There were a number of characters at the Porton Down experimental lab. Down the corridor where I worked, for example, was a pathologist who, like many others, had been put into an army uniform for the duration of the war. I will call him Major Long. Major Long unwittingly provided humor where humor was much needed. For example, there was a rule in the army that all “other ranks” must salute officers and that officers must return the salute. Major Long rode a bicycle to work, and this made him very uncertain about which hand he should salute with. We enjoyed saluting him to see whether he would fall off his bicycle.
One day my colleagues and I were working in the lab, and Major Long's head appeared around the door. He said, “Have you seen a rabbit?” We told him, “No.” After a while, he reappeared and said, “It had a tube in its mouth.”
On another occasion, Major Long came to see me about the layout of an extensive field trial. I had arranged that the 40 sampling points were randomly distributed over a particular area. He came to me and said, “They can't possibly be random.” So I showed him a map on which I had divided the entire area into 100 numbered squares, and I explained that we took 40 items from a table of random numbers to determine which squares became our 40 sampling points. He looked at me suspiciously and said, “Ah yes! But what about the mirror image?” He was an innocent soul. One day he was tired and explained to us that he had been up most of the night teaching his wife biology.
An outstanding scientist whom I came to know was Britain's leading pharmacologist, Professor John Gaddum (later Sir John). He was himself a competent statistician, and we had a number of discussions about the work that was going on. He was unimpressed with self-important figures and unintelligent generals. At the beginning of the war, they wanted to dress him up as a colonel and keep him at the station. He would not go along with this, however, and returned to his university in Edinburgh, telling them that they could find him there if needed. He was particularly interested in an experiment that I had designed for an American researcher concerning lewisite, a chemical warfare agent. If you were unlucky enough to get a tiny drop of lewisite in your eye, after a short interval, you were blinded. The investigator was trying to find out how to prevent this, using the eyes of rabbits for experimentation.
The problem was that although the two eyes of a single rabbit were comparable, comparisons between the eyes of different rabbits were not. I was rather proud of a complicated statistical design that I developed in which all the important treatments could be investigated with no more variation than that between the eyes of single rabbits. My investigator asked me to write an appendix that explained this complex design. After the report was published, Gaddum came to see me and said he'd read the report but what had happened to my appendix? I explained that the people in what was called (rather appropriately) the “main block” had deleted it, presumably because it was written by a mere sergeant. (These “in-charge” people were not scientists, of course, but high-ranking civil servants.) Gaddum was incensed, and he took me by the hand and said, “Come with me.” We marched up to see the top brass. He asked them on what grounds they had removed my contribution, and getting no satisfactory reply, he became quite angry. He banged on the table and said, “Put the damn thing back!” They did.
During the war, the British Army had an outfit called ENSA that was supposed to entertain the troops. Each week they sent us singers, dancers, magicians, and so on, all second rate and uniformly awful. I was so disgusted with one lot that in an unguarded moment in the sergeant's mess, I announced that I could put on a better show myself. Some scoffed at this idea, so to prove them wrong, I got together with like-minded people to make my point.
Obviously one thing we needed was a chorus of girls. At the station, there were women from the Army (ATS), Navy (WRENS), and Air Force (WAAFS). The WAAFS had the best legs, but they refused to be in the show if we allowed girls from the other services to be in it. I argued with them, but in the end, they prevailed and the chorus was all WAAFS (Figure 2.2).
Figure 2.2 We put on a show.
The show was called, “You've Had It,” and we wrote a song for a curtain raiser:
We're a new show
Called “You've Had It”
Not a blue show
And we're glad it's
Filled with laughter and with music
Hope you like us in our new show.
We had various “acts.” In one of these, the curtain went up revealing a folding screen on center stage. One by one female garments—jacket, skirt, bra, panties, and so on—were hung up by someone on the other side of the screen. Then the screen fell down to show a fully dressed young lady ironing her clothes.
In another act, the curtain went up to reveal a white sheet illuminated from behind. The shadow on the screen showed an inert figure lying on a table. The audience was told that this was the sergeant major who was about to undergo an operation. The shadow of the “surgeon” appeared carrying what appeared to be a huge saw. The rhythmic screeching of the saw blade was accompanied by loud howling. Then various objects were drawn out, apparently from the sergeant major's stomach. Among these was a dead rat.
Our show was a hit. It's not quite true, by the way, that the ENSA shows were all awful. Once, we had Glenn Miller who was, of course, first class. I remember they played “When We Begin to Clean the Latrine” to the tune of “Begin the Beguine.”
In another homegrown effort to entertain the troops, I took part in a production of the play, Cinderella, organized by a Major Kirwin. I played Cinderella, and the glass slipper was played by my Army boot. Our play deviated in many other ways from the original story.
The show went on for two successive nights. On the first night, there was a bit of a prop malfunction. Cinderella's coach was pulled by a pretend horse powered by two lance corporals, one for the back legs and one for the front. At some point, suddenly, much too early and quite unexpectedly, the horse and coach appeared on stage. This stopped the show because no one knew what to do. Kirwin was incensed. He ran across the stage and tried to force the horse off, but what he succeeded in doing was pulling its head off. This exposed the top half of a lance corporal who blinked pathetically into the bright lights. Kirwin didn't help matters by saying something like, “I've seen some idiots in my time, but you're the worst.”
On the second night, things went better, but there was a colonel from the artillery in the audience who had seen both performances. He was not particularly bright, and after the performance, he was heard to say to Major Kirwin, “I did enjoy the show the second time, but you left out the best part, you know—where you pull the head off the horse.”
Another mishap occurred during the scene when Cinderella was supposed to go miraculously from rags to riches. The lights went out, and I was required to do a very quick change. Jessie, my wife to be, was in the wings to help me with this. Unfortunately, I was in such a hurry that I brought up my knee and accidentally gave her a black eye.
Jessie and I had met in the Army. She was a sergeant in the ATS and worked as a secretary for an officer training group stationed near our experimental station. She was a great companion, and we enjoyed long walks on Salisbury Plain, found places to eat in the evening, and shared books together. We were married at a church in Cheshire in 1945. The war was winding down, and most soldiers would soon be home, but my tour of duty in the Army was not over.
The poison gases that we had been studying in England were mostly those that had been used in the First World War (WWI), and there was little that was new. But near the end of the war, the Allies discovered shells in Germany containing a new group of toxic nerve gasses (tabun, sarin, and soman). I was there when we received a small sample of one of these at our experimental station. Three of us—Professor Gaddum, his assistant Mac, and me—were there when we witnessed some preliminary estimates of the toxicity.(There were ways of testing highly poisonous substances without being exposed to them.) Mac prepared a highly diluted sample and injected a rabbit. Even at th
is minute dose, the rabbit died at once. Gaddum was surprised and asked Mac to check the dilution and to do it again, and again the rabbit died immediately. So Mac tried a tenth of the dose, and then a hundredth, with the same result, and it was soon clear that we were dealing with substances that were orders of magnitude more toxic than anything we had known. When vaporized, they produced gases that had an immediate effect on the central nervous system, quickly resulting in death.
In short order, Britain sent a group of experts and their assistants on a secret mission to Raubkammer, the enemy's experimental station at Munster Lager, in Northern Germany (Figure 2.3). I was part of this team, and I helped to design and analyze some of the field trials necessary for the study of these frightening new substances. We crossed the Channel on tank transporters with about 40 trucks filled with lab equipment. Sitting next to the drivers were various kinds of experts in chemical warfare wearing uniforms from the Army, Navy, and Air Force as well as some civilians. We slowly made our way up through the destruction. We must have seemed a strange lot as we drove through the ruins of Belgium and Germany. I remember coming to an intersection where army police were directing lines of tanks and other army vehicles. They looked at our peculiar convoy in amazement and said, “What's this lot then?” We told them that our mission was very secret, and finally we produced a document that satisfied them and they allowed us to proceed.
Figure 2.3 The German Experimental Station at Raubkammer.
Upon arriving at Raubkammer, we saw how the Germans had cleverly camouflaged their research station. For instance, the chemistry lab and the physics lab looked like farmhouses that were situated a considerable distance apart. To make it easier to communicate, they had developed small electric cars that they recharged every night. We made good use of these.
The Germans had also developed a superior system to study gas shells. At our experimental station in England, to simulate reality, the artillery had fired gas shells onto the range from a couple of miles away. The firing wasn't very accurate and often landed uncomfortably close, prompting us to run for cover. At the German station, however, there was a tower close to the layout with a gun on top that used a reduced charge so that the speed of the shell and the angle at which it landed simulated firing from a long way away. While I was there, the man who performed this operation was called “explosives worker Hellman,” and although he had had the same job under the Nazis, no one found this arrangement uncomfortable. I had taken some German in school and tried to speak it when I first got to Raubkammer, until a German worker at the station said, “I tink it vud be bettah if we spoke eenEenglish.” I took the hint.
It was easy to forget how toxic these nerve gasses were. We were used to field trials using WWI gases such as phosgene and lewisite when all you had to do was take a sniff and you would have plenty of time to put on your respirator. That would have been fatal with these new gases. Once, for example, I entered the lab at Raubkammer and thought there had been a failure in the electricity supply because it seemed to me that all the lights were dim. What had happened, actually, was that a minute dose of nerve gas had caused my pupils to constrict.
From time to time, we needed small items from the village down the road. On these trips, a sergeant from the German Army acted as my chauffeur. I'll call him Sergeant Shultz. He was a big man, and we communicated very well, mostly with signs. Although his uniform had been mended so many times it was a truly pitiful sight, he kept his dignity. I imagine he had seen quite a bit of the fighting, perhaps on the Russian front.
Down the road, there had been a prisoner of war camp for Italian officers. They had changed sides sometime previously, and they wandered around in their fancy uniforms waiting for repatriation to Italy. Shultz respected British troops, but he regarded these Italians as rank traitors, and when we saw them walking along the road, he became uncontrollable. He stuck his head out of the window of the car and, while making obscene gestures, shouted, “Macaroni! Macaroni!” as we passed. I saw his point of view.
There was also a number of standard cars available to us, and from time to time, we used them to visit cities such as Hamburg and Hanover. I think that most people in England and the United States have no idea of the intensity of devastation from aerial bombing that Germany had experienced in the second half of WWII. The damage was scarcely credible. There were huge areas in which there were not even ruins; everything was completely flat so far as the eye could see.
The feeling against the RAF was intense among the Germans. At Munster Lager, we received our meals in the same facility that had been used by the previous German investigators with the same people running the kitchen and handing out the food. I was going through the line with a colleague when the young lady behind the counter recognized my friend's RAF uniform and exclaiming, “Luft,” threw a bowl of soup all over him.
When we had first arrived at Munster Lager, we had taken over the 200 or 300 Germans that had run the show—from cooks to chromatographers— and when we were leaving, they were very sad. How were they to live now? The best we could do was to give them our remaining supply of absolute alcohol. They were happily singing when we left.
Being at the German research station delayed my discharge from the Army. V-E Day was on May 8, 1945, but I remained in Germany for six months, until the end of 1945. When I finally did return to England, the Army gave me a medal and I was “demobbed”—that is, demobilized. By the time I got to it, the process of demobilization had become very efficient. The demobilization office was close to Exeter, in the west of England. You went on the train as a soldier and came out on another train a civilian. At the demob station, we first received some new underclothes, then went on to a larger room in which suits of various colors and sizes were available, along with shirts and ties and shoes. My recollection is that we came out looking quite smart. It was strange to see the Army being so efficient, but I was one of the last to be “demobbed,” so they had had a lot of practice.
In England, there was an arrangement similar to the GI Bill in the United States. The government paid for me to attend University College in London for three years to study statistics under Professor E.S. Pearson. But getting there was not as easy as it sounds. The Army said they would release me if I could show that I had been accepted at the University. The University said they would accept me if I could show that I had been discharged from the Army. Most of the time I am a truthful person, but when you are dealing with bureaucracy, careful lying is sometimes essential. I forget whom I lied to (I expect it was the Army—they were used to it), but I did get my discharge.
While I was at University College, Jessie and I lodged with a man who was working on his Ph.D. Jessie acted as his housekeeper and cook in exchange for our rented room. Later we lived with my sister Joyce and her husband Alfred. Jessie and Joyce were experts in making our skimpy rations go a long way. Alfred used to cycle home from work at midday, which left him little time to eat his meal, but he refused an offer from Joyce to pack him a lunch each day. However, when Alfred's brother Barrie, who had undue influence over Alfred, said, “Alfred, instead of cycling back and forth, why don't you ask Joyce to pack you a lunch to take with you?” and Alfred did ask Joyce to pack him a lunch: she became quite annoyed.
Although living conditions were difficult after the war, we also had some happy times together. On a number of occasions we managed week-long houseboat trips on the River Thames with Joyce and Alfred and Jessie's parents (Figure 2.4). Once it gets past London, the Thames becomes very different. It is much narrower, beautifully clean, and passes through lovely countryside. It wanders about and eventually passes through Oxford. Fully equipped houseboats were available for hire, and it was pleasant in the summer to rent one and to explore the river leisurely.
Figure 2.4 Boat with Joyce and family.
While I was at University College, there was a day set aside for visiting relatives. My mother came, and I showed her the Statistics Department. Next door to it was the Genetics Department.
There I showed her some Ishihara charts that have colored dots arranged so that if you had normal vision, you would see one number, and if you were red-green colorblind, you would see another. I showed one to my mother and said, “If you were colorblind, you would see a six.” She said, “Well it is a six.” Dr. Kalmus, the professor of genetics, happened to be passing by and asked, “Is someone colorblind?” I replied, “Yes, my mother.” “I don't think so,” he said. Of course it turned out that I was colorblind. The professor explained that only 0.4% of women are colorblind, as opposed to 7% of men. At this point, I was 26 years old, had been in the Army, and through the war without a clue about this.
My friend Merve Muller recently reminded me that while we were both at Princeton, he was a passenger in my car when I slowed unexpectedly at a traffic light. I said, “I know that when the lights are vertical, the top one is green. But these lights are horizontal. Is the one on the left green?” He looked surprised at my question, and feared, perhaps, for his life, so I told him of my colorblindness.
Merve also recently recalled a time when we were both at the same conference in Texas. I showed him some very nice gray shirts that I had purchased on sale in the hotel and urged him to take advantage of the special price. Merve did not have the heart to tell me that my new shirts were in fact a vivid shade of pink.
University College was at one end of Gower Street and further down was the London School of Tropical Medicine where the Royal Statistical Society had its meetings. I only had to walk a few hundred yards down Gower Street to go to these meetings. In particular, there were four “read” papers presented each year. These special research papers were printed in advance and circulated to the membership before the meeting. Because we had already read the paper, only a brief introduction was made by the author at the meeting, and most of the time could be devoted to discussion. By tradition, the “proposer of the vote of thanks” said what he thought was good about the paper and the seconder said what he thought was not so good. After this, there was a general discussion by the fellows of the Society and often a number of famous statisticians spoke.
An Accidental Statistician Page 5