ABSTRACT
On 1 August 1941 Basil Schonland was appointed Superintendent of the Air Defence Research and Development Establishment (Operational Research Group), or ADRDE(ORG) in its somewhat more abbreviated form. Jack Ratcliffe had now left for his new post at TRE and Schonland was in charge of an impressive group of scientists, mainly biologists and physiologists-all of whom had been carefully selected from the universities around the country to plug the glaring gap that Blackett had foreseen once the physicists were swallowed up by the demands of radar. These men, Blackett’s Circus of old, brought, by the very diversity of their scientific backgrounds, a new dimension to the world of applied military research and soon their skills were to be used even more widely, as the concept of active collaboration with the army gained ground, particularly within General Pile’s Anti-Aircraft Command. In addition, for a period of a few months, Schonland was also responsible for the technical work of those radar officers at Petersham who were not yet in uniform. The third component of Ratcliffe’s ‘triple diadem’, as Schonland referred to it, the Radar School was pressed on him too, but he steadfastly refused to take it on and so it was placed under the command of Major Pat Johnson, a physicist, rowing blue and sometime soldier before the war. Soon, all these groups would be working closely together as the science of Operational Research found itself on the battlefields of France. Now though, Schonland’s most pressing need was to familiarize himself with an organization of many parts, many of which were not yet in full running order. He was pitched straight into an extremely heavy schedule of briefings and conferences with his staff, visits by senior officers and a mountain of paperwork, the details of which he knew very little. To master it as quickly as possible required working to a punishing schedule and so, in the beginning, his working day commenced at 9.00 every morning and went through until 11.00 or even 12.00 at night with just short breaks for meals. Only Sundays were sacrosanct and then he slept and wrote to Ismay.
