Churchill's Iceman

by Henry Hemming

  During the summer of 1927 he commissioned a promotional film from a prestigious production company which specialised in battle scenes and wildlife documentaries. Despite their obvious qualifications for the job, they found the task somewhat challenging. ‘In all our experiences of photographing every kind of wild creature, not excepting cultures of bacilli, the problem of photographing children in their wild state proved the most difficult to tackle,’ grumbled one cameraman. ‘Whereas animals can be more or less localised and controlled by food, and bacilli must remain within the confines of a test-tube or petrie-dish [sic], no such artificial fixity could be obtained with the children.’ Eventually the children lost interest in the cameras, and were recorded dissecting Susie’s recently deceased cat – ‘It fair makes you sick, doesn’t it?’ a cameraman whispered to his producer – as well as starting a bonfire that got out of hand and burnt the school canoe. ‘Even Geoffrey Pyke was a bit upset about that.’ Ten days later they had enough material to cut a half-hour-long film.

  Two young scientists at Malting House

  ‘Remarkably interesting and altogether delightful,’ was the Spectator’s verdict on Let’s Find Out, after initial screenings in Manchester and London, where 500 people came to watch it in the Marble Arch Pavilion. The children appeared to be:

  ‘having the time of their lives, wading up to their knees trying to fill a sandpit with water, mending a tap with a spanner, oiling the works of a clock, joyously feeding a bonfire, dissecting crabs, climbing on scaffolding, weighing each other on a see-saw, weaving, modelling, making pottery, working lathes – in fact doing all those things which every child delights in doing. At Malting House School children’s dreams come true. The school is equipped with the most extensive apparatus, which will stimulate the natural curiosity possessed by every child. [. . .] There is no discipline. There are no punishments. Children may hit one another so long as they only use their hands, but I believe quarrels are rare and, though it seems almost unbelievable with the unending opportunities which must occur, there has never been an accident of a serious nature. The children are left to form their own opinions, tastes, and moral codes. After having seen this film, on the photography of which the British Instructional Films are to be congratulated, I came away wishing with all my heart that my own dull schooldays had been as theirs are, and that education could be made such an adventure for every child.

  ‘Co-investigator’ Susie Isaacs with the children of Malting House

  Much of this was an accurate reflection of the radical educational experiment Pyke had set up. For most children it really was as if their dreams had come true. But as a promotional film there was no mention of any of the school’s difficulties.

  ‘Moulds are wrong,’ Pyke had once said, ‘and shaping is wrong, whatever it may aim at.’ Yet his belief that every child was a scientist in the making had permeated the school, and although he scoffed at the idea of parents pressing their cultural inheritances onto their children, he was gently moulding his son and the other children at Malting House into idealised versions of himself: free-thinkers with scientific outlooks who could one day reminisce on healthy and non-traumatic childhoods. There was nothing wrong with this, perhaps, but it illustrates one of the small slippages between theory and practice at Malting House.

  A more telling gap had opened up between how the children were supposed to react to a life without rules and how they actually reacted. Beyond a certain age it was clear that some children needed clearer boundaries.

  ‘We want to be made to do definite things as they are in other schools,’ one seven-year-old complained at a fractious staff meeting, having just threatened to hit one of the grown-ups. This same child was asked why he wanted to be made to do definite things.

  ‘Because we don’t do anything otherwise. After all, what’s a school for?’

  He was then asked to draw up a timetable, which he did, before summing up his feelings as follows: ‘I want to be made to do what I want to do.’ This perfectly embodies the sometimes paradoxical nature of our relationship with rules, no matter how old we are. These children wanted boundaries, boundaries of their own choosing, but boundaries all the same, and they wanted them to be enforced. This went against the school’s philosophy.

  Another problem, though less obvious, was the extent of Pyke’s largesse. Even he would later admit to managing the school during this period ‘extravagantly’ and ‘irrespective of money’. Although he continued to spend within his means, his liquidity was greatly reduced. While he was not in debt, he had never been so vulnerable financially.

  Having gained control of most of the world’s supply, the CEI cartel squeezed up the price of copper from £54 a ton earlier that year to £60 by October. Pyke had never seen the price behave like this. Nor had he ever pitted himself against an international cartel. It would be a severe test of his market prowess.

  Earlier that month he had bought a large quantity of copper and, later, a sizeable holding of tin. The market was up. According to his model, the next move should have been to sell his copper on the basis that the price would soon drop. But he did not. Second-guessing the cartel, he hung on to the copper, thinking that the CEI was only interested in growing or stabilising the price, a decision he later described as a mixture of ‘imbecility and commercial rashness’.

  The order of subsequent events is hard to reconstruct. Either the cartel flooded the market with copper or one of Pyke’s brokers got wind of his exposure and began to offload, with other brokers following suit. Most likely, it was a combination of the two. The price of copper plummeted, followed by the price of tin and lead, leaving Pyke with no choice but to hold on to what he had in the hope of weathering the storm. With the metals market in freefall one of his brokers asked for cover. Hopelessly over-leveraged and with very little liquidity, Pyke had no way of providing it short of selling up. Doing so, of course, would merely depress the price further and worsen his position. As he stalled, his other two brokers came in for cover. It was at this point in the history of Malting House that Susie Isaacs resigned.

  The difficulties between her and Pyke had become more pronounced over the last ten months. It had begun with trifles over missed appointments and the ghost of a disagreement about who was taking more credit for the success of the school. Periods of calm would be punctured by rows in which both hurled torrents of half-remembered slights at each other before apologising and carrying on as if nothing had happened. The subtext to this was the way in which their affair had ended. Pyke resented the idea that Susie had both started it and finished it, which seemed to induce in her a scintilla of guilt to add to any feelings of inadequacy she might have had owing to their difficulties in bed. When she heard that Pyke had gone to Switzerland to see another woman after the end of their affair she had felt a pang of jealousy. All this had the strange effect of making her not only more tolerant of his unreasonable behaviour in between rows, but angrier when they came to argue.

  ‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ he told her, after she had begun to cry. ‘But I’ve been hurt too. There’s a limit to endurance. You’ve pushed a knife in me and screwed it round!’

  She had done no such thing, but when the world appeared to be collapsing around him Pyke looked for a scapegoat. Susie was the obvious target.

  By now Nathan knew about the affair and, following Susie’s resignation, he sent Margaret a sixty-eight-page letter in which he described himself as ‘quite naturally displaced’ and ‘full of admiration for Geoff’. ‘I’ve no resentment against Geoff,’ he went on, feeling only that his judgement had gone awry. The crux of the problem, he explained – Pyke’s greatest asset and at the same time the source of his self-destruction – was ‘the free play of that magnificent instrument, his mind. [. . .] More than anyone else I know [he] needs to be on his guard against the very powers of his mind.’ Magnificent it might have been, but it was hard to see how even Pyke could find a way out of the mess he was now in.

  A family portrait taken sh
ortly before Pyke’s financial crash

  The first decline and fall of Geoffrey Pyke was halting and slow; it lasted nearly two years and by the end there seemed to be no further to fall. Unable to provide cover to his three brokers, Pyke’s trading companies had all gone into liquidation by the start of 1928. As sole guarantor he faced claims against him of £72,701, more than £2.2 million in today’s money. He had no way of paying it back.

  Pyke did everything possible to save Malting House, making advance payments to the staff and disappearing to Switzerland for two months to delay the issue of writs. Cambridge friends rallied round and donations came in from parents as well as the likes of Siegfried Sassoon, Victor Rothschild and Victor Gollancz. But it was not enough.

  After the school received a glowing write-up in the New York Times, Pyke applied for a grant from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Trust with a covering letter signed by a group of worthies later described as ‘possibly the greatest galaxy of academic figures of the day ever assembled for a private fund-raising scheme’. It was to no avail.

  The year after his personal financial crash Pyke was declared bankrupt, and in January 1929 the public bankruptcy hearings began. Lawyers acting for the brokers picked over his activities in what felt like a protracted judgement on his life and on the school into which he had poured at least £11,000 – referred to witheringly in court as his ‘great scheme’.

  Certainly there were problems in the conception of Malting House. At least one of the children there, Jack Pole, who went on to become a renowned historian, would look back on his time there with bitterness. Yet for the majority of children this was a sunny, magical period that could only be appreciated once it had passed. One teacher wrote of the school that she had ‘never seen so much pleased concentration, so many shrieks and gurgles and jumpings for joy as here’. It was in the field of educational theory, however, that the impact of Malting House was most keenly felt on account of the mountainous records kept from the start. As Pyke had always hoped, the school became a starting point for further research. What he may not have appreciated, given the unhappy end to their relationship, was that most of this analysis would be done by Susie Isaacs.

  Her study of the Malting House data formed the basis of her books, Social Development in Young Children and Intellectual Growth in Young Children, which secured her reputation as arguably ‘the greatest influence on British education in the twentieth century’. The same data provided the impetus for Sir Percy Nunn’s Department of Child Development at the University of London that went on to play a key role in the development of primary education in post-war Britain.

  Yet for the barristers in the Bankruptcy Court in 1929 the only question that mattered was whether the school had played a part in Pyke’s tax-reduction scheme. Without full details of his accounts, it is impossible to say one way or another. What does become clear from the transcript of his examination is that Pyke was determined not to be pinned down. He was in escapologist mode. Even when the most damning evidence was read out to him about the tax advice he had received from the Soviet stooge D. N. Pritt, he would not yield to its meaning. Pyke was on top of his facts and light on his feet, exceptionally so. He infuriated his examiners by picking apart their questions, at one point informing a barrister that the question he had just been asked was in fact a statement delivered with a questioning lilt. Another time he asked the barrister to improve the wording of his inquiry.

  ‘Quibbling again?’ came the reply.

  ‘Accuracy,’ said Pyke.

  ‘No, quibbling again.’

  ‘No, one meaning to one question.’

  And on it went.

  At one point he was accused of presenting the court with a ‘tissue of falsehoods’, and there is no doubt that he was obscuring some key details in the arrangements between him and those shareholders from whom he had bought share options at inflated prices. Yet before the truth of this could be established, at the end of a particularly long session, Pyke collapsed.

  Owing to the bankrupt’s ‘indisposition’, described elsewhere as a ‘sudden illness’, the hearing was adjourned until the following month. Only days before he was due in court again Pyke wrote to say that he was ill. The date of the hearing was pushed back once again and the night before he was due to appear, 22 April 1929, Pyke might have tried to kill himself.

  A note signed by two doctors shortly afterwards described him as ‘dangerously ill and in my opinion [he] may not live through the night’. There is no further clue as to what happened, only the possibility that he had attempted suicide. The session was adjourned once more and Pyke was moved to a nursing home in Muswell Hill, from where a signed affidavit was sent to the court describing the patient as ‘suffering from paranoia (bordering on insanity), amnesia, fits of melancholia and incapability of severe mental effort’, so that ‘he will not be fit to attend to any business or legal affairs for at least twelve months’.

  While there is a minute chance that Pyke had either fooled or persuaded a doctor to write this note, now that the barristers were closing in, this was almost certainly a genuine breakdown. Since he had been struck by what was thought to be pneumonia in Ruhleben he had experienced periodic bouts of chronic inertia accompanied by an overpowering sense of melancholy, so bad that there were times when he could not get out of bed. The strained circumstances of watching his life fall apart might have induced or exacerbated one of these episodes.

  In July 1929 Margaret Pyke confirmed to the court that her husband was ‘bordering upon insanity’. In the same month the school’s scientific appointee sued him for unpaid wages. It was also around this time that Malting House closed its doors for good.

  Geoffrey Pyke was bankrupt, he was being sued, his experimental school had closed, he was living in a nursing home and had been described as borderline insane. But still he had not reached rock bottom. During the winter of 1929, with the global economy entering meltdown, his wife left him.

  We will never know all the reasons for this. Pyke’s affair with Susie must have played a part in their separation, and there is the possibility that Margaret had an abortion in the years after David’s birth, and that it was Pyke who had first suggested this. Yet we know that she was never again in a relationship with a man, and that rather than get divorced they remained amicably separated for the rest of their lives.

  In a potted biography of Margaret Pyke published long after her death the reader is told that ‘her husband died in 1929’. He did not. And yet, a version of Pyke came to an end. During his first thirty-five years as an energetic Futurist in love with the scientific method, Geoffrey Pyke had tricked his way into and out of an enemy nation and had tasted life as a correspondent, best-selling author, minor Bloomsberry, financial speculator and radical educationalist. He had ridden waves of desire and rejection, jealousy and lust, living throughout as if with one layer of skin removed, and as a parent he had staked everything on the possibility of providing his son with an upbringing that was better than his own. His life was characterised by a propensity for taking enormous risks to achieve the seemingly impossible. Here was someone who inhabited the world as if it were an enormous game in which the rules were still being worked out. Now that game seemed to be over. In many ways it helps to think of this moment in his life as a death, for if he was to return to the stage he would need to do so as a man reborn.

  PART II

  HOW TO RESOLVE AN EPIDEMIC OF ANTI-SEMITISM, A ROYAL SCANDAL AND THE THREAT OF FASCISM

  BY THE TIME Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, in 1933, Geoffrey Pyke was living in a damp, ramshackle cottage in the Devil’s Punchbowl, deep in the Surrey Hills. He had become a recluse, or what his mother would call a luftmensch, literally ‘a man in the air’, a dreamer who does not concern himself with material things and appears to be drifting along without any purpose. Yet that would soon change.

  It was Margaret Russell, a cousin of Bertrand and friend of Pyke’s from his days at the 1917 Club, who had helped to arrange hi
s tenancy at the cottage. Its ceilings were famously low, a reminder perhaps of the Jewish barrack at Ruhleben, and there was neither running water nor electricity. But at twelve shillings a month the cottage was, if nothing else, affordable. During the four years since his financial collapse Pyke had survived on handouts from friends, what little remained of his inheritance and the occasional commission to write advertising copy for Jack Beddington at Shell, where others such as John Betjeman and Ben Nicholson were also helping to reinvent the brand. Yet the money was never enough and for the first time in his life, as the Western world ground deeper into economic recession, this unemployed bankrupt experienced the imprisoning austerity of poverty.

  Since his breakdown in 1929 Pyke had drifted apart from his Cambridge friends and lost some of his amour propre. He wore a beard and went about the cottage in a dilapidated elephant-grey Homburg hat. He wrote and read more than before. He considered his purpose in life. When his mood was up he played Mozart records at full blast, yet when it was down and descended into one of those deadening lulls with which he had become familiar, there were times when he felt unable to move.

  His son, David, was now at the Dragon School in Oxford, and during the holidays lived mostly with his mother at Balcombe Place in West Sussex. This was home to the remarkable women’s rights campaigner Lady Denman, who had recently appointed Margaret the Secretary of her National Birth Control Council. This was at a time when birth control remained an outré subject. David later recalled being driven in Lady Denman’s chauffeured Rolls-Royce from Balcombe to his father’s cottage. Sometimes he arrived to find him accompanied by Marjorie Edwards, aquiline and attractive, who cooked for him and typed. Otherwise his father’s only companion appeared to be his dog, Judy.