An Encyclopaedia of Myself. Jonathan Meades
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Название: An Encyclopaedia of Myself
Автор: Jonathan Meades
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780007568918
isbn:
Salisbury had not then, and still has not, a seat of tertiary education. Its intelligentsia was mainly composed of Porton Down scientists. They were clever people and, incidentally, my ad hoc teachers. Ken said that Porton had ‘the atmosphere of a university … there were scientists of every discipline – there was even an archaeologist who had dug round Stonehenge.’ Having received his degree and several promotions, he was, after little more than a year devoted to the design of chemical weapons, appointed head of the Munitions Section of the Australian Field Experimental Station. ‘Assessing bomb performance … What that actually meant was laying waste to a considerable area of the Queensland jungle.’
Post-war he was seconded from there to BAOR, and then to Washington DC, Utah and Alberta, where he encountered the practices of operational research.
The house next to my parents’ that Edward Fielden’s firm had torpidly built for Ken and Peggy was hardly finished when Ken was appointed Director, Chemical Defence Research and Development at the War Office. They let the house and moved to Twickenham. The first tenants sublet the granny annex to a girl who played host to Salisbury’s folkies, among them the future actor Brian Protheroe (né Jones), then a lab assistant at Porton. Ken sat on various NATO committees, went on to become Director of the Operational Research Establishment at Byfleet. In 1968 he was given the post of Scientific Adviser to the Treasury with a brief to apply operational research methods to large-scale government projects including the funding of the Channel Tunnel and the Thames Barrier, the NHS’s expansion and the introduction of decimalisation. He was instrumental in bringing computers into government. A move which was widely, though ultimately unsuccessfully, resisted. When he retired he was Chief Scientific Officer. He had come to admire William Armstrong, Denis Healey and Harold Wilson. He had foreseen, correctly, that Victor Rothschild’s CPRS – which he reckoned to be a club-like vanity project – presaged the advent of partial ‘special advisers’ and battalions of consultants. He was astonished by Tony Benn’s ‘silliness’. His reaction to any mention of our eventual Salisbury neighbour Edward Heath was to suppress a laugh.
Although he was an ambulatory encyclopaedia he was reluctant to foist his knowledge on the unwilling. He was a measured optimist who believed in the values of the Enlightenment and in the beneficence of science. He was, equally, bewildered by the intellectual baselessness and fatuity of religious ‘faith’ and contemptuous of the tribalism that accompanies it.
‘I suppose we did do some pretty terrible things [at Porton] … In the chambers. The chambers … Even thinking about those chambers is, ah … Putting on masks to go in them … We did some pretty terrible things to ourselves too. It’s amazing there weren’t more like Baconfn4 – no one followed the safety drill. Pretty reckless, but that was how it was in those days. Thankless task Darlowfn5 had – no one took any notice … The thing is, we didn’t think of what we were doing as terrible … It wasn’t terrible then … Defence of the realm – not too fashionable nowadays. Being one step ahead – that was the deterrent … Letting them know
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