'The New Men' (Sunday 1st June 2003 , 3:00 p.m.)
Eliot's war was spent locked in the race against the germans to split the atom. It was the greatest adventure of his life. The biggest thing he had ever been involved in. You could say he was the crucial link between the nuclear research facility at Barford and Whitehall. On the one hand he was struggling to keep the scientists under some semblance of control, among them his brother Martin and his former Cambridge colleague, Walter Luke. On the other, he fought to keep his masters in government convinced that nuclear research was a vital initiative. On an April evening in 1943, he arrives at the hanger in Barford, where the atomic pile - a huge, concret cube - loomed like an eastern religious monument. Here he finds that there are problems in the development.
Dramatised by Jonathan Holloway from C. P. Snow's 1954 novel, "The New Men".
With David Haig [Lewis Eliot], Tim McInnerny [Martin Eliot], Jeremy Swift [Walter Luke], Claire Skinner [Irene Eliot née Brunskill], Adrian Scarborough [Eric Sawbridge], John Carlisle [Sir Hector Rose], Sean Baker [Captain Smith], Andrew Wincott [Edgar Hankins], and Rolf Saxon [David Rubin].
60 minutes.
