Brundrett had known me for years. He was a keen farmer who successfully bred Friesian cattle and was much interested in my experiences at Achnadarroch. He asked me what I thought I could do in the Admiralty and I explained that years spent watching my father at work had given me as good a grounding in electronics as I could have got at university. Within ten minutes he had arranged for me to start at the Admiralty Research Laboratory the following week.
My section at the Admiralty Research Laboratory (ARL) was run superbly by Stephen Butterworth, who for some unknown reason was always called Sam. He was a tall, gaunt man with a curly mop of dark hair. He smoked a pipe continuously, worked like a madman, and gathered around him a team of extraordinarily talented young scientists, including Massey, Gunn, Wigglesworth, Bates, and Crick. I felt terribly insecure when I arrived at ARL because of my lack of qualifications. Every night I sat up at the kitchen table in our small flat in Hampton Wick learning advanced physics from textbooks as German bombs dropped all around. But Butterworth was a constant source of encouragement. His one failing was his greatest strength: he did the job silently, leaving self-publicity to others. At the end of the war the reward for his genius and his quiet industry was a paltry OBE.
The Admiralty Research Laboratory's contribution to winning the war has been much undervalued. One of the most pressing problems facing Britain at the outbreak of war was the threat of magnetic mines. ARL began work on developing degaussing systems to neutralize our ships' magnetic fields and thus protect them. Without a really effective system our ability to fight on in 1940 would have been seriously in question.
At Dunkirk, for instance, thousands of mines littered the shallow waters off the coast. Hitler was convinced that these would prevent any mass evacuation of British forces. Butterworth knew that the German mines worked North Pole downward only, and suggested we magnetize our ships South Pole downward so that the ships repelled the mines. The Admiralty embarked on a massive program of reversing the magnetism of all the ships going to Dunkirk. The result was that not a single ship was lost to mines.
In the turmoil of war, there was little choice but to give young people their head. Soon after Dunkirk I and another young ARL scientist, Ray Gossage, were given the job of degaussing the battleship PRINCE OF WALES. She lay in dry dock in Rosyth and for her next voyage was scheduled to carry Winston Churchill to the Atlantic Conference with Roosevelt. She had been built in Belfast in a yard which had left her magnetic field running around her rather than from end to end. The original degaussing had been a failure and she was considered highly unsafe in her present form.
Gossage and I worked out an improvised system of flashing out the athwartships magnetization by winding a giant coil lengthwise around the ship. We then energized this by connecting it up to a submarine battery. The whole operation took days to arrange and involved the whole crew of the ship. As we watched from the dry dock in Rosyth, hundreds of men worked in unison to our commands, though we were both barely in our mid-twenties.
Science in wartime is often a case of improvising with the materials to hand, solving a problem as best you can at the time, rather than planning ten or fifteen years ahead, when it may be too late. The war shaped my later approach to technical intelligence. It taught me the value of improvisation and showed me, too, just how effective operations can be when the men of action listen to young men with a belief in practical, inventive science. Sadly, by the end of the war this attitude had all but disappeared; the dead hand of committees began to squeeze the life out of England.
From 1942 onward I worked on the first anti-midget-submarine detection systems. They were used successfully to protect the harbors during the torch landings in North Africa and later in Northwest Europe. This work got me involved in the operation to sink the prize German battleship TIRPITZ. She lay in Altenfjord and posed an ever-present danger to British shipping. An operation to sink her, using midget submarines, was planned. We knew that the Germans were protecting Altenfjord with submarine detectors consisting of rows of coils on the seabed which picked up the magnetic flux of a passing craft. These were similar to those I had developed at ARL, so I was asked to come up with ideas for degaussing our X-Craft midget submarines to enable them to pass into the fjord undetected.
The technical problems of degaussing a submarine are far more complex than those of a ship, but eventually I found that an electro-magnet placed along the length of the submarine and energized with the right amount of current would neutralize the loops of the submarine detectors on the seabed. I also calculated that if the X-Craft went in during a magnetic storm, this would increase the chances of nondetection by a factor of between 10 and 100. I traveled up to the Magnetic Observatory at Eskdalemuir and found that they had a good chance of predicting a storm of sufficient size, so I put my findings up to the Navy.
In 1944 the degaussed British X-Craft went in under cover of a magnetic storm. With great bravery, the crews managed to place charges against TIRPITZ and cripple her. Three VCs were won that day. But the bravery would have counted for nothing without the technical backup of ARL.
By the end of the war the course of my life had changed irrevocably. Although agriculture remained my first love, I was clearly destined not to return to it. I sat instead for the postwar Scientific Civil Service competition chaired by C P Snow. It was designed to sort out the best scientists among the hundreds recruited during the wartime expansion. I passed out joint top with 290 marks out of 300. Butterworth congratulated me warmly. All those nights sitting up with the textbooks had finally paid off, though the credit was largely his.
My father returned to the Marconi Company as Engineer in Chief in 1946, and I began work as a Principal Scientific Officer at the Services Electronics Research Laboratory that same year. For the next four years we worked closely alongside each other, the trials of the 1930s an unspoken bond between us, until that telephone call from Sir Frederick Brundrett in 1949 brought MI5 into my life.
A few days after that first meeting in Brundrett's office in 1949, I received a telephone call from John Taylor inviting me down to London. He suggested St. James's Park and we met on the bridge in front of Buckingham Palace. It struck me as an odd way to conduct the business of national security, strolling among the pelicans and the ducks, pausing occasionally to ponder our reflections in the pool.
Taylor was a small man with a pencil mustache and a gray, sharpish face. He had been one of Montgomery's communications officers during the North African campaign, and although now a Post Office technician, he retained his abrupt military bearing. He ran the technical research, such as it was, for MI5 and MI6 from his laboratory inside the Special Investigations Unit of the Post Office at Dollis Hill. Taylor made certain I knew he was in charge. He told me bluntly that, apart from one brief visit to MI5 headquarters at Leconfield House to meet Colonel Cumming, I would have to deal through him as an intermediary. Taylor discouraged discussion about "the office"; he merely explained that I would be given the title of "external scientific adviser" and that I would be unpaid for my duties. For several years we continued to meet in St. James's Park about once a month to talk over the written reports on technical matters which I filed to C. W. Wright, the secretary of Brundrett's committee. (Wright later became Deputy Secretary at the Ministry of Defense.)