The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain. Juliet Gardiner

1927, had invited the scientific community to declare a ten-year moratorium on research, for the general good of mankind, since while science had undoubtedly advanced knowledge, it had done nothing to increase wisdom. (H.G. Wells had recently in effect suggested a similar — though permanent — ‘holiday’ for the episcopate, also in the cause of human progress.) Society was suffering, in the Bishop’s view, from a ‘moral lag, a gap between moral and scientific advance, for man’s body had in effect gone on growing while his soul had largely stood still or gone back’.

      Notwithstanding the Bishop, scientific research carried on, but the Association strove harder to break down public resistance to the advance of science. Some scientists discussed whether by growing more specialised they might have become ‘blinkered’ to the wider concerns of humanity, while others addressed the question of whether science had a particular relevance — even a special duty — to society. And a small number of radical scientists at Cambridge (particularly), London and a few other universities, or assembled round the Tots and Quots dining table, despaired that their agenda for the ‘social responsibility of science’ was not in fact what generally drove scientific endeavour or its public perception. As Zuckerman pointed out, the ‘efforts of scientists are generally misunderstood, because they are not interpreted to the world by scientists themselves, and because few of those who are immediately responsible for the conduct of social affairs are scientists. There are, for example, no scientists in the Government.’ Moreover, as the Marxist mathematician Hyman Levy argued to Julian Huxley in a BBC broadcast in 1931, ‘Since scientists, like other workers, have to earn their living … to a large extent the demands of those who provide the money will, very broadly, determine the spread of scientific interest in the field of applied science … I know of no scientist who is so free that he can study anything he likes, or who is not limited in some way by limitations such as the cost of equipment.’

      J.D. Bernal (whose book The Social Function of Science was a manifesto and a blueprint for the unlimited potential of science for progress, especially once it was freed from the shackles of capitalism) took up the theme in response to a criticism from a fellow scientist that ‘Bernalism is the doctrine of those who profess that the proper objects of scientific research are to feed people and protect them from the elements, that research workers should be organised in gangs and told what to discover.’ It wasn’t, he riposted, as if the idea that science had a social function was new. It was ‘palpable and admitted fact’, and that function was ‘largely economic under present conditions and likely to become even more so’. Nevertheless, under capitalism, science was not generally regarded as being capable of ‘solv[ing] completely the material conditions of society’, Bernal wrote in 1935, ‘but rather the best application of science is conceived of as producing such a fatuous and stupefying paradise as … Brave New World [by Aldous Huxley, Julian’s younger brother, published in 1932]; at worst, a super-efficient machine for mutual destruction with men living underground and only coming up in gas masks’.

      To Hyman Levy, as to Bernal, Lancelot Hogben, J.B.S. Haldane, Joseph Needham and other radical scientists, only a society transformed along socialist lines into a planned economy producing an abundance of socially useful goods, equitably distributed to all sections of the population who would thus feel ‘practically and morally bound to one another in this great collective endeavour’ would devote sufficient scientific resources to the solution of economic and social problems. For Levy, what had become clear was ‘not only the social conditioning of science and the vital need for planning … but the impossibility of carrying this through within the framework of a chaotic capitalism’ in which scientists felt unlistened to, undervalued and underfunded (only 0.1 per cent of the Gross National Product was devoted to scientific research and development in the 1930s; by the 1960s it was nearer 3 per cent). For Bernal, ‘Science has ceased to be the occupation of curious gentlemen or of ingenious minds supported by wealthy patrons, and has become an industry supported by large industrial monopolies and by the State.’ But in a capitalist society this had resulted in ‘a structure of appalling inefficiency both as to its internal organization and as the means of the application to problems of production or of welfare’. Bernal’s plan, or map, of the future direction of science had analogies with Keynes’ economic plan: government would need to take a centralised directional role in the healthy development of science and technology, as in the economy.

      But unlike Keynes, Bernal was and continued to be a Marxist all his life (though his membership of the CPGB lapsed in 1933 — or was allowed to lapse, since at the time the Communist Party entertained a certain suspicion of intellectuals). ‘During the years of the great Depression I began to study in a more serious way the works of the founders of Marxism, and there I found a philosophy … that could be lived and could be a guide to action,’ he wrote. The Social Function of Science was explicit — and much quoted both by those admiring and those critical of the ‘red scientists’ of the 1930s of whom Bernal was at the forefront (‘that sink of ubiquity’, Hyman Levy called him) — in insisting on science’s social responsibilities. Bernal also played a key role in the regeneration of the Association of Scientific Workers: ‘In its endeavour science is communism … In science men have learned consciously to subordinate themselves to a common purpose without losing the individuality of their achievements … Only in the wider tasks of humanity will their full use be found.’

      Across the river from the laboratories of London University and the Tots and Quots dining tables, an ambitious building designed for a new way of living was taking shape. In January 1935 the young Frances Lonsdale, who would become both a Somerset farmer (as a near neighbour of Evelyn Waugh) and an acute biographer of Edward VIII, was picking her way behind her future husband, Jack Donaldson, through the ‘dust and rubble of a new building that had recently arisen in the suburb of Peckham. The building, which had been minutely planned to serve an entirely original purpose, had a front elevation of curved glass windows set in concrete two stories high, and was functional, not in the architectural sense of the word in much use at that time, but in response to the needs of an inspired conception … Although built with a flat roof and without decoration, it had an elegant buoyancy which was to remind one, when it was lit up at night, of a great liner at sea … It was not quite finished, and it was for me astonishingly material evidence of what seemed an incredible venture.’ This modernist wonder had been designed by Sir Owen Williams, a noted structural engineer rather than an architect (a species he dismissed as ‘decoration merchants’), who already had to his credit the huge Boots factory in Nottingham and the glittering, black-glass-fronted Daily Express office in Fleet Street. Its simple, airy construction was designed expressly for the occupant: the Pioneer Health Centre, a cause to which Jack Donaldson would donate £10,000, nearly half the money he had inherited from his father. Lord Nuffield was also a donor.

      This ‘form following function’ ethos of modernist architecture was particularly salient, since the Pioneer Health Centre was constructed to house a large-scale experiment on the effect of the environment on health, a concentration on preventative rather than curative medicine. The pioneers were a husband and wife team, Dr George Scott Williamson and Dr Innes Pearse, and the new Health Centre was the result of five years’ fund-raising activity by the couple to move their work from a small house nearby to this beacon to their conviction that, like illness, health could also be contagious. Once a patient presented at a doctor’s surgery or hospital ward, Dr Pearce believed that he or she would be in ‘the advanced stages of incapacitating disorder’ — that is, they felt ill. She had been appalled when working in a welfare clinic in Stepney in London’s East End to realise that she had never seen a healthy baby. The only time mothers came to the clinic was in an emergency, and all she could do was to treat the ailing infant. There was no time to enquire into the circumstances of the exhausted-looking mother, and of course she never saw the father.

      What was needed were not just health facilities that acted as a ‘sieve for the detection of disease’, but conditions in which people could ‘keep fit and ward off sickness before they were smitten’; these would be provided by a place where the practice of health was distinct from the conventional practice of medicine. Only families, which the Peckham pioneers had decided were the ‘units for living’, were allowed to join, each paying a shilling a week (the Centre was intended to be self-supporting), and every member had to submit to periodic ‘health