Backroom Boys: The secret return of the British boffin by Francis Spufford, Faber and Faber, £14.99, ISBN 0571214967 Reviewed by Roy Herbert
SOMETHING of a misleading description and more of a celebration that the British boffin has never been away, this is first-class writing about the work of the scientists and technologists popularly supposed to wear pullovers and quizzical expressions, smoke pipes and do something incomprehensible in small back rooms. They appeared occasionally in British films played by character actors. The most familiar of these boffins is Q from the James Bond series.
Francis Spufford has a remarkable gift for exegesis of the meeting of science and technology, when things based on discovery are actually made and exploited, while keeping the real people in the foreground. It’s an area of tension, a balance between success and failure that accounts for proportionate nail-biting.
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One of the tales here is of the post-war British space programme. It was embarked on when the UK was still punch-drunk from the second world war, only dimly aware it was no longer a world power. Its first success was the Ariel satellite, albeit placed into orbit by NASA. In naming it, Lord Hailsham, then minister for science, got the wrong character from Shakespeare and thought Ariel from The Tempest had said he could put a girdle round about the Earth in 40 minutes – in fact it was Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But as Backroom Boys points out, the UK is the only country in the world to have cancelled its space programme just when it had scored a resounding success – with its launcher, Black Arrow. The British satellite Prospero is still in stable orbit. Further absorbing stories include those of Concorde, mobile phones and computer games, the double helix of DNA and the cliff-hanger that is the history of designing and building the British Mars probe, Beagle 2, due to land on the planet at Christmas this year. You can scarce forebear to cheer. Inspiring stuff.