The Brit's were amazingly tolerant and actually solicited crackpot ideas during the war. Many of them worked out - like dam busting, tanks with flails to clear mine fields, radar, atom bombs (lots of the initial work was done in England before they moved to the US), code cracking computers, jet engines, etc. Some were truly crack pot like the aircraft carriers made of sawdust and ice, a model of which was built in Canada before giving up on the idea. But they were desperate enough to try just about anything.