A Summer Bright and Terrible (11 page)

Dowding saw no point in arguing with them,
especially since he had another idea—an extraordinarily simple idea, which no
one had ever thought of before. Airplanes did not carry radios, but, he
thought, why shouldn’t they? Way back in the First World War, he himself had
conducted experiments in air-to-ground radio communication, and it had worked.
The trials had never been followed up, since the Air Ministry in its wisdom had
decided that air-to-ground communication was of no use. But Dowding thought he
might as well pursue his own ideas rather than those of the Air Ministry. He
installed a radio set in one of his fighters and had the airplane follow the
bombers back to their base and inform him by radio when they landed. As soon as
they did, Dowding sent his fighters to attack them on the ground. He caught
them napping, wiped them out, and would have won the exercise if the umpires
hadn’t been so confused that they decided to cancel the whole business and go
home.

Now, with Wimperis before him, he thought how
wonderful it was that someone else was thinking about new ideas. But he had to be
sure it worked. So he said no to the immediate expenditure of research funds,
but not to the idea. He wanted a demonstration.

Wimperis said he didn’t know how he could
demonstrate the effect without funds to build the equipment. Dowding replied
that there were lots of radio sets around the country; surely something could
be found. Wimperis said yes, of course, he’d have a demonstration set up within
two weeks.

He left Dowding’s office without a clue in the
world as to how this was to be done, but he knew whom to pass the buck to. He
sent for Watson-Watt and asked him to set up a demonstration. Watson-Watt said
certainly, and he left Wimperis’s office without a clue in the world . . . but
he too knew whom to pass the buck to.

He sent for Wilkins and told him to set up the
proper equipment for a demonstration. Wilkins had no one to pass the buck to,
so he told “W-W” the facts: “To modify a transmitter to operate suitably short
pulses of high enough power to enable an aircraft echo to be displayed on a
receiver was quite impossible in the time suggested.”

Watson-Watt was devastated, but Wilkins was
not. It was simply a question of figuring something out. There was always an
answer, he thought, if one tried hard enough. And very quickly he came up with
it.

The problem was to send out “suitably short
pulses of high enough power.” All radio wavelengths were not expected to be
equally effective. Upon first working out the details for Watson-Watt, he had
calculated that the equipment should use pulsed wavelengths of the same size as
the wingspan of the aircraft they wanted to detect: “suitably short pulses.” He
now remembered that there was a rather powerful British Broadcasting Company
(BBC) station that broadcast at shortwave and was located at Daventry; the
station’s wavelength was twice what was needed, but Wilkins thought this might
be good enough, at least for a rough demonstration.

The test would be simple. They arranged for an
RAF bomber to fly up and down a prearranged course south of Daventry, in the
path of the BBC’s broadcasts, and Wilkins would set up the equipment to find
the radio echoes it sent back. Dowding arranged for Mr. Rowe to be the official
RAF observer, and on the day before the scheduled test, Wilkins took an
assistant in a van loaded with the equipment to find a good spot to set up.

He found an open field that gave a clear view
in the right direction, and the two of them got to work. While they were
setting up the aerials, an ominous black cloud began drifting in their
direction. With a flash of lightning and a loud boom, it let loose just as they
were finishing with the aerials but before all the connections had been made.
The men dove into the van and drove off to get some dinner while they waited
out the storm.

It was dark before the weather loosened up, and
when they got back to the field, they realized they hadn’t thought to bring any
lights, having intended to finish their work in daylight. Now Wilkins worked by
the intermittent light of flaring matches, which his assistant held for him,
and finished just five minutes before the station went off the air at midnight.
The equipment worked perfectly. Smiling a sigh of relief, he turned on the ignition—and
found that the van wouldn’t move: The field had turned to mud with the
thunderstorm and had frozen solid around the wheels by midnight. Luckily, the
men found a shovel in the van, dug themselves out, and managed a few hours’
sleep in the local pub before starting out for the next day’s demonstration.

Which worked perfectly. In fact, better than
perfectly. The bomber flew its course, out of sight of those in the field, and
they picked up the radio echoes and were able to chart its course. When they
did they were puzzled: It didn’t correspond to the course they had agreed on.
Watson-Watt then talked to the pilot and found that he had gotten lost; the
radar plot was a more accurate indication of where he had been than he himself
could tell by looking out the window.

Rowe communicated all this to Wimperis, who
went back to see Dowding the next day. Dowding immediately authorized the ten
thousand pounds.

The future of civilization would have come
cheap at twice the price.

Now the three pieces of the puzzle were in
place. With radio direction finding, or RDF as they called it, or radar as it
would come to be known, the Luftwaffe’s bombers could be spotted in time for
the new fighters to climb into position to intercept. The fighters were fast
enough to catch the bombers and, with their eight guns, would be able to bring
the bombers down. All that was needed now was an army of scientists to turn the
proposed warning system into reality, and a lot of effort to organize the support
system that would make it all work.

Eleven

You might think that gearing up to save the
world from the horrors of Hitler would occupy a man’s mind full-time, but a man’s
a man for a’ that, and in the dark lonely hours of the night his fancy—even
that of a fifty-year-old man—will perforce turn to thoughts of love. For
Dowding this meant Clarice, his only love, his love for only two years;
Clarice, who had died fifteen years before.

Dead.

Dead and gone? Perhaps not.

Dowding’s first exposure to the other world
of spirits and fairies took place in India, in 1906, when he was serving as a
subaltern in the army. He wrote home from Kalabagh that it rained “every
blessed day; the whole place is like one vast sponge. Tennis is impossible.” He
went on to mention en passant that “there is a lady here with a Planchette
[Ouija board] apparatus, which writes fluently but with extreme inaccuracy; the
spirit who actuates the board calls himself Nathaniel Bopp & is only ten
years old; which perhaps accounts for his self-confidence and lack of veracity.
The lady’s husband insults ‘Nat’ consistently. . . .”

This casual acceptance of messages from the
beyond was not at all unusual at the time. Spiritualism was in its heyday,
finding interest and favour among the most educated as well as among the least.
Charles Dickens, for example, was the most popular writer of his day, and such
popularity has its basis in a genuine relationship to the public. He wrote not
only for them but
of
them: his feelings, his outlook, his beliefs,
resonated with the great mass of people. His membership in the Ghost Club,
then, reflected the widespread beliefs of many in his audience.

The Ghost Club was formed in Cambridge in 1855
by Trinity College fellows who accepted the existence of ghosts and other
psychic phenomena. The club harboured not only intellectuals like Dickens but
also clergymen and scientists, and it continues to this day. Of course, it
would be ridiculous today for a scientist to belong to such a club dedicated to
communicating with the dead. But “the past is a different country; they do
things differently there,” and in the century of Dowding’s birth, they did
indeed do things differently. Science had shown that the universe was vastly more
mysterious than had been believed, and even today, John Wheeler, one of our
greatest physicists, has noted that “the universe is not only stranger than we
suppose, but stranger than we
can
suppose.”

This is not to suggest that Wheeler believes in
the living dead, but to those pioneers of modern science in the nineteenth
century the strangeness of the universe was even stranger than we can suppose
today, and post-mortem existence did not strain the faculties of the mind.
Belief in a life after death and in the reality of communication across the
boundary does, after all, predate all of today’s religions. Its origin as a
cultural phenomenon, however, can be said to have taken place just a few
decades before Dowding’s birth. This public fascination with the spirit world
began with the explosive popularity of the Fox sisters, who, on March 31, 1848,
discovered how to communicate with the spirit who inhabited their haunted
house. By a series of clicks and knocks, they learned that the spirit was angry
because he had been murdered five years previously. Miracle of miracles!

The story was picked up and widely circulated,
and the two Fox sisters became vaudeville celebrities with their psychic
demonstrations. One of the two, Margaretta, later confessed that she faked the
spirit’s clicks by clicking on her own double-jointed toe, but the widespread
publicity the sisters received sparked a movement similar to the flying-saucer
craze, which began almost precisely a hundred years later.

Spiritualism received a tremendous boost in the
final decades of the nineteenth century from three widely respected figures:
Arthur Conan Doyle, William Crookes, and Oliver Lodge. Conan Doyle’s respect
(in this respect) was unearned; he was a good writer but had no real
understanding of either science or philosophy. Though the Sherlock Holmes
stories he produced are topflight, the pseudoscientific utterances of Sherlock
are just plain silly. Lodge and Crookes, on the other hand, were two of the
most eminent scientists of the century.

In 1870 Sir William Crookes, the discoverer of
thallium and the inventor of the Crookes tube—the precursor of today’s
television tubes—and later the president of the world’s most distinguished
scientific body, the British Association, embarked on a scientific
investigation of this thing called spiritualism. “I consider it the duty of
scientific men who have learnt exact modes of working to examine phenomena
which attract the attention of the public, in order to confirm their
genuineness, or to explain, if possible, the delusions of the honest and to
expose the tricks of deceivers.” Good try, Sir William. He concentrated on the
most notable medium of the day, a delightful young lady named Florence Cook,
and after a couple of years, he announced that he was satisfied that she was
neither deluded nor a deceiver. She was, in fact, the genuine goods.

He maintained this stance for the next three
years, defending her—and through her, all spiritualists, who loudly proclaimed
William James’s dictum “In order to prove that not all crows are black, you
need find only one white crow.” Crookes was convinced, after thorough
investigation using the most stringent scientific techniques, that Miss Cook
did converse with dead spirits and that she did bring them into the seances in semi-material
forms. In short, he concluded that there was life after what we call death and
that communication between the two spheres of existence is open to a privileged
few. Then, in 1874, he suddenly stopped all proselytizing and washed his hands
of the whole business. He never reversed his findings; he just stopped writing
and talking about it, and no amount of interviewing would entice him to say
another word.

Which is rather peculiar. Had he lost all
interest in the very nature of life and death? When we look at the whole story,
at the small nuances and the large facts, it seems that the most likely
explanation is that Sir William was sleeping with Miss Cook, or perhaps with
the attractive young lady, Katy King, whose protoplasmic materializations at
the seances were most provocative. The affair lasted several years, and when it
ended, so did Sir W’s interest in spiritualism.

Was Sir William a dupe or a duper? Did he
really believe that Katy was pulled from the ethereal plane by Florrie to
materialize for the pleasure of her customers, or was he a willing participant
in her act? We have no answer to this question, but it seems to me that the
answer lies in the very soul of a scientist, who attacks a problem with the
tacit understanding that Mother Nature is not out to trick him. In Einstein’s
phrase, “the Lord is subtle, but not malicious.” When scientists turn to the
investigation of phenomena that may be real or may be trickery, the scientific
method loses much of its power. By the very nature of science, which treats
observation as the lodestone of truth, someone manipulating the observations
might trick a scientist even more easily than a layperson.

Much more incredible than the idea that Sir
William could have been tricked by a woman with whom he was infatuated is the
idea that he would have been willing to lie about his observations. For a
scientist to lie—to fabricate data—is the ultimate sin. Of course, we all sin,
but I know of no episode in history in which a scientist lied about his data
for love. For money, prestige, power, and government grants, yes. But not for
love.