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One Matter Which May Have Occurred to You Is the Fact I Remalned

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One Matter Which May Have Occurred to You Is the Fact I Remalned ) The writer of my Biographical Memoir for the Roval Societv and others who mav be interested one matter which may have occurred to you is the fact that I remalned unknighted. This note gives the story as far asI know it. After the New Year's Honours List of 1942, Lord Cherwell apologised to me for the absence of my name from the List, saying that he had not had much luck with his nominations on that occasion. This was a complete surprise to me, because I had no idea whatsoever that I had been eit'her nominated or considered: Honours were maLters that I simply had not thought about, in my junior rank and especj-ally j-n the preoccupatj-on of war. f was therefore gratefully surprised when in May 1942 the prime Minister's Secretary wrote telling me that it was his intentj-on to include me for a CBE in the impending lj-st, and he would. be glad to know that I would accept, which I did. Lord Cherwell then told me that there had been a strong objection from the Hdad of the Civil Service Sir Horace Wilsonr or the grounds that such an award would be inconsistent with my salary as a civil servant. Lord Cherwell had retorted that the recLification of such an anomaly was in the hands of the Civil Service for all- it needed to do was to j-ncrease my salary to the appropriate level. This, of course, was not done; but I received the CBE, when aII that Sir Horace would have sanctioned would have been an I4BE, two Steps downr or exceptionallyr EIfl OBE. Lord Cherwell told me that Sir Horace had threatened to reeign over the matter. In so far as I can understand them in retrospect, presumably the Civil Service argument is that the Crown always acts with justice, and rewards a civil servant commensurately with the responsibility of his office. Therefore even when discharg ing/ -2- discharging this responsibility to the fuII, the civil servant cannot do work of more than a certain degree of merit, and must thus be rewarded with the appropriate level of honour, just as in the Army a lieutenant would not carry the same responsibility as a General, and thus could not merit more than an I'IBE to the General's CBE. Years later, happy though f had been to receive a CBE, I learned from Churchili himself that he had intended the honour to be even higher. It seemed that a recommendation had been made by the Air Minister Sir Archibald Slnclair, after the success of the attack on the German radar station at Bruneval in February 1942, and on hearing of this recommendation Churchill mj-nuted Sir Archibald on 3rd April 1942: 'Dr. Jones's claims i-n my mj-nd, are not based upon the Bruneval raj-d, but upon the magnificent prescience and comprehension by which in 1940 he did far more to save us from disaster than many who are gtittering with trj-nkets. The Bruneval raid merely emphasised and. confirmed his earlier services. I propose to recommend hj-m for a CBr. ; Sir Horace Wilson's opposition had thus succeeded in thwarting Churchill's intentions to the extent of downgradj-ng the CB to a CBE. I was not a unique sufferer from Civil Service protocol for in his book The_Churchillians (Weidenfeld and Nj-colson, 1981) Sir John Colville, who was Churchill's Secretary, related the case of Sir Anthony Beever, whom Churchill proposed for a KCB in 1952. 'He was, it appeared, of the wrong seniority in the Cj-vil Service for a knighthood of any kind' wrote Sir John, 'and the secretary to the Treasury, Sir Edward Bridges, descended in wrath on No.10. He had a blazing row with the Prime Mj-nister: at least Bridges blazed, but to my surprise Churchill remained icily ca1m. Fortunately, the Queen quite independently had decided that Beever's long and helpfut connection with Auckingham Palace on episcopal matters deserved a KCVO. The Prime lr,linister at once concluded that a/ -3- a personal gift of this kind from the Queen was even more distinguished than the order of the Bath. So with a mischievous smile he told me to let Bridges know he would withdraw his proposal ..When the Honours List was publj-shed a few days later, the Treasury were dumfounded" They had been outwitted by their own First Lord and their Sovereign' . In my own case, if I had known that Sir Horace Wilson's opposition had led to the downgrading from CB to CBE, I would have seriously consj-dered declining the Honour, if this was the system on which it had been awarded. Happily, perhaps, since I did not know the details until Churchill sen'L me a copy of hj-s Minute when he was writing his Memoirs, I accepted the CBE and there the matter rested. On New Year's morning, 1946, I- was surprised to read my name in the newspapers among the CBs there had not been the customary intimation from the Prj-me Ministerrs off ice. I had no idea of where the recommendation had originated; both Churchill and Cherwel-l were out of office, and I imagine j-t had come from the Chief of the Air Staff, Slr Charles Portalr ds he then was, and perhaps for this reason I had been treated as a Serving Officer who would be expected to accept an honour without discretion to d.eclj-ne - not that I had any objection. So the war had ended with my having been awarded both the CB and the CBE. These honours entitled me, according to Whitaker's Almanack,to take my place in State processions immediately after the Masters in Lunacy and ahead of the eldest Sons of younger Sons of Peers. The CBE later afforded me much delight when the President of the Hampton Instj-tute, a negro college in Virginia, introduced me to his audience with 'Ladies and gentlemen, I want to introduce to you Dr. R.V. Jones THE CHAMPION OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE!' The CB, too, gave some cause for mystified amusement when the Head of a college in Colorado in introducing me ended with 'He j-s also a Companion of the Bath, whatever that may mean'. rf/ -4- If it is idle but intriguing to speculate on what might have happened if Churchj-llrs 1942 intention had been fulfilled at the time, because the question might then have arisen at the end of the war of recognition for my post-Bruneval servj-ces. These included the Scientific Intelligence effort in support of Bomber Command, the original suggestion of Window, or 'Chaff ', the counterj-ng of German radar for the Normandy Landings (where as a result of my nominating him to head the operation, as his Obituary in the Daily Telegraph for 30 November i98B recorded, Air Vice-Marshal Victor fait was awarded a KBE) and. the intelligence agaj-nst the V-1 and V-2 weapons, forecasting their technical performance in details so accurately that Churchill tabulated them in his Memoirs. It may not be too much to suppose that had I been made a CB for services up to Bruneval, a knighthood might have been contemplated in respect of the later services. Even sor the cB and cBE meant that I had received more recognition than nearly all other scientists in the war, except for Lindemannr-Tizard and Watson-Watt, and for the George Cross won by Peter Danckwerts. Recognition for men of science had indeed been meagre. The three Superintendents at the Radar Establishment at Malvern, for example, received no more than a CBE each, and. there was little beyond OBEs for those who had contr j,buted so marvellously at Bletchley - My own seemingly anomalous recognition therefore aroused some feelings, especially since whatever contributions I had made were hidden in official secrecy. It may well have been assumed that, far from being deserved, the decoratj-ons had come to me nepotically as Lind.emannrs 'bIue-eyed boy', even though the truth was very dj-fferent. When in 1946 I was appointed to the Chair of Natural Philosophy at Aberdeen, and my scientific referees were the Nobe} Prizewinners E.B. Appleton and G.P. Thomson, as well as Tizard, one physiclst (J.T. Randall, who had made a vital contribution in the invention of the centimetric magnetron) told one of my future colleagues at Aberdeen that my appointment had 'shocked the scientific world'. Whether/ -5- Whether or not this ornl.lrJus comment might turn out to be justified, I left government service for Aberdeen in 1946 in the belief that some of us who had been so deeply involved in what science had done in the war should return to the universitles to bring on the new generations of students in science so that they would be able to draw upon the benefit of the many and intense experiences we ourselves have had, ard they in their turn could build on what we had done. It was a rewarding time, even though almost everything was in short supply, except for the students who were mainly ex-servicemen returning from the war. Including myself there whom were under 21 were nine academic staff, three of still ' and we had around 400 students. But these students had a vital qualification. Nearly every one of them had been in one or other of the Services, had seen matters of both life and death, had learnt the value of discipline and reliability, and had deci-ded that hre truly wanted the benef it of higher education.
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