A Tale of Two Brothers

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In the years following the end of World War Two Britain became increasingly dependant on oil, most of which came by tanker from the Middle East via the Suez Canal. The Foreign Office quickly recognised that it needed more Arabic and Farsi speakers, and with his well known ability with languages, Leonard was sent to language school to become proficient in these tongues. In 1954 Leonard was posted to the British Embassy in Cairo with the vague title of Adviser to the Ambassador, but really to spy on the government of President Nasser. In order to preserve diplomatic appearances, Eveline was required to accompany her husband, and their children were left in the care of their grandmother Eileen. Shortly after their arrival in Egypt, Leonard and Eveline were on the move again to Baghdad where Leonard probably had a major role in the formation of the Middle East Treaty Organisation —better known as the Baghdad Pact — with the intention of containing the expansion of Soviet power in the Middle East. Following the Cairo instigated riots in December 1955 in the capital of Jordan Amman in protest against Jordan joining the Baghdad Pact, Leonard was moved once more to Jordan with a role that was never satisfactorily explained.

In March 1956 there were further bloody riots in Amman, and Leonard and Eveline were killed by an explosion that wrecked their official limousine. Their deaths were officially put down as an unfortunate accident, but there had been rumours of an affair between Leonard and an Iraqi princess who was later betrothed to King Farouk II, the Hashemite king of Iraq who was himself assassinated during the coup of 1958.

With the death of their parents there was much debate between their respective grandparents as to the fate of Gillian and Peter. At this point Keith intervened and with surprising firmness insisted that he should be allowed to officially adopt them as his own children. When his condition as a confirmed bachelor was used as an argument against this, he replied that he was able to offer them not only a comfortable home and a good education, but also love and stability. He also pointed out that in appearance at least, he was identical to their deceased father. In the end he got his way and Gillian and Peter moved to live with Keith in a large detached house in Didsbury, a leafy suburb of the city of Manchester, where he was now Professor of Physics in the university.

Under Keith's wise and gentle tutelage, Gillian and Peter blossomed and in their turn went to university and eventually made good careers, Peter as a consultant cardiologist and Gillian as a political journalist and commentator. By the time of his retirement in 1987 at the age of 68 Keith had five 'grandchildren' ranging in age from fourteen months to seven years who were to be the delight of his declining years. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 many of the military and scientific secrets of the Cold War years began to be released into the public domain. For the first time Keith's part in the development of the first nuclear bomb was officially revealed and recognised and in 1993 he was belatedly awarded an MBE by the British Government, although there were many who believed that the quality and originality of his work in the 1940s was deserving of a Nobel Prize.

In his retirement many of Keith's colleagues suggested that as one of the few remaining scientists who had worked at Los Alamos he should write a history of those years. Although he did contribute a chapter to an official account of the British role in the development of the atomic bomb, he surprised everyone by revising the draft of his brother's unfinished second novel. This was published in 2003 shortly after the invasion of Iraq by British and American forces. It quickly became a best seller, and was particularly popular with opponents of Britain's involvement in the Iraq War, exposing as it did the murky history of her role in the politics of the Middle East in the years following the end of the Second World War.

Keith died peacefully in his sleep in 2006 after a short illness. The only family photographs that he had on display in his bedroom were those of him with his 'grandchildren' on their many camping expeditions to the Lake District, and the official photograph of him outside Buckingham Palace after receiving his MBE from the Queen. However, when his adopted daughter Gillian was sorting through his possessions, hidden at the bottom of a drawer in his bedside table she was surprised to find an album of black and white photographs of her mother Eveline in some of which she was rather sexily dressed, and a small bundle of letters in her mother's handwriting dating from the early spring of 1940 to summer 1941. When she read the letters, which were full of expressions of growing passion and deep longing to be with him, for the first time Gillian realised that her mother had had an intimate love affair with Keith over a year before she had even met Leonard. She was very moved by what she discovered, and even more by what they revealed about Keith's unselfish and caring nature. She also decided that there was nothing to be gained by making Keith and Eveline's relationship public, and she put the photographs and letters in his coffin.

Keith had requested a quiet family funeral followed by cremation as most of his former colleagues and friends had predeceased him. However, present in the crematorium chapel and filling it to overflowing, in addition to his 'children' and 'grandchildren', the university Vice Chancellor and senior members of the Department of Physics were there to pay their last respects as well as many of his former students, some of who had come from overseas to be there. This would no doubt have been a complete surprise to Keith, who remained a modest man to the end of his life, but was a thoroughly merited tribute to a life lived in the service of others, and a demonstration of the love and esteem in which he was held by those who had known him.