The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain. Juliet Gardiner

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       NINE Primers for the Age

      I regard Nature as perhaps the most important weekly printed in English, far more important than any political weekly.

      Arnold Bennett, November 1930

      Mr [H.G.] Wells at one time appeared to think that the scientists might save us. Then more recently it was going to be international financiers. But so many committed suicide. So now it is going to be aviators. Perhaps soon we will be told to pin our hopes on a dictatorship of midwives.

      Professor F.S. Blackett, ‘The Frustration of Science’ (1935)

      In October 1933 the writer H.G. Wells gave a dinner party. Since he had invited too many guests to fit round the table in his flat in Chiltern Court, off Baker Street, the party dined first at the Quo Vadis restaurant in Dean Street, Soho — a building in which Karl Marx had once rented rooms — and then repaired to the flat, where it was promised that Moura Budberg (a Russian aristocrat and probably the common-law wife of the writer Maxim Gorky, who had to come to London as Wells’ mistress, but continued to maintain distinctly shady links with the Soviet Union) would entertain the assembled company by playing the harp. It was a glamorous evening, with the socialite Lady Emerald Cunard ‘in ermine, almost invisible under pearls and diamonds, scenting out the lions’, the novelist Enid Bagnold, now married to the head of Reuter’s, Sir Roderick Jones, ‘brazening out’ a nettle rash by covering her face with an orange veil, Harold Nicolson, Max Beerbohm, and ‘H.G. at the centre, rosily smiling, all the guests talking at once’.

      Unfortunately a number of the guests, including Moura Budberg, were taken ill with food poisoning, so there was no music that night, but there was endless discussion, as there always was at Wells’ soirées, including one the month before, assembled ‘to discuss a magnificent idea he has, to unite science to save the world against all its growing dangers: Fascism, Communism, Japanism, Americanism and Journalism … H.G. “chaired” the meeting in his squeaky voice, which becomes quite a handicap in such circumstances. Nothing was decided, naturally, except the need for something, and H.G. will go on giving dinner parties to discuss saving the world.’

      ‘Saving the world’ from the list of spectres Wells evoked, as well as those of the economic slump and intractable unemployment at home, was something discussed at a lot of top people’s dinner tables in the 1930s. And scientists were at the forefront of such debate, as many were convinced that scientific methods would come up with solutions that inexpert, ill-informed, blundering politicians seemed utterly unable to locate.

      Although he was primarily interested at the time in ‘the reproductive physiology of monkeys and apes, and the bearing of any evidence on the evolutionary interrelationship of monkeys, apes and man’, which he was well placed to research as Prosecutor, or research fellow, at the Zoological Society in Regent’s Park (a post he had achieved at the young age of twenty-four), Solly Zuckerman also had a wider range of interests. The atmosphere of the time encouraged him to discuss with some friends, including the young political economist (and great joiner of discussion groups) Hugh Gaitskell and G.P. ‘Gip’ Wells, the zoologist son of H.G., the idea of forming a small dining club. In the autumn of 1931 ‘Tots and Quots’, an abbreviation and inversion of the phrase in Terence’s Phormio: ‘Quot homines, tot sententiae’ — ‘So many men, so many opinions’ — convened for the first time at Pagani’s restaurant in Great Portland Street.

      It was a distinguished (entirely male) table: the robustly confident young scientists who assembled to ‘let ideas roam’ over the question of ‘what role science might play in social development’ included the physicist and crys-tallographer J.D. Bernal (reverentially known as ‘the sage’ although he confessed that even his encyclopaedic knowledge had lacunae when it came to ‘fourth century Roumania’), who believed that science ‘held the key to the future’, while socialism had the ability to turn it; the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane, perhaps ‘the last man to know all there was to be known’, with a matchless ability to communicate the complex in public lectures, books and his regular science columns in the Daily Worker; the biologist and author of the best-selling Mathematics for the Million and Science for the Citizen, books he described as ‘primers for an age of plenty’ intended to equip their readers with sufficient knowledge to become effective citizens in a scientific age, Lancelot Hogben, a conscientious objector in the First World War whose acute mind challenged everything; the prehistorian Gordon Childe (another success with what he referred to as the ‘bookstall public’); the sinologist and historian of science Joseph Needham; the zoologist J.Z. Young; the Cambridge economic historian M.M. Postan and the Oxford economist Roy Harrod. Others, such as the literary critic I.A. Richards and the geneticist Lionel Penrose, declined to join but volunteered to ‘clock in’ as guests when the subject under discussion interested them.

      Tots and Quots dinners lapsed for a time in the mid-1930s (not helped by the fact that Hugh Gaitskell probably lost the Minute Book), but the club reconvened in 1939 (with a slightly shuffled membership which now also included Richard Crossman) as a ‘platform to proclaim our views … about the vast potential [for the] applications of scientific knowledge when dealing with the complicated problems of war’.

      But although ‘Gip’ Wells, who had co-written the best-selling The Science of Life with Julian Huxley at his father’s bidding, resigned after the first dinner, complaining that ‘he had hoped the whole thing would be fun, whereas we were obviously going to become monastic and deadly serious’, the small (fourteen was the average number) group of scientists and economists met regularly during the worst years of the Depression, eating well as they pondered the responsibilities of their discipline in a country shot through with social and economic problems.

      In 1934 Ritchie Calder, the scientific correspondent of the Daily Herald, advocated that the House of Lords should be replaced by what he called a ‘Senate of Scientists’. The year before, the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins, in his Presidential Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, had urged the formation of a ‘Solomon’s House’ of the wisest (men) in the land who would assemble to synthesise knowledge, appraise its progress and assess its impact on society. The nutritionist F. LeGros Clark stated that scientists found politics ‘a disreputable game’, which it was their duty to ‘try to transform into a pastime with clean, scientific rules’. Professor Frederick Soddy was explicit: since science was society’s ‘real master’, society should ‘insist on being ruled, not by a reflection of a reflection, but directly by those [scientists] who are concerned with the creation of its wealth, not its debts’. J.B.S. Haldane, writing in Nature in January 1934, had suggested that refusing to apply scientific method to the conduct of human affairs would bring about the failure of Britain’s political СКАЧАТЬ