"Has Marconi gone mad?" asked Sarnoff. "This project will finish him. It'll never work."
Father replied: "G.M. and Franklin think it will."
"Well, you can kick my ass all the way down Broadway if it does," said Sarnoff.
Three months later the circuit was operational, on contract time. It worked twelve hours a day for seven days at 350 words a minute and was, in my view, one of the great technical achievements of this century. My father's only regret was that he never took the opportunity to kick Sarnoffs ass all the way down Broadway!
My youth was spent living through this great excitement. I suffered constantly through ill-health. I developed rickets and wore leg irons until practically into my teens. But there were compensations. Nearly every day when my father was at home he collected me from school and drove me to his laboratory. I would spend hours watching him and his assistants as the great race from Grimsby to Sydney unfolded. It taught me a lesson which stayed with me for life - that on the big issues the experts are very rarely right.
The 1930s opened hopefully for the Wright family. We scarcely noticed the growing worldwide financial crisis. I had joined Bishop's Stortford College, a small but hardily independent school, where I began to shine academically and finally threw off the ill-health which had dogged me since birth. I returned home for the summer holidays of 1931 having passed my school certificate with credits in all subjects. The following term I was due to join the University Group, with every expectation of a good scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge.
A week later my world disintegrated. One evening my father came home and broke the news that he and Franklin had both been sacked. It was days before he could even try to explain, and years before I understood what had happened.
In the late 1920s Marconi had merged with the Cable Companies in the belief that only by cooperation with them could wireless gain the investment necessary to ensure its emergence as the principal method of worldwide communications. But as the slump developed, wireless posed more and more of a threat to the cable interests. They were dominant in the new company and slashing cuts were made in wireless research and the installations of new systems. Marconi, old and sick, had retired to Italy, but not even an intervention from him could secure a change of heart in the new management. Franklin, my father, and many others were sacked. For the next decade long-distance wireless communication stagnated and we as a family passed into years of great hardship.
Within a few months my father slipped into the abyss of alcoholism. He could no longer afford to keep both his sons at school, and as I was older and already had my school certificate I was the one to leave. The trauma of those events brought back my ill health and I was afflicted with a chronic stammer which rendered me at times virtually speechless. In the course of that short summer holiday I changed from a schoolboy with a secure future to a man with no future at all.
The decision to remove me from school and its effect on my health consumed my father with guilt. He drove himself to further drinking excesses. My mother coped as best she could, but bereft of status and income she gradually became isolated until the only visitors were the nurses called to restrain my father after a dangerously prolonged bout with the Scotch bottle.
Years later, when I began to search out for MI5 the well-born Englishmen who had become addicted to Communism in the 1930s, this period of my life came to fascinate me. They had enjoyed to the full the privileged background and education denied to me, while my family had suffered at the capricious hand of capitalism. I experienced at first hand the effects of slump and depression, yet it was they who turned to espionage. I became the hunter, and they the hunted.
In one sense the explanation was simple. It was 1932. I had no qualifications. I was fifteen, I needed a job, and I had little time for political philosophy. I advertised in the personal columns of THE TIMES for any work. The first reply was from a woman named Margaret Leigh, who ran a small farm called "Achnadarroch" at Plockton near Wester Ross, Scotland. I became her farmhand. There was no pay, just board and lodgings. But amid the rolling hills and endless skies of Scotland, I gradually recovered from what had gone before, and in time discovered the greatest love of my life - agriculture.
Margaret Leigh was an idealist. She wanted to run her farm as a training ground for boys from London slums so that they could obtain employment as farm managers. In the event, the idea never took off, and she decided instead to write a novel about life on Achnadarroch; she wrote while I tended the farm. And at night, when I had finished the chores, she made me read aloud what she had written until slowly my stutter was mastered. The book was eventually published and became a great success under the title HIGHLAND HOMESPUN.
In spring 1935 we were evicted from Achnadarroch by a landlord greedy for more rent than we could afford to pay. We moved to another, cheaper farm in Cornwall and our life went on much as before. My ambition at this time was to become an agricultural scientist researching into food production techniques. But with my truncated formal education I could not hope to qualify for a scholarship. There were no grants in the 1930s. Eventually, with a little help from Margaret, some astute pig dealing of my own, and a useful family connection with the Master of St. Peter's College, Oxford, I was able to raise enough money to get a place at the School of Rural Economy. A year after I reached Oxford I married my wife, Lois. It was 1938. War was in the air. Like most young people we felt we might not have too long together.
By the time I went up to Oxford my father had begun to repair the damage of the previous six years of alcoholism. At my mother's instigation he had begun to work again at the Marconi Company as a consultant. And partly, I think, he was jolted by the realization that war was once more imminent. Anxious to help as he had in 1915, he approached Sir Frederick Brundrett in the Naval Scientific Service. Brundrett told him frankly that his reputation for alcoholism made a senior position impossible. Instead Brundrett offered him a post as an ordinary scientific officer for a trial period. I always admired my father tremendously for this. He sacrificed half what he was earning from the Marconi Company as a consultant to come and work at an experimental bench with scientists who were twenty years younger than he was. He made no issue of having once been the Marconi head of research. In a sense I think he was anxious to atone for the past; but he also genuinely believed that war was coming and that everyone had a duty to contribute.
His long experience scanning the ether ensured that his career soon flourished again. He was given charge of technical developments of the Y intercepts - the tactical intercepts of German Communications - and later he became Chief Scientist at the Admiralty Signals Establishment. Once again he was back in the Great Game, and he rediscovered his youth. By 1943 he was responsible for drawing up the signal plans for D-Day. It was a massive task. But after every working day he sat into the small hours with his wireless, listening to the chatter of Morse, logging and analyzing it ready for the next day. I often think he was at his happiest hunched over those sets, headphones clamped around his head, trying to make sense of the mysterious electronic universe.
At the outbreak of war the School of Rural Economy closed and my tutor, Scott Watson, became Chief Scientist at the Ministry of Agriculture, taking most of the staff with him to begin the vital task of preparing the country's food supplies I was now the only member of the family not in some way involved in the war effort. My brother had joined the Services Electronics Research Laboratory and my sister was an intercept operator for the Wrens. (She later worked closely with R. V. Jones on SIGINT, and married Robert Sutton, the head of SERL.) I wrote to Brundrett in the hope that there might be a space for me somewhere in the Admiralty. To my surprise I received a telegram inviting me to his office.