Geoffrey Pyke
Geoffrey Pyke was an English journalist, educationalist, and inventor.
Pyke came to public attention when he escaped from internment in Germany during World War I. He had travelled to Germany under a false passport, and was soon arrested and interned.
During the Second World War, Pyke proposed the newly invented material, pykrete, for the construction of the ship Habakkuk.
Early life
Geoffrey Nathaniel Joseph Pyke was born on 9 November 1893 in Kensington to Lionel Edward Pyke QC, a barrister, and Mary Rachel Pyke. Pyke was the cousin of Magnus Pyke.From 1907–1909, Pyke was educated at Wellington College. At his mother's insistence, Pyke maintained the dress and habits of an Orthodox Jew. He became an atheist when he was thirteen. The persecution he suffered instilled in him a hatred of and contempt for "The Establishment". After two years at Wellington, he was withdrawn, tutored privately and then admitted to Pembroke College, Cambridge, to study law.
First World War
At the outbreak of the First World War, Pyke quit his studies to become a war correspondent. He persuaded the editor of the Daily Chronicle to send him to Berlin. He used the passport obtained from an American sailor by travelling via Denmark. In Germany, he conversed with local Germans, and eavesdropped on other people's conversations, witnessing the mobilisation of Germans for war with the Russian Empire.In early October, 1914, after six days in Germany, Pyke was arrested in his bed-sitting room, and was taken away leaving a letter written in English on his desk. Confined to a small cell in solitary confinement, he believed that he might not be executed after all; remarking that "the German government was not going to waste 4d on my keep if it was going to be faced with burial expenses on the fifth day". During captivity, he reflected on hunger:
During confinement, Pyke longed for books, writing material and socialising. When allowed out for exercise, he moved around the yard and exchanged words with other inmates. He pieced together poems from memory – If by Rudyard Kipling and Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll – and recited them loudly in the darkness. During this time, Pyke questioned his sanity.
In January 1915, he was transferred to another prison where he was able to mix with other prisoners and buy newspapers, learning that thousands of foreigners had passed through this prison for a period of quarantine before being transferred to the internment camp at Ruhleben. Five days later, he was transferred to a third prison in Moabit, and then to the internment camp at Ruhleben.
At Ruhleben, Pyke met fellow graduates from Oxford and Cambridge. They supplied him with extra clothes, food, books and other amenities. Pyke soon became ill and he nearly died of double pneumonia and food poisoning, but recovered in summer. Despite illness, he thought about the possibility of escape and repeatedly questioned fellow inmates. Most were pessimistic about escape, but an Englishman, Edward Falk, agreed despite the low success rate of other attempts. Pyke compiled statistical data on previous escapes, and together with Falk, made a decision to escape, following a regime of calisthenic exercise to prepare. On the afternoon of 9 July 1915, Pyke and Falk crept into a hut and hid under tennis nets, using glare from the sunset to blind the patrolling guard. Successful, they waited until dark and climbed over the perimeter fences.
Pyke and Falk took a tram into Berlin, buying clothes and camping equipment and then traveled west. Within of the Dutch border, they decided to walk, traversing barbed wire fences and quagmire. Approaching the border, they consumed what remained of their food and discarded their equipment apart from some rope made from string, deciding to cross the Dutch frontier. As they rested, they were discovered by a soldier and tried to talk their way out of the encounter, only to discover the soldier was Dutch and they were already inside the Netherlands. From here, made their way to England. Pyke visited his news editor to confess that his mission had failed. However, the editor told Pyke that the story of his escape, based on a long telegraph report Pyke had sent from Amsterdam, had become one of the biggest Fleet Street scoops of the war. Pyke was the first Englishman to get into Germany and out again, and he was encouraged to write a series of articles for the Chronicle. Pyke refused, citing lost interest in being a war correspondent. He divided his time between lecturing on his experiences and writing for the Cambridge Magazine, edited by Charles Kay Ogden.
Pyke arranged for some food parcels to be sent to friends in Ruhleben; the boxes contained details of his method of escape concealed in false bottoms. Although his parcels arrived, no prisoner attempted to repeat his methods. As an escaped prisoner of war, he was exempt from conscription and his views had begun to drift towards pacifism. He wrote a memoir of his experiences, To Ruhleben – And Back, and published in 1916. Because the war was still on at that time, Pyke omitted some details of his escape from his account. To Ruhleben – And Back was republished in 2002. In March 1918, Pyke met Margaret Amy Chubb, they were married within three months of meeting.
Between the wars
Malting House School
Between the First and Second World Wars, Pyke attempted a number of money-making schemes, speculating on the commodity market, using his own system of financial management and working through a number of different stockbrokers to avoid attention and higher stock broking charges. The Pykes had a son, David Pyke, and Pyke became preoccupied by the question of his son's education. In October 1924, to create an education that differed from his own and promoted curiosity whilst equipping young people to live in the twentieth century, he set up an infants' school in his Cambridge home. His wife, Margaret, was a strong supporter of the school and its ideas. Pyke recruited a psychologist, Susan Sutherland Isaacs, to run the school, and although Pyke had many original ideas regarding education, he promised her that he would not interfere.Pyke continued with his city speculations which funded the Malting House School.
The Malting House School was based on the theories of the American philosopher and educationist John Dewey. It fostered the individual development of children; children were given great freedom and were supported rather than punished. The teachers were seen as observers of the children, who were seen as research workers. For a short time, The Maltings was a critical if not a commercial success; it was visited by many educationists and it was the subject of a film documentary. Pyke had ambitious plans for the school and began to interfere with the day-to-day running, whereupon Susan Isaacs left The Maltings.
In 1927, Pyke lost all his money and became bankrupt. The Malting House School was forced to close, Margaret Pyke had to take a job as a headmistress's secretary; she left Geoffrey although they were never divorced. Already suffering from periodic fits of depression and burdened with huge debts to his brokers, he withdrew from normal life altogether and survived on donations from close friends.
Work against antisemitism
In 1934, Pyke opposed the wave of antisemitism in Nazi Germany, citing humanitarian reasons. Pyke campaigned for Christian leaders to make simultaneous public statements condemning the Nazis, raising money to set up an organisation to combat anti-Semitism. He wrote a number of magazine articles on the irrationality of prejudice and started work on a book. In his published letters and articles, Pyke insisted that it was necessary to collect data and this struck a chord with other thinkers who would – giving full credit for the germ of an idea to Pyke – go on to establish the Mass Observation project that set out to document the lives of ordinary Britons.Voluntary Industrial Aid for Spain
During the Spanish Civil War, Pyke founded the Voluntary Industrial Aid for Spain organisation, encouraging individuals with little money to contribute their time and skills instead. This was opposed by trade unionists who believed that unpaid work might set a dangerous precedent, but Pyke persisted. By October 1938, twenty-five vehicles had been sent to Spain including two mobile blood transfusion units, and by the end of the war, more than seventy vehicles had been contributed. Organised by Trade Unions, workers were, with the assistance of sympathetic employers who lent the use of machines and premises, able to produce useful items of equipment. Pyke also invented a motorcycle sidecar to carry medical supplies or a patient. He raised funds to pay for American-built Harley-Davidson motorcycles that were then plentifully available second-hand, and persuaded workers to make the sidecars free of charge with the results being sent out to Spain.Pyke also assisted in arranging for the manufacture of mattresses for the Spanish government, for the collection of redundant horse-drawn ploughs for Spanish farmers, and bundles of hand-tools for use by labourers. He published aggressive propaganda brochures pointing out that British workers were not to consider their contributions a form of charity while Spanish people were fighting and dying for their fellow workers. To answer a shortage of bandages and dressings in Spain, he suggested that sun-dried peat moss sewn into muslin bags could be used as a substitute for cotton dressings. Soon, moss collected by volunteers in Britain was on its way to Spain.
Second World War
Spying on Nazi Germany
In 1939, before the outbreak of the Second World War, Pyke considered the problem of finding out what the German people actually thought of the Nazi regime. His idea was to perform an opinion poll in secret by sending volunteers to Germany to interview ordinary people. He would train the volunteers personally. The plan was that the interviewers should pose as golfers on a tour of Germany and that interviews should be informal, with the questions being inserted into everyday conversation; the first German city to be targeted would be Frankfurt. Pyke travelled to Frankfurt where he met Peter Raleigh. Raleigh suggested that there were enough of Pyke's golfers in Germany to challenge the Frankfurt golf club to a match. Pyke concluded that this would be an excellent idea, and put this new plan into action.By 21 August, Pyke had ten interviewers working in Germany. On 25 August, following hints from contacts at the Foreign Office, Pyke recalled all his agents and they arrived back in England over the following few days. Pyke's original idea had been to present Hitler with an account of the true feelings of the German people, but this did not materialise with the outbreak of war. Raleigh and Patrick Smith did make a broadcast on the newly formed BBC World Service in which they contrasted the mood in Germany with that in London, and Pyke prepared a report for the War Office.
Pyke tried to generate interest in his opinion poll results and in repeating the exercise in Germany using people from neutral countries. He got little support, but did attract the attention of Conservative Member of Parliament Leo Amery. Amery did think that Pyke's idea was worthwhile and privately convinced others including Clement Attlee and Sir Stafford Cripps. Pyke's friends concluded that nothing would come of the scheme and persuaded Pyke to let the matter drop.