In March 1941 the President of the Royal Society, Henry Dale, dropped in on his friend and the secretary of the Society, A.V. Hill, to hint that he was planning on recommending Hill for a knighthood. With Dale’s recommendation, such an honour would be almost guaranteed, especially as knighthoods for a couple of previous secretaries of the society suggested a precedent (or maybe even the beginnings of a tradition). Dale thought that his confidential conversation with Hill was a friendly (if a little improper) formality. He had already written to Winston Churchill to nominate Hill, whom he said occupied a ‘leading position among the distinguished scientific research workers of the present day’, and whose ‘reputation is probably as high in the United States of America, and in other foreign countries, as in Britain’. A knighthood would be appropriate not only because of Hill’s eminence as a physiologist, but also in light of his ‘important’ and (inevitably) ‘confidential’ public services ‘in connexion with the present war’. Even before the war had started, Hill had been involved in the development of radar and the rescue of refugee academics from Nazi Germany through the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning. A few decades previously, Dale was aware, Hill had already accepted an OBE for wartime scientific work in 1918 when he was more junior – if no less talented – in his profession. It seemed entirely reasonable that he would welcome further honours.
However, Dale had not realized that not only had this earlier award become something of an embarrassment for his friend, but also that a knighthood was wholly unacceptable from Hill’s point of view. The conversation, which Dale had hoped would bring pleasure, ended in awkwardness as Hill immediately rejected the idea of a knighthood. Lest his friend think his fervent reaction to the offer rude Hill quickly wrote to Dale to clarify his reasons. Hill recalled his OBE – won at the time of greatest public skepticism about the new Order of the British Empire – with something approaching shame. Even though his research was of direct importance to the prosecution of the First World War, he was guilty that he had not been suffering on the front lines with others of his generation (see Chapter one). He gave Dale two reasons for declining the knighthood. In terms of the good of the Royal Society, he argued that his receiving such a title would create an undesirable and unnecessary precedent of automatic knighthoods for secretaries of the Society, which would ‘better be kept for people in the Government Service. The prestige of the Royal Society does not depend on such things’.
More importantly he attested to a ‘deep-rooted personal dislike of the whole “honours” system’. The system was bad for scientists ‘because it causes jealousy and a feeling that their contributions are not recognised in those who don’t get honours’. Among their colleagues in the world of science, Hill suggested, knighthoods and the prestige they brought had become too important as markers of status and, consequently, promoted professional jealousy. The whole game of titles, this response implied, was below him (although he did not stress this point too much – Dale had accepted a knighthood almost ten years earlier). When he looked at his colleagues, with all their internal bickering and rivalry, Hill saw the knighthood as a cause of status anxiety rather than a form of public recognition that enriched the profession.
In his unpublished memoirs, Hill railed against what he perceived as the integration of the Royal Society into the government, and argued that the Society’s independence should be preserved, citing the automatic knighthoods for secretaries as an indication of this invidious integration with the ‘Establishment’. In an honorific sense, as this chapter will show, this integration was catalyzed by the Second World War and the importance of scientific research to the conduct of the war. Hill also justified his rejection of a knighthood by quoting Thomas Huxley’s argument that ‘The sole order of nobility which, in my judgment, becomes a philosopher, is the rank which he holds in the estimation of his fellow-workers, who are the only competent judges in such matters.’ Faraday, Darwin, Shakespeare and George Trevelyan never adorned their names with the title ‘Sir’, and privately Hill relished the fact that he kept company with such luminaries. This did not stop him from accepting the CH from the government, which did not carry a title (but which, if anything, aroused a greater sense of competition and jealousy than knighthoods because of its exclusivity) in 1946. His biographer suggested his reluctance for accepting a knighthood may have had something to do with his detestation for his given names, Archibald Vivian. Being styled ‘Sir Archibald’ would have been frustrating for the man who wanted to be known as ‘Hill’.
Source: Henry Dale Papers, Royal Society Archives