'Encounters' with Lord (C.P.) Snow

C.P. Snow’s novels show that he was very clued up about Oxbridge College politics. He was also well known for his ideas about 'The Two Cultures', which very much accorded with my own thinking, as is evident in my Letters to the Editor about Physics and Society.

In October 1960 the Master and Fellows of Gonville & Caius College elected me to senior membership with rights to dine and entertain guests at high table. Sir Nevill Mott, who was my Professor at the Cavendish Laboratory, invited me to the Master’s Lodge to partake of a celebratory sherry. When I called at the appointed time I met Lord (C.P.) Snow coming out of the Lodge. He smiled in a very friendly fashion and I responded likewise. This was during the ‘winkling out’ from the Cavendish Laboratory when Lord Snow was a Director of English Electric, the company doing the ‘winkling out’.  Lord Snow was also a Civil Service Commissioner.  At that time the 1st Lord Nelson of Stafford was the Chairman of the English Electric Group.

About a year later, while I was still at the Cavendish, P.B. (Peter) Fellgett wrote asking my advice on how to deal with an electronics technician who was on the staff of the Observatory at Edinburgh, where Fellgett had gone from Cambridge University. I wrote back accordingly and Fellgett called in on me at the Cavendish a week or two later and expressed great appreciation of my advice. He then, surprisingly, said that he had kicked up a fuss over delays in hearing about a Civil Service appointment he had applied for and as a result he had been asked to see C.P. Snow himself and state his complaints. His appointment had followed quickly. It was a puzzling comment for I saw nothing in it of relevance to me.

In 1966, just before I left Marconi Instruments, I went to see the Chairman, Neil Sutherland, at Marconi’s Head Office at Chelmsford. In the course of conversation he asked if I knew Lord (C.P.) Snow at the Ministry of Technology. I said I did not but that I had met Blackett. At the time Lord Snow, Lord Blackett and the 2nd Lord Nelson of Stafford, who had succeeded his father as Chairman of English Electric, were all junior ministers.

In November1969 I met the 2nd Lord Nelson of Stafford in his office at GEC and left with him some papers describing my experiences at Cambridge Consultants Limited (CCL). In them, I described an incident in which English Electric had suggested ordering from CCL a mobile measurements laboratory for £20,000. I went on to discuss the possibility that this might have been a double entendre way of hinting, capable of several interpretations. Not long after the meeting with Lord Nelson there appeared in the Atticus column of the Sunday Times an item headed "MOBILITY IS THE NAME OF THE GAME", concerning the use of euphemisms by the security services. Adjacent to it was a piece about Lord Snow and the Post Office Think Tank.

In April 1970, MOD's McCauley telephoned me in response to my letter to my M.P. about an invitation I had received to go to Moscow as a Visiting Professor.  His first words were that my letter had "reverberated around the corridors of power". Was his opening statement yet another allusion to C.P.Snow?  C.P. Snow’s novel “The Corridors Of Power” had been widely read at that time.

Then, on 1st May 1970, there had been much more specific references to Lord Snow by Hans Motz when we met in Oxford.

To cap it all, in March 1971, two months after I joined Hatfield Polytechnic, it was announced that he was to open its new Library and become the Polytechnic Visitor.

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