The Janus-face of Techno-nationalism: Barnes Willis and the "Strength of England"

Barnes Wallis has long been the most famous British engineer of the twentieth century. Celebrated for his invention of the "Bouncing Bomb," used in the "Dam Busters" raid during World War II, he has been the subject of the immensely popular and still well-known British film The Dam Busters , released in 1955, and a major BBC television documentary in 1967 and two biographies, one in 1973, the other in 2005. ¹ The Bouncing Bomb and the Dam Busters raid have been the subject of numerous popular books, while his representation in The Dam Busters has itself received attention from historians. In 2001, a public poll made him one of the hundred "Greatest Britons" ever—the only other engineers on the list were Isambard Kingdom Brunel, James Watt, and Frank Whittle. ² But fame is not power, and there were postwar engineers who had greater influence and were more grandly decorated than Wallis. ³ In interesting and important ways, however, Wallis stood for engineers as a whole and their power and influence, or lack of it, for many decades. Although his fame as an engineer and representative of British engineering endures, his powerful and distinctive vision of a future England and English engineering—the one most clearly articulated by an engineer during the postwar period—does not. ⁴

In a series of speeches and interviews from the 1950s to the 1970s, Wallis denounced England's decline and put forward a program for its redemption. ⁵ The creativity of its engineers and their new technologies of trade and communication, he argued, could arrest national decline and reinvigorate the British Commonwealth. Wallis spoke with authority, and his arguments were taken up and debated by both supporters and detractors. While many of these arguments were not original, they nevertheless reflected and provided a prominent example of what was taken to be a central problem of British science and technology in the postwar years: inadequate support from the British government. He did not restrict himself to rhetoric—he attempted to materialize his ideology through his designs. Wallis designed supersonic swing-wing airplanes and merchant cargo-carrying submarines, both of which he viewed as quintessentially English technologies that would counter U.S. commercial and Soviet military threats. Individuality, craftsmanship, high technology, and anti-gigantism were, he believed, all aspects of English technology that stemmed from the uniqueness of the English character.

This technological nationalism was backward-looking in character: Wallis sought technological solutions to Britain's decline that drew on particular notions of technology and empire from the interwar period. He envisaged a "second Elizabethan Age" in which a mercantilist, even autarkic, Britain would be at the heart of a strengthened British Commonwealth. Wallis's views on the British Empire, the Commonwealth, "New Elizabethanism," morality, and the family were typical of the postwar political Right. Indeed, he had close associations with Conservative members of Parliament (MPs) (and, later, the far-right "Monday Club"), and he was much exercised by nonwhite immigration into Britain. Like many on the Right at that time, he was notably anti-American. ⁶ This particular mix of beliefs is of some significance because it reminds us that enthusiasm for high technology and progressive thinking should not be conflated—the two are not always congruent in twentieth-century ideologies.

Wallis provides an example of technological nationalism as a critique of the technological policies of the state, as well as of leading engineers and of industry. This point is of interest, as most studies of technological nationalism characterize it as an ideology of the state and do not inquire into the politics of engineers. ⁷ Exceptions are to be found in the work of Jeffrey Herf and Gabrielle Hecht, who have studied the politics of engineers and technocrats. There are clear similarities between Wallis and the four German engineers studied by Herf who were active in the Weimar and Nazi periods, and the French nuclear engineers studied by Hecht: all were nationalistic in their thinking about technology and wanted to create technologies bearing national characteristics. ⁸ [End Page 64...