C.P. Snow

C.P. Snow (Charles Percy) (1905-1980), later Lord Snow, was a writer and scientist who worked all his life to expand public knowledge of, and enthusiasm for, science. He began professional life as a scientist, graduating with a first-class degree from London University and a PhD from Cambridge (his Thesis was on 'The infra-red spectra of simple diatomic molecules'), being awarded a fellowship at Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1930. Realizing that he would not achieve as much as many brilliant contemporaries, he chose to concentrate on literature, until with the advent of the second World War, he became an administrator, recruiting scientists for the war effort, including the atomic bomb. After the war, he was a Civil Service commissioner recruiting scientists to government service. In the first of Harold Wilson's governments (1964-1970), he was appointed parliamentary secretary in the Ministry of Technology, sitting in the House of Lords as Baron Snow of the city of Leicester. He then continued to speak on science and technology as a back-bencher in the Lords.

He is famous for a sequence of eleven novels known collectively as Strangers and Brothers (originally the title only of the first to be published). These reflect his own life through the eyes, and narration, of Lewis Eliot. They are:

• Strangers and Brothers (1940), republished as George Passant (1973), about a provincial eccentric who gathers a group of young people round him, as Lewis embarks on a career;
• The Light and the Dark (1947), about Roy Calvert, a bipolar scholar of Manichean texts (hence the title) who volunteers for service in Bomber Command, in the hopes of being killed;
• Time of Hope (1949), about the childhood and early professional life of Lewis (he is a lawyer), and his marriage to Sheila Knight;
• The Masters (1951), about the election of a new Master in a Cambridge College; The New Men (1954), about the development of the atomic bomb, involving Eliot's brother, Martin, and the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; *Homecomings (1956) (published as Homecoming in the USA), reverting to Eliot's own life, the suicide of Sheila, his career and involvement with a married woman;
• The Conscience of the Rich (1958), about a wealthy Jewish family tormented by a liberal conscience during the 1930s (the time of the Spanish Civil War. and the Great Depression;
• The Affair (1960), about the apparent falsification of scientific results in the college of The Masters, which centres, like the earlier novel, on politics in thge microcosm;
• Corridors of Power(1964), about public politics and personal relationships around the time of the Suez crisis (the title has become a catch-phrase for the dealings around Westminster of British political life, civil servant and elected politicians);
• The Sleep of Reason (1968) is based on the Moors Murders. George Passant returns to draw Lewis Eliot into involvement with the case;
• Last Things (1970), which rounds off the lives of the characters, and some of the moral and political questions posed by the series.

• Novels outside the sequence include: Death Under Sail (1932), an experiment in writing detective fiction; New Lives For Old (1933; published anonymously) was "science fiction in the manner of H. G. Wells" (ODNB) - Snow and Wells have much in common, apart from identifying themselves by double initials; The Search (1934), a novel about career development and scientific research; The Malcontents (1972); In Their Wisdom (1974); and A Coat of Varnish (1978).

Snow is also remembered for a most telling contribution to academic debate - and the phrase under which it continues to this day, The Two Cultures. This was first used as the title of a piece in the New Statesman (6 October 1956) in which he argued that the split between the ways of thinking of artists and scientists was deeply damaging to modern education, and the society it supports. This was developed in his Rede lectures at Cambridge, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution and the Godkin lectures at Harvard in 1960, published in 1961 with a postscript as Science and Government. Here he warned against the undue influence which scientists with political agendas acquire when political leaders are ignorant of science, pointing to examples from his experience in the Second World War. He also argued against the belief that science could be blind to ethical considerations in an address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (27 December 1960), reprinted as 'The moral un-neutrality of science' in Science, 27 January 1961, and available on-line at http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/snow-charles_moral-un-neutrality-of-science.html. Snow - like so many of his generation of scientists he was deeply concerned at the nature of atomic war - said that scientific endeavour carried a burden of moral responsibility.

His non-fiction books included (apart from The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959) and Science and Government (1961):

• The Two Cultures; and A Second Look (1964);
• Variety of Men (1967), accounts of people he had met in his career;
• Trollope: His Life and Art, a short life of Anthony Trollope (1974);
• The Realists: Portraits of Eight Novelists(1975);
• The Physicists: a Generation that Changed the World (1981; published posthumously)).