Tizard, Henry

Henry Tizard and William Perkin put it less charitably. The former wrote that most of the staff were content to live like gentlemen, passing to the younger generation the knowledge that been amassed by others .Perkin said in his Presidential Addressto the Chemical Society in 1915, shortly after he had taken up the Waynflete chair ... 

Frisch and Peierls finished their two reports and took them to Oli-phant. He quizzed the men thoroughly, added a cover letter to their memoranda ( I have considered these suggestions in some detail and have had considerable discussion with the authors, with the result that I am convinced that the whole thing must be taken rather seriously, if only to make sure that the other side are not occupied in the production of such a bomb at the present time ) and sent letter and documents off to Henry Thomas Tizard, an Oxford man, a chemist by training, the driving force behind British radar development, the civilian chairman of the Committee on the Scientific Survey of Air Defense—better known as the Tizard Committee—which was the most important British committee at the time concerned with the application of science to war. 

What I should like, Henry Tizard wrote Mark Oliphant after he had studied the Frisch-Peierls memoranda, would be to have quite a small committee to sit soon to advise what ought to be done, who should do it, and where it should be done, and I suggest that you, Thomson, and say Blackett, would form a sufficient nucleus for such a committee. Thomson was G. P. Thomson, J.J. s son, the Imperial College physicist who had ordered up a ton of uranium oxide the previous year to study and felt ashamed at the absurdity. He had concluded after neutron-bombardment experiments that a chain reaction in natural luranium was unlikely and a war project therefore impractical. Tizard, who had been skeptical to begin with and had taken Thomson s conclusions as support for his skepticism, appointed Thomson chairman of the small committee James Chadwick, now at Liverpool, his assistant P. B. Moon and Rutherford prot g John... 

---