HOUSMAN'S desire not to be known as a gentleman and Gowland Hopkins's demand for recognition and proper respect raise the question of the social standing of those people who in the twentieth century occupied the cognitive niches and sites with which the present study is preoccupied. Olive Lloyd-Baker's and Joseph Needham's remarks are reminders that even deep into the twentieth century the very concept of merit was contested and the notion of hereditary talent still held its hold. An anxiety about status is reflected in a remark Cyril Hinshelwood, president of the Royal Society from 1955 to 1960, made to Isaiah Berlin: ‘there is no quicker way of making a first-class institution third-class than by appointing second-class men.’ Even in 1968 the report of Lord Fulton's on scientists’ place in the civil service struck a note of status anxiety:

The historian who has studied these issues traces the discrepancy between the status of scientists and administrators in the civil service to the founding of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research during the Great War.

This chapter, therefore, is about the institutional and intellectual identities of British learned people from 1900 to 1950. It shows how far belonging and knowing were tied together and how far one's identity was tied to what one claims to know. It shows how far one's conception of oneself was connected to membership in various epistemic communities and how far these conceptions of identity rested upon the recognition and respect such communities provided.