Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin [Paperback]

Described in the blurb as 'a vivid love-letter to quiet men in pullovers', this is a fascinating account of those ingenious engineers who invented the technologies of the future, often on a shoestring budget. It opens with the arrival of the first V2 noted by the British Interplanetary Society in a London pub, and we soon read of a surreal meeting between Arthur C Clark, the famous science-fiction writer, and C S Lewis. We learn how Britain cancelled its space program and how Ernest Benn was a good friend to Concorde. The story covers other technologies such as computer games, mobile telephones and mind-boggling efforts with the human genome. It makes for compulsive reading and is the sort of book only British endeavours could produce. It deserves to sell and sell. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

'A must for every British Christmas stocking.' John Carey; 'Unputdownable... the man writes like a dream - informed, fresh, racy prose.' Guardian

The most fascinating book I've read all year. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

A rapturous history of British engineering, a vivid love-letter to quiet men in pullovers, Backroom Boys tells the story of how this country lost its industrial tradition and got back something else.

'A wonderful accomplishment - Backroom Boys sharply evokes a lost world of Dan Dare, Look and Learn and Meccano, and goes on to show us how that world was never lost: that it is, in fact, the secret history of today.' Ken MacLeod

'Unreservedly marvellous . . . Francis Spufford is the Tom Wolfe of technology journalism.' Focus

'Provides start-to-finish enjoyment . . . [Spufford] can make the heart leap simply by detailing what engineers do with mild steel or carbon fibre.' Sunday Times

'I don't want to pretend that Backroom Boys is perfect; It's just as near to it as makes no difference.' Daily Telegraph

'The man writes like a dream - informed, fresh, racy prose . . .

You wouldn't think that a book describing the fall and rise of British technologies since 1945 could be unputdownable, but Spufford shows it can be done.' Guardian

Britain is the only country in the world to have cancelled its space programme just as it put its first rocket into orbit. Starting with this forgotten episode, ‘Backroom Boys’ tells the bittersweet story of how one country lost its industrial tradition and got back something else.

Sad, inspiring, funny and ultimately triumphant, it follows the technologists whose work kept Concorde flying, created the computer game, conquered the mobile-phone business, saved the human genome for the human race - and who now are sending the Beagle 2 probe to burrow in the cinnamon sands of Mars.

‘Backroom Boys’ is a vivid love-letter to quiet men in pullovers, to those whose imaginings take shape not in words but in mild steel and carbon fibre and lines of code. Above all, it is a celebration of big dreams achieved with slender means. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Francis Spufford, a former Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year (1997), has edited two acclaimed literary anthologies and a collection of essays about the history of technology. His first book, I May Be Some Time, won the Writers' Guild Award for Best Non-Fiction Book of 1996, the Banff Mountain Book Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award. His second, The Child That Books Built, gave Neil Gaiman 'the peculiar feeling that there was now a book I didn't need to write'. His third, Backroom Boys, was called 'as nearly perfect as makes no difference' by the Daily Telegraph and was shortlisted for the Aventis Prize. In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He teaches writing at Goldsmiths College and lives near Cambridge.

[The ‘Preface’ from ‘Backroom Boys’]

‘The backroom boys’ is a phrase from the 1940s. It’s what industrial-age Britain used to call the ingenious engineers who occupied the draughty buildings at the edge of factory grounds and invented the technologies of the future. Almost always, they were boys, or rather men: for historical reasons, but also because there is perhaps an affinity between the narrow-focused, wordless concentration required for engineering and a particular kind of male mind. Black-and-white war films made them iconic, gave them a public face everybody recognised, as the unworldly innocents who somehow produced a stream of spectacularly lethal gadgets. ‘The backroom boys have come up with this. Perhaps you’d like to explain, Dr Prendergast.’ ‘Certainly, Major. You twist this little dial here, breaking the mercury-fulminate fuse, and you gently lower this lever here, and a sheet of flame comes out there. Oh, I am sorry. I’m sure your moustache will grow back.’ In the cinema, real backroom boys like Barnes Wallis, creator of the bouncing bomb, and R. J. Mitchell, designer of the Spitfire, were joined by a legion of fictional counterparts. The public learned a set of characteristics that apparently spelled boffin: distracted demeanour, ineptitude at human relationships, perpetual surprise at the use that other people put their ideas to. But the backroom boys didn’t only do military technology. They existed in every industry. They worked on the chemistry of paint, they devised new relays for telephone exchanges, they improved the performance of knitting machines. They were the quiet makers, regarded with affectionate incomprehension (and a little condescension) by a nation which found it easier to admire its smooth talkers and nice movers.

This book begins in the 1940s, but it is about much more recent British history. It is about what happened to the backroom boys as the world of the aircraft factories and the steel mills faded. There is an expected story here, a story we all know already about decline and the diminishing of British ambitions, but like the stereotype of the backroom boys, that story gives a complacent pat to a process which was, in truth, much less predictable. It’s true that there were errors, there were losses, there was a retreat from industrial competence out of all proportion with necessity. But there were unremembered victories as well as unforgotten failures. Above all, there was adaptation. When the old industries faltered in Britain, the ingenious spirit of the backroom boys survived. The urge to build the future detached itself from lathes and wind tunnels, and reappeared in the new technologies of software, gene sequencing and wireless communications. The backroom boys are with us still.

This book is about the makers, but it’s also about the making. Engineering, of any description, is an art of the possible. It happens at the junction between what is materially possible and what is humanly possible. Its course is shaped by the latest developments in the endless struggle to manipulate obdurate matter, and also by the agendas and priorities and resources and hopes and illusions of a society. Engineering is where science intersects with the way we live. So the fortunes of governments and businesses belong in its story; they have to be told too.

All the events described here really happened, but I am not trying to write the whole history of the transformation that took place in Britain over the last thirty years. I have not set out to be comprehensive, or final. I have chosen six incidents in the process, six scenes in a much larger drama. But, taken together, they tell one story: the story of how Britain stopped being an industrial society, and turned into something else. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.