CONTENTS
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Henry Hemming
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Author’s Note
Introduction
PART I
How to Become a War Correspondent
How to Escape
How to Become Invisible
Pyke Hunt, Part 1
How to Raise Your Child (and Pay for It)
PART II
How to Resolve an Epidemic of Anti-Semitism, a Royal Scandal and the Threat of Fascism
How to Prevent a War
Pyke Hunt, Part 2
How to Defeat Nazism
Pyke Hunt, Part 3
How to Change the Military Mind
Pyke Hunt, Part 4
How to Succeed in America
Pyke Hunt, Part 5
How to Win the War with Ice
How to Survive
How to Live
Pyke Hunt, Part 6
Epilogue, or, How to Think Like a Genius
Notes
Select Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Index
Copyright
Misadventure in the Middle East In Search of the English Eccentric
Together
Abdulnasser Gharem
I still remember the thrill of being shown into the dusty attic, in south London, which contained almost all of Geoffrey Pyke’s papers. It was 2008, and by my side was Pyke’s daughter-in-law, Janet. The sight before me was a biographer’s dream – papers which had not been touched for decades gathered together in bulging bin liners, wasp-strewn trunks and khaki folders fastened long ago with pins. Not only did Geoffrey Pyke write prolifically but he tried to keep everything he put down on paper. My greatest debt in writing this book is to Janet Pyke and her family for allowing me to see these papers and for providing assistance and encouragement over the last six years.
Just months after I decided to write this life of Pyke, MI5 released almost all of its papers on him to the National Archives in Kew. I am grateful both to the Security Service for choosing to do so at this particular moment and to the staff at the National Archives, particularly Ed Hampshire. I’d also like to acknowledge the assistance I received at the British Library, the Lambeth Archive, Nuffield College Library, the new defunct newspaper library at Colindale, Cambridge University Library, the Archive Centre at King’s College, Cambridge, the National Archives and Library of Congress in Washington DC and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library at Hyde Park, New York State. Michael Meredith at Eton College Library, Glyn Hughes at the National Meteorological Archive, Catherine Wise at the Cambridge Union Society, John Entwistle at the Reuters Archive, Cindy Tsegmid and Lucy Arnold at the Leeds University Archive, Dr G. E. Edwards at Pembroke College, Steven Leclair at the National Research Council Canada in Ottawa and Katharine Thomson at the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge were equally helpful.
Further assistance, for which I am indebted, came from Bernd Barth-Rainer, Peter Morris, Georgina Ferry, Michael Weatherburn, Jeremy Lewis, Paul Collins, Jared Bond, Jonathan Ray, Janet Sayers, Kevin Morgan, Gordon Corera, Thomas Rünkel, Reinhard Müller, Charles Faringdon, John Monson, Amir Sam, John Betteridge, Philip Womack, Lindsay Merriman, Hugo Macpherson, Sarah and Tom Carter, Robin Lane Fox, George Weidenfeld, Artemis Cooper, John Julius Norwich, Leonora Lichfield, Harriet Crawley, Dickie Wallis, Cutler Cook, Alexander Kan, Jeremy Bigwood, Andrew Lownie, Nigel West, Boris Jardine, Nicolas Smith, Karen Ganilsy, Stephen Raleigh, Anthony Hentschel and Charles Leadbeater.
Jonathan Conway showed tenacity and skill in helping to shape the outline of this book. Trevor Dolby at Preface has been hugely supportive throughout and great fun to work with. Will Sulkin was an extraordinarily thoughtful editor. John Sugar and Rose Tremlett at Preface have both been immensely helpful. Thanks also to my dad, for his feedback, and to Bea, my sister, to whom this book is dedicated and who has been, from the start, full of imaginative advice.
Finally my love and thanks to the two women in my life, Helena and our daughter Matilda, the latter for splashing me each evening at bathtime, the former for her unending love, silliness and unconditional encouragement. I can’t imagine doing any of this without you – you make the whole thing worthwhile.
‘I’d like everything concerning me to be destroyed and to be forgotten as if I’d never lived,’ wrote Pyke in his final letter to his son. Yet David Pyke chose to keep his father’s papers. Even if he had thrown them away, it would have been impossible to delete Geoffrey Pyke’s imprint on the world, to undo the conversations, speeches, articles and inventions, as well as the universe of ideas which he had sung into being during his fifty-four years, and which had covered such an astonishing range. Pyke’s Zelig-like journey through the early twentieth century encompassed a landscape of different fields – from the molecular constitution of ice through to Gallup Surveys, exotic investment models and the application of Freudian psychoanalysis to kindergarten design. He would tackle the problem of European anti-Semitism with the same imaginative, scientific rigour as the question of how to adapt a motorcycle sidecar for the Spanish Republicans. Also he had the remarkable ability to conceive complex technical ideas in spite of having no scientific training. What is interesting today is to see how his various ideas have aged, and the extent to which he was ahead of his time.
Pyke’s work on NHS recruitment was included by John Cohen in a Minority Report that went out under both their names and has been described recently as ‘one of the most radical critiques of nurse recruitment and education’. It foreshadowed many of the problems which would plague the NHS over the following decades.
His letters to The Times about the government’s decision not to donate to UNICEF or abolish the death penalty were no less prescient. The latter was abolished in 1965, and today the British government gives roughly 0.7 per cent of the Gross National Income in foreign aid and to organisations like UNICEF.
His hopes for pedal-powered devices and, as he rather clunkily put it, ‘the utilisation of muscle-power’ are no less relevant today as energy prices soar, along with levels of obesity. Now there are charities and companies which adapt bicycles to power everything from water pumps to threshers, grinders, cinemas, kettles and even laptops. There is also a version of Pyke’s cyclo-tractor in use, admittedly not the farm vehicle that Pyke had in mind but a pedal-powered bar in which you and your friends can cycle down the street while getting drunk.
His discovery of Pykrete proved to be a significant development in our understanding of ice, and for Professor Mark the results of the Habbakuk experiments ‘have been put to good use ever since in all permanent constructions (roads, airstrips, bridges, and habitats) in Arctic and Antarctic regions.’ While the idea of using Pykrete to build an enormous berg-ship has captured many people’s imaginations – there has been a radio play on the subject, as well as one book and many television documentaries – to date this ship has not been built. Yet if the price of steel ever again becomes prohibitively high, as it was during the war, we may yet see berg-ships moving cargo around the world.
The Weasel tracked carrier, which emerged from the Plough proposal, was later used at the South Pole and in Canada’s North-western Territories for scientific research and mineral prospecting.
As we know, the First Special Service Force, which also emerged from Plough, later evolved into the Canadian and US Special Forces.
Pyke’s idea for an underwater oil pipeline, PLUTO, which he had first proposed in 1934, has since been replicated all over the world.
The pioneering concept behind Voluntary Industrial Aid for Spain of organising groups of factory workers to produce material aid in their spare time remains largely untouched, and in Britain today there are no charities using this model, possibly for a similar reason to the one Pyke encountered at the time: the unions would not stand for it.
The principle behind Pyke’s 1936 suggestion of an ‘anthropology of ourselves’, which resulted in the Mass Observation movement, has since become an accepted and important tool in the way we analyse British society. The Office for National Statistics collects a dizzying range of data on how we live, while the British Social Attitudes survey, among others, gauges our attitudes to major political and cultural questions just as Pyke had once proposed.
A decade after he began to raise money for an institute designed to eradicate anti-Semitism from Nazi Germany, lest there be a genocide on the scale of what had happened to the Armenians in Turkey, the horror of the Nazi Holocaust became clear. Sixty-six years later the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism opened in Britain, at Birkbeck College, University of London, with aims similar to the organisation which had been once proposed by Pyke.
The legacy of Malting House School has since been described as ‘out of all proportion to its three-year life span and the limited numbers of pupils with which it dealt’. For Pyke its great achievement was the role it played in raising his son, David, who could later reflect that ‘one of the factors of my life has been a distinct absence of revelations. People usually find that some adult experience awakens them to an aspect of life previously closed to them; I have never had that. Everything was always open to me.’ Elsewhere it has been suggested that Malting House ‘played a key role in contesting and reconfiguring understandings of the “nature” of the English child’. By recording in such minute detail how the children reacted to this unfettered existence Pyke produced a longitudinal study of enormous value. Again, many of the school’s underlying principles became widely accepted in educational theory after his death.
Yet the strand of Pyke’s thought which has aged better than perhaps any other is one not easily associated with a particular period of his life – it is what he said and wrote about innovation. Inventing radical ideas was his metier. In the millions of words he wrote during his life he was at his most lucid on the history of stunningly original ideas and, as he told Mountbatten and others, he planned to write a history of Habbakuk to serve ‘as a serious sociological study of the Dynamics of Innovation in our time’. Right up to his death he was gathering material for this book, focusing on where radical ideas came from and why so many fell on stony ground. ‘Should this country go to war again it might be as well that such studies should exist and have been absorbed by both the public and the official mind.’ This book was to be the last word on innovation, an exploration of radical ideas written by a man who had been described repeatedly as a brilliant problem-solver. It would be an everyman guide to thinking like a genius – for he believed that anyone could think as he did.
‘What made Pyke so extraordinary,’ ran his obituary in Time magazine, ‘was his consistent belief that a human being could reason his way through any problem. That belief rammed Geoffrey Pyke’s bald head into – and sometimes through – one stone wall after another.’ But like so many books that are described at length by their author before being written, this one never materialised. We can still imagine what it would have contained. If you look at the way Pyke approached problems during his life, whether it was getting out of Ruhleben or winning the Battle of the Atlantic, there are clear patterns that emerge. Rather than waiting for moments of divine inspiration Pyke had a robust problem-solving technique. His method for coming up with radical new ideas can be broken down into a series of stages. They go roughly as follows:
His first step, simple as it may sound, was to be adventurous. Adventurousness could be defined as ‘a readiness to make a fool of oneself’ – something he called ‘the first duty of a citizen’. He lived by Dostoyevsky’s maxim that ‘the cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month’. Any mistakes you made were ‘the social and purposive equivalent of Nature’s mutations’, without which there can be no progress. In other words, to be adventurous one must also be prepared to look silly or be laughed at and that requires courage. Without this it is almost impossible to come up with a truly radical idea.
The next step followed on from the first. A by-product of being intellectually adventurous was to develop a more sceptical attitude to what you were told. Pyke trained himself to question accepted truths, and to keep doing so until he had found the one which did not ring true – for there was always at least one. ‘It is easier to solve a problem than it is to spot what is the problem (as the whole history of science and technology shows). Almost any fool can solve a problem and quite a number do. To detect the right problem – at least so I have found – requires what Wells calls the daily agony of scrutinising accepted facts.’ Challenging everything like this was not just a ‘daily agony’ but a form of impertinence. In Ruhleben it felt rude to question the accepted fact that nobody could escape – rude but essential. ‘My technique, whose results sometimes give me a spurious appearance of brilliance, consists of nothing more than having enough intellectual courage to think in terms which our social environment has decided are nonsense and to see if after all our epoch is right . . . in every particular. It is not. And that is all there is in the trick. And I can teach anyone young enough in heart to do the same.’
Once this ‘daily agony’ had provided him with an interesting problem, Pyke would pause to refine it. This was a key step, for the wording of the question had to be right. He often found that tiny adjustments to the formulation of a problem could unlock a torrent of fresh ideas. He got nowhere by asking himself what disguise he and Falk should adopt to get from Ruhleben to London undetected; instead the question was how they would like to come across in the eyes of those they encountered. ‘The correct formulation of a problem is more than halfway to its solution,’ he insisted. ‘If anybody says he has nothing to say it only means that the problem has been put to him inappropriately.’
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 amateur 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.
ON 1 SEPTEMBER 1914 Geoffrey Pyke left the offices of one of the country’s best-selling newspapers in something of a daze. What he had just suggested to the News Editor of the Daily Chronicle was so outlandish, so apparently silly, that he had given little thought to the possibility that it might be taken up. Now, as he made his way through the hurly-burly of Fleet Street, with bodies brushing past and the hum of horse manure buffeting up around him, he broke into a sweat. The thought jammed in his head was simple enough: that as a result of the conversation which had just finished he might be taken outside a foreign jail before the end of the month and shot. Gazing up at the soot-streaked palaces on either side of him, buildings which no longer impressed him as they had done earlier, Pyke wondered if he had made a terrible mistake.
It had begun two months earlier, in July 1914, soon after he had finished his second year at Cambridge where his ‘abilities made him conspicuous’ and he was thought to be ‘extremely clever’. Pyke was taller than most and gangly, with a mat of dark hair set above a playful expression, someone who thrived under pressure and exuded the hard-won confidence of a boy who had been bullied at school before blossoming at university.
After the excesses of May Week – the dancing, the shows and the sunny evenings spent ‘ragging’ about – he had set off with a friend on a walking tour of Norway and Sweden. Like most of their contemporaries, neither one saw the recent assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in distant Sarajevo as a reason to call off the trip.
His companion was fellow Cambridge undergraduate Philip Sargant Florence, breezy and broad-shouldered, who was three years older than him, half-American and had grown up in an eccentric household. Generally he was hardened to the quirks of others, yet at an early stage in their journey Sargant Florence detected a change in his friend. If some people become a more cautious version of themselves in a foreign setting, Pyke seemed to do the opposite, and in this case Sargant Florence was partly responsible.
They had come to know each other through meetings of the Cambridge Heretics, a debating society that Sargant Florence had co-founded several years earlier and which was famous by then for its lively, free-flowing discussions. Recent speakers included the poet Rupert Brooke and the author G. K. Chesterton, and over the past year Pyke had become an avid member. For him the open-minded rigour of the Heretics’ discussions was a revelation, and was a lifetime away from his miserable experiences at Wellington College, the militaristic public school where he had spent two unhappy years before Cambridge. It was also a tonic against the sadness of his life at home where he was never really able to escape the ghost of his father or the all-too-real presence of his widowed mother Mary, who liked to tell her four children that if she could swap their lives for that of their late father she would.
Pyke’s father, Lionel, had been a precocious barrister who took silk at the age of thirty-eight before running unsuccessfully for Parliament as a Liberal candidate. He had become Leader of the Admiralty Bar before his unexpected death at the age of forty-four from a respiratory condition. Geoffrey, his eldest son, was five at the time. This was the defining trauma of Pyke’s life. It left him reaching for father figures throughout his life, and at the same time it broadened the possibilities of his personality. He could fashion the memory of his father as he liked and even then he was not left with a rigid template of how to behave. The loss of his father seemed to produce in Pyke a Herculean drive: he latched on to new ideas with enthusiasm, and none more so than those outlined in a sensational talk he had heard in Cambridge just days before setting out for Norway.
The Cambridge Heretics had been addressed by the legendary founder of Futurism, Filippo Marinetti, in what was breathlessly described by the Cambridge Magazine as ‘one of the most amazing meetings Cambridge has ever known’. Pyke had been aware of the larger-than-life Marinetti. Only a fortnight earlier he had included the Futurist’s onomatopoeic sound-poem ‘Pont’ in a special edition of Mandragora, the undergraduate magazine that he co-edited. But this was the first time he had seen and heard the Italian in full flight. The effect was like that of a baptism.
Marinetti’s speech to the ‘spellbound’ Heretics, delivered entirely in French, ‘but with such fluency, energy and clarity that few failed to follow his every word’, seemed to be a primal howl against convention, sentimentality and the dumb worship of tradition. These were the targets picked off each week by the Heretics. You might think he was preaching to the choir. What set his talk apart was Marinetti’s underlying enjoinder to his audience to do more than attack the past: they should revel as well in the possibility of an electrified future defined by machines, speed and the limitless potential of human agency. Only weeks later, in Scandinavia, Pyke launched himself at his new surroundings like a zealous disciple of Marinetti.
Sargant Florence would watch, bemused, as his friend ran up to farmers they passed and ask in puppyish German how a particular machine worked, why it was there, whether it could be improved, and, more often than not, if he could have a go. On one occasion, when the two hikers spied in the distance a team of Norwegian lumberjacks escorting logs downstream, Pyke jogged off to join in. Perhaps he felt there was a better way to move the logs, or maybe he wanted to improve his understanding of the lumberjacks’ technique. In any event, he was soon hopping from trunk to trunk, ‘caused a log jam, and was almost drowned’.
Pyke was, by his own account, ‘very young, and a firm believer that everything was possible till proved the opposite by oneself, and that the madder the scheme, the better the chances of success’. The experience of being abroad for him seemed to slough off any vestiges of adolescent self-consciousness until there was nothing left but playful curiosity.
It was in this spirit, in the Swedish port of Malmo, soon after the lumberjack incident, that Pyke began to run at full tilt towards the end of a quay. Ahead of him was the ferry to Copenhagen. Sargant Florence was on board. Moments earlier it had begun to pull away. Still gathering speed, Geoffrey Pyke reached the edge of the quay and jumped.
It is a moment worth savouring. Suspended in mid-air is a bespectacled young man with a rucksack on his back. The sun angles down on his forehead and the air around him is spiced with the tang of diesel fumes. Passengers on the ferry stare, faces presumably blank as it is not yet clear where the parabola of his jump will take him.
Pyke’s leap out over the harbour waters was a typically bold and bravura move, the kind of impulsive act that would have made Marinetti proud. Without any way of knowing how far to jump, or how high, Pyke had plunged himself into this uncertainty, conscious that every second spent dithering would reduce his chances of landing on the ferry. He was not assured of success but the chance of it easily justified the small risk of drowning. Only when he had launched himself off the edge of the quay and begun to fly did he realise – could he realise – that the ferry was out of reach, and rather than land heroically on board he fell like a deadweight into the scum-topped waters of Malmo harbour.
Bobbing about, Pyke yelled at Sargant Florence over the din of the engine to wait for him in Copenhagen. He took the next ferry across the Öresund and arrived in the harbour area of Nyhavn, popular with sailors and prostitutes, where he found his friend amid the purplish shadows of another glorious summer evening. In ways that neither could have foreseen the complexion of their trip was about to change.
Waiting for them in Copenhagen was Sargant Florence’s sister, Alix. Elfin, tall and dark, she too was a Cambridge Heretic and doubtless she spent the night bringing both men up to speed on what had been happening in the rest of Europe since their departure. There was Austria-Hungary’s ultimatum to Serbia, the Kaiser’s support for the Austrians, Russia’s backing of Serbia, France’s resolve to weigh in, Britain’s refusal to rule herself out, and more recently – more ominously – the Kaiser’s decision to cut short his own holiday in the Norwegian fjords.
Not long after, on 28 July, these three Cambridge Heretics heard that Austria-Hungary had declared war on Serbia. This was not an elaborate ‘newspaper scare’. It was real. It had begun. There followed across Europe more than forty declarations of war and orders to mobilise. In Paris the word heard on every street corner was ‘incroyable’. ‘The world is gone mad,’ wrote Winston Churchill to his wife. There were drunken celebrations in Berlin, Paris and Vienna as youthful crowds bawled out patriotic songs late into the night. As young men began to be called up, thousands of rushed marriages took place over that sweltering weekend. In Copenhagen, meanwhile, Philip and Alix Sargant Florence took a ship back to Britain. Pyke remained where he was.
Rather than return to London he chose to send a telegram to the head office of Reuters, news agency of the British Empire, offering his services as a correspondent. It was a reckless move: the longer he stayed in Denmark the harder it would be to find a ship back to Britain, and he was not even assured of a reply from Reuters, let alone a positive one.
Reuters, it turned out, was facing the worst crisis in its history. Its arrangement with the Berlin-based Wolff News Agency was on the brink of collapse, which would soon open up enormous gaps in its news-gathering service. Letter codes, whereby Reuters correspondents used code to reduce the length of their telegrams back to London, were soon to become illegal, which would force costs to soar, while the ill-conceived Reuters Bank was in dire straits now that its manager, a Hungarian, had been conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian Army. Shortly before the outbreak of war the company’s senior management had decided that only a handful of war correspondents could be sent into the field. Otherwise they must rely on freelancers, known either as ‘String’ or ‘Special’ Correspondents.
Just days after making this decision, Reuters received an offer of correspondence from an unknown twenty-year-old in Copenhagen. He was English and appeared to be literate. In that strange hiatus between the outbreak of war and Britain’s entry into it, with the shape of the war hanging in the balance, Reuters agreed to take on Pyke as a Special Correspondent.
Pyke would later refer to himself with pride as ‘Reuters’ special correspondent in Denmark at the time of the outbreak of war’. It was an audacious coup, born of little more than his being prepared to look foolish. But, as he soon discovered, writing the telegram had been the easy part; finding some news was going to be more difficult.
Though Pyke once described Copenhagen as ‘the Athens’ to which Norwegians flocked ‘when their own barren hills did not provide enough intellectual intercourse’, his initial experience of Danish conversation was Spartan. ‘Woe betide him who finds himself a correspondent on those silent shores,’ he groaned. The people of Copenhagen seemed to have perfected the ability to ‘answer the most pointed of questions with a discreet evasion, and the most subtle by ignorance’. Instead he looked beyond the city for news, where he learnt that four German warships and a handful of U-boats had been seen to the south. Now he had the material for his first Reuters dispatch. It would also be one of his last.
In London it was noted that: ‘Four German destroyers were also reported off Hammerfest, apparently bound for the White Sea. Reuters’ correspondent at Copenhagen stated that on the afternoon of August 5 three German submarines were sighted at the southern outlet of the sound. They appear to have taken up their position there as a sort of advance guard.’
This was first-rate news. In Reuters there must have been murmurs of congratulation for those who had given Pyke his opportunity. Now they wanted more.
In a confident and expansive mood, Pyke cast his net wider and over the coming days met Edward Lyell Fox, a young American with a high forehead who was later described by Special Branch as ‘a rather seedy individual’. Fox was a twenty-six-year-old Special Correspondent with only a handful of pieces to his name, mostly travel and sports. As Pyke would later find out, he was not everything he appeared to be.
At one point in their conversation, no doubt to impress the young Englishman, Fox let on that he was able to smuggle uncensored material into and out of Germany. The implications for Pyke were stunning. There were no British correspondents in Berlin and it was illegal for British, French or Russian nationals to enter the country. Editors on Fleet Street had given up all hope of getting uncensored correspondence out of Germany, and yet ‘the desire to know the truth of what was going on at that time in the interior of Germany was intense,’ wrote Pyke. ‘The floodgates of news had clanged to, and not a word that could be prevented, or had not a purpose in it, was leaving Germany.’ If Fox was to be believed, then Pyke had only to find willing correspondents in Germany who could pass their reports to Fox before he took them out to Copenhagen. Pyke would then courier this material to London. On Fleet Street the bidding war would be frenzied. All Pyke needed was a list of correspondents in Germany.
On 17 August, at a quarter to eight in the evening in Copenhagen, Pyke sent the following telegram to Reuters in London (the breaks were added by the censor, who let it pass): ‘Have means of uncensored communication interior Germany | literary and telegraphically | send name address of trustworthy intelligent individuals | not press Bureaux | to act as correspondents there.’
If there was a reply he never saw it. By revealing the position of warships in his first Reuters dispatch Pyke had publicised sensitive German naval intelligence. After the publication of this report Germany’s Minister to Denmark had made a formal complaint, which had by now percolated through various diplomatic channels. Pyke was told to pack his rucksack and leave. Crestfallen, he sailed to Greenock, Scotland, arriving during the last days of August.
It had been a fascinating adventure, but one which appeared to have run its course. At least, that was the impression Pyke gave for most of the journey home. Yet by the time he reached London his mood was transformed. He had come up with a new plan, one so outrageous that just the thought of it made him smile.
Pyke had spent most of his childhood, including the long and unhappy years after his father’s death, in an elegant Kensington town house with a white stuccoed facade. It was from this house, several days after his return from Copenhagen, that he set out for Fleet Street. We may never know whether it was charm, luck, personal connections or a cocktail of all three which was responsible, but somehow he had secured an interview with Ernest Perris, News Editor of the Daily Chronicle, a newspaper with a circulation exceeding that of The Times and Daily Telegraph combined.
Like most editors, Perris was at that time in a state of sustained shock after the publication three days earlier of the ‘Amiens Dispatches’. These were two frank assessments of the British Expeditionary Force’s first engagements of the war – at Le Cateau and Mons – by veteran correspondent Arthur Moore for The Times and Hamilton Fyfe for the Weekly Dispatch. Ordinarily they would not have been published but both had been approved by the censor, F. E. Smith, later Lord Birkenhead, who even added lines about the urgent need for reinforcements.
The ‘Amiens Dispatches’ had sent shock waves rippling across the country, undermining some of the popular belief in a swift and easy victory for Britain and her allies. In Parliament the decision to publish these reports was slammed as defeatist. Churchill wrote a furious letter to the publisher of The Times. Yet the shock on Fleet Street was as much envious as it was outraged. The Chronicle, for one, had recently assured its readers that ‘the censorship that we exercise over our news will not affect its value’. The Amiens Dispatches had shown that to be nonsense. Perris needed to strike back with vital news, to let his readers see the war as it really was. He was desperate for a scoop, which was why he was even prepared to meet this callow undergraduate.
‘Yes, yes, what is it you want?’ Perris began. ‘Quickly, please, I’ve got no time to spare.’
As if to emphasise the point he picked up a pair of telephone receivers and dictated foreign telegrams into each. Next, as Pyke remembered, he ‘rang a bell cunningly hid under the edge of the table, glanced about him in all directions at once, first at a row of large clock dials showing the hour in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Petrograd, Berne, Madrid, Belgrade, Antwerp, and Amsterdam, frowned, looked at the large wall map, gave instructions to a pallid, overworked clerk for yet another foreign cable to go, and repeated, “Yes, quickly, please, I’m busy.”
Pyke’s plan was ingenious and a little mad, and over the next ten minutes he did his best to explain it.
For many young men like Pyke, who had grown up in upper-middle-class Edwardian London and liked to read, the idea of being a war correspondent had a heroic and at times breathless appeal. In 1912 the journalist Philip Gibbs described it as ‘the crown of journalistic ambition, and the heart of its adventure and romance’. The life of a war correspondent seemed to combine the most attractive elements of explorer, spy and best-selling author. Marinetti had been a war correspondent several years earlier in Libya, as had Churchill in South Africa, and by 1914 Pyke described himself as ‘absolutely determined to be a correspondent somewhere’.
But where?
On his way back from Denmark Pyke had pored over a map of the world in the hope of finding a newsworthy spot which did not yet have a full complement of correspondents. Yet whenever he found a likely destination his ambition foundered on his almost complete lack of journalistic experience. Apart from a handful of Reuters dispatches, by the age of twenty he had written no more than two short stories, a handful of book reviews, forty-two lines of doggerel and various interviews, including one with the actor Henry Lytton (then playing ‘Ko-Ko’ in The Mikado), all for the Cambridge Magazine or Mandragora, both of them parochial university publications. Nobody on Fleet Street could mistake him for a seasoned correspondent, and even they were finding it hard to get work.
The novelist Arthur Ransome, a decade older than Pyke, a Russian speaker and the author of books and numerous articles, was unable to persuade any British newspapers to take him on. Indeed, what was sometimes known as the ‘Street of Adventure’ had been besieged since the outbreak of war by a ‘procession of literary adventurers’. There were ‘scores of new men of sporting instincts and jaunty confidence, eager to be “in the middle of things,” willing to go out on any terms so long as they could see “a bit of fun”.’ Pyke spoke no foreign language fluently, he had published no books and had left the country just twice. He did not stand a chance.
The problem appeared to be intractable, unless, that was, he could turn it upside down. Rather than look for a way past his inexperience he placed it at the heart of this puzzle. Instead of trying to identify towns or cities where there were not enough correspondents – but where there soon would be – he needed to look for a place in which correspondents would always be in short supply and where he might never face any competition.
He looked at the map afresh. No matter how long the war went on there were unlikely to be many correspondents in Reykjavik, surely. Or in Timbuktu, for that matter. ‘Suddenly it came to me. We had no correspondents in Berlin. Supreme ass of all asses – of course – Berlin; the very place; no competition; no editor would say with an air of tired resignation that he was already very well served there, and had no necessity for further assistance, though of course he was very grateful, etc. etc. No difficulty at all, except of getting there, and out again.’
Geoffrey Pyke, Special Correspondent in Berlin.
His heart must have lurched at the thought. To produce a single report from the German capital would be the journalistic scoop of the war. Berlin was the last place where anyone would think to go as an English war correspondent, yet there were editors on Fleet Street who would sell their grandmothers for a stream of reliable news from the heart of the German Reich.
Of course, most of Pyke’s contemporaries would have dismissed this idea as fantasy the moment it entered their minds. It was thought to be impossible to get into Germany as an Englishman, impossible to move around and impossible to get one’s reports out.
Or was it?