Though he was not being paid for this, every day he made the journey from Steele’s Road to his temporary office to pore over statistical data concerning the European consumption and use of fuel, food, fats and rolling stock (which explains his interest in trains when he was under surveillance). He also conducted experiments with the help of barrow boys in Covent Garden into how much weight they could move in a day.
At the time, as a British child, you would be taught in school that there were three main sources of power: coal, oil and hydroelectric. But, as Pyke explained in an Economist article published four days before V-J Day, there was a fourth source of power ‘on which the world wholly relied in previous ages and which even before the war represented a far larger proportion than most people know. That source is muscle – animal and human. The widespread and inarticulated assumption that this source of power was, or is, negligible is a myth.’ The human body was capable of turning food into energy far more efficiently than a steam locomotive converted coal. Efforts should be made now, Pyke argued, to ensure that during the coming crisis caused by coal shortages there would be equipment in place allowing people to make up some of the energy shortfall using muscle-power.
One of the ways to do this, he went on, was by using pedal-powered machines. Rolling stock could be moved with ‘Cyclo-Tractors’: pedal-powered locomotives employing twenty to thirty men operating a series of cycles. Pedal-powered dynamos could be installed in homes. Fields could be ploughed using pedal-powered tractors. Pyke had identified a problem before it turned into a crisis and now, in the summer of 1945, he had what appeared to be a solution. Yet he faced a familiar struggle, both to convince others that there was a problem and that he had a solution.
In the weeks after the end of the war, he launched a one-man campaign to promote ‘the utilisation of muscle’. As well as his article in the Economist he wrote a letter to The Times, a trio of articles in the Manchester Guardian, another in the New Statesman and Nation, several articles in the monthly magazine Cycling and gave an interview to the Daily Mail (which resulted in an error-strewn account that left Pyke furious). All made a detailed case for embracing muscle power in the face of the looming energy crisis.
Winter came, and with it some of the coal and food shortages that Pyke had predicted. He continued to busy himself around Whitehall, pressing his idea on officials from the Ministry of Supply and the Colonial Office. But nothing happened. From start to finish, this experience was a drawn-out reminder of his newfound impotence and just how hard it was for a private citizen to persuade those in government, during peacetime, to adopt an unusual idea. As he explained to a friend, he was engaged once again on ‘the uphill task of innovation, trying to put over a perfectly simple policy which has somehow been missed, without the help of my old ally . . . – not Mountbatten, but Hitler, the threat of disaster – . . . It is a long story, and I am keeping daily notes as material for the “study in the dynamics of innovation” which ought to be written one day. I don’t think I am going to meet with success. But I feel I ought not to give it up completely, until I know it to be completely hopeless.’
In late 1945 Pyke turned for help to what he presumed would be two sympathetic bodies, the Fabian Society and the Association of Scientific Workers – then paying him a small unemployment benefit. He was hoping that one might commission him to write a fuller report on this problem and his proposed solution. The response, however, was tepid. Bosworth Monck, General Secretary of the Fabian Society, admitted to Pyke: ‘The truth is that the Society has a reputation for being a hive of long-haired intellectuals, and I am reluctant to put forward anything which might lay us open to the charge of being cranks.’ There followed a lively correspondence inspired by this line about the fear of being taken for a crank. For Pyke this illustrated why so many radical ideas went unrealised. ‘What’s the use of having ideas in a civilisation where you need the force of a sledgehammer to get them looked at?’ Of course, once they had been looked at there was always the chance that they would be ridiculed by those who did not fully understand them – as Pyke was now reminded.
‘FLOATING AIR STATIONS OF ICE’, ran The Times headline; ‘GIANT ICEBERG SHIPS PLANNED AS BASES’ roared the Express; ‘THE MOST STAGGERING WAR PLAN OF ALL’ exclaimed the Mirror; while for the Sketch, Habbakuk was ‘H. M. S. ICEBERG (UNSINKABLE)’. In early 1946 the Admiralty issued a press release outlining the story behind Habbakuk, and for a moment, in the days that followed, it was as if everyone Pyke knew had either read about his idea or heard of it. While the reaction he personally experienced was positive, many of these articles had an incredulous and at times mocking tone. Pyke was happy to be laughed at, but he wanted to be laughed at for the right reasons. He complained to the Chronicle for describing Habbakuk as a ‘failure’. The plan had been sound, he told them. What had gone wrong was that the Battle of the Atlantic had gone right.
No less upsetting was the timing of the Admiralty press release. It had come after a flurry of letters from Pyke asking for the patent rights to Pykrete. By releasing the story in full, the Admiralty had effectively destroyed his patent rights, an ugly gesture which caused Pyke to turn in on himself. In letters to friends he was now ‘at war’ with the Admiralty, an institution he described as ‘the enemy’, and in his spare moments he continued to ruminate on his failure to come up with the idea for Habbakuk sooner.
So it came as a relief after months of thankless campaigning – for the patent rights to Pykrete and the utilisation of muscle-power – when John Cohen, a quantitative psychologist at the Cabinet Office, invited Pyke to take part in a very different project.
During the run-up to the 1945 General Election each of the major British political parties had pledged to create a national health service based on earlier proposals set out by Sir William Beveridge. In the wake of Labour’s landslide victory a Working Party was set up to establish a new system of nurse recruitment, nurse training and nurse pay. Cohen, who was attached to this body, decided in 1946 to find a non-civil servant to provide a sweeping analysis of nurse recruitment. Pyke’s name had come up. The unemployed former civil servant had little hesitation in accepting.
He soon learnt that the system of nurse recruitment in Britain was haphazard, antiquated and poorly documented. Rates of pay varied throughout the country along with supply, hospital size and standards of care. Job retention was low, owing to the sometimes appalling working conditions, and by 1945 the shortage of nurses, according to the Minister of Health Aneurin Bevan, was very nearly a ‘national disaster’. From a distance this was ideal Pyke-territory. There would certainly be no battle to have his opinion heard as for once he had been asked for it. But his progress was slow, and before he could reach any final conclusions the Working Party published its initial report.
In vague terms it proposed a new system of nurse recruitment, not so very different from what had gone before, that could be adapted to future health policy. In no way was this the result of a rigorous scientific analysis, nor did it suggest a list of concrete improvements. Pyke wanted nothing to do with the report, and nor did Cohen, who refused to sign it. Instead he promised a Minority Report with an Appendix by Pyke.
At last, in 1947, Pyke slipped into gear, attacking the subject from first principles and identifying five key questions: What was the proper task of a nurse? What training was required to equip her for that task? What annual intake was needed and how could it be obtained? From what groups of the population should recruitment be made? How could wastage during training be minimised? Before the war, health policy had been governed by the need to establish the minimum health conditions. Now it was time to identify the optimum. Pyke sought out fresh data wherever he could find it, writing letters to hospitals and borrowing so many library books that he had to put up new shelves in Steele’s Road.
But still this subject did not yield to his analysis. The work left him feeling weary and spent and he began to describe himself as ‘tired, suffering from melancholia, falling asleep
after meals, often silent’. His decision-making could become impaired, as it did when he spent hundreds of hours devising a formula for the ideal division of national income between capital expenditure and consumption in the hope of reaching a conclusion on health expenditure, only to realise that the ratio must shift with time, making his formula useless. He took on a secretary to do twenty hours of typing each week, yet this only seemed to make matters worse. At a time when he should have been condensing his notes, the towers of paper around his rooms only became taller.
After months of procrastination, Cohen became anxious. ‘Unless our document is published in time for public discussion before the summer, we shall have completely missed the bus. That is what I am beginning to fear,’ he told Pyke in January 1948. ‘I should hate to think I was harassing or rushing you in any way. I am fully aware of your health troubles. But are there not degrees of “perfection”? Could the level of aspiration not be somewhat reduced?’
By then the problem had as much to do with perfection as paranoia. A misplaced pronoun from Cohen – he had referred to ‘my report’ rather than ‘our report’ – had left Pyke convinced that he was secretly planning to take the credit for their joint efforts. ‘I have thrown everything into this work,’ he told him, ‘and gone short of food to pay the serious incidental expenses over this long period.’ He even demanded written assurances from Cohen that he would not pass off their research as his own. But this was a distraction, really. Unable to finish the report, he had looked for a scapegoat. In the past he had rounded on his mother, his brother, Susie Isaacs, Duncan, Wernher and more recently Bernal; now it was Cohen’s turn.
At a loss, Pyke explained his inability to finish this paper to the psychoanalyst Edward Glover, brother of James (who had long ago attempted a psychoanalysis of Pyke). Glover’s reply was acute. ‘I can see only one practical way of bringing the jam to an end soon; it is to sacrifice the narcissistic desire to finish your own work yourself – or at any rate to submit to the challenge of having someone else finish it for you which might mobilise in you a desperate last attempt to complete it without help.’ Cohen was of course the man to do this, and yet, ‘it is not what he does (by way of cutting and completing) that matters but the narcissistic threat to you of his attempting to do so’.
Glover knew Pyke well enough to hint at another mental block. ‘You hang on to immortality by being the eternal son. To admit that the future generation is a future generation excludes your privilege of taking part in it. So you won’t tell them anything. Well. Tell them. As you are working on sound principles you can’t be so very far wrong.’ Though Pyke would often refer to Mountbatten as a Peter Pan figure, there was also a part of him which refused to grow up. His outlook had been forged in that youthful moment in his life when the enemy seemed to be the stolid assumptions of an older generation, to the extent that he was unable to imagine himself belonging to that group. There were also other anxieties weighing down on him which he did not share with Glover, ones that troubled him more deeply in the days after reading this letter.
For some of those in London who had lived through the war there was a loneliness that came with peace. By 1948 the country had entered an age of austerity. Wartime amateurs were being replaced by peacetime professionals, some of the old divisions of class were coming back and the country looked dingier, shabbier and more worn than it had done before the war. Rationing was still in place, unemployment was creeping up, and with the return of the soldiers, many of them brutalised by service, Britain had become a more violent place. This was the country that Pyke woke up to on the morning of Saturday, 21 February 1948, the society which George Orwell had spent the past few months abstracting as he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. It was, in many ways, a more lacklustre place than it had been during the war, and on that particular day it was also bitterly cold, with snow covering large swathes of the country.
Pyke was bedridden again. He was depressed by the thought of tackling the NHS report as well as the uncertainty of what would follow. There were also times when he became gloomy about the society in which he lived, and in particular its attitude towards new ideas. ‘Bad manners to new ideas, to new suggestions, are sabotage – as they are in war, they are a Public Offence,’ he had recently told his listeners in a BBC broadcast entitled ‘The Dynamics of Innovation’. Bad manners towards new ideas were ‘an offence against the possibility of more food, more housing, more fun, more expansion of the personality, much as music: – That is to say – like bad manners towards children – they are an offence against the possibility of better people. That, pragmatically, is the only immortal sin. No matter that the idea to which we are bad-mannered may prove impractical, or not the most economic, or even fundamentally fallacious, – any more than it matters that a person to whom we are bad-mannered may not be first-class, may be a dud. If you are well-mannered only to the successful and to those you like, then you are a snob, and deserve the penalties you may get from your mistakes.’
Years of frustration seemed to coalesce in this grievance about society’s attitude towards innovation. In a letter to The Times published in December 1947, several months after that BBC talk, Pyke went further by suggesting that the nation was enslaved to its past. He had called for the abolition of the death penalty, insisting this was not about the merits of capital punishment as a deterrent, but whether, in England, ‘we have the decency, the dignity, the self-respect, and the courage to live out our lives without this real or imaginary protection. This has nothing to do with the question of whether human life should be regarded as sacrosanct. But if MPs vote for the preservation of the death penalty it will be a vote for the preservation into the future of the beastliness and barbarity of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English civilisation, and will show that we as a nation are slaves to our social inheritance, for evil and for good.’ Shortly afterwards Parliament would vote for the preservation of the death penalty (it would remain in place until 1965).
The following month he wrote again to The Times, this time about the government’s decision not to contribute to UNICEF. He found this unforgivable, especially in light of the contributions made by poorer nations. ‘Can we not pull our socks up? Do we agree with the refusal made in our name? If not, are we to allow it to stand? Our boast of democracy is at stake. What have the churches to say? Will they remain silent, inactive at this blasphemy in action (the only real blasphemy) against “Suffer Little Children to Come unto Me”? What have parents to say? And the Trade Unions? What have decent people of all parties to say to their MPs?’ His conclusion was desolate. ‘Actions like this, which suggest that we are condemned to perpetuate the evils in our past against our better but impotent judgement, unconsciously persuade men that there is nothing to be done with such a civilisation but to destroy it as thoroughly and rapidly as possible.’
Pyke was arguing himself into a corner, walling himself in until he could only see a society doomed to repeat into perpetuity the mistakes of the past. This civilisation was apathetic and toothless. It was in thrall to its elders and snobbish towards new ideas, and as such it had become unworthy of his improving attentions; much easier to ‘destroy’ everything ‘as thoroughly and rapidly as possible’.
Both of these letters had been sent to Donald Tyerman, Assistant Editor at The Times, with whom Pyke had corresponded for several years. In late February 1948 Tyerman replied with a more personal letter than usual. It began with praise for a paper that Pyke had sent him. Then Tyerman delivered his broadside. ‘What is wrong with Pyke? Why hasn’t he written the great book? Why is it that after reducing our problems to simple questions he can then never finish the answers? Why does every memorandum of his, which sets out to be constructive, end in becoming an unfinished encyclopaedia? I get the impression that all your simple shrewd questions lead in the same direction – in the direction of the Book to end all books which, by its nature, will never be written – which is a pity. There is a case, I think, for asking your next simple shrewd question about
yourself, because your inability to impress people with the practical rightness of your views isn’t entirely due to their imperviousness to new ideas. Even if you had your way and got a community open to innovation, there would still be the problem of Pyke to solve.’
It was a problem which he had tackled repeatedly, one that was as familiar to him as the smell of his sheets, and on the day that Tyerman wrote this letter Pyke set in motion what seemed to him the only solution to the ‘problem of Pyke’.
On the night of Saturday, 21 February Geoffrey Pyke placed a note on his door which read ‘Please do not wake me’. He shaved off his beard and sat down in a chair by the window. Next to him were headed notepaper, a pen and a container full of commercially available barbiturates.
He took the pills.
Knowing that he had probably less than half an hour to live he began to write. One of his first messages was to his wife.
Dear Marge,
I write to you after I’ve taken the poison to die. I have become too tired to go on and have now been swindled of my ideas by one Cohen. I can now do no more than send you my love and best wishes,
Your Geoff.
Another was to his son David. The Janet he refers to was Janet Stewart, whom David would later marry.
My darling Sonny,
I cannot help myself. I am too tired; too exhausted, and I have been swindled again, by a man Cohen who has taken my ideas. I die loving you and Mummy and Janet; my heart’s best wishes go out to you. I cannot explain the misery of my life. There would be no purpose in the attempt to. I cannot go on. This last blow finishes me.
Your loving Daddy.
The third was to Elsie Myers, whose husband Leo had killed himself in 1944, also with an overdose of barbiturates.
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