Abstract
The beginning of the Second World War brought forth a new level of social commitment from many of Britain’s leading biologists. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the majority of scientific leaders were deeply opposed to the Hitler regime and the onset of war turned their opposition into action.1 For some, like C.P. Blacker, this meant joining the military effort directly, whilst the older statesmen of British science found other ways to assist the Allied cause.2 Julian Huxley, 52 years old in 1939, spent most of the first years of the conflict working unofficially as a British diplomat in the USA whilst Lancelot Hogben served the country by working on British Army medical statistics with Frank Crew for the War Office.3 J.B.S. Haldane, some five years older than Huxley and Hogben, conducted pioneering research into human survival under water, designed to assist Britain’s submarine effort.4
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Notes
Werskey, Visible College, p. 265. Also see G.P. Wells, ‘Lancelot Thomas Hogben’, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society (1978), 24, 183–221. Werskey also documents other scientific war roles, pp. 263–6.
Haldane wrote at length about the dangers of new weaponry in the interwar period. See especially, Callinicus where Haldane argued that the terrible potential of new artillery made chemical warfare a more humane military option. See J.B.S. Haldane, Callinicus: a Defence of Chemical Warfare ( London: Kegan Paul, 1925 ).
J.B.S. Haldane, Science Advances ( London: Allen and Unwin, 1947 ), pp. 235–6.
Clark recalls that Haldane felt that scientists were being underused in the war. See R. Clark, The Life and Work of JBS Haldane ( London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1968 ), pp. 134–5.
J. Huxley, ‘Men of Science and the War’, Nature (1940), 146: 3691, 107–8.
For details see S. Nicholas, The BBC, British Morale, and the Home Front War Effort 1939–45 ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992 )
S. Nicholas, in N. Hayes and J. Hill (eds), ‘Millions like us?’: British Culture in the Second World War ( Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999 ).
S. Nicholas, The Echo of War: Home Front Propaganda and the Wartime BBC 1939–45 ( Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996 ), p. 140.
R. Gregory, Science in Chains ( London: Macmillan, 1941 ), p. 3.
For the origins of Huxley’s involvement with UNESCO see J. Huxley, Memories II ( London: Allen and Unwin, 1973 ), pp. 30–6.
J. Huxley, The Uniqueness of Man ( London: Chatto and Windus, 1941 ), p. 49.
J.B.S. Haldane, Keeping Cool and Other Essays ( London: Chatto and Windus, 1940 ), pp. 34–5.
See Jones, Science, Politics and the Cold War, p. 75 R. Darnell, And Along Came Boas: Continuity and Revolution in American Anthropology ( Amsterdam: J. Benjamin, 1998 ).
See W. Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990)
D. Southern, Gunnar Myrdal and Black–White Relations ( Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987 ), and King, Race Culture and the Intellectuals, pp. 21–48.
G. Myrdal, An American Dilemma: the Negro Problem and Modern Democracy ( New York and London: Harper, 1944 ).
Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal, pp. 274–5 and King, Race, Culture and the Intellectuals, pp. 22–3. For broader analysis of the use of science in legal challenges to segregation see J. Jackson, ‘The Scientific Attack on Brown v. Board of Education, 1954–1964’, American Psychologist (2004), 59: 6, 530–7.
O. Klineberg (ed.), Characteristics of the American Negro ( New York: Harper, 1944 ).
Also see R. Benedict, Race, Science and Politics ( New York: New Age Books, 1940 )
A. Montagu, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: the Fallacy of Race ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1945 ).
For British contributions to this new anthropology see D. Stone, ‘Nazism as Modern Magic: Bronislaw Malinowski’s Political Anthropology’, History and Anthropology (2003), 14: 3, 203–18.
Huxley in I. Zollschan, Racialism Against Civilisation ( London: New Europe, 1942 ), p. 8.
Little published his first major piece of research on this topic in 1948. See K. Little, Negroes in Britain: a Study of Race Relations in English Society ( London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1948 ).
In the war years he was already publishing on the topic. See K. Little, ‘The Study of Racial Mixture in the British Commonwealth: Some Anthropological Preliminaries’, The Eugenics Review (1941), 32: 4, 114–20
K. Little, ‘Racial Mixture in Great Britain: Some Anthropological Characteristics of the Anglo-Negroid Cross’, Eugenics Review (1942), 33: 4, 112–20.
See R. Clark, The Rise of the Boffins ( London: Phoenix, 1962 ).
During this conflict, 30,000 Germans living in Britain were interned and 10,000 more were forced to leave the country. For details see P. Panayi, The Enemy in Our Midst: Germans in Britain during the First World War ( Oxford: Berg, 1991 )
P. and L. Gillman, Collar the Lot!–How Britain Interned and Expelled its Wartime Refugees ( London: Quartet Books, 1980 ), pp. 8–21.
Kushner and Knox, Refugees in an Age of Genocide, p. 161. For details see N. Bentwich, The Rescue and Achievement of Refugee Scholars: the Story of Displaced Scholars and Scientists 1933–52 ( The Hague: Nijhoff, 1953 ).
For analysis see R. Cooper, Refugee Scholars: Conversations with Tess Simpson (Leeds: Moorland, 1992)
R. Cooper, Retrospective Sympathetic Affection: a Tribute to the Academic Community ( Leeds: Moorland, 1996 ), and London, Whitehall and the Jews, pp. 47–50.
Parkes was a leading campaigner on behalf of Europe’s Jews. See J. Parkes, An Enemy of the People: Anti Semitism ( Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1945 ).
For analysis see C. Richmond, Campaigner against Anti Semitism: the Reverend James Parkes, 1896–1981 ( London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2005 ).
See G. Schaffer, ‘Re-Thinking the History of Blame: Britain and Minorities during the Second World War’, National Identities (2006), 8: 4, 401–20.
For a sophisticated analysis of black US soldier presence in Britain see C. Thorne, ‘Britain and the Black GIs: Race Issues and Anglo-American Relations in 1942’, in C. Thorne, Border Crossings: Studies in International History (Oxford: Basil Blackwood, 1988), pp. 259–74
G. Smith, When Jim Crow Met John Bull ( London: I.B. Tauris, 1987 )
D. Reynolds, Rich Relations: the American Occupation of Britain 1942–5 ( London: HarperCollins, 1995 ), pp. 216–35.
M. Sherwood, Many Struggles: West Indian Workers and Service Personnel in Britain 1939–45 ( London: Karia Press, 1985 ), p. 101.
A. Richmond, Colour Prejudice in Britain: a Study of West Indian Workers in Liverpool 1941–51 ( London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954 ), p. 78.
For the government view, see D. Reynolds, ‘The Churchill Government and the Black American Troops in Britain during World War Two’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (1985), 5: 35, 113–33.
A. Keith, Essays on Human Evolution (London: Watts and Co, 1946), pp. 91 and 11.
R. Gates, Human Genetics (New York: Macmillan, 1946), two volumes, pp. 45, 1160 and 1243.
C.P. Blacker, ‘Galton’s Views on Race’, Eugenics Review (1951), 43: 1, 22.
C.P. Blacker, ‘“Eugenic” Experiments Conducted by the Nazis on Human Subjects’, Eugenics Review (1952), 44: 1, 9–19.
For an analysis of these ongoing concerns see E. Stadulis, ‘The Resettlement of Displaced Persons in the United Kingdom’, Population Studies (1952), 5: 3, 207–37, 208–9.
This research was published as R. Gates, Pedigrees of Negro Families ( Philadelphia: Blackiston, 1949 ). For an analysis of Gates’s problems at Howard see Schaffer, ‘Scientific Racism Again?’, pp. 253–78.
For the ideology behind the founding of Howard see R. Logan, Howard University: the First Hundred Years 1867–1967 ( New York: New York University Press, 1969 ), pp. 18–22.
For details of government thinking on British population trends and manpower needs in this period see Stadulis, ‘The Resettlement of Displaced Persons in the United Kingdom’, pp. 209–10, D. Cesarani, Justice Delayed: How Britain Became a Refuge for Nazi War Criminals (London: Heinemann, 1992), pp. 68–70
J. Isaac, British Post-War Migration ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954 ), p. 18
J. Tannahill, European Volunteer Workers in Britain ( Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958 ), p. 114.
See M. Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century ( Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985 ), p. 333.
Jewish terrorism in Palestine had been muted during the war as the leadership of the Yishuv fell in behind the Allies in their fight against Nazism. Terrorism began in earnest after the end of the conflict and was especially pronounced as radical Jewish groups splintered off from the more moderate Haganah. For details see M. Gilbert, Exile and Return: the Emergence of Jewish Statehood ( London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978 ), pp. 272–96
T. Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate ( New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000 ), pp. 112–50.
T. Kushner, ‘Anti-Semitism and Austerity: the August 1947 Riots in Britain’, in P. Panayi, Racial Violence in Britain 1840–1950 ( Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1993 ), pp. 152–66.
Also see G. Alderman, The Jewish Community and British Politics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), pp. 128–50, Holmes, John Bull’s Island, p. 245 and
D. Leitch, ‘Explosion at the King David Hotel’, in M. Sissons and P. French, The Age of Austerity ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986 ), pp. 58–85.
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© 2008 Gavin Schaffer
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Schaffer, G. (2008). The Challenge of War: the 1940s. In: Racial Science and British Society, 1930–62. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230582446_3
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