Everybody's Conscience

The London Times called Geoffrey Nathaniel Pyke "one of the most original if unrecognized figures of the present century." London University Physicist J. D. Bernal said he was "one of the greatest . . . geniuses of his time." What made Pyke so extraordinary was his consistent belief that a human being could reason his way through any problem. That belief rammed Geoffrey Pyke's bald head into--and sometimes through--one stone wall after another.

Fabulous Failure. In 1914 Pyke, a Cambridge graduate, walked into the London Daily Chronicle and asked for a job. German armies were then surging through Belgium and the editor wryly agreed to hire Pyke if he could get a report from inside Germany. Seriously and logically Pyke set about journeying to the enemy capital.

He got to Berlin, via Amsterdam, with a passport bought from an American sailor. For six months he managed to send a steady stream of dispatches to the Chronicle before the Germans identified and arrested him. After narrowly escaping execution as a spy, Pyke made a bold daylight escape from a prison camp and returned to Britain.

His next problem was money. Pyke solved it by studying the stockmarket, making a carefully calculated killing. This enabled him, in turn, to tackle the problem of educating his son. Since he could find no school in tune with his own ideas, he founded the Malting House School at Cambridge, a fabulous institution (annual cost per student: $4,000) where children aged four to ten were taught laboratory physics and chemistry before they could read or write. Pyke went back to the stockmarket for additional funds, but this time the professionals ganged up on him. At the age of 34 he was haled into bankruptcy court (assets: $272; liabilities: $290,000). The Malting House School closed.

Futile Success. In 1938, Pyke decided that Hitler could not be dislodged until Britain knew what the Germans really thought. He planned a sort of Gallup poll of the Third Reich--his investigators were to be disguised as a visiting British golf team.

All of his projects required immense capital outlay as well as unlimited confidence in Geoffrey Pyke, which is why most of them remained in the idea stage until he joined Lord Mountbatten's Combined Operations staff during the war. In that atmosphere of frenzied immediacy, amid the flinging about of millions of pounds and dollars, Geoffrey Pyke had his innings.

He dreamed up the "weasel," the tracked, amphibious jeep that wallowed through mud from Italy to the Pacific. Pyke first wanted his weasels built to jump sideways so they could avoid dive bombers. His plan to combat U-boats in the North Atlantic burgeoned into the Habakkuk Project.* It called for a fleet of 2,000-ft. iceberg aircraft carriers built of Pykrete (40-foot-thick ice blocks reinforced with wood pulp). This idea fascinated Winston Churchill; a working model was laboriously constructed in Canada's Lake Patricia, but the project was abandoned as Allied successes against U-boats ended the need.

After the war Pyke addressed himself with his usual passionate intensity to the problems of peace. "The underlying issue of our time," he wrote, "is whether our civilization can be reformed or whether, for progress, a revolution is essential. . . ."

Said a friend: "Geoffrey was everybody's conscience. At times, you didn't feel you could face him."

Ill with leukemia, depressed by the state of the divided world, he began to doubt his basic premise. Last week, Geoffrey Pyke, 54, gave up, killed himself with an overdose of a barbiturate. It was the only unoriginal thing he had ever done.

* From a verse in the book of Habakkuk: ". . . . For I will work a work in your days, which ye will not believe, though it be told you."

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