The man who made Churchill beam

BUSTS of Winston Churchill take pride of place in the home of

Professor R. V. Jones of Aberdeen as he reflects on an extraordinary

career which brought him fame as a scientist while still in his

twenties.

The man who discovered how to divert the German bombers from their

wartime targets -- and became one of Churchill's blue-eyed boys -- now

lives alone in Aberdeen's west end, a tall, quiet-spoken man of 82.

His thoughts range from those dramas of 1940 to the personal tragedy

of losing, within a month, both his wife Vera and their glamorous

daughter Susan, a former Miss Scotland who hit the headlines and the

high spots of New York society.

The man who also met Einstein raised eyebrows and incurred the

displeasure of daughter Susan when he was found mixing with the Moonies

religious sect. But he can explain it all.

So what were the origins of this gifted scientist -- and why did he

linger in Aberdeen when higher positions were calling?

Reginald Victor Jones was born in the London street which became

better known in more recent times as the scene of the Brixton riots. His

father's career was split between being a postman and a sergeant in the

Grenadier Guards.

But there was a clever streak in the family and young Jones won a

scholarship to Oxford in 1929 -- it was there he met Einstein -- and had

already gained a doctorate in physics by the age of 23.

''I was going to be an astronomer and my life looked fairly settled,''

he recalls. But his first scientific paper was on the subject of

infra-red detectors, at the same time as radar became a topic.

With the rise of Hitler, Professor Lindemann, Jones's superior who

became Lord Cherwell and a friend of Churchill, was agitating for the

formation of a defence committee. The question in 1938 was: Do the

Germans have radar? Our intelligence services didn't know.

Young Jones, who had developed a taste for intelligence work, could

hardly have guessed that he would soon be scientific adviser to MI6 and

Assistant Director of Intelligence at the Air Ministry.

''I had come to the conclusion,'' he says, ''that the Germans were

developing radio beams to guide aircraft on their night-time raids on

British cities. Professor Lindemann could hardly believe it but he told

Churchill and I was asked to write him a report.

''I had seen Churchill in 1937 when he looked very tired and we all

thought he wouldn't last much longer. Now I was called to a meeting and

found him at the top of the table with people ranged on either side.

They seemed to be talking at cross-purposes when Churchill asked me a

question.

''I said 'Can I tell you the story from the beginning?' He said that

was a good idea and apparently I proceeded to talk for 20 minutes.''

If Churchill was alarmed by the Jones discovery, he was relieved to

hear that something could be done about it. By picking up from German

transmitters their pattern of radio dots and dashes, you could jam and

paralyse their system and feed in misleading signals. That way, you

could divert their bombers to targets in the open countryside where they

would do less damage.

Churchill was delighted. From that moment on, he would call young

Jones ''the man who broke the bloody beam''.

Of course it didn't stop all German raids but Jones would include in

his claims that it averted at least half a dozen other tragedies on the

scale of Coventry's devastation.

It was the beginning of a constant scientific battle, not only to

counter the German menace of bombs and rockets but to defeat their own

defences against British raids. The Germans would have given anything

for a Jones on their side, a fact revealed in post-war meetings with

their top men, who were unstinting in their admiration and astonished

they had been foiled by one so young.

With all enmity gone, he now counts some of those Germans among his

best friends, one of whom sent him a piece of the Berlin Wall!

So Jones became a wartime legend while still very young, credited with

being the father of electronic warfare, establishing principles applied

as recently as the Gulf War. But, in the peace of 1945, individual

genius gave way to bureaucracy and he fell out with the Joint

Intelligence Committee.

''I had suffered so much during the war from professors speaking

outside their expertise that I thought I had burned my academic boats,''

he says.

However, an Oxford friend had become a professor at Aberdeen

University, passing on good impressions, and Jones himself had visited

the city in 1943 to take charge of a German Junkers 88 which came down

there.

He and a wartime colleague, Professor Philip Dee, both headed for

Scotland, Professor Dee to Glasgow, where he found that one of his

predecessors was Lord Kelvin, so venerated that they even preserved

broken glass from his attempt to create a vacuum.

Jones, on the other hand, found that one of his predecessors as

professor of natural philosophy at Aberdeen was the much-neglected James

Clerk Maxwell, whose reputation he set about restoring. In 1946, R. V.

Jones settled among his post-war students, many of them returning

ex-servicemen intrigued to learn the identity of their professor.

Still in his thirties when I first met him, Jones made Aberdonians

feel good to have a man of his calibre in their midst. The obverse of

the scientific nature was an impish inclination towards practical jokes

and playing the mouth-organ (he wrote a serious paper on the Theory of

Practical Joking).

Apart from teaching, his scientific work continued at Aberdeen, which

became a world centre for creating crystals. Former students also

carried his development of mechanical movement into circuit-board

manufacture in companies like Philips and Hewlett-Packard (Philips has a

plaque in his honour at Eindhoven).

''Aberdeen had a lot going for it when I came here. My wife liked it

and we were made very welcome. Over the years I had offers in the

industrial and academic fields but I didn't want to become a

vice-chancellor.

''I do sometimes wish I were closer to real centres of learning.

Aberdeen had the chance to become one of those centres but went instead

for expansion at the expense of quality. When I came here there were 23

universities in Britain and Aberdeen was in the top half. Now there are

100 universities and it ranks about fiftieth.''

Relations soured a little over his refusal to quit the handsome

university house in Queen's Terrace, formerly the Granite City's Harley

Street and now prime property for oil-related and financial companies.

There he resides with memories of a lively family. He laments the loss

of discipline in society but concedes that he had his own share of

problems.

Daughter Rosemary, now a divorcee of 44 with a business in London,

once ran away from home. Her elder sister Susan, a glamorous blonde,

worried her father by entering the world of beauty contests which took

her to the latter stages of Miss Universe.

Susan became the Countess Parente, married to an Italian-American

aristocrat who was physician to people like Frank Sinatra and Zsa Zsa

Gabor. But high life in Manhattan ended in divorce and she returned to a

second marriage in Scotland, acknowledging the frothy nature of her

early days.

Indeed she fell to chastising her father, alleging that he had allowed

himself to become a respectable front for the cult of the Moonies. The

learned professor assured me that, although he is still in touch, he

never did have a religious commitment.

They had merely organised some splendid scientific conferences and he

had agreed to be co-chairman when there were no fewer than 18 Nobel

prizewinners present.

Tragically, Susan's diabetes became a serious matter and she died two

years ago at 51, within a few weeks of her mother. Son Robert, 50, is a

seismologist.

Professor Jones surveys the various honours around the house but

settles on the busts of Churchill, whose determination to be in the

thick of the action fascinated him.

He had booked himself a berth for D-Day and stood down only when King

George VI said that, if Churchill was going, he was going too. Did I

know that Winston, determined to be a pilot, had chalked up 140 flights

before the First World War? He gave it up only when his deeply worried

wife had a miscarriage.

We were back where the story had started. Back in those dens of

top-secret discussion where a young lad from London confronted history

-- and sowed the seeds of a legend.