By the end of the war Holmes was still at Imperial College, still only a demonstrator and still on a salary of £150 a year, despite having published three books and gained a significant reputation for his work on radiometric dating. His finances were permanently under pressure such that when Maggie gave birth to their son Norman within two weeks of Armistice Day in 1918, they became critical. He had tried to get other jobs but despite being awarded the doctorate dreamt about in his letters from Mozambique, somehow no job had materialised either before, during or after the war. Watts had tried to get him a position as lecturer in petrology at Oxford ‘but naturally failed!’; he had testimonials from many eminent geologists for his application to Cardiff; but in 1919 he could not even get a teaching job at Aberystwyth. He wrote to Dr Prior:

I am glad to tell you that Aberystwyth failed to appreciate my qualifications for the geology post and appointed a student (Welsh!) instead. The department is very small and crowded and its chief objective appears to be to train girls to pass examinations to be teachers. So I am well out of it!