ABSTRACT
The tenancy of some of the most senior posts in the British scientific establishment fell vacant in 1949 and men of stature to fill them were being sought in rather an uncoordinated fashion. The present incumbents were men whose names, almost without exception, had been linked with Basil Schonland’s since the days when they had all graced the hallowed halls of Cambridge and, especially, the Cavendish laboratory. Though it was their scientific prowess that had first gained them attention, it was the demands of war that saw all of them thrust into positions of considerable administrative responsibility. Sir Edward Appleton, ionospheric physicist and Nobel laureate, was Secretary of the DSIR throughout the war years and the man ultimately responsible for the Tube Alloys project that led to the concept of the atomic bomb. In May 1949 he would return to academia as Principal and Vice-Chancellor of Edinburgh University. Sir Charles Darwin, mathematician and one of Schonland’s first scientific collaborators, spent the early years of the war as Director of the National Physical Laboratory and then became the first Director of the British Central Scientific Office in Washington responsible for all scientific liaison between the two countries, including the atomic bomb. After a year he was appointed the first Scientific Adviser to the War Office and then returned to the NPL in 1943. He was due to retire from that post in March 1949. Sir Ben Lockspeiser, whose career within the walls of the Civil Service shielded him from much of the wider world, had, since 1946, been Chief Scientist at the Ministry of Supply, that multi-tentacled organization responsible for the provision of research, development and equipment for the Ministry of Defence, and he was now about to succeed Appleton at the DSIR. There were thus two large gaps in Britain’s scientific edifice that had to be filled.
