success had fallen off, and he was rapidly getting out of pocket.

  By now, we realized that he was dead serious, and I told him that we had said ‘No’ because we knew that this was likely to happen to any of us who started betting without a deep study of the subject. However, with the Prof it was different. He, too, faced Tuck’s problem on a larger scale in that the University gave him much too small a grant on which to run the Clarendon. As a result, the Prof had taken to betting, and the reason that he was never in the Laboratory before 11 a.m. was that he was in his rooms in Christ Church studying the form for the day, and the reason that he was closeted with Keeley for half an hour or so before noon was that they were on the telephone to various bookmakers laying out their bets. To our delight, Tuck swallowed this completely and over the next two or three days we gradually enlarged the story, each succeeding detail becoming more outrageous.

  Finally, the story spread to the workshop, who overdid it. They told Tuck that the Prof had made so much money out of the Turf that he had had a fit of conscience, and had decided that he ought to plough some of the money back, with the result that he had founded the Linde-mann Stakes of fifty guineas with two thousand added. At that point, Tuck saw that he was having his leg pulled, and he came into tea this time saying, ‘Ha, ha, you chaps. Jolly funny! It was a good story while it lasted, but now I have seen through you, and you’ll never catch me again!’ I now agreed that he had had his initiation and was therefore one of us from now on, and that it would be quite useless of us to try and pull his leg again. However, within a few minutes I had worked the subject round to what an unusual lot we were. Douglas Roaf was Eastern Counties Ballroom Champion (which was untrue) and the Prof had been Tennis Champion of Sweden. Tuck said, ‘Now you are at it again, but you don’t catch me this time—I am going to call your bluff!’ Now Lindemann used to come in to tea, in which he never partook, but usually stood somewhat aloofly away from t
he main party. I had the impression he felt he ought to be there but somehow could not quite join in. On this occasion, though, he was dragged in by Tuck who went up to him and said, ‘I say, Professor, these silly asses are trying to tell me that you were Tennis Champion of Sweden!’ The Prof was taken aback by Tuck’s familiarity, and more or less froze him with a restrained, ‘As a matter of fact, I was.’ Tuck thereupon recoiled, and decided that perhaps some of our tall stories were true.

  So we could now put him through the same cycle until he had reached a suitable stage of disbelief again, and I then told him that Derek Jackson owned nearly half of The News of the World and rode in the Grand National every year. Tuck promptly tackled Jackson. It was hardly fair, in that it was indeed highly improbable that a distinguished spectroscopist should also be a Grand National rider, but it was quite true. I once asked Derek why, with all his money, he took spectroscopy so seriously. ‘Why, man,’ he replied, ‘you must have something to do in the summer when you can’t hunt!’ With his affluence he was accustomed to privileged treatment, one of the privileges being a first class corner seat with its back to the engine. Whenever he failed to find one he simply pulled the communication cord. The first time he did this, at Paddington, he got away with it by writing a straightforward apology. The second time, he pulled the cord so violently that it broke. He was then sent up to Oxford in a specially cleared compartment with a frightened little guard, who thought he was mad, all to himself. That time he got away with it by threatening to bring an action on behalf of the public, pointing out that the train had been sent out of Paddington in a defective condition, because it had no communication cord, and there might be some unfortunate woman about to be ravished who would in her distress tug at the communication cord, to no avail. The third time, his defence was that the train had been sent out of Paddington one minute early and, knowing the reputation of the Great Western Railway for punctuality, he had thought of all those regular travellers who would have been expecting to catch the train in the last minute and who would now find it gone; but this time he was fined. His response to Tuck’s incredulity that he rode in the Grand National is better imagined than described.