Charles Snow: The New Men

I did not think so. Rose said: ‘That makes us a very cosy little party.’

He spoke with a flick of the tongue, but he did not mean that it was strange for him, the Permanent Secretary, to be invited along with someone many rungs lower (I had started as what the Civil Service called a principal). Rose was too confident a man to bother about trivialities like that; he was himself formal, but he only objected to informality in others when it interfered with his administrative power.

The Minister came in, carrying a coalscuttle, on his hand a grimy cloth glove. He knelt by the grate, picked out lumps of coal and built up the fire. He was naturally familiar and unobtrusive in manner, but sometimes I thought he had developed it into an act. When people called on him in Whitehall, he would take their hats and coats and stow them punctiliously away in his cupboard. Kneeling by the fire, he looked thin-shouldered, wispy, like an elderly clerk.

‘I just wanted to have a word with you two,’ he said, still bending down.

‘An old boy came in to see me a day or two ago,’ he went on, as he pulled up a chair between us, round the fire. The ‘old boy’ was an eminent physicist, not more than sixty, that is, ten years Bevill’s junior. And the visit had taken place a week before: Bevill had been thinking things out.

‘I think I ought to put you two in the swim,’ he said. ‘Though, as you may have gathered, I’m a great believer in no one knowing more than he’s got to know to do his job. And I don’t mind telling you that I’ve wondered whether either of you have got to know this time. But Eliot must, if he’s going to be much use to me, and there may be some action for you, Rose, not now, perhaps in a year or so’s time.’

‘If you think it wiser that I shouldn’t know till then, Minister,’ said Rose. Underneath the courtesy, he was irked by Bevill’s talent for using two words where one would do. I thought that he underrated the old man, particularly when, as now, he settled down comfortably to another Polonius-like discourse on security. The first thing, said the Minister, was to forget all about the official hierarchy, the next was to forget that you had any relatives. If you possess a secret, he said, your secretary may have to know: but not your second-in-command: and not your wife.

‘If you decide to leave me out at this stage, I shall perfectly well understand,’ said Rose, getting back to relevance.

‘No, my dear chap. It wouldn’t be practical,’ said the Minister. ‘I shouldn’t be able to pull the wool over your ears.’

The Minister sometimes got his idioms mixed up. Rose went on watching him with pale, heavy-lidded eyes, which met the old man’s frank, ingenuous, blue ones. With the same simple frank expression, Bevill said: ‘As a matter of fact, some of these scientists believe they can present us with a great big bang. Like thousands of tons of TNT. That would be a futurist war, if you like. That old boy the other day said we ought to be ready to put some money on it.’

It sounded like the gossip I had heard in Cambridge, and I said so.

‘Ought you to have heard?’ said Bevill, who thought of science in nothing but military terms. ‘These chaps will talk. Whatever you do, you can’t stop them talking. But they’re pushing on with it. I’ve collected three appreciations already. Forget all I tell you until you have to remember — that’s what I do. But the stuff to watch is what they call a uranium isotope.’

He said the words slowly as though separating the syllables for children to spell. ‘U.235,’ he added, as though domesticating a foreign name. To each of the three of us, the words and symbols might as well have been in Hittite, though Rose and I would have been regarded as highly educated men.

The Minister went on to say that, though the scientists ‘as usual’ were disagreeing among themselves, some of them believed that making a ‘superbomb’ was now only a matter of a series of techniques. They also believed that whichever side got the weapon first would win the war.

‘These people always think that it’s easier to win wars than I do,’ he added imperturbably.

‘How soon before it’s a feasible proposition?’ Rose asked him.

‘Not tomorrow,’ said Bevill. ‘Anything up to ten years.’

‘That’s a very long-term prospect,’ said Rose.

‘I’m not an optimist,’ the Minister replied. ‘It may be a very long-term war. But I agree with you, my dear chap, it doesn’t sound like business for this time. Still it won’t do any harm to watch out and keep our powder dry.’

‘Many thanks for giving me the warning, Minister,’ said Rose, deciding there was nothing more of use to be learned that afternoon. ‘Many, many thanks.’

But before Rose could get away, Bevill showed us his private dossier of the uranium project. We must not refer to it again by that name, he said: as with all other projects of high secrecy, he copied out the ‘appreciations’ in his own hand, keeping no copies: the documents were then mounted in a loose-leaf cover, on which he printed a pet name.

‘I’m going to show you my name for this new stunt,’ he said, with a smile that was frank, shy and eager. And into that smile there crept the almost salacious pleasure that many men show as they talk of secrets.

He turned over the cover, and we saw, painted in bold capitals, the words:

MR TOAD

‘That’s what we’ll call it here, if you don’t mind,’ he added.

IT still did not seem significant. That winter, one or two of us who were in the secret discussed it, but, although we looked round the room before we spoke, it did not catch hold of us as something real.

Once Francis Getliffe, whom I had known longer than the other scientists, said to me: ‘I hope it’s never possible.’

But even he, though he did not want any men anywhere to possess this power, spoke without heaviness, as if it were a danger of the future, a piece of science fiction, like the earth running into a comet’s path.

All the arrangements of those first months of Mr Toad were on the pettiest scale — a handful of scientists, nearly all of them working part time, scattered round three or four university laboratories; a professor wondering whether he might spend three hundred and fifty pounds for some extra help; an improvised committee, meeting once a month, sending its minutes to the Minister in longhand.

In the summer of 1940, on one of those mornings of steady, indifferent sunshine that left upon some of us, for years afterwards, an inescapable memory, I was walking down Piccadilly and noticed half a dozen men coming out of the Royal Society’s door in Burlington House. I knew most of them by sight. They were scientists, nearly all youngish men: one or two were carrying continental briefcases; they might have been coming from an examiners’ meeting. In fact, they were the committee, and the sight of them brought back the Minister’s pet name, which, with the war news dragging like an illness, did not seem much of a joke.

Soon afterwards, in the Minister’s office we received intelligence that the Germans were working on the bomb. Although we had all assumed it, the news was sharp: it added another fear. Also it roughened the tongues of those who were crusading for the project. Step by step they won for it a little more attention. By the spring of 1941 they obtained sanction for a research establishment — not a grand establishment like those working on radio and the immediate weapons of war, but one with perhaps a hundred scientists to their thousands. For a site, they picked on a place called Barford — which I had not heard of, but found to be a village in Warwickshire, a few miles from Stratford-on-Avon.