Backroom Boys: the secret return of the British boffin
Francis Spufford Faber & Faber, 250pp, £14.99
ISBN 0304359270
You would have needed a heart of stone not to shed tears of helpless laughter. As Concorde completed its final commercial flight, Tony Benn, preening and condescending as ever, solemnly told the television audience that the occasion marked the end of British manufacturing industry. The man who was always wrong about everything had done it again.
Benn, as Francis Spufford records, had been rather keen on Concorde. In 1974, he had taken 50 shop stewards for a ride in honour of Labour's manifesto pledge to engineer "an irreversible shift of power in favour of working people and their families". Hah, bloody hah. For the next 30 years, Concorde carried none but the very rich and the hyper-privileged. Democratisation of the air had been more effectively served by none other than Boeing in Seattle with its glorious 747.
I'd better get this off my chest: commercially, technically, aesthetically and even ergonomically, Concorde was a rotten plane. Its commercial shortcomings need no further elaboration. Technically, it simply adapted military technology and refused to aspire to any of the breakthroughs that would be necessary for commercial supersonic flight. Aesthetically, it was a horror - a tube with a point at each end and ludicrously oversized wings - and no match for the 747, for me the most beautiful machine of the 20th century. And having flown by Concorde once, I can tell you it was noisy, cramped, bumpy and crude - although I didn't say no to the Talbot '66, which somehow made it all worthwhile.
Sadly, Spufford's chapter on Concorde doesn't engage with any of these issues. Instead it gets bogged down in the tedious negotiations of the early 1980s that led to British Airways buying the planes. Who now cares? Spufford's subtext is that British engineers are heroes and that the dumb tube must be celebrated one way or another.
Never mind. This is a great idea for a book, and in parts Spufford triumphantly pulls it off. He argues that there is still much we should celebrate about British engineering prowess but, in order to do so, we must look beneath the surface. In the postwar period, the British ceased to build mighty ocean-going liners, great factories or even halfway decent planes, but our engineering heritage was not lost. Rather, it went underground.
By driving around in white vans, for example, British radio engineers worked out the technology of cellular phones. By running a space programme on a shoestring until the early 1970s, British aerospace engineers created a technical and imaginative legacy that, through Beagle 2, now stands the best chance of establishing whether there is or ever has been life on Mars. And by accelerating the academic programme to map the human genome, British geneticists engineered a sequence that is open to all comers.
Spufford tells these stories with, at times, a technophile elan worthy of Tom Wolfe. His description of the Black Arrow rocket programme and its final success just as funding had been cancelled is poignant and thrilling. Indeed, the whole of his first chapter on space - "Flying Spitfire to other planets" - combines boyish excitement with a real sense of the postwar, post-imperial mood that brought us crashing down to earth as we more or less pulled out of the space business in the 1970s.
Equally, the chapter describing the exotic technical difficulties involved in getting a mobile phone network to function is a revelation. Spufford accurately pinpoints the strange hybrid of Thatcherite laissez-faire and Euro- interventionism that somehow put us years ahead of the Americans.
However, the section on the human genome project is far too hard on Craig Venter, the man who mounted the private sector challenge. Without Venter's impatience, the academics would still be promising genomes in five years' time. It is also far too kind to James Watson. From the notes, it doesn't look as though Spufford interviewed him. This is lucky for Spufford - but it would surely have changed his views about the project.
Spufford omits to mention the one perfect example of the phenomena he is describing - the British automotive industry. All our big players collapsed and 50,000 engineering petrolheads went underground. Now, as a result, nearly all the world's fastest cars are built in England by crazed, brilliant men in tiny garages. Watching a Formula One or Indy car race is a far better way to celebrate British engineering than waving flags at Concorde.
But this is a fun book. And despite there being too much uncontrolled imagery and sub-Wolfean ranting of the "gee-whizz, these guys were really cooking" variety, Spufford mostly writes well. The story is, on the whole, a sad one, yet he ends on Beagle 2, which is still cruising towards Mars. If, early on Christmas morning, that little dog chirps back to us that it is safely down, then life in the backrooms will definitely take a turn for the better. Although doubtless Benn will get on board and announce it's a triumph for old Labour.
Bryan Appleyard is working on a book about aliens
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