Dead Eccentric No. 2

Geoffrey Pyke 1893-1948

Is one of my all-time favourite English eccentrics. As well as being a journalist, spy and investor, Pyke was a military inventor of fantastic ability and imagination. According to his biographer, David Lampe, ‘any single one of his major projects could be expanded to fill a large book. His aphorisms, his vital ideas about ideas, would fill still more books.’

In 1939, with war against Germany imminent, Pyke hatched a plan – to avert conflict by showing Hitler an opinion poll suggesting that most Germans were against the idea of war. Pyke recruited a team of students, dressed them up as golfers, and packed them off to Germany to conduct the survey. As he guessed, what they gathered showed that most Germans were indeed against the war, but before the students could finish their survey and present it to the Fuhrer Hitler invaded Poland.

Soon after, in trademark straggly beard, shabby suit with a bootlace for a tie, no socks and instead brightly coloured spats (as he put it spats obviated the need for socks), he volunteered his services to Lord Mountbatten, informing the general, ‘Lord Mountbatten, you need me on your staff because I’m a man who thinks. But my services will not come cheap.’

Mountbatten later described him as, ‘the most unusual and provocative man I have ever met.’ Lord Zuckerman, on the staff of Lord Mountbatten at the time, described him as ‘not a scientist, but a man of a vivid and uncontrollable imagination, and a totally uninhibited tongue’.

I like the fact that he was taken on and later defended by Mountbatten and his staff. It seems indicative of a hard-won toleration of eccentricity at this time (in contrast to the attitudes of English generals during the First World War, or indeed the US Military in the Second World War who were so disgusted by the sight of Pyke that his idea for a motorised sled, for example, was ignored until Allied military operations had moved on from snowy climes).

Pyke’s motorised attack-sleds, never realised, were designed to carry torpedoes and leave a trail of insect-eggs as they motored along. The eggs would hatch later, so obscuring the trail. As they were to be used in German-occupied Scandinavia Pyke decided that the sleds should be hidden in sheds marked (in German) ‘Officer’s Latrine. For Colonels Only.’

His most impressive design was an aircraft carrier made from ice reinforced with wood shavings, a composite he called ‘pykrete’. Brilliantly, Pyke had realised that the molecular structure of ice was similar to that of concrete yet ice had a lower tensile strength. Pykrete was indestructible compared to more conventional shipbuilding materials: during trials it was bombed, torpedoed, shot at, set fire to but nothing could make a real impression.

Lord Mountbatten, then Chief of Combined Operations, was so excited about it that he went to see Churchill and, so the story goes, dropped a lump of it into Churchill’s bath (with Churchill in it) to demonstrate that it did not melt. Churchill repeated this trick more or less on President Roosevelt by placing lumps of the stuff in near-boiling water. Again, it retained its shape and did not melt.

Pyke named his putative aircraft carrier Habbakuk – it was meant to be Habakkuk, in honour of a Hebrew prophet from the Old Testament who prophesied about the eventual coming of, ‘a work which you will not believe though it be told to you.’ An Admiralty clerk mis-spelt it. Battleship Habbakuk would have been 2000 feet long and weighed 2.2 million tons, however the Normandy landings removed the need for a ship of this size and the plans were shelved.

To destroy Romanian oil fields, he suggested sending in teams of carefully drilled St. Bernard’s dogs, each with a mini-barrel of brandy round their neck. The German guards would see the dogs, want to give them a cuddle, at which point they’d notice the brandy and get drunk leaving the British commandos free to attack. Or, they could send in scantily clad women to distract the guards. Failing that Pyke suggested dressing British commandos up as Romanian firefighters and getting them to rush in immediately after British bombers had set fire to the oilwells.

Prior to all this, Pyke had a brief and for some time successful career as a financial investor. At one point he controlled a third of the global supply of tin.

A non-practising Jew, he also founded his own school. It contained Britain’s first ‘jungle gym’ and was designed to be the exact antithesis of Wellington School, where he was miserable as a child. In Pyke’s school pupils were never reprimanded nor forced to learn any particular subjects. Instead, in true eccentric fashion, they were encouraged to find out things for themselves. Unfortunately in 1928 his investments went awry and the school was forced to close.

In the winter of 1948 his depression defeated him. Sitting in bed – he often worked from bed so as not to waste time getting up and dressing and was known to hold conferences with military chiefs from his bed – and writing non-stop – Pyke is said to have suffered from hypergraphia – he took an overdose of sleeping pills. As they kicked in he continued to write. On the last page he would write the words stream, with each line becoming less legible, until at last they trail off.

On his death, The Times described him as, ‘One of the most original, if unrecognized, figures of the present [20th] century.’ The Guardian wrote, ‘Britain has lost one of the greatest and certainly the most unrecognized geniuses of all time.’

At his request no gravestone was erected.