The New Men
The New Men, published in 1954, is the sixth novel in C. P. Snow's series Strangers and Brothers.
Plot synopsis
Lewis Eliot, his brother Martin, and Cambridge fellow, Walter Luke become involved with the scientific community and reaction to the development and deployment of nuclear weapons by Britain during the Second World War.The story's main location is a fictional early British nuclear experimental establishment where the characters try to get an early nuclear pile going and also try to harvest enough enriched uranium or plutonium to try to beat the Americans to the bomb.
As Snow's science researchers, and science civil servant, characters are, or were, portrayed as Cambridge dons in this book he clearly did want to make the location of the research station the real UK nuclear Centre at Harwell with its close association with Oxford. So instead, as this line from the book puts it,: “For a site, they picked on a place called Barford –which I had not heard of, but found to be a village in Warwickshire, a few miles from Stratford-upon-Avon”.
Several commentators on the book claim, or suggest, that not only is the research station fictional but so is the village of Barford. In fact Barford is a real village in Warwickshire, and it is indeed not far from Stratford-upon-Avon. However, if the “final” version of the research station as described in the last chapter of the book was real it would certainly have more than dominated the actual real village of Barford.