The Times Great Women's Lives

by Sue Corbett

  SCIENTIST WHO WON THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR CHEMISTRY IN 1964

  JULY 30, 1994

  The world recognised Dorothy Hodgkin as one of the outstanding scientists of the 20th century. She will always be remembered for her discovery of the structure of penicillin, of the anti-pernicious anaemia factor, Vitamin B12, and of the diabetic hormone, insulin.

  However, she will also be remembered as a unique human being — a woman with no enemies, a woman of infinite understanding, compassion, simplicity and an enduring serenity. She was never too busy to help both the deserving and the undeserving in distress, caring about individuals as well as the needs of universities and society whether at home or abroad. Besides being a scientist she was a wife, a mother and a grandmother, and her home welcomed scientists, politicians and the down-and-out with unfailing warmth. This was based on the depth of love and understanding that existed between her and her husband Thomas, a distinguished Africanist and Arabist.

  She had a modest but engaging approach to formal occasions. When summoned to the Palace to receive the Order of Merit it is said that she arrived on foot, approached one of the guards and simply said, “I want to see the Queen.”

  Dorothy Mary Crowfoot, as she was before she married, was educated at the Sir John Leman School, Beccles, and at Somerville College, Oxford, where she later became a tutor and fellow, building up in the college a tradition of scientific scholarship in the days when few women read science. At Somerville one of her undergraduate students was Margaret Thatcher.

  In 1946 she became a university lecturer and demonstrator; in 1956 University Reader in X-ray Crystallography; and in 1960 Royal Society Wolfson Research Professor.

  Her own scientific work began with H. M. Powell in Oxford and concerned certain compounds of thallium. In 1932 she moved from Oxford to Cambridge and, working with J. D. Bernal, began to explore the structures of an enormous range of molecules, many of them of biological importance. Amid a great deal of distinguished work, some of the crystals she studied at this time were to be particularly significant and of lifelong interest.

  The most exciting of the discoveries at Cambridge was to be longest in coming to fruition. In 1934 the first X-ray photograph of a crystalline protein, pepsin, was taken in Bernal’s laboratory. A year later Hodgkin photographed, for the first time, insulin crystals of the form used when the structure was finally solved in 1969. Following an examination of suitably prepared (wet) crystals, a year or two later, she used the mathematical technique introduced by Patterson in 1935 to obtain some objective information about the arrangement of atoms within the molecules. Such an awareness of the possibilities of new methods always characterised her work.

  At the time, in the absence of computers, a detailed determination of the arrangement of the atoms of a molecule as large as insulin, with more than 1,000 atoms, was impossible. After obtaining the important result which indicated the regularity of this molecule, Dorothy Hodgkin returned to the structures of smaller biologically interesting molecules, which were also entirely unknown. The first structures to which she applied the new objective methods were derivatives of the sterols, which had been the subject of her PhD thesis with Bernal, and her investigations confirmed their previous conclusions.

  Work on penicillin began in 1942, an investigation fraught with difficulties caused both by the nature of the crystals and by the fact that the chemical structure of the molecule was not known. Throughout this investigation, the chemical and crystallographic evidence were compared, and much ingenuity was required to obtain the correct structure in a problem so close to the limits of possibility. The important results led the way to the structures of a large number of antibiotics over the years, particularly of the cephalosporins. In 1970 the structure of the large and interesting compound, thiostrepton, with antibiotic properties, was determined. This molecule required, in its time, as much genius for its solution as did penicillin in the 1940s. Such an ability to choose and solve important problems at the limit of the technique was a continuing feature of Dorothy Hodgkin’s work.

  This was particularly evident in the determination of the structure of vitamin B12, the anti-pernicious anaemia factor. The first X-ray photographs were taken before even the size of the molecule was known, and from these the size was determined. The investigation, from 1948 to 1956, demanded not only a great deal of painstaking hard work from many people, but also enormous insight. The structure of the important central part of the molecule was obtained by combining information from four slightly different compounds, one of which was a degradation product of vitamin B12. Again, the investigation showed the complementary nature of crystallographic and chemical investigations.

  It is, perhaps, the insulin structure which Dorothy Hodgkin had most wanted to see in full detail. Her early pictures in 1935 were taken when even the first principles of protein structure were in dispute. Advances in technique and in computer technology made determination of structures of this complexity possible. The early 1960s saw structures of important protein molecules such as haemoglobin, larger than insulin. For several years after that, the very close packing of insulin molecules in the crystal, commented on in her first papers, made the structure still difficult to solve.

  However, in 1969, the structure of “two zinc” insulin was solved in such detail that the positions of the individual chemical groups could be seen. The tightness of the packing of the molecules of insulin now became useful, allowing even greater detail to be discovered. This detail was required by Hodgkin who expected to be able to define the position of each atom in order to understand the structure. Recent work has been directed toward increasing such detail and toward understanding the action of this molecule in the body.

  Her many and far-flung former students and colleagues will remember with gratitude and amazement her uncanny ability to choose the right from the wrong features, despite apparent evidence to the contrary, and even more her generosity and her ability to let them follow their own paths under an ever-watchful eye.

  After her retirement from her Wolfson chair in 1977 she became a fellow of Wolfson College. But she had already, in 1970, become Chancellor of Bristol University and continued as such until 1988. There she is remembered for the intense interest she took in student affairs, particularly in the lives of overseas students. A facility in Bristol which offers accommodation to overseas students, opened in 1986, is named Hodgkin House in honour of her and her husband.

  Another concern of hers during her time at Bristol was the Hodgkin scholarship for which she encouraged Bristol students to raise the money themselves. It was officially a scholarship “for students from southern Africa”, but no one was in any doubt that what was really intended by it was to raise money for students from South Africa, who were battling apartheid and would certainly have not been able to get government backing for studies overseas. It was an initiative typical of her radical nature.

  Another offshoot of this was her becoming, with another Nobel laureate, the physicist Sir Cecil Powell, a founder-member of “Pugwash”. This was an international organisation of scientists whose aim was to keep lines of communication open between those working on this and the Warsaw Pact side of the Iron Curtain in the days of the Cold War.

  A woman of indomitable spirit, she refused to let even severe arthritis call a halt to her scientific activity. Only last year, although wheelchair-bound, she flew to an international crystallography conference in Peking, to the astonishment of the other delegates who attended it.

  Dorothy Hodgkin was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Society in 1956, the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for 1964 and was made a member of the Order of Merit in 1965. At the time of her death she was the senior member of the order. She was also a member of many of the great national scientific academies and the recipient of many honorary degrees from universities here and abroad.

  Her husband Thomas died in 1982, and she is survived by two sons and one daughter.

  Dorothy Hodgkin, OM, FRS, scientist, was born
on May 12, 1910. She died on July 29, 1994, aged 84

  ODETTE HALLOWES

  * * *

  RESISTANCE HEROINE WHO SURVIVED WARTIME TORTURE TO BECOME A BEACON OF POSTWAR HEALING

  MARCH 17, 1995

  Of all the women who took part in wartime special operations in France, Odette — as she was universally known in spite of having borne three married surnames in her lifetime — perhaps best symbolised the indomitable spirit of resistance to the horrors of Nazism. Captured by the Gestapo in France in 1943 and consigned, after being cruelly tortured in Paris’s notorious Fresnes prison, to Ravensbrück concentration camp, she emerged emaciated, weak and gravely ill at the end of the war.

  But, in the years that followed, her undiminished mental and moral energy, combined with a complete absence of bitterness towards her tormentors and the nation that had spawned them, became a beacon to others who had suffered disfigurement, pain or bereavement. Indeed, the theme of her postwar working life, with its service to various charities and help for the underprivileged, was the healing of those wounds, both physical and mental, which had been inflicted upon individuals by the war.

  Her George Cross, she always maintained, was not to be regarded as an award to her personally, but as an acknowledgement of all those, known and unknown, alive or dead, who had served the cause of the liberation of France. Her wartime experiences had taught her two great truths: that suffering is an ineluctable part of the human lot, and that the battle against evil is never over.

  Fame came to her notably through the film Odette, which celebrated her life, but she never sought it. In her entry in Who’s Who she styled herself simply: housewife.

  She was born Odette Marie Céline Brailly in Picardy, the daughter of Gaston Brailly, who was killed towards the end of the First World War. She was educated privately and at the Convent of Ste Thérèse in Amiens.

  She always said that she had been determined at the outset to marry an Englishman, after a series of young British officers were billeted on the family house during the First World War. At any rate, when the son of one such man, whom her mother had nursed back to health, visited the family after the war to improve his English, romance soon blossomed. She married Roy Sansom, who worked in the hotel industry, in 1931 and settled in London, where she had three daughters.

  British domiciled she might be, but her heart remained French. After the catastrophe to French arms in the early summer of 1940, she longed to do something more active than looking after her young ones. By a stroke of luck she got in touch with the independent French section of the Special Operations Executive.

  Yet when she was first interviewed there were some doubts about her suitability as a clandestine SOE courier. Would she be able, as a mother of three young daughters who might be constantly on her mind, to undertake missions requiring steely nerves and an ability to concentrate on the task in question to the exclusion of all else? On the other hand, from certain points of view she seemed an ideal candidate. She was young, attractive, vivacious. She knew France; she had a winning manner. Furthermore, she had a burning desire to redeem by direct action the disgrace her country had suffered in its capitulation of June 1940.

  Accepted, she joined the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (since membership of a service organisation was a prerequisite of working for SOE, and the FANY provided basic training in such matters as driving, wireless operation, etc) and did well in all her courses. She returned to France secretly, by small boat from Gibraltar to Antibes, on the last night of October 1942, with orders to join a new circuit in Burgundy. There she got on so well with Peter Churchill, SOE’s organiser on the spot, that he secured London’s leave to keep her on the Riviera.

  Within a fortnight, the Germans and Italians overran all southern France. Churchill and Mme Sansom continued to try to provide contact between London and a large and, as it turned out, a purely imaginary secret army that was supposed to be organised by a friend of Churchill’s codenamed “Carte’’, the father of Danielle Darrieux the film star. Unfortunately quarrels among “Carte’s’’ friends became so acute that next February Churchill took Mme Sansom and his wireless operator, Adolphe Rabinovitch, away to St Jorioz near Annecy in the French Alps. Churchill then returned to London for instructions.

  While he was away, Odette was approached by a “Colonel Henri’’, who represented himself to be a German officer who wanted to defect to the Allies. She was highly suspicious of “Colonel Henri’’ with some justification since he was in fact Sergeant Bleicher of the Abwehr. But one of the more impetuous of the “Carte’’ members was taken in by him and imparted some names and numbers of the members of the circuit in and around Annecy. Churchill returned to France by parachute on April 14-15, 1943, and was met by Odette, with whom he returned to St Jorioz.

  He had already been warned against “Colonel Henri’’ in London. But their operation had been fatally undermined by the indiscreet disclosures of their “Carte’’ comrade. After dark next evening Bleicher and a detachment of Italian troops arrived at the hotel in St Jorioz where Odette and Churchill were staying. He arrested her in the hall and, going upstairs, where he found Churchill sound asleep in bed, arrested him too.

  Churchill and Odette passed themselves off as married, and as relations of Winston Churchill (he claimed to be Churchill’s nephew). They were, therefore, for a time treated with a mixture of savagery and deference. Odette was sent to Paris where, at the notorious Fresnes prison, she endured excruciating torments including having her toenails pulled out (for a year after her homecoming she could not wear shoes and had to walk on her heels until several operations restored her to normal mobility).

  Both she and Churchill were eventually sent to the vast concentration camp at Ravensbrück, north of Berlin, where, in June 1943, Odette was condemned to death. That sentence was not carried out, but for the remainder of her stay there her lot was one of alternate mollycoddling and beating which is the traditional procedure of the interrogator. Neither of them, however, made any admissions of importance. Meanwhile, Rabinovitch, who had evaded arrest, escaped to England only to be dropped back by an unhappy staff error straight into the arms of the Gestapo next year.

  At the end of the war, when the Red Army’s advance approached Ravensbrück, Fritz Suhren, the camp commandant, drove in a sports car with Odette beside him into the American lines, in the hope that he could use her charm to save himself. She at once denounced him and he was hanged after trial.

  Odette became a national heroine, subject of innumerable newspaper articles, a book by Jerrard Tickell and the film Odette (1950) which starred Anna Neagle in the title role. She was appointed MBE in 1945 and in the following year awarded the George Cross. In 1950 she was made an officer of the Légion d’Honneur.

  She believed that the George Cross had been given to her, not because she had been especially gallant, but because she had had the good fortune to survive, unlike 11 other women in her section who had died in German hands, some of them shot within earshot of her cell.

  Her first husband died and she married Peter Churchill in 1947. In 1956 that marriage was dissolved and she married Geoffrey Hallowes, a wine importer, who had also served in another section with the SOE in France. He was a constant support to her throughout the years when her life was lived in the glare of often unexpected bursts of publicity, not all of them welcome; there were, for example, criticisms of the effectiveness of SOE’s operations in southern France.

  But there was also publicity of a more light-hearted kind. On one occasion her mother’s house in Kensington was burgled, the thief making off with some silver spoons and Odette’s George Cross and Légion d’Honneur. Distraught at the loss of her daughter’s treasures, Mme Brailly appealed through the press for their return. The thief, evidently a humane soul, obliged. His letter accompanying the decorations read: “You Madame, appear to be a dear old lady. God bless you and your children. I thank you for having faith in me. I am not all that bad it’s just circumstances. Your little dog re
ally loves me. I gave him a nice pat and left him a piece of meat out of fridge. Sincerely yours, A Bad Egg.’’

  Odette was active in many organisations: she was on the committee of the VC and GC Association; she was a vice-president of the FANY; an honorary member of the St Dunstan’s Ex-Prisoners of War Association; and President of 282 (East Ham) Air Cadet Squadron.

  Last year, though already frail, she revisited Ravensbrück. For her it was the first time since 1945. The occasion, the unveiling of a plaque remembering the courage of the SOE women who had died there, was for her a profoundly moving experience.

  Her husband and the three daughters of her first marriage survive her.

  Odette Hallowes, GC, MBE, wartime heroine of the Special Operations Executive, was born on April 28, 1912. She died on March 13, 1995, aged 82

  GINGER ROGERS

  * * *

  DANCING FILM STAR WHO “DID EVERYTHING FRED ASTAIRE DID, BUT BACKWARDS AND IN HIGH HEELS”

  APRIL 26, 1995

  Ginger Rogers was a vivacious film star from the golden age of Hollywood whose screen career was made by her celebrated screen partnership with the late Fred Astaire. This ran from 1933 to 1939 and embraced some of the cinema’s most celebrated musicals. She was outstanding neither as a singer nor as a dancer but she responded triumphantly to Astaire’s immaculate professionalism and sense of style. Theirs was art that concealed art and what appeared on the screen was a total effacement of a painstaking quest for spontaneity and grace.

  In the context of her career the musicals she made with Astaire formed a relatively small part. In other films stretching over a period of nearly 30 years, she revealed herself as an expert comedienne and a serviceable dramatic actress with a particular talent for impersonating children.

  Above all, Ginger Rogers was a star who never lost the common touch. She remained at heart the ordinary, jolly working girl, not very different from scores of others who dreamt of making it into the movies and getting to dance with Fred Astaire.