In February 1946, about two months after my return from Switzerland, I was off to the Continent again - this time to Germany. My old friend Bertie Blount, whose family had always been army people, was unable to resist the desire to get into uniform during the war and had a distinguished career in the army. At the end of the war he had the rank of staff colonel in the British Zone of Occupation, where he was responsible for the control of chemical and biological research. Although theoretically located elsewhere, he soon realised that Gottingen was the scientific centre of the Zone and spent most of his time working from the Aerodynamische Versuchsanstalt (whose occupying staff included a resourceful airman named Ronald Purchase). One of his great interests was to collect some of Germany's leading scientists together there, and, in due course, to re-create the old Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft in a new form as the Max Planck Gesellschaft. This Gottingen group became part of the Control Commission's responsibility, and Bertie remained with it for a few years before leaving the army and returning to civilian life. One of his great interests was to see German science - which we both knew well from our student days - started up again in the devastated Germany of those days. So it was that, in February 1946, I was asked by the Foreign Office (at his instigation) to visit the British Zone of Occupation and see what might be done. At that time there was no way in which a civilian could do such a thing, so I was given a status equivalent to brigadier, dressed up in an ill-fitting army battle-dress, and put on a rather decrepit old Dakota which was ferrying supplies and occasional passengers to Buckeburg in north-west Germany. There we landed on what looked like a sea of mud, and I was met by Bertie; we drove to Gottingen where I was put up in the officers' mess. The mess was rather spartan, but reasonably comfortable, and we were well looked after. Certainly, the contrast between it and what I saw of the living conditions of the German civilians in Gottingen and in other parts of the country I visited was striking. Germany was in a shocking state; there had been appalling destruction in the cities (although not in Gottingen nor in many other small towns), food everywhere was scarce and bad, money had become more or less valueless, and daily life was conducted under a kind of barter economy in which the common currency seemed to be cigarettes.
Using Gottingen as our base, we made visits to a number of main centres of academic activity in the British Zone - Cologne, Hamburg, Kiel - and I renewed acquaintance with a goodly number of chemists, many of whom I had known before the war. These included Brockmann, Windaus, Bayer, Alder and Diels among others. The tour was not without its amusing features. I still recall the look of astonishment and disbelief on the face of Otto Diels when he discovered that the 'British general' who, he had been told, wished to interview him turned out to be me, and the not dissimilar reaction of Kikuth at the Elberfeld research laboratories of the old I.G. Farbenindustrie who, on asking me rather resignedly on my arrival in uniform what I wanted from them, was told that I really didn't want anything but a cup of tea and a chat.
Apart from a fleeting visit paid by Bertie Blount during the last days of the war, when he was attached to S.H.A.E.F. (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces) and on his way eastwards to Leipzig, neither of us had had any contact with Walther Borsche since before the war. We knew that he had been dismissed from his post, but, although he was living in the country at Friedberg (Hessen) when the war ended, we had reason to believe that he and his wife were back in Frankfurt (although not in the university) by February 1946, occupying rooms in the house of a scientific friend (Dr Rajewski). Borsche fell foul of the Nazis and lost his academic position although he had no trace of Jewish blood in his ancestry; but, like his old friend Adolf Windaus, he made no attempt to conceal his hatred of everything the Nazis stood for. Bertie and I decided we would begin our scientific tour by going down to Frankfurt to see our old teacher. Frankfurt a.M. was, of course, in the American Zone, but we managed to think up some excuse for going there, obtained the necessary permits, and set off by road.
In Frankfurt we had first to present ourselves to American headquarters in the Palmengarten. My chief recollection of our call there is the remarkable behaviour of the (Puerto Rican) sentry at the main gate, who insisted on examining our papers page by page while holding them upside down.
We located the Borsche family without difficulty, and were able to visit and to spend a happy hour or two with our old professor and his wife. They were in very good shape, and seemed to be as reasonably comfortable as one could be in a German city at that time. Frankfurt was in a shocking mess. To me, particularly depressing was the destruction of the Altstadt. The cathedral was still more or less intact, but I remember standing on the steps of what had been the Romerhaus - only the facade was still standing - and looking across a wilderness of rubble towards the Main. Everything I had known so well in the old days had gone - the Roseneck, the Funf-Fingergasse - everything! One morning I thought I would like to visit the university at Bockenheim, and have a look, not only at the laboratories, but also where I had lived; I even thought I might be able to trace my old landlady in the Konigstrasse. We were lodged in a hotel in the Bahnhofsplatz about a mile or so from the university, so I thought I would walk. I certainly got a shock. On the way to the university I don't suppose I saw more than a dozen undamaged houses. In Bockenheim itself Konigstrasse, in which I had lived, had simply vanished and there was also a good deal of damage to the university buildings. Part of the chemical laboratory building where I had done my research was still standing in the Robert Mayer Strasse, and, as I could see on approaching, it was being used, since students were passing in and out. Although I didn't expect to find anyone there whom I knew, I decided to go in and have a look around. This I did, and, although my uniform attracted some attention, no-one interfered and I was able to look at my old laboratory - still just as it used to be - and wander through the building. In the course of this tour I went down to the basement, where the store which issued chemicals and equipment used to be. It was still there and still functioning as in the old days, with a queue of students filing past to purchase or borrow things. What really surprised me was that I could see that the white-coated figure behind the store counter was the same Herr Moller who had been storekeeper in my day. So I quietly joined the queue of customers, and, in due course, came up to the counter. Moller looked up, gazed at me in silence for nearly a minute, and then in his ripe Frankfurt dialect said ' Good God, who would have believed it - it's Herr Todd.' And with that he pulled down the shutter over the counter, emerged from the side-door, seized me by both hands and said ' Come in, come in - this calls for a drink!' So in I went and sat on one of the two stools in the store. Moller, meanwhile, took two beakers from a cupboard, put a generous amount of laboratory alcohol into each, diluted them with a roughly equal quantity of distilled water, handed one to me, then sat down on the other stool. We toasted one another and the old days several times in this ghastly potion, and then Moller began to chat about the laboratories and their inhabitants. 'Herr Todd', he said, 'in our days we had chemists in this place, eh? You remember them - von Braun, Borsche and the others! Ah! Things have changed! Do you know, some of the people the Nazis sent here were scientifically so small that you could hardly see them!'
While in the American Zone we drove down to Darmstadt (although strictly we had no authority to do so), in order to see another chemical friend, Clemens Schopf, who was professor at the Technische Hochschule there. He and his wife were well, but living in a rather battered house standing in a sea of rubble. Thereafter we returned to Frankfurt, and set off northwards to Dusseldorf to begin our tour of some of the places in the British Zone where, as in Gottingen, there were signs of a renascence of scientific activity. On the way to Dusseldorf we chose a route which took us through old haunts in the Taunus hills, and, in particular, to the little town of Idstein, where I knew that the family of my former co-worker, Anni Jacob, lived, and where her brother-in-law was the village pharmacist. We called on him in the forenoon of a crisp sunny day, and were g
reeted with great enthusiasm. The entire Jacob family was summoned, and Anni's brother-in-law and nephew went off to the bottom of the garden and dug up several bottles of their best wine, which they had carefully buried to protect it from the American occupying troops. We had a hilarious time, and, much later in the day, departed in a somewhat tattered condition, complete with some wine and a bottle of home-made spirit rather flatteringly called 'gin', the production of which seemed to be a flourishing cottage industry in Idstein. (That bottle ultimately fetched up in the mess at Gottingen, where it was labelled 'Echtes Toddka' and stood there in a cupboard for about two years before it (allegedly) exploded.) We arrived late at night in Dusseldorf, but my recollections of the journey and our arrival are a bit hazy! After discharging some official duties with the British authorities in Dusseldorf, our route took us on to Hamburg, Kiel, Cologne, Bonn and Elberfeld in succession. Thereafter we went back to Gottingen and I returned to England.
During this trip I saw enough the realise that, with the kind of encouragement that Bertie Blount was giving to the German scientists, it would be possible to get science in the British Zone into reasonable shape quite quickly once the general economic situation improved. I also learned, to my great relief, that the two great German chemical encyclopaedias, Gmelin's Handbuch der Anorganischen Chemie and Beilstein's Handbuch der Organischen Chemie, had been rescued from Berlin by the efforts of Blount and Professor Roger Adams who was, as a civilian, performing the same kind of duty in the American Zone of Occupation. The editors, staff, and most of the material belonging to these works were now located in the West - Dr Pietsch and Gmelin in Clausthal-Zellerfeld, and Dr Richter and Beilstein in Hochst, near Frankfurt. They still had many problems to face, not least among them being the procurement of current scientific literature, which they could not afford to buy abroad. It seemed to me that I would probably be back in Germany again before long, and in this I was quite right.
Within the next eighteen months I paid two further visits, based in each case on Gottingen as before. On the first of these trips I was accompanied by H. W. Thompson (now Sir Harold Thompson) and H. J. Emeleus. Thompson was already an old friend of mine, and an even older one of Bertie Blount; we had all three studied in Germany at the same time; Emeleus, of course, was now my colleague in Cambridge, and he had studied in Karlsruhe at about the same time as I had been in Frankfurt. We three, like Bertie Blount, had the great advantage of being fluent German speakers, which made everything go more smoothly. During this visit we had a gathering in Gottingen of all the German chemists who could be mustered, at which the new Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker was formally set up, replacing the virtually defunct Deutsche Chemische Gesellschaft. The meeting, which included participants from both the French and American Zones was, I think, the first scientific meeting held in Germany after the war. It was a great success, and we had a symposium at which Thompson, Emeleus and I read papers on what had been happening in chemistry outside Germany. Emeleus and I had a good look at the problems of Gmelin and Beilstein, and I then created, unilaterally and without authorisation, a Beilstein — Gmelin Commission of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (subsequently whitewashed by Professor Delaby, the Secretary General of the Union) and wrote on its behalf to the publishers of all the main chemical journals in the world, asking them to donate copies of their publications to each of the two Institutes. The response was magnificent; almost without exception, they sent two copies of each issue to me in Cambridge and I had them transmitted to Germany through official channels. It involved Emeleus and me in a lot of work until mails were reliable enough for journals to be sent direct from the publishers, but I like to think it was worth it; had it not been done these two great encyclopaedias might well have foundered and disappeared. Of course, all was not smooth sailing - we had to cope with disputes between Dr Pietsch and his German governing body about what weight was to be given to the history of chemistry, and there were numerous alarms and excursions over attempts by publishers in England to get hold of Beilstein. But it was all good fun and very interesting, as also were the visits we made to German industrial research organisations on our 1947 visit. Looking back on things now, it seems to me that Britain really did a very good job for science in its zone of occupation, and I believe that much of the credit for this must go to Bertie Blount; his services in this respect are remembered with gratitude in Germany, but have received less than their due recognition at home.
Prior to 1946 I had little contact with national or international scientific organisations, and my interest in chemical education did not extend much beyond the day-to-day involvement with teaching in my own department. However, the visits to post-war Germany, which I have just mentioned, introduced me to some of these matters and in the years that followed I became increasingly involved in them and in the promotion of chemical research by the award of postgraduate scholarships and fellowships, serving on a variety of charitable organisations concerned with such matters. Of these, one of the more interesting was the Salters' Institute of Industrial Chemistry which was a major activity of the Worshipful Company of Salters, one of the twelve great livery companies of the City of London. The great livery companies of London are the descendants of mediaeval craft guilds. Although many of them - like the Salters - have long since lost their significance, they own much city property and spend large sums charitably, mainly on schools, almshouses and the like. Early in this century the Court of the Salters' Company decided that it would like to devote at least some of the Company's wealth to promoting the chemical industry, as being perhaps the nearest equivalent to its ancient, but vanished, involvement with salt production and distribution. Accordingly, it established a body known as the Salters' Institute of Industrial Chemistry, to provide assistance by way of grants to boys wishing to study chemistry, and by making awards at the postgraduate level to young men wishing to pursue research preparatory to taking up an industrial career. Admission to the livery of the Salters (which numbered only about 120 in all) was almost exclusively by patrimony, and so it happened that when, in 1946, the Company sought to reactivate the Institute (which had been inactive during the war years), they found that the livery contained no members concerned in any direct way with chemical education or research who might assist in its work. The Court of the Company then decided to break with its traditions, and to invite two chemists - myself and Charles Goodeve - to join the livery and help run the Institute. This we did, and, although because of war damage to its London properties the Company for a time had only very limited funds available, the Institute restarted its operations and has grown steadily in its scope ever since. My association with the Salters' Company has always been a happy one; I served as Master of the Company in 1961-62 and my son and son-in-law continue the family connection as liverymen and members of the Institute Committee.
Both in Britain and in the United States science was fully harnessed to the war effort between 1939 and 1945 with the spectacular results we all know. In Britain guidance for the overall effort was provided by the Scientific Advisory Committee to the War Cabinet. This committee, which was chaired by the Secretary to the Cabinet, Sir Maurice (later Lord) Hankey, was quite small consisting of the President of the Royal Society (from 1940-45 my father-in-law, Sir Henry Dale), two of the Society's Honorary Secretaries and the heads of the Medical and Agricultural Research Councils and the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. The impressive contributions made by science during the war years led to a feeling in government, as well as in scientific circles, that perhaps a somewhat similarly organised scientific effort would be equally valuable in peace, and especially during the period of reconstruction and re-orientation of effort which would follow immediately after the end of hostilities. Shortly after the end of the war, a committee under Sir Alan Barlow (the Barlow Committee) was set up to look at some aspects of this, and especially at our needs for scientific manpower. Amongst other things, it recommended the setting up of two advisory bodies at
the highest level - an Advisory Council on Scientific Policy dealing with civil science and technology, including manpower requirements, and a Defence Research Policy Committee to deal with defence matters. It was envisaged that these two bodies would have a common chairman, so that proper liaison would be ensured, and it was suggested that the chairman would be employed as a full-time civil servant. These recommendations were accepted, and, in 1947, the Advisory Council on Scientific Policy was set up ' to advise the Lord President of the Council in the exercise of his responsibility for the formulation and execution of Government scientific policy'. Sir Henry Tizard was appointed to be simultaneously Chairman of the Advisory Council and of the Defence Research Policy Committee. Much to my surprise I received from the Lord President of the Council (Herbert Morrison) an invitation to join the Council as one of the original members. The invitation surprised me, partly because as a chemist I had not been heavily involved in the war effort - certainly less so than many physicists - and partly because I did not consider myself at all knowledgeable on policy matters; but the prospect was attractive and I accepted the invitation.
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