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Collection Description
The Archive contains substantial record of Crowther’s long career
in journalism, including his work for Nature, Scientific American,
New Scientist and, in particular, the Manchester Guardian where he
was the regular science correspondent, a position for which there was
no precedent at the time. The position allowed Crowther to become acquainted
with leading scientific figures in the 1930s. Topics covered range
from the technology of ‘talkies’ to science in Czechoslovakia.
Scientific breakthroughs in television and atomic weapons are covered
in an accessible but authoritative way. Crowther’s politics tended
to surface only his articles on Russia (his four-part ‘Science
in Soviet Russia’ appeared in 1929), but his papers also demonstrate
the subtle political nature of the editing process which Crowther viewed
as compromising the scientist’s supposed objectivity. Daily journalism
was only one of Crowther’s many activities, however, and he produced
a rapid sequence of books, including An Outline of the Universe (1931)
and The ABC of Chemistry (1932) he communicated momentous discoveries
in the physical sciences to a wide readership, while The Social Relations
of Science (1941) occupies a genuine niche position in the ‘science
and society’ literature of the 1930s and 1940s. The Crowther
Archive contains correspondence, research, notes and drafts relating
to 40 different titles, together with an associated collection of many
of the books themselves.
Crowther’s enthusiasm for Stalin’s policy towards science
fed his own ideological view of the scientist’s role in society.
He visited the USSR several times in the 1930s and the Archive contains
valuable and detailed accounts of Soviet research institutes of the
time.
Despite a steep political leaning towards the left, Crowther was a
true internationalist at heart and forged links with French Communist
scientists like Frederic and Irène Joliot-Curie which led to
a role in the creation of the Anglo-French Society of Scientists in
1940. He also maintained connections to European intelligentsia, including
prime movers in the Bauhaus movement such as architect Walter Gropius
and painter László Moholy-Nagy. Correspondence with these
figures is included in the Archive.
In 1940, Crowther forged links with Mass-Observation’s Tom Harrisson
(see the Mass-Observation
Archive) to investigate the public’s
perception of science. Crowther was concerned that the caricatured ‘mad
scientists’ populating pulp novels and low-budget films left
the public with a preconceived view of scientists as essentially. The
Crowther Archive and the ‘Science’ topic files in the Mass-Observation
Archive document Crowther’s and Harrisson’s efforts
to promote science in a more positive light.
At the outbreak of war Crowther was appointed the first director of
the Science Department of the British Council and the Archive records
its important role in shaping the international cultural body which
ultimately became Unesco. The Crowther Archive is an invaluable source
of official material for those investigating Unesco’s origins
and workings. It also records two other significant wartime endeavours
which came out of Crowther’s time at the British Council. The
first was the establishment of a Cultural Scientific Office in Chungking
headed by Crowther’s associate, Joseph Needham, who did much
to challenge the Western perception of the Chinese as ‘mystical’ people
who knew nothing. The second product of Crowther’s directorship
was the Society for Visiting Scientists, which aided imperilled or
vulnerable scientists in Europe such as those endangered by the rise
of Nazism. The Archive includes Crowther’s detailed notes on
the history of the Science Department itself.
Making friends in high places and enemies on both the left and right, the correspondence housed in the Archive is often as revealing as Crowther’s published works. Correspondents include historian and literary critic AL Rowse, geneticist and statistician Lancelot Hogben, language reformer CK Ogden and Communist Party founder Ralph Fox. His correspondents frequently attached related lecture notes, pamphlets and press-cuttings to their letters and these are housed alongside.
Archival history
The Crowther Archive was acquired in the early days of the Science
Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex, when Roy MacLeod,
Research Fellow at SPRU (later Reader in History and Social Studies
of Science) was building the new discipline of the ‘social studies
of science’ and seeking to give Sussex a leading role in it.
MacLeod then taught courses that included material on the history of
science writing and science journalism.
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