Charles Snow: The Conscience of the Rich

Charles Percy Snow was born in Leicester, on 15 October 1905. He was educated from age eleven at Alderman Newton’s School for boys where he excelled in most subjects, enjoying a reputation for an astounding memory and also developed a lifelong love of cricket. In 1923 he became an external student in science of London University, as the local college he attended in Leicester had no science department. At the same time he read widely and gained practical experience by working as a laboratory assistant at Newton’s to gain the necessary practical experience needed.

Having achieved a first class degree, followed by a Master of Science he won a studentship in 1928 which he used to research at the famous Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. There, he went on to become a Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1930 where he also served as a tutor, but his position became increasingly titular as he branched into other areas of activity. In 1934, he began to publish scientific articles in Nature , and then The Spectator before becoming editor of the journal Discovery in 1937. However, he was also writing fiction during this period, with his first novel Death Under Sail published in 1932, and in 1940 ‘Strangers and Brothers’ was published. This was the first of eleven novels in the series and was later renamed ‘George Passant’ when ‘Strangers and Brothers’ was used to denote the series itself.

Discovery became a casualty of the war, closing in 1940. However, by this time Snow was already involved with the Royal Society, who had organised a group to specifically use British scientific talent operating under the auspices of the Ministry of Labour. He served as the Ministry’s technical director from 1940 to 1944. After the war, he became a civil service commissioner responsible for recruiting scientists to work for the government. He also returned to writing, continuing the Strangers and Brothers series of novels. ‘The Light and the Dark’ was published in 1947, followed by ‘Time of Hope’ in 1949, and perhaps the most famous and popular of them all, ‘ The Masters’ , in 1951. He planned to finish the cycle within five years, but the final novel ‘Last Things’ wasn’t published until 1970.

He married the novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson in 1950 and they had one son, Philip, in 1952. Snow was knighted in 1957 and became a life peer in 1964, taking the title Baron Snow of the City Leicester. He also joined Harold Wilson’s first government as Parliamentary Secretary to the new Minister of Technology.When the department ceased to exist in 1966 he became a vociferous back-bencher in the House of Lords.

After finishing the Strangers and Brothers series, Snow continued writing both fiction and non-fiction. His last work of fiction was ‘ A Coat of Vanish’, published in 1978. His non-fiction included a short life of Trollope published in 1974 and another, published posthumously in 1981, ‘ The Physicists: a Generation that Changed the World’ . He was also inundated with lecturing requests and offers of honorary doctorates. In 1961, he became Rector of St. Andrews University and for ten years also wrote influential weekly reviews for the Financial Times.

In these later years, Snow suffered from poor health although he continued to travel and lecture. He also remained active as a writer and critic until hospitalized on 1 July 1980. He died later that day of a perforated ulcer.

‘Mr Snow has established himself, on his own chosen ground, in an eminent and conspicuous position among contemporary English novelists’

It was a summer afternoon, the last day of the Bar final examinations. The doors had just swung open; I walked to my place as fast as I could without breaking into a run. For an instant I was touched again by the odour of the old Hall, blended from wooden panels, floor polish, and the after-smell of food; it was as musty as a boarding house, and yet the smell, during those days, became as powerful in making one’s heart lift up and sink as that of the sea itself.

As I stared at the question-paper, I went through an initial moment in which the words, even the rubric ‘Candidates are required to answer…’ appeared glaring but utterly unfamiliar. At the beginning of each examination I was possessed in this way: as though by a magnified version of one of those amnesias in which a single word — for example TAKE — looks as though we have never seen it before, and in which we have to reassure ourselves, staring at the word, that it occurs in the language and that we have used it, spelt exactly in that fashion, every day of our lives.

Then, all of a sudden, the strangeness vanished. I was reading, deciding, watching myself begin to write. The afternoon became a fervent, flushed, pulsing, and exuberant time. This I could do; I was immersed in a craftsman’s pleasure. In the middle of the excitement I was at home.

Towards the end of the afternoon, the sunlight fell in a swathe across the room, picking out the motes like the beam from a cinema projector. I was cramped, tired, and the sweat was running down my temples; my hand shook as I stopped writing.

In that moment, I noticed Charles March sitting a little farther up the hall, across the gangway. His fair hair, just touching the beam of sunlight, set it into a blaze. His head was half turned, and I could see the clear profile of his clever, thin, fine-drawn face. As he wrote, hunched over his desk, his mouth was working.

I turned back to my paper, for the last spurt.

I had been a little disappointed at not meeting Charles during the course of the examination. We had only talked to one another a few times, when we happened to be eating dinners at the Inn on the same night; but I thought that at first sight we had found something like kinship in each other’s company.

I knew little of the actual circumstances of his life, and the little I knew made the feeling of kinship seem distinctly out-of-place. He came from Cambridge to eat his dinner at the Inn, I from a bed-sitting room in a drab street in a provincial town. His family was very rich, I had gathered: I was spending the last pounds of a tiny legacy on this gamble at the Bar.

We had never met anywhere else but at the Inn dining table. When I last saw him, we had half arranged to go out together one night during the examination. All I had heard from him, however, was a ‘good luck’ on the first morning, as we stood watching for the doors to open.

At last the invigilator called for our papers, and I stayed in the gangway, wringing the cramp out of my fingers and waiting for Charles to come along.

‘How did you get on?’ he said.

‘It might have been worse, I suppose.’ I asked about himself as we reached the door. He answered: ‘Well, I’m afraid the man next to me is the real victim.’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘He was trying to get a look at my paper most of the afternoon,’ said Charles. ‘If the poor devil managed it, I should think he’d probably fail.’

I laughed at him for touching wood. He began protesting, and then broke off: ‘Look here, would it be a bore for you if we had tea somewhere? I mean, could you possibly bear it?’

I was already used to his anxious, repetitious, emphatic politeness; when I first heard it, it sounded sarcastic, not polite.