a word often associated with the Russian Communist regime.
Tots and Quots
Professor Solly Zuckerman had established in 1931 a London-based dining club called the Tots and Quots, which included many leading members of the British scientific establishment. Its name was derived from the Latin tag Quot homines, tot sententiae (‘As many opinions as there are men’).
Zuckerman,Lord Solly OM KBE FRS (1904–93)
A zoologist and Operational Research pioneer, he was born to Jewish immigrants in South Africa. After studying medicine at the University of Cape Town and later attending Yale University, he went to London in 1926 to complete his studies at University College Hospital Medical School. He began his career at the London Zoological Society in 1928 and worked as a research anatomist until 1932. He taught at the University of Oxford in 1934–45, in which time he was elected FRS. In 1931 he established the Tots and Quots scientific dining society. During the Second World War he undertook various research projects, advised the RAF, and proposed that in the build-up to the Normandy landings the Allied air forces should target the French railway network, in particular its locomotives and locomotive repair facilities.
In June 1940 a meeting was attended by Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin Books, who was so fascinated by the discussion about what scientists could do to help win the war that he offered to publish the arguments. Eleven days later 25 scientists delivered their manuscripts, and in late July 1940 a 140-page Penguin Special entitled Science in War was published, opening with the stark message, ‘The full use of our scientific resources is essential if we are to win the war. Today they are being half used.’
Our American Allies
From the beginning of the war Henry Tizard, the rector of Imperial College and chairman of the Committee for the Scientific Study of Air Defence, had been considering how to cultivate ties with American scientists with the objective of ‘bringing American scientists into the war before their government’. As a result, in February, 1940 Professor Hill went to the USA to discuss with American scientists possible areas of collaboration. Encouraged by the discussions, he and Tizard set about obtaining Cabinet approval for the dispatch of a formal scientific mission to the USA to share the UK’s military and scientific secrets with the Americans.
The result was that in September 1940, while the Battle of Britain was at its height and well over a year before the Americans entered the war, Tizard himself led a mission to the USA to disclose Britain’s most carefully guarded secrets. These included designs and hardware for anti-submarine detection, explosives, gyro-gunsights, jet propulsion, micro-pump valves, proximity fuses, radar, cavity magnetrons, rockets, and a possible atomic bomb. Of these it was the cavity magnetron which, by increasing by a factor of a thousand the transmitting capabilities of American radar, convinced the Americans that the British were disclosing everything they knew.
Tizard, Sir Henry FRS (1885–1959)
He was educated at Westminster and Oxford and, as a physical chemist, was elected a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, in 1911. In the First World War he joined the RFC, where he undertook aerodynamic observations, worked on bombsights, and, having learned to fly, became his own test pilot.
Upon returning to Oxford in 1919 he was appointed a reader in chemical thermodynamics; working on the performance of petrol engines and, he developed octane numbers for rating fuel. In 1919 he was made a member of the Aeronautical Research Committee and the following year he became assistant secretary of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research which was responsible for co-ordinating the scientific work of the defence and civil departments. In 1933 he was appointed chairman of the Aeronautical Research Committee and two years later chairman of the new Committee for the Scientific Study of Air Defence. These were the bodies that first discussed Robert Watson-Watt's idea for detecting the presence of aircraft by radio beams. The following year he and others resigned from the latter committee as a result of Lindemann's manoeuvres but he continued to take an active part in the development of radar. He encouraged work at the University of Birmingham that led to the invention by John Randall and Harry Boot of the cavity magnetron. This provided the basis for, among other things, centimetric radar, thereby making airborne radar interception possible. In September 1940, with the Battle of Britain at its height, he led a mission to share with the Americans Britain’s scientific and military secrets which proved to be one of the key events in forging the Anglo-American technical alliance in the Second World War. He later played a key part in winning support for Frank Whittle's jet engine. In 1929–42 he was rector of Imperial College London, prior to becoming president of Magdalen College, Oxford, for the following five years.
Leaving Oxford in 1947, he returned to Whitehall as chairman of the Defence Research Policy Committee and a member of the Advisory Council on Scientific Policy. He retired from government service in 1952 when he became pro-chancellor of the University of Southampton. He died in Hampshire in 1959.
Tizard’s package was described by an American as ‘the most valuable cargo ever to reach our shores’, while to a Briton ‘the decision to (disclose) all the UK’s secrets, showed great wisdom and boldness’. On their safe arrival in Canada, the two scientists who conveyed the hardware across the Atlantic, John Cockcroft and Taffy Bowen, were shown a pistol by the ship’s captain who told them that he had been instructed, had mishap befallen the ship, to ensure by any means at his disposal that they were not to be taken alive by the enemy.
Hill, Archibald V. CH OBE FRS (1886–1977)
A. V. Hill, as he was generally known, was a physiologist and one of the founders of biophysics and of operational research. A Cambridge graduate, he served in the Army in the First World War undertaking ballistics research; his peacetime work was on muscles, for which he was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1922. He was a professor at University College London from 1923 to 1951. In 1935 he worked with Patrick Blackett and Henry Tizard on the committee that gave birth to radar. In 1933, he was a founder member and Vice-President of the Academic Assistance Council (later the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning) which, in particular, assisted refugee Jewish scientists to re-establish themselves in the British academic establishment.
With Blackett he resigned from Tizard’s Aerial Defence Committee in 1935 because of Lindemann’s manoeuvrings and later was highly critical of his influence on Churchill. Prior to the 1940 Tizard Mission to the USA, Hill went to Washington to sound out his American contacts on their likely reaction to such an initiative; his positive report was a factor in persuading the British Government to proceed with the mission. He knew many leading scientists well, had many influential contacts and, inter alia, recommended Blackett’s appointment to Anti-Aircraft Command. He served as an independent MP for Cambridge University in 1940–45. He took part in many scientific missions to the US. He was appointed OBE in 1918 and also elected FRS; he became a CH in 1946.
American military science was the responsibility of the National Defense Research Committee, whose establishment was authorised by President Roosevelt after reading a paper by Vannevar Bush, the head of the Carnegie Institution. Bionote in Chapter 10.
As the USA and UK had a similar approach regarding the scientist-military relationship there was close Anglo-American technical collaboration
