Crucial war work by staff included research into the manufacture of a certain type of glass (previously only available from Germany); training thousands of munitions workers and aeronautical inspectors; investigating the nutritive properties of new foods; providing intensive linguistic courses for interpreters, and the invention of a ‘bacterised peat’ to increase the output of land, by producing artificially a rapid decomposition.
Captain William Brown, then head of the King’s Physiological Department, was appointed chief neurologist to the fourth Army, commanding the NYDN (Not Yet Diagnosed Nervous) centre – the medical term for suspected shell shock at the time. Academics served abroad as bacteriologists, analysing the water supplied to troops, took up work for the War Trade Intelligence Department, and the Department of Household Science ran courses in ‘trench cookery’.