Churchill's Iceman

by Henry Hemming

  Having refined the question, Pyke would move on to the next stage – research – which saw him head off in two different directions. He would mine the past for historical analogies and lost solutions, for we live in a written culture that encourages forgetfulness. Yet he would also search for scraps of information and inspiration in the world around him, scouring newspapers, journals, films, posters, statistics and surveys, as well as the conversations he had. ‘One of my ideas [. . .] came from a music hall song with a line “The Bomb that Found Its Own Way Home.”’ In a similar sense, he believed in carrying out small-scale experiments to learn about the problem in hand. His guiding principle here was never to limit research to a single field, which explains the bewildering range of influences behind the Malting House School, for example, from Freud and Rousseau to Montessori, Armstrong and his own childhood. ‘We cannot tell where data and ideas will come from, or to whom they will be significant.’ Instead he taught himself to look for correlations everywhere. ‘EVERYTHING IS IRRELEVANT TILL CORRELATED WITH SOMETHING ELSE.’ Identifying those correlations ‘is not a question of ability, but of free-mindedness’.

  Sometimes this research would provide him with a solution and there was no need to go any further. But for trickier problems Pyke would reach for his ‘Auto-Socratic’ technique in which he imagined a dialogue between two voices – best described as a wildly inventive teenager and a polite psychiatrist. The teenager represents fantasy, the psychiatrist is reality. One proposes – and takes things to an extreme – while the other scrutinises – and does so graciously. The sober voice of reality does not shoot down ideas for the sake of it but allows the voice of fantasy to finish each train of thought. The dialogue between the two begins always with the patient presenting the problem in its most pared-down form, after which the conversation ferrets off under its own momentum until it produces either a subject for further research or a solution.

  There were times when this technique was ‘Auto-Shavian’ as much as Auto-Socratic, such was Pyke’s love of Bernard Shaw’s paradoxes and his habit of spinning round every truism, question or statement. Pyke, too, had a pathological weakness for reversal. The Nazis set up an institute to study the Jewish Question; as a Jew he would study the Nazi Question. When in a rush to get to Berlin, he took the slowest train possible. To inflict the greatest damage on an enemy in occupied territory he urged that it be occupied more fully. If for at least one of his critics at OSRD Pyke ‘would rather wage a futile campaign with mathematical or psychological elegance than win the war by recourse to vulgar or commonplace weapons or strategems’, more often than not these reversals provided Pyke with a way out of any intellectual dead-end.

  Another defining element of Pyke’s technique was his determination never to become attached to a tentative solution. As he had learnt with Plough and Habbakuk, one must always be ready to try, fail, learn and try again as soon as possible. He also learnt repeatedly and painfully that all innovations must encounter resistance. As he once told Mountbatten, his experience of suggesting new ideas had been ‘to be heartily kicked in the pants’. The times in his life when he was most successful were those when he anticipated where the resistance to his idea would lie.

  After the war, Pyke complained to Michael Foot, the future Labour Party leader, that ‘the sport of shooting down ideas has come to be a substitute for the amusement of shooting down grouse and partridges’. An idea might also be shot down because it was no good. It could be that it threatened the prestige, earning power or autonomy of an individual or an institution. The fear of its unintended consequences, or the suspicion that its benefits had been exaggerated, had the ability to turn people against it. Incomprehension was another reason why some of Pyke’s most radical ideas met with resistance. At other times the opposition might stem from a personal dislike of the scheme’s author.

  But for Pyke, new ideas were usually dismissed because they threatened a tradition or habit. Sometimes he was right. We look for consistency in our surroundings and all too often will turn against an innovation not as a result of a level-headed assessment but purely because of its disruptive nature.

  Towards the end of his life Pyke began to appreciate that there were steps he could take to protect his ideas from this kind of opposition, and on those happy occasions when he was successful it was often because he had communicated a clear narrative about what his new idea was and why it was so useful. He would contrast the consequences of developing it with inaction. When convincing those in Combined Operations to take on Plough, he recognised that resistance might be directed against the author of the concept as much as the concept itself, so he worked hard at personally winning over the officers he spoke to. When trying to improve the image of Malting House he understood the importance of showing the radical new ideas it embodied in action, so he commissioned a film about the school. The demonstration of Pykrete which took place in Churchill’s bath and in Quebec did more than anything else to convince senior political and military figures that Habbakuk could work (though neither was his idea). But perhaps the most important thing Pyke did when trying to introduce a strange, disruptive idea like Habbakuk or Plough, the reason why he got as far as he did, was that he won over powerful individual supporters.

  In today’s jargon these are sometimes called ‘early adopters’. It is easy to spot a potential early adopter in the top brass of any institution: he or she will be the person who likes to take risks or prides themselves on being outspoken. Once Pyke had identified an early adopter there were various tricks he used to win them over. He would avoid sending over a written summary of his idea before meeting in person. Once he had been granted an audience he would do his best to provoke them and make them laugh, for we become more impulsive when in a good mood. Usually he told them that he only wanted several minutes of their time, or that they need read no more than the first few pages of his proposal. He would appeal to their curiosity by presenting the idea as a story with a beginning, middle and end and, like any skilled storyteller, he tried to vary the scale by moving about historically and remembering to zoom out and in. He would find out about the interests of this early adopter and play to them in his pitch. Where possible he would also appeal to their vanity by implying that they were the only ones with the imagination and foresight to recognise the Promethean brilliance of his new idea. As he did with Mountbatten so often, Pyke tried to extend the ownership of an idea by leaving elements of the plan unfinished. In this way additional details might be provided by Mountbatten and, once he had begun to fill in some of the gaps, Pyke would refer to the proposal as ‘our idea’. He would also stress that his radical solution was not the finished one and that others needed to come in – all of which made his ideas appear less dogmatic or intimidating.

  The final stage of Geoffrey Pyke’s problem-solving technique was to carry out a post-mortem. He would ask himself if there were lessons to be taken from his latest attempt to bring a new idea into the world. Increasingly, towards the end of his life, this was where he went wrong.

  When casting his eye back over an unsuccessful campaign he was too quick to blame its failure on society’s fear of change. There were times, as Donald Tyerman suggested, that ‘even if you had your way and got a community open to innovation, there would still be the problem of Pyke to solve’. Yet to imagine Pyke without ‘the problem of Pyke’ is a counter-factual too far. The ‘problem of Pyke’ represents the same disequilibrium that drove him on with the kind of relentless momentum which is so often manifested in those who lose a parent at a young age.

  In many ways the shape of his personality was set by the end of the First World War, after which he emerged as a young man suffering from an undiagnosed condition, possibly Addison’s Disease, who carried the scars of an abusive childhood and the complex of having survived a war in which he did not fight – both because he had escaped from imprisonment and was deemed medically unfit for service. He had also written a best-selling book, smuggled himself into Germany, become an am
ateur spy, faced execution in solitary confinement, converted to socialism and escaped from a German detention camp. All this by the age of twenty-four.

  This unique and unlikely set of experiences changed his understanding of what was possible and why change did not happen sooner. Many of us at a similar age might test the boundaries of what we can achieve before undergoing a realignment of sorts. Pyke never experienced that adjustment. He remained in this youthful frame of mind for the rest of his life, unyielding in his determination that no question was beyond him, resistance to new ideas was socially inherited and that each of us can solve any problem we like. Moreover, we have a duty to do so. He was intelligent and comfortable with paradox, and in the English society he inhabited his eccentricities were tolerated – indeed, his character is at times a reflection of this abiding English tolerance for colourful nonconformists.

  ‘Pyke is just a pure English freak,’ he imagined Mountbatten telling General Marshall (in a letter Pyke had sent to Mountbatten). ‘Of course, most of our freaks are no good. But about one in a thousand is the goods. You know, just like you might have to open a thousand oysters before you get one with a pearl. Though Pyke is not an oyster. For you can’t shut him up.’ He warmed to his theme of the English and their oddballs: ‘We have a very sound method for testing their sense of the practical. If they have got enough sense to force their way through all the barriers of officialdom to the people at the top, then there must be something to them’.

  This is a revealing line. It is one of the only times we are given a glimpse of Pyke’s ambition. He knew that he was unusual, that some saw him as a ‘freak’, but he was desperate to prove his worth by having his ideas taken up at the highest level.

  During the Second World War this singular Englishman realised his dream by forcing himself and his ideas through to the very top. In the face of the fascist threat he flourished, but there was only so much he could do alone. Throughout his life his most radical ideas depended on the support of others, and his role was simply to propose these ideas. ‘I have to behave rather like Nature,’ he once wrote, ‘throwing up a hundred million pollen on the chance that one may do its duty.’ Of course his greatest and most radical idea was that each of us could do the same ourselves.

  NOTES

  The page references in this notes correspond to the printed edition from which this ebook was created. To find a specific word or phrase from the notes, please use the search feature of your ebook reader.

  Where no collection is indicated, the item can be found in the Geoffrey Pyke Archive, housed at the time of publication with Janet Pyke.

  ‘ADM’, ‘B’, ‘BT’, ‘CAB’, ‘DEFE’ and ‘KV’ – National Archives, Kew

  ‘AMEL’ – Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge

  ‘Cherwell Papers’ – Nuffield College, Oxford

  ‘FDR’ – Franklin D. Roosevelt Library

  ‘JDB Papers’ – Cambridge University Library

  ‘L. H. Myers Papers’ – Eton College Library

  ‘MB1’ – Mountbatten Papers, University of Southampton

  ‘NRCC’ – National Research Council of Canada

  ‘Ramsey Papers’ – King’s College Modern Archives Centre, Cambridge

  ‘RUH’ – Liddle Collection, Leeds University

  ‘SAPMO-BArch’ – Foundation Archives of Parties and Mass Organisations of the GDR in the Federal Archives (SAPMO), Bundesarchiv, Berlin

  vii epigraph: Socrates, Defence of Socrates, 30d–31a, transl. David Gallop, from Plato, Defence of Socrates, Euthyphro, and Crito (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1997, p. 45

  Introduction

  3 ‘only unoriginal thing’: ‘Everybody’s Conscience’, Time, 8 March 1948

  3 ‘one of the most original’: ‘Mr Geoffrey Pyke’, The Times, 26 February 1948

  3 ‘Pyke’s genius’: L. L. Whyte, The Listener, 30 September 1948

  3 ‘North Face’: John Cohen, ‘Geoffrey Pyke: Man of Ideas’, New Scientist, 23 July 1981, p. 246

  3 ‘the sort of man’: David Lampe, Pyke: The Unknown Genius (London: Evans Brothers), 1959, p. 10

  3 ‘right-hand men’: ‘Pyke of Habbakuk’, Evening Standard, 24 February 1948

  4 ‘immense natural dignity’: Cohen, ‘Geoffrey Pyke: Man of Ideas’, p. 246

  4 ‘Russian princeling’: Cedric Hentschel, ‘Geoffrey Pyke’, Less Simple Measures (Berkeley, Gloucestershire: Garratt), 2002, p. 44

  4 ‘Byzantine icon’: Elias Canetti, Party in the Blitz (London: Harvill), transl. Michael Hofmann, 2005, p. 181

  5 ‘concealed truth’: GP Notebook, 9 October 1941

  5 ‘voice of Conscience’: Oscar Cox to Harry Hopkins, 13 November 1942

  How to Become a War Correspondent

  11 ‘abilities . . . clever’: Reginald Drake to R. Banfield, 4 July 1916, 101570/MI5/G, KV 2/3038

  13 death of father: Cohen, ‘Geoffrey Pyke: Man of Ideas’, p. 246

  13 ‘most amazing meetings’: Cambridge Magazine, 6 June 1914, vol 3, no. 25, p. 708

  14 ‘spellbound . . . every word’: Ibid.

  15 ‘log jam’: Lampe, Pyke: The Unknown Genius, p. 19

  15 ‘firm believer’: Geoffrey Pyke, To Ruhleben – And Back (New York: Collins Library / McSweeney’s), 2002, p. 31

  17 Reuters crisis: Donald Read, The Power of News: The History of Reuters (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1999, p. 1

  17 Pyke’s career as a Reuters correspondent: This episode is not at all well documented – all Reuters telegrams from this period were pulped after the war, and as a String Correspondent Pyke would not have been listed as a Reuters member of staff. But it is unlikely that Pyke would have made such a claim and put it in print, given how easy it would be for Reuters to dispute it.

  17 ‘Reuters’ special correspondent’: The Manchester Guardian, 26 July 1915, p. 4; The Scotsman, 26 July 1915, p. 8

  18 ‘Athens . . . intercourse’: Geoffrey Pyke, The Fortnightly Review, 1 January 1916, p. 35

  18 ‘pointed of questions’: Ibid., p. 38

  18 ‘four German destroyers’: United States Naval Institute, Proceedings, ed. E. J. King, (Annapolis: US Naval Institute), 1914, vol. 40, p. 1566

  18 ‘seedy individual’: Basil Thomson to Reginald Drake, 26 June 1916, KV 2/3038

  19 no British correspondents: James W. Gerard, My Four Years in Germany (London: Hodder and Stoughton), 1917, p. 94

  19 ‘desire . . . Germany’: Pyke, To Ruhleben, pp. xiii-xiv

  20 ‘censorship’: Daily Chronicle, 7 August 1914

  20–1 ‘quickly, please’: Pyke, To Ruhleben, p. 1

  21 ‘crown of ambition’: Philip Gibbs, Adventures in Journalism (London: Heinemann), 1923, p. 179

  21 ‘absolutely determined’: Pyke, To Ruhleben, p. 4

  22 ‘procession . . . fun’: Philip Gibbs, The War Dispatches (London: Anthony Gibbs and Phillips and Times Press), 1964, p. 4

  22 ‘no correspondents in Berlin’: Pyke, To Ruhleben, p. 5

  23 ‘Glory of glory’: Ibid.

  24 ‘fine voice’: ‘The Union Society’, The Cambridge Review, 27 Feb 1913, vol. 34, no. 852, p. 320

  24 ‘good elocutionist’: Cambridge Magazine, 18 October 1913

  24 ‘pleasing song’: Ibid., 17 May 1913

  24 ‘spare moments’: ‘Union Notes’, The Granta, 10 May 1913, vol. 26, no. 592, p. 319

  24 ‘brilliant . . . ill-balanced’: Basil Thomson to Reginald Drake, 26 June 1916, KV 2/3038

  24 Telegraph scoop: Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty (London: Quartet), 1978, p. 87

  25 ‘some knew a little’: Pyke, To Ruhleben, p. 6

  26 ‘hot iron’: Ibid., p. 63

  27 ‘expecting English journalists’: Ibid., p. 5

  28 ‘correct formulation’: GP to Palmer Putnam, US National Archives and Records Administration, Records of the OSRD, Division 12, Project Records 1940–45, OD-65

  28 US consulates: Gerard, My Four Years, p. 96

  29 birth certificate fee: Bankru
ptcy Hearing No. 243 of 1928, ‘Geoffrey Nathaniel Pyke’, BT 226/4520

  30 customs shed: Edward Lyell Fox, Behind the Scenes in Warring Germany (New York: McBride, Nast and Co.), 1915

  30 ‘The people know’: Quoted in De Beaufort, Behind the German Veil (London: Hutchinson), 1917, p. 27

  30 ‘people were seized’: Gerard, My Four Years in Germany, p. 95

  31 ‘He will punish’: Peter Englund, The Beauty and the Sorrow (London: Profile), 2012, Kindle location 273

  31 ‘divorced . . . breath’: Pyke, To Ruhleben, p. 9

  32 ‘spitting’: Ibid., p. 9

  32 ‘Ach so’: Ibid., p. 10

  33 ‘horribly uncertain’: Pyke, To Ruhleben, p. 13

  33 ‘Several times’: Ibid.

  33 ‘Suddenly I heard’: Ibid., p. 14

  33–4 ‘I saw . . . Bummelzug’: Ibid., p. 19

  34 Berlin: Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring (London: Papermac), 2000, p. 83 with reference to James Steakley, The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany (New York: Arno), 1975, pp. 24–27

  35 ‘The first thing’: Pyke, To Ruhleben, p. 21

  36 ‘I listened’: Ibid., p. 22

  36 ‘Do not say “Yes”’: De Beaufort, Behind the German Veil, p. 49

  36 ‘den of lions’: Pyke, To Ruhleben, p. 28

  37 ‘packed . . . music’: Ibid., p. 34

  37 ‘the booms . . . paper’: Ibid., p. 7

  39 ‘It would not be long’: Ibid., p. 48

  40 ‘Velazquez’: Ibid., p. 50

  40 ‘infantile sparring’: Ibid., p. 51

  41–2 ‘Outside I could hear’: Ibid., pp. 66–67

  How to Escape

  44 ‘terrible mistake’: E. M. Falk, ‘My Experiences as a Prisoner of War in Germany, and How I Escaped’, Blackwood’s Magazine, No. 1203, Vol. 199, p. 4

  44 ‘specimens’: Ibid., p. 11

  44–5 ‘There were whites . . . brothel’: Ibid., p. 10