MAUD COMMITTEE• 343AlthoughWinston Churchill’s scientific adviser, Professor Lin-
demann, was yet to be convinced, the Thomson committee received
some disturbing news from Copenhagen, where Lise Meitner had
been visiting as the Nazis had invaded. Viennese-born, beautiful, and
Jewish, Meitner was Frisch’s aunt, and a former X-ray technician
during World War I, who had headed the physics department at Otto
Hahn’s laboratory in Dahlem until July 1938 when, in fear of perse-
cution, she had moved to Stockholm—covertly via Holland, having
been denied an exit visa by the Nazis. Her escape was engineered
with Hahn’s knowledge and the help ofPaul Rosbaud, the scientific
editor of the publishers Springer Verlag. With the minimal protection
of her Austrian passport, she had promptly returned to Sweden
whence, on 9 April, she sent a telegram to a friend in England, appar-
ently containing a hidden meaning:
met niels and margarethe recently both well but unhappy
about events please inform cockroft and maud ray kentThe message was relayed to Cockcroft at the Cavendish Laboratory
in Cambridge, who understandably placed the worst possible inter-
pretation upon it. He read it to mean thatNiels Bohrwas anxious
about the work being undertaken by the Nazis, and he believed a clue
was contained in the inexplicable reference to ‘‘MAUD RAY
KENT.’’ This, Cockcroft realized, was almost an anagram for ‘‘ra-
dium taken’’ and took it to be a characteristically ingenious warning
intended to alert him to the fact that the Germans were collecting
radium to assist in a bomb development project. Chadwick agreed
with the anagram theory, which coincided with other reports that the
Nazis were gathering physicists at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes in
Berlin, and concluded that the enemy had begun a race to build an
atomic bomb. As a consequence, the Thomson Committee renamed
itself the Maud Committee and prepared a detailed report for the War
Cabinet recommending further research.
In fact, Meitner had not concealed any sinister message in her tele-
gram. She merely had wanted to inform Cockcroft that the Bohrs
were still in Copenhagen and to have the news passed to the English
governess, Maud Ray, who had taught the Bohrs’ boys English and
was presently living in Kent. That particular mystery remained un-