Geoffrey Pyke - Between The Wars

Between The Wars

Pyke tried his hand at a number of money-making schemes. For a while, he speculated heavily on the commodity market and used his own system of financial management instead of more conventional techniques. He worked through a number of different stockbrokers so that no one of them would realise the large amount he was investing, thereby avoiding higher stock broking charges.

The Pykes had a son, David (1921–2001). Pyke became preoccupied by the question of his son's education. He wanted to create an education that promoted curiosity and equipped young people to live in the twentieth century – an experience of education that would be utterly different to his own. To do this, in October 1924 he set up an infants' school in his Cambridge home. His wife, Margaret, was a strong supporter of the school and its ideas. Pyke recruited psychologist Susan Sutherland Isaacs to run the school; although Pyke had many original ideas regarding education, he promised her that he would not interfere.

Pyke continued with his city speculations which funded the Malting House School.

The greater his gains, the more he invested until he began to see himself and the people who ran the Great Ormond Street office as a gang of economic corsairs, youthful Bloomsbury intellectual buccaneers slashing through the City and coming away with all its money, and with it endowing a worthwhile work. Certainly no individual in the strange company ever made any noticeable personal profit, and Pyke's high salary was always paid immediately into the Malting House account. —Lampe

The Malting House School was based on the theories of the American philosopher and educationist John Dewey. It fostered the individual development of children; children were given great freedom and were supported rather than punished. The teachers were seen as observers of the children, who were seen as research workers. For a short time, The Maltings was a critical if not a commercial success; it was visited by many educationists and it was the subject of a film documentary. Pyke had ambitious plans for the school and began to interfere with the day-to-day running, whereupon Susan Isaacs left The Maltings.

In 1927, Pyke lost all his money; he was bankrupt. The Malting House School was forced to close, Margaret Pyke had to take a job as a headmistress's secretary; she left Geoffrey although they were never divorced. Already suffering from periodic fits of depression and burdened with huge debts to his brokers, he now withdrew from normal life altogether and existed on donations from his close friends.

In 1934, Nazis in Germany announced the creation of an institute for the study of Jewish history and culture. Hitler said that it would be endowed with unlimited funds for scholars who would establish "scientifically" why world Jewry should be exterminated. Pyke was incensed by this, not because it represented a personal threat, but because of its inhumanity. Pyke decided to campaign for Christian leaders to make simultaneous public statements condemning the Nazi move. He raised money to set up an organisation to combat anti-Semitism, although this did not succeed. He wrote a number of magazine articles on the irrationality of prejudice and started work on a book, but became distracted by other injustices.

With the outbreak of the Spanish civil war, Pyke supported the British Voluntary Industrial Aid organisation. Voluntary Industrial Aid encouraged those who had little money to contribute their time and skills instead. Organised by Trade Unions, workers were, with the assistance of sympathetic employers who lent the use of machines and premises, able to produce useful items of equipment. In Spain, ambulances were in short supply. Pyke invented a motorcycle sidecar to carry medical supplies or a patient. He raised funds to pay for powerful, American-built Harley-Davidson motorcycles that were then plentifully available second-hand, and persuaded workers to make the sidecars free of charge with the results being sent out to Spain.

Pyke also assisted in arranging for the manufacture of mattresses for the Spanish government, for the collection of redundant horse-drawn ploughs for Spanish farmers, and bundles of hand-tools for use by labourers. He published aggressive propaganda brochures pointing out that British workers were not to consider their contributions a form of charity while Spanish people were fighting and dying for their fellow workers.

To answer a shortage of bandages and dressings in Spain, he recalled that in the First World War, sun dried peat moss sewn into muslin bags was used as a substitute for cotton dressings. Soon, moss collected by volunteers in Britain was on its way to Spain.

Throughout this period Pyke was short-tempered with other supporters of the Spanish loyalists; at meetings, he could not understand why his own plans were not wholeheartedly supported by others; he was frequently loud and rude.

In 1938, Pyke took great pleasure in his son's acceptance as a junior member of a US medical research unit. It pleased him that his son described the work as "beautiful" – to Pyke the most beautiful thing would always be pure research: the acquisition of new knowledge for its own sake. David Pyke went on to become an expert in Diabetes.