by Sue Corbett
This was not done by chance; she had made a close, critical study of the craft. Lecturing, once, on Aristotle’s Poetics she remarked that he was obviously hankering after a good detective novel because he had laid it down that the writer’s business was to lead the reader up the garden, to make the murderer’s villainy implicit in his character from the start, and to remember that the dénouement is the most difficult part of the story.
But it is some 20 years since Miss Sayers wrote a detective story, and, shortly before her death, she said: “There will be no more Peter Wimseys.” The detective writer had been ousted by the Christian apologist. Miss Sayers approached her task of making religion real for the widest public with a zeal that sometimes shocked the conventionally orthodox (with whose protests she was well able to deal) and always held the ears of listeners and the eyes of the reading public. The Man Born to be King became a BBC best-seller, attracting large audiences Christmas after Christmas.
She carried what she regarded as the central purpose of her life on to the stage and into books. Dogma had no terrors for her. She did not believe in putting water into the pure spirit of her Church. Dante, with his colloquial idiom and unselfconscious piety, naturally attracted her. The translations she published of his Inferno and Purgatorio caught the directness of the original but failed, as Binyon did not, to catch the poetry. But her prose comments have done more than those of any other recent English author to quicken interest in Dante.
Dorothy Leigh Sayers was born in 1893, the daughter of the Rev Henry Sayers and Helen Mary Leigh. She was in print before she was 21 with Op I, a book of verse, and followed it in 1919 by another, Catholic Tales. It was a medium in which she could be skilful, flexible, and effective, and readers of The Times Literary Supplement will, no doubt, remember her strong poem, The English War, which appeared in its issue of September 7, 1940. Lord Peter made his first appearance in 1923 in Whose Body? There followed Clouds of Witness (1926), Unnatural Death (1927), The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928) and The Documents in the Case (1930).
In 1930 Miss Sayers in addition to producing her Strong Poison, yet another detective book, made an interesting departure. Out of the fragments of its Anglo-Norman version she had constructed her Tristan in Brittany, in the form of a modem English story and produced it, partly in verse and partly in prose.
Have His Carcase (1932) introduced a companion for Lord Peter in the shape of Harriet Vane, a writer of detective stories. In Hangman’s Holiday (1933), a book of short stories, she created another amateur detective, Mr Montague Egg, who was a simpler reasoner than Lord Peter, but almost as acute. In The Nine Tailors, though of the same genre, her theme was built round a noble church in Fenland, and possessed a majesty which disclosed powers the authoress had scarcely exerted until then. Gaudy Night (1935) took Lord Peter and Harriet Vane into the serene and serious life of a women’s college at Oxford, and psychological problems deeper than those which belong to the detective convention arose.
In 1936 her Busman’s Holiday, a play which presented Lord Peter married — Miss Sayers called it “a love story with detective interruptions” — was staged at the Comedy Theatre. She had a collaborator in M. St Clair Byrne, and between them they provided Lord Peter’s public with an excellent entertainment. The Zeal of Thy House (1937), which was written for the Canterbury Festival and played there and in London, was set in the twelfth century and was a sincere and illuminating study of the purification of an artist, a kind of architectural Gerontius purged by heavenly fire of his last earthly infirmity. The Devil to Pay (1939) was also written for the Canterbury Festival. It set the legend of Dr Faustus, one of the great stories of the world, at the kind of angle most likely to commend it to the modern stage. Later it was played at His Majesty’s Theatre. By sheer alertness of invention and the power to fit her ideas into a dramatic narrative she accomplished an extremely difficult task with credit. Love All (1940) was an agreeable and amusing comedy.
In 1940 Miss Sayers published a calmly philosophic essay on the war, which she named Begin Here. Then, in 1941, she followed it with her The Mind of the Maker, in which she analysed the metaphor of God as Creator and tested it in the light of creative activity as she knew it.
Unpopular Opinions, a miscellaneous collection of essays, came out in 1946, Creed or Chaos, another series of essays, pungent and well reasoned, in 1947, and The Lost Tools of Learning in the following year.
She began her translations of Dante for the Penguin Series with the Inferno which came out in November, 1949; Purgatorio followed in May, 1955.
She found the third volume Paradiso the hardest and in August, 1956, her translation had reached Canto VII. Her commentary was one of the most valuable parts of her books. After she had finished her second volume, she slipped in, as a kind of relaxation, a translation of Chanson de Roland, published this year.
She was an honorary D.Litt. of Durham University. She married in 1926 Captain Atherton Fleming. He died in 1950.
Dorothy L. Sayers, novelist, was born on June 13, 1893. She died on December 17, 1957, aged 64
DAME CHRISTABEL PANKHURST
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CAMPAIGNER FOR WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE AND CO-FOUNDER OF THE WOMEN’S SOCIAL AND POLITICAL UNION
FEBRUARY 15, 1958
Dame Christabel Pankhurst, DBE, who with her mother, Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst, founded the Women’s Social and Political Union, which in the years before the First World War campaigned for women’s suffrage, and who was the driving force behind the militant section of the movement and possibly its most brilliant orator, died on Thursday at Los Angeles. She was 77.
From the start of the campaign her power sprang from what was, in a very real sense, a magnetic personality. A most attractive young woman with fresh colouring, delicate features, and a mass of soft brown hair, a graceful figure on the platform, she spoke with a warmth, a passion, and a highly effective raillerie, which few who were prepared to give her a hearing could resist. Though the crowds in Hyde Park did not always spare her, the most familiar cry they set up in the neighbourhood of the WSPU platform there was “We want Chris.” Courageous and resourceful in her extreme fashion in the years before 1914, she was a force to be reckoned with.
On the outbreak of war she and the other leaders declared a truce and lent their organization to the cause of national service. She made one or two attempts after the conclusion of hostilities to enter Parliament, but then abruptly abandoned public life and in her later years assumed the part of religious propagandist and proclaimed her belief in the imminence of the Second Advent.
Christabel Harriette Pankhurst was born on September 22, 1880. Her father, Richard Marsden Pankhurst, a man of some ability who had been the friend of John Stuart Mill, was a barrister and an ardent social worker. Her mother, Emmeline Pankhurst, was the daughter of Robert Goulden, a calico printer. Until she was 13 she was educated at home and then, after a spell at Manchester High School, at the age of 16 was sent to complete her education in Switzerland. Both parents were keenly alive to politics and both were what a generation ago would have been called feminists — her father had helped to form the original Woman’s Suffrage Committee in 1865.
From an early age Christabel herself grew absorbed in political questions. Her father died in 1898, leaving the family in straitened circumstances, and for some time she helped her mother, over whom she at all times exercised a strong influence, by acting as a deputy registrar of births and marriages. She shared — and deepened — her mother’s sympathies with the Independent Labour Party, and in 1901, when she was appointed to the executive committee of the North of England Society for Women’s Suffrage, she also became a member of the Women’s Manchester Trade Union Council. In 1903 mother and daughter jointly set up the Women’s Social and Political Union, which promptly began to carry resolutions on the suffrage question in trade councils all over the country.
In the following year, having studied law at what was then the Victoria University, Manchester, where la
ter she took an LL.B. degree with honours, she sought admission as a student at Lincoln’s Inn and was refused. This refusal, against which she entered an impassioned protest, marked what was perhaps the real starting-point in her career of militancy. Not, however, until her arrest, in 1905, together with Miss Annie Kenney, after their determined interruption of a meeting at Manchester addressed by Sir Edward Grey (Christabel had spat in a policeman’s face, and, after refusing to pay the fine imposed, went to prison for a week) was the militant movement formally inaugurated. Mrs Pankhurst and other members of the WSPU gave it a start with their pilgrimages to the House of Commons, and the long series of conflicts with the law and the police followed.
All that was most dramatic in Christabel Pankhurst’s career is bound up with the history of the militant phase of the “Votes for Women” campaign during the nine years before the outbreak of war in 1914. As organizing secretary of the WSPU, she was tireless and purposeful. In February, 1907, she was arrested and served a term of a fortnight’s imprisonment. Not long afterwards she was charged with her mother and Mrs Drummond with inciting to riot and received a sentence of 10 weeks. During her trial she called the Home Secretary (Mr Herbert Gladstone) and the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Mr Lloyd George) as witnesses and with her legal training ably cross-examined them. In 1912, at the height of the window-breaking campaign, she escaped to Paris, where her mother, temporarily released from prison, joined her.
On the outbreak of war they both declared an immediate suffrage truce. With the announcement that as militant women she and her associates might be able to do something to arouse the spirit of militancy in men, she set herself the task of furthering national service and encouraging recruiting. From this point she planned somewhat vaguely to make of the body of future women electors a national, Imperial and international force. In November, 1918, she was adopted by the “Women’s Party” (into which the WSPU had translated itself in the previous year) as a candidate for Parliament. At the “khaki election” she stood as a Coalition candidate for the Smethwick division and was only narrowly defeated. Later, she became prospective candidate for the Abbey division of Westminster. But her interest in politics waned rapidly, and the preoccupations of her later years are illustrated in various small volumes in which she turned to, among other sources, the Apocalypse of St John of Patmos for support for her belief in the imminence of the Second Advent. She had been created D.B.E. in 1936.
Dame Christabel Pankhurst, DBE, was born on September 22, 1880. She died on February 13, 1958, aged 78
ROSALIND FRANKLIN
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MOLECULAR BIOLOGIST WHOSE RESEARCHES CONTRIBUTED TO THE UNDERSTANDING OF THE STRUCTURE OF DNA
APRIL 19, 1958
Dr Rosalind Franklin died on Wednesday in a London hospital. She was 37.
Professor J. D. Bernal writes:—
“Rosalind Franklin’s early and tragic death is a great loss to science. She has the distinction of having made her name successively in two very different branches of research, first in the study of coal and coke, and then in that of nucleo-proteins and virus structure.
“She discovered in a series of beautifully executed researches the fundamental distinction between carbons that turned on heating into graphite and those that did not. Further, she related this difference to the chemical constitution of the molecules from which the carbon was made. She was already a recognized authority in industrial physico-chemistry when she chose to abandon this work in favour of the far more difficult and more exciting fields of biophysics.
“Here, first in King’s College London, she studied the structure of nucleic acid — the substance now recognized as the key to the regular functioning and inheritance of all living organisms. By the most ingenious experimental and mathematical techniques of X-ray analysis, she was able to verify and make more precise the illuminating hypothesis of Crick and Watson on the double spiral structure of this substance. She established definitely that the main sugar phosphate chain of nucleic acid lay on an outside spiral and not on an inner one, as had been authoritatively suggested.
“Moving to Birkbeck College, Miss Franklin took up the study of what is probably the most thoroughly studied of the plant viruses — that of Tobacco Mosaic disease — and almost at once, using the techniques she had already developed, made notable advances on it. She first verified and refined Watson’s spiral hypothesis for the structure of the virus. She then made her greatest contribution in locating the infective element of the virus particle — its characteristic ribose nucleic acid. This she did by combining the study of the intact virus with that of a reconstituted virus without nucleic acid and using substituted mercury atoms as markers.
“Thus she was able for the first time to set out the structure on a molecular scale of a particle which if not in the full sense alive is capable of the vital functions of growth and reproduction in other cells. Her scale model of this structure is the central feature of the virus exhibit at the Brussels Exhibition.
“Her investigation of virus structure brought her widespread recognition in general biological as well as in biochemical and biophysical fields. One proof of that recognition was the generous grant from the Department of Health of the United States, which was just beginning to help her to extend her work on an adequate scale. Her work was, indeed, as much appreciated abroad as it was in Britain. She was particularly well known in France, where she worked for several years, and later in Germany and the United States, where she was recognized as one of the select band of pioneers who were unravelling the structure of nucleo-proteins in relation to virus diseases and genetics.
“She was cut off in the middle of further plans which all who knew her work were confident she could have carried out with the same success. She had already started work on the virus of poliomyelitis and on the microsomal particles found in most healthy cells which are said to be responsible for protein synthesis and have marked similarity in size and structure to the small spherical viruses.
“Rosalind Franklin was not only a brilliant individual research worker with apparently effortless skill and precision in experiment, but also had the makings of a great organizer of research, as the small and devoted team she gathered round her bears witness. Her life is an example of single-minded devotion to scientific research.”
Rosalind Franklin, molecular biologist, was born on July 25, 1920. She died on April 16, 1958, aged 37
MARIE STOPES
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AUTHOR OF THE SEX MANUAL “MARRIED LOVE” AND FOUNDER OF BRITAIN’S FIRST BIRTH-CONTROL CLINIC
OCTOBER 3, 1958
Marie Stopes, who died yesterday at her home at Dorking, Surrey, can fairly be said to have transformed the thoughts of her generation about the physical aspects of marriage and the role of contraception in married life.
Immediately after the First World War she began to issue the books which made her famous and notorious. In emotional, even rhapsodic, language far removed from the scientific precision in which she had been trained, she preached the gospel of marriage as a partnership of equals, sacramentally expressed both in its physical relations and in deliberate and joyous parenthood.
Attainment of this ideal of married love required the use of contraception to remove the fear of pregnancy at the wrong time and for deliberate family planning. Her books discussed the methods of contraception she favoured with uninhibited candour, though not always with medical accuracy; and she founded Britain’s first birth-control clinic to give practical expression to a mission she pursued with religious fervour.
Addressed not to the learned or scientific public but to ordinary inarticulate men and women, and especially to wives and mothers, her writings at once achieved — and still retain — an enormous circulation. They helped innumerable humble folk to avoid unhappiness and ill-health. Before her advent the birth-control movement had been the preserve of a group of “Neo-Malthusian” intellectuals preoccupied chiefly by a rather academic concern about the balance between popu
lation trends and economic resources.
She transformed it into an openly discussed affair of the masses, directly and intimately concerned with the welfare of individual men and women and of their children. Her frontal attacks on old taboos, her quasi-prophetic tone, her flowery fervour aroused strong opposition from those who disagreed with her for religious reasons or felt she overstepped the bounds of good taste: and the launching of her pioneer clinics in London, Leeds, and Aberdeen was sometimes attended by stormy scenes.
Marie Carmichael Stopes was the eldest daughter of the late Henry Stopes, an anthropologist and archaeologist. Educated at St George’s, Edinburgh, and the North London Collegiate School, she went on to University College London with a chemistry scholarship. Having there gained the gold medal in junior and senior botany and her BSc — she later took the DSc — she went to Munich and graduated as PhD. In 1904 she joined the science staff of Manchester University. In 1907 she travelled to Japan, where she spent nearly two years at Tokyo University and explored the country (including some remote areas) for fossils. She returned to Manchester as a lecturer in fossil botany. She was also a fellow and sometime lecturer in palaeo-botany at University College London. During this period she wrote a number of scientific papers, as well as books on plant life and on Japan. An early marriage was, at her suit, annulled.
In 1918, retaining her maiden name, she married Humphrey Verdon Roe, the aircraft pioneer and co-founder with his brother of the firm which made the Avro biplane. In the same year she produced her two best sellers, Married Love and its sequel, Wise Parenthood, forerunners of a series of similar books which sold in hundreds of thousands. With the support of various well-known people she and her husband established “the Mothers’ Clinic” in Holloway (now in Whitfield Street, St Pancras), and used the proceeds of Married Love and their own private resources to keep it going and to promote other clinics through her Society for Constructive Birth Control. In 1930 a play of hers, Our Ostriches, forceful propaganda but without dramatic merit, was staged at the Royalty Theatre. Her husband died in 1949.