C. P. Snow - Life

Life

Born in Leicester to Ada and William Snow (a church organist and choirmaster), Charles was the second of four boys (his brothers being Harold, Eric and Philip Snow). Snow was educated at the Leicestershire and Rutland College, now the University of Leicester, where he read Chemistry for two years and proceeded to a Master's in Physics. From Leicester, Snow went on a scholarship to Cambridge and gained his Ph. D. in Physics (Spectroscopy). In 1930 he became a Fellow of Christ's College.

He served in several senior civil service positions: as technical director of the Ministry of Labour from 1940 to 1944, and as civil service commissioner from 1945 to 1960. As a politician he was parliamentary secretary in the House of Lords to the Minister of Technology from 1964 to 1966 in the Labour administration of Harold Wilson. He was knighted in 1957 and made a life peer, as Baron Snow of the City of Leicester, in 1964.

Snow married the novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson in 1950. They had one son. Friends included the mathematician G. H. Hardy, for whom he would write a biographical foreword in A Mathematician's Apology, the physicist P.M.S. Blackett, the X-ray crystallographer J.D. Bernal and the cultural historian Jacques Barzun. At Christ's he tutored H. S. Hoff – later better known as the novelist William Cooper. The two became friends, worked together in the civil service and wrote versions of each other into their novels: Snow was the model for the college dean, Robert, in Cooper's Scenes from Provincial Life sequence. In 1960, he gave the Godkin Lectures at Harvard University, about the clashes between Henry Tizard and F. Lindemann (later Lord Cherwell), both scientific advisors to British governments around the time of World War II. The lectures were subsequently published as Science and Government. For the academic year 1961 to 1962, Lord and Lady Snow served as Fellows on the faculty in the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University.