The Indefinable Charm of 'Mad Jack' Howard
The battle for heavy water (part 1)
Seeking a distraction from the grim news from our friends in America, I thought that for this post I’d cheer myself up by returning to one of the most extraordinary historical characters I’ve ever encountered on my writing travels. This is Charles Henry George Howard, 20th Earl of Suffolk and 13th Earl of Berkshire, who had a small but rather colourful walk-on part in my history of the development of atomic weapons, first published in 2009 as Atomic: The First War of Physics and the Secret History of the Atom Bomb 1939-49.
Born on 2 March 1906 (we share a birthday), Charles Howard inherited the family titles at the age of 11 when his father Henry was killed in action at the Battle of Istabulat in Mesopotamia (now Iraq) during the first world war. Charles studied at the Royal Naval College in Osborne, Isle of Wight, and at Radley College, before quitting at the age of 17 to join the merchant navy as a deckhand aboard the sailing ship Mount Stewart. He returned two years later and joined the Scots Guards, but his taste for adventurous living did not meet the standards of discipline required of Army life, and he would likely have been asked to resign his commission had he not been invalided out with rheumatic fever.
Undaunted, he worked his passage by ship to Australia, where he took jobs as a farmhand and as a labourer in a sawmill, before becoming a ‘jackaroo’, working to gain experience on the sheep station in Queensland that he would later part-own. To those who knew him in Australia he was simply ‘Jack’ Howard. He was reluctant to use his title if he could avoid it, and was without class consciousness.
On returning to England and the responsibilities of his inheritance, he quickly realised that there was little adventure or even modest excitement to be found in running 10,000 acres of Wiltshire countryside. He confessed to his girlfriend, Minnie Mabel Forde Pigott, a Chicago-born musical-comedy actress with the stage name Mimi Crawford, that he had long held an ambition to become a scientist. With her encouragement, in 1934 he enrolled for a degree in chemistry and pharmacology at the University of Edinburgh. He and Mimi were married the same year, and their first son – Michael – was born in March 1935. In 1937 Howard was elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He graduated a year later, and joined the Nuffield Institute for Medical Research in Oxford.
Nuclear fission
The world was changed forever on Christmas Eve 1938. Austrian physicist Otto Frisch had joined Lise Meitner, his ‘short, dark and bossy’ aunt, a pioneer in the study of radioactive substances, for a short holiday in the small seaside village of Kungälv – King’s River – near Gothenburg in Sweden. Frisch had left Germany five years earlier. He was a young, personable, and inventive physicist at the University of Hamburg. He was also an Austrian Jew, and had fallen victim to the Law for the Re-establishment of the Career Civil Service, introduced in April that year by the new National Socialist government, the first of four hundred such decrees. It provided a legal basis on which the Nazis could forbid Jews from holding positions in the Civil Service, including academic positions in German universities.
Meitner had fared no better. She had been the head of physics at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin, where she worked with distinguished German chemist Otto Hahn, her collaborator of some thirty years. Albert Einstein had once called her a ‘German Madame Curie’. But Meitner was not German. Like her nephew, she was Austrian. When German forces marched into a welcoming Austria in the Anschluss of 12 March 1938, Meitner became a German Jew. That she had been baptized at the age of 30 held no sway with new German racial laws, and the following day she was denounced by a Nazi colleague and declared a danger to the Institute. She escaped to Sweden.
A month earlier Meitner had been informed that Frisch’s father – Meitner’s brother-in-law – had been arrested in Vienna, and subsequently discovered that he had been sent to Dachau concentration camp in Bavaria. But as they set out from their hotel for a morning walk on Christmas Eve, Frisch on skis and Meitner on foot, this troubling news was not the subject of their animated discussion. Meitner had received a letter from Hahn bearing some remarkable scientific news. Bombarding uranium with neutrons had produced the element barium. A single neutron had somehow split a uranium atomic nucleus virtually in half.
It was understood that a neutral atom consists of a central nucleus packed tight with positively-charged protons and electrically neutral neutrons, which is orbited by a sufficient number of negatively-charged electrons to balance the positive charge. The number of protons in the nucleus determines the nature of the element, ranging from hydrogen with 1 (a nucleus consisting of a single proton), to uranium with 92 protons. Elements with the same numbers of protons but different numbers of neutrons in their nuclei are called isotopes. A nucleus with 1 proton and 1 neutron is an isotope of hydrogen, and is called deuterium. The most common isotope of uranium has 92 protons and 146 neutrons, making 238 ‘nucleons’ in total, written U-238. But naturally-occurring uranium also contains a small percentage of the isotope U-235, with three fewer neutrons.
As they walked, Frisch speculated that the forces holding a uranium nucleus together might be delicately balanced with those threatening to tear it apart. Perhaps hitting it with a single neutron is sufficient to push it over the edge, causing it to distort, elongating and forming a narrow waist before splitting to form two smaller nuclei, like ‘a very wobbly, unstable drop, ready to divide itself at the slightest provocation, such as the impact of a single neutron’.
But the nuclear fragments created by such a split would each carry away a sizeable amount of energy. Meitner realised that the masses of the fragments would not quite add up to the total mass of the original uranium nucleus. These masses differed by about one-fifth of the mass of a single proton, mass that had gone ‘missing’ in the nuclear reaction. Meitner converted this missing mass to energy using Einstein’s famous formula E = mc2. She estimated that the energy released would be about 200 million electron volts.
An electron volt is the amount of energy a single electron gains when accelerated through a one-volt electric field. A 100-watt light bulb burns energy at the rate of about 600 billion billion electron volts per second. We can, perhaps, agree that 200 million electron volts might not sound like much in comparison, but this is energy released by a single nucleus. A kilogram of uranium contains billions upon billions of nuclei. In fact, if every nucleus in a kilogram of uranium released 200 million electron volts of energy, this would be equivalent to the energy released by about 22 thousand tons of TNT explosive.
Frisch called it nuclear fission.
Chain reaction
The news travelled fast. Frisch told Danish physicist Niels Bohr about the discovery on his return to Bohr’s institute in Copenhagen, where he was working. Bohr was planning a trip to join young American physicist John Wheeler at Princeton University in the US, and together they figured that the nuclei responsible for fission were not those of U-238, but rather the rare isotope U-235. By March 1939 research groups in America and in France had shown that, on average, each fission reaction releases between two to four more neutrons, called secondary neutrons, leading to speculation that it might be possible to achieve a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.
On America’s West Coast, Luis Alvarez found out about nuclear fission from an article buried in the San Francisco Chronicle. He immediately abandoned the barber’s chair in which he had been sitting, and dashed to Berkeley’s Radiation Laboratory to spread the news. He informed another young Berkeley professor, regarded by many as the American wunderkind of theoretical physics, who ‘instantly pronounced the reaction impossible and proceeded to prove mathematically to everyone in the room that someone must have made a mistake’. But the young professor became convinced within minutes of being shown new experimental evidence, and within a few days a crude design for an atomic bomb had appeared on the blackboard in his office. His name was J. Robert Oppenheimer.
But Bohr sought to dispel fears that development of a new generation of weapons of unimaginable destructive power was likely, or even possible, in the near future. It was by now clear that U-238 had an appetite for high-energy ‘fast’ neutrons of the kind released by fission reactions. These fast neutrons are therefore captured, stalling a chain reaction in natural uranium. In contrast, the much more vulnerable U-235 nucleus can be split with slower neutrons, for which U-238 has less of an appetite. It seemed that a chain reaction would only be possible with slow neutrons, offering a potentially interesting new source of power (for example in a nuclear reactor). But a bomb consisting of a mixture of U-235 and U-238 would fizzle out long before it could explode.
Of course, Bohr declared in discussions with his colleagues in April 1939, it might be possible to manufacture a bomb based on pure U-235. But this was a minor isotope, present in naturally-occurring uranium to only one part in 140, a miserly 0.7 percent. Isotopes of the same element are chemically indistinguishable and cannot be separated by chemical means. Physical separation would be required, relying on the tiny difference in the masses of the isotopes, about 1.3 percent. Such physical separation on the scale required to build an atomic bomb – a scale presumed at this stage to be measured in tons – appeared profoundly impractical. ‘Yes, it would be possible to make a bomb,’ Bohr declared, ‘but it would take the entire efforts of a nation to do it’.
Mobilization
There remained many open questions, but even the remote possibility of building weapons of mass destruction was too important not to be pursued. The discovery of fission and its experimental confirmation had been published openly in scientific journals, prompting breathless accounts of an impending ‘super-bomb’ in the mainstream press. In Germany, the Reich Research Council set up the Uranverein (uranium club) to investigate these possibilities, led by theorist Werner Heisenberg.
Meanwhile the Hungarian émigré physicists Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, and Edward Teller (the ‘Hungarian conspiracy’) urged Einstein to write a letter to US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, warning of ‘extremely powerful bombs of a new type’.
At 4:40 am on 1 September 1939, the German Luftwaffe attacked and destroyed the Polish town of Weilun, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, the first in a series of preludes to a full-scale German invasion. Allied governments declared war on Germany on 3 September.
In Britain, Frisch (now at the University of Birmingham working with fellow émigré Rudolf Peierls), realised that they had been asking themselves the wrong question. A U-235 bomb driven by a chain reaction with slow neutrons would require an impossibly large critical mass. But, of course, there was no reason to think that U-235 nuclei would not be fissioned by fast neutrons. Frisch calculated that fast-neutron fission would reduce the critical mass of U-235 required to just a few pounds. In a material as dense as uranium, this would be a mass about the size of a golf ball.
In a further twist, while travelling on the Berlin subway, Uranverein physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, one of Heisenberg’s former students and a close friend, realised that if U-238 captures a neutron to form the isotope U-239, this will quickly decay to form a new element unknown in nature with 93 protons. American physicists further deduced that this new element would in its turn be unstable, decaying to another new element with 94 protons and 145 neutrons. This would be even more fissionable than U-235. And because it is chemically distinct from uranium, this new element could be much more easily separated. It would subsequently be named plutonium.
There were now at least two routes to an atom bomb. Separate sufficient U-235 to produce a bomb core with a super-critical mass. Or build a nuclear reactor to breed plutonium, and chemically separate this to produce a plutonium bomb core. As the chain reaction in a nuclear reactor relies on slow neutrons, the uranium would need to be surrounded by a moderator whose purpose is to slow down the fast secondary neutrons without absorbing them. There were two prime candidates – carbon in the form of graphite, and ‘heavy’ water, in which the two hydrogen atoms in regular water (H2O) are replaced by heavier deuterium isotopes (D2O).
The Uranverein physicists ruled out graphite as unsuitable. This, it would transpire, was a mistake, likely caused by impurities in the sample of graphite they had tested. The German physicists turned their attentions instead to building an experimental nuclear reactor with a heavy water moderator. The required research materials – uranium oxide and heavy water – instantly took on the guise of military materiel.
The German physicists organised for a contract to be issued for the production and delivery of quantities of refined uranium oxide to the Berlin-based Auer Company, which had access to uranium from the Joachimsthal mines in Czechoslovakia. But the only facility producing heavy water in commercial quantities (as a by-product) was a fertilizer plant owned by the Norwegian company Norsk Hydro. The plant, which had commenced production in 1934, was perched high in the fjords at Vemork near the town of Rjukan in the remote Telemark region of Norway, about 150 miles west of Oslo.
The Norwegians were not very co-operative.
The fall of France
None of this thinking was happening in isolation. Any physicist anywhere in the world with an interest in nuclear research and access to the scientific literature could follow developments and apply the requisite logic. In Paris, the team of French physicists which included Frederic Joliot-Curie, Hans von Halban and Lew Kowarski had contributed to this literature and had independently surmised that it might be possible to build a nuclear reactor using heavy water as a moderator. Joliot-Curie duly advised the French Ministry of Armaments of its importance in nuclear research, and Jacques Allier was despatched to Norsk Hydro. Allier was a representative of the Banque de Paris et des Pays Bas, which had a controlling interest in the Norwegian company. He was also a lieutenant in the Deuxieme Bureau, the French military intelligence agency.
Arriving in Oslo under an assumed name and carrying a credit note for FF36 million, Allier had intended to negotiate the purchase of all the available heavy water. But when it became clear what purpose it served, the Norsk Hydro managing director pledged the entire stock to the French government at no cost. A total of 185 kilos of heavy water was removed from Vemork and smuggled first by air to Edinburgh, then by rail and ferry to Paris, where it was stored in an air-raid shelter at the College de France. As German forces marched on Paris in early June 1940, Joliot-Curie received instructions from the French Armaments Minister not to allow their supply of uranium ore and heavy water to fall into enemy hands.
Halban and Kowarski left Paris with their families and headed south. Halban loaded the 26 jerricans of heavy water into a Peugeot station wagon, together with his wife Else and young daughter, and drove to Mont-Dore, a spa town in central France. There they were joined by Allier. The heavy water was stored initially in the local women’s prison, then in the death cell in neighbouring Riom’s state prison, the condemned prisoners themselves carrying the heavy water into the cell. Next morning the Prison Governor, perhaps nervous of the impending arrival of new masters, refused to release the heavy water until Allier threatened him with a loaded revolver.
Halban and Kowarski were busy setting up new laboratory facilities in the villa Clair Logis at Clairmont-Ferrand when, two days after the fall of Paris, the word came from Allier to evacuate France altogether. They headed for Bordeaux.
Oscar and Genevieve
At the outbreak of war in Europe, Howard found that his recurring bouts of rheumatism prevented him from joining a front-line regiment. Offers of staff positions were judged unsuitable: ‘I’m not going to sit behind a desk and issue orders for the discomfort of the poor bloody infantry’. Instead, he joined the Ministry of Supply’s Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) and shortly before the fall of France was dispatched to Paris as liaison to the French Ministry of Armaments. His mission was to bring back machine parts rescued from French factories, valuable industrial diamonds, a group of French nuclear scientists, and a quantity of heavy water. German forces were aware of his presence, Berlin radio describing him as ‘the British arch-spy’.
In the final days before the fall of Paris, Howard raced around in an open-topped car. Armed only with a letter of introduction from the French Minister of Armaments, and a pair of .45 automatics, he confronted a number of bankers and demanded release of their store of industrial diamonds into his care. For those few who hesitated, he would lean forward, jacket open, revealing Oscar and Genevieve, his pair of automatic pistols nestled in shoulder holsters, which encouraged a more co-operative response. He escaped from Paris just hours before the arrival of German armoured columns, and drove overnight south to Bordeaux.
His rather imaginative approach to his missions earned him the nickname ‘Mad Jack’, and Halban and Kowarski quickly began to appreciate why. With the port at Bordeaux under attack, and with hundreds of thousands of refugees flocking to the docks seeking safe passage, chaos reigned. Howard, unshaven and covered in tattoos from his sheep farming adventures, simply got the crew of the British coal ship SS Broompark too drunk to set sail until he had completed his mission. As Halban and Kowarski and their families, the team of French nuclear scientists, and the heavy water were all being loaded, a Belgian banker carrying another £3 million worth of diamonds arrived at the dock in a sports car. The ship sailed from the dock down the Gironde estuary on 19 June, just as a nearby ship hit a mine and sank.
There were 25 women on board the SS Broompark, including Howard’s blonde private secretary, Eileen Morden. When some of the women began to complain of sea-sickness, Howard administered his remedy of choice – champagne. Kowarski quickly learned to have absolute confidence in Howard’s abilities: ‘His infectious good humour made the entire trip seem like a schoolboy adventure’.
Joliot-Curie and his wife Irene (daughter of Marie Curie) decided to return to Paris. Uranverein physicists hastened to Joliot-Curie’s laboratory in occupied Paris towards the end of June. Joliot-Curie could not hide the fact that he had accepted deliveries of uranium ore from Belgium and heavy water from the Vemork plant in Norway. When the Uranverein physicists demanded to know where these materials were he simply stated that the uranium ore had disappeared ‘south’ along with the French government (it had in fact gone to Algeria) and that the heavy water had been loaded onto a ship known to have been sunk in the Gironde estuary.
The SS Broompark docked at Falmouth in the early hours of 21 June 1940, and the French scientists were transported to London by train. Howard took a taxi to the Ministry of Supply in Whitehall. A sleepy porter was advised by ‘a fearsome figure – unshaven, wearing a tattered trench-coat and a disreputable black hat’, that the reason for his visit was ‘diamonds’, delivered by ‘Suffolk’. The weary porter explained that he needed a full name, not the county in which the visitor lived. The Minister of Supply was unavailable, so the Ministerial Under-secretary was called. His name was Harold Macmillan, who later recalled: ‘a young man of somewhat battered appearance, with haggard eyes, yet distinguished by a certain air of grace and dignity. He was quick to explain his purpose. He had in a taxi outside a large consignment – some £4 million worth – of industrial diamonds. He also bought something called heavy water, and some French scientists’. Macmillan would later confess: ‘I have had the good fortune to meet many gallant officers and brave men, but I have never known such a remarkable combination in a single man of courage, expert knowledge and indefinable charm’.
The heavy water was stored temporarily at Wormwood Scrubs prison in London, before being transferred into the care of the librarian at Windsor Castle. Halban and Kowarski joined the growing ranks of physicists participating in Britain’s fledging nuclear programme, which would eventually gain the code name ‘Tube Alloys’. They relocated to Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory, where they formed a research group to develop a uranium-heavy water reactor. The French physicists’ adventure was turned into a feature film in 1949, titled La Bataille de L’Eau Lourde (the Battle for Heavy Water). It starred the physicists, playing themselves.
Danger UXB
Howard’s role with the DSIR changed soon afterwards. He became fascinated by the challenge posed by defusing unexploded bombs, requiring an extraordinary mix of science and adrenalin-fuelled courage. He became head of a new Experimental Field Unit, set up by the Unexploded Bomb Committee (UXBC) under the Director-General of Scientific Research. Howard’s brother Greville explained: ‘He looked on each bomb as a new challenge – examining it from all angles, listening to it, his fingers exploring the metal shell. All this time he would be dictating to Eileen Morden his conclusions and the method he proposed to use in de-arming the bomb when the time came for her to take shelter. If anything went wrong, then at least others would not make the same mistake’. He told his brother ‘If my name is on a bomb, that’s it’.
He was usually accompanied by Marden and his cockney driver, Fred Hards, styled the ‘Holy Trinity’, and a small team of seven soldiers. On completing a difficult job, Howard would take his team for a meal at the Ritz or Kempinski’s in London, no doubt attracting odd glances from other diners as the group, dressed in battledress and stained overalls, passed pieces of bomb mechanism around the table as their meal was being served.
But there were those involved in the deadly business of bomb disposal that were critical of Howard’s approach. He was accused of carelessness, of being too much a showman and of taking unnecessary risks. It was very rare for there to be any more than one person anywhere near an unexploded bomb after it had been uncovered.
On 12 May 1941, Howard’s team was called to attend an aged and rusting unexploded bomb in Hackney Marshes in south-east London. It had been dropped on London some six months earlier, and removed to a ‘bomb cemetery’ in the Marshes, where it had become known colloquially as ‘Old Faithful’. Howard’s mission was to defuse the bomb and recover the fuses – a delayed-action clockwork fuse classified as type 17 and an anti-handling device fitted with a mercury-tilt motion sensor classified as type 50. Any fuses recovered intact were used for training other bomb disposal experts.
As the team attempted to sterilize the bomb with steam, it exploded, leaving a crater five feet in diameter. Fourteen people were killed. All that survived of Howard was a silver cigarette case. Hards died calling out for Suffolk. Morden died in the ambulance. It was later surmised that the bomb had also been fitted with a ZUS-40 anti-removal device, invisible beneath the type 17, which had triggered as Howard was attempting to remove it.
On 15 July 1941, Howard was awarded a posthumous George Cross ‘for conspicuous bravery in connexion with bomb disposal’. Morden and Hards received Commendations. In Their Finest Hour, the second volume in Winston Churchill’s history of the second world war, he wrote:
One bomb disposal squad I remember which may be taken as symbolic of many others. It consisted of three people, the Earl of Suffolk, his lady private secretary and his chauffeur. They called themselves ‘The Holy Trinity’. Their prowess and continued existence got around among all who knew and 34 unexploded bombs did they tackle with urbane and smiling efficiency, but the 35th claimed its forfeit.
On his father’s passing, Michael became the 21st Earl of Suffolk and 14th Earl of Berkshire, at the age of six. It appears that he had inherited his father’s indefinable charm and, unlike his father and grandfather, managed to live a full life. On his death in August 2022 aged 87, the best-selling ‘bonkbuster’ author Jilly Cooper admitted that Michael had been one (of three) inspirations for one of her most famous literary creations, serial womaniser Rupert Campbell-Black. She explained: ‘Despite his title and status, [Michael] never made you feel inferior. All the best of Rupert, but without the awful parts’.
Coming soon: Operation Gunnerside and the Real Heroes of Telemark: The Battle for Heavy Water (Part 2).
Jim Baggott is an award-winning science writer. This post is based in part on extracts from his book Atomic: The First War of Physics and the Secret History of the Atom Bomb 1939-49, first published in the UK by Icon Books and as The First War of Physics by Pegasus Press in the US. Atomic | Jim Baggott
Brilliant tale of derring-do and a welcome reminder of the good in us all.
Wow, great story!