Henry Tizard | Biography

Henry Tizard played a pivotal role in British military policy during World War II. He advised the government on a wide variety of military applications of scientific and technological innovations, including radar and the jet propulsion engine. His scientific education and military experience allowed him to communicate effectively with people in both areas.

Sir Henry Thomas Tizard was born on August 23, 1885, in Gillingham, Kent, to Captain Thomas Henry and Mary Elizabeth (Churchward) Tizard. The family was financially solid but not wealthy. As a navy hydrographer, his father had participated in extensive naval survey work around the world. He encouraged his son's early interest in science. The young Tizard looked forward to a naval career, but just before he was to enter naval school at 13, his left eye was damaged when a fly flew into it. His sight was impaired enough to bar him from naval service. He then enrolled at Westminster preparatory school, and later at Magdalene College, Oxford, where he studied physical chemistry. The day of his final examinations he was seriously ill with the influenza that would recur throughout his life, but he still managed to take first honors.

The center of physical chemistry research at the time was with Walther Nernst at the University of Berlin. Tizard enrolled there in 1908 to work toward a Ph.D. Although he stayed in Berlin only a year, Tizard had two experiences there that were to prove significant for Britain: he noted the powerful changes chemistry was bringing to Germany's technological (and therefore military) status, and he met Frederick Lindemann. Lindemann, a fellow chemistry student, was the son of an Alsatian who had become a naturalized Briton. In Berlin, Tizard and Lindemann studied together, practiced boxing at a gymnasium, and ice skated. This early friendship was to sour in the midst of the anxiety and political intrigue of World War II.

In 1911 Tizard became a fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, where he taught physical chemistry. In 1914 he embarked on a British Association tour of Australia, during which he met Cambridge's Ernest Rutherford (a noted physicist) and other eminent scientists. The onset of World War I cut the trip short, and Tizard returned to England to enlist in the Royal Garrison Artillery. He was soon transferred to the Royal Flying Corps, where he began a lifelong commitment to aviation technology. His training as a pilot during this period enabled Tizard to understand the practical problems of flying in a way that was rare among scientific advisers and much appreciated by the other aviators. It was also during this time (1915) that he married Kathleen Eleanor Wilson. They eventually had three sons, John, Richard, and David.

At the end of the war, Tizard became assistant deputy of the newly-formed Royal Air Force and encountered Winston Churchill, then Minister of Munitions, for the first time. He never got along well with Churchill, who like Lindemann, enjoyed the intricacies of political gamesmanship which Tizard disliked intensely. In 1919, partly at Tizard's urging, the professorship of experimental philosophy at Oxford went to Lindemann. The two men continued to see each other from time to time, but hostility was already flaring up between them. One colleague remembered them getting into a shouting match over the relatively trivial question of whether oranges should best be packed in symmetrical rows or in off-center layers.

Between the wars, Tizard consulted with the British petroleum industry. With Randall Pye, he studied adiabatic (heat neither lost nor gained) compression of gases, identifying the chemicals that were to prove most effective as fuel in internal combustion engines. Tizard also expanded his role as government adviser, working in the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, where he hoped to encourage the application of scientific and technological discoveries. He found government and military leaders slow to assimilate new scientific knowledge, and this was to become a long-term frustration.

By the early 1930s Hitler's aggression posed a threat to Europe, and the British began to worry about air attacks. They had no way to detect incoming planes which, in any effective defense strategy, would have to be intercepted at the coastlines. Various "death ray" ideas were discussed, but no technology presented itself clearly. Tizard became chair of a committee (the Tizard Committee) to investigate the possibilities, one of which was the reflection of radio waves off the atmosphere. Lindemann soon joined the committee, urging study of aerial mines and balloon intercepts, which Tizard believed were unlikely to be of much use. Lindemann also wanted to find a protection against night attacks, whereas Tizard believed the daylight threat was greater. Tension between the two men increased, as Lindemann was close to Churchill and Tizard's power was advisory rather than executive. As it turned out, Lindemann was right about the danger of night attacks. Tizard's mistake in this regard tended to obscure his foresight in pushing radar research. He was largely responsible for establishing the country's chain of radar stations that enabled Britain to survive the Battle of Britain in 1940. Credit for his role was slow in coming.

In 1939 Tizard was asked to evaluate the feasibility of an atomic bomb. He tried unsuccessfully to obtain the option for all the uranium available from the Belgian Congo, but he did manage to obtain some uranium to send to the United States, where it became the first nuclear fuel. Working as an unofficial adviser to Lord Beaverbrook (William Maxwell Aitken), Tizard served as a conduit for classified information passing between Britain and the United States. In 1940 he headed a mission to America for this purpose, taking along the cavity magnetron (called the "heart of radar"), which the British had developed but the Americans were to make practicable.

Political rivalry with Lindemann and frustration with the government's inability to set clear priorities and lines of authority led Tizard to curtail his active government service in the last years of the war. He opposed the government's policy of random bombing of German cities because he believed it would be less effective than bombing U-boats. He became president of Magdalene College, Oxford, in 1942 and retired from the Air Ministry in 1943. After the war, Tizard continued to support increased rigor in Britain's technological development, advising the government on science and military policy through the early 1950s. He received many honors, including the Order of the Bath, several honorary degrees, and membership in the Royal Society. Tizard died in Fareham, Hampshire, on October 9, 1959.