Battling for Britain Prussian style

During my first term at Oxford in 1938, when walking down the south side of the Christ Church quad, I passed a large man in a bowler hat and a smart London suit. The only persons in the college who wore bowlers were the porters and most dons followed David Cecil’s advice to dress in Oxford as if staying in a modest country house. The large man was clearly a man of importance but he seemed out of place. I was no wiser when told that he was Professor Lindemann, the owner of a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce and a private bathroom in his college rooms, both unheard of luxuries for a don.

Adrian Fort traces his rise to eminence in this scholarly book which provides fascinating, if sometimes disconcerting, glimpses of the world of science and government in the 1930s and 1940s. Roy Jenkins has remarked on Churchill’s penchant for bizarre, even disreputable, friends. Lindemann was eminently respectable but an oddity in English society. Born in Baden in 1886, he remained a German citizen until 1904 when he became a British citizen to escape conscription in Prussia. Ever afterwards he made a persistent effort to be accepted without question as an English patriot and gentleman. But he had not acquired the automatic credentials provided by an English education. The family home was in Devon, but his father, a gifted amateur astronomer, sent him to Damstadt Technical High School rather than to a major public school and to Berlin University rather than to Oxford or Cambridge. He was given an allowance by his father of £30,000 a year and during his doctoral studies he lived in a suite in the Adlon Hotel, the Berlin equivalent of Claridges.

Most popular

Brendan O’Neill

The moment in the ‘grooming gangs’ debate that shamed Jess Phillips

Prewar Germany was an exciting time for a young physicist as the Newtonian universe was being revolutionised by the quantum theory which Fort endeavours to explain to the lay reader, an almost impossible task.