Comrade Haldane Is Too Busy to Go on Holiday

by Gavan Tredoux

  This book is not a biography of Haldane. Nor is it principally concerned with his scientific work, except insofar as that interacted with his communism. A great deal of new information is presented here, derived from MI5 files on Haldane and his associates, declassified VENONA signals intelligence, and the Haldane Papers at University College London. Many other minor sources have been used to give a clearer picture of his context. Haldane’s own writings are extensively referenced to establish the (at times incredible) opinions he voiced about the Soviet Union, Stalin, and related topics. The reader may easily suspect that these are the products of misleading summarization; therefore many quotations have been provided. The appendices contain complete VENONA decryptions relevant to Haldane and the X Group that he was a member of. The reader will also find there Haldane’s incomplete autobiography, up to 1938, which has never been published before, and other useful primary material.

  1. EARLY DAYS

  Haldane’s home life was not especially politicized. His father, John Scott Haldane (1860–1936), was a mild-mannered professor of physiology at Oxford, though he had been educated at Edinburgh, with moderately socialist views and a mania for self-experimentation—extending to the use of his own children as supplementary guinea pigs. His attractive mother, Louisa Kathleen (1863–1961), was a quiet but convinced conservative, perhaps even doctrinaire. JBS was born at Oxford on Guy Fawkes Day in 1892, and allusively nicknamed “Squawks” by his parents. A sister, Naomi—later a successful novelist and far-left political activist—followed in 1897.

  The Haldane family tree led to many eminent men and women on both sides, creaking with the weight of them. His father, John Scott, had three notable siblings. The Liberal Lord Chancellor Richard Burdon Haldane (1st Viscount Haldane) (1856–1928) was a lawyer, politician, and occasional Hegelian philosopher. Sir William Haldane (1864–1951) was a lawyer who rose to the senior post of crown agent for Scotland. The writer and suffragette Elizabeth Sanderson Haldane (1862–1937) was entirely self-educated but published extensively, including studies of Hegel and Descartes. John Scott’s father was the distinguished Scottish lawyer Robert Haldane (1805–1877) of Auchengray, who had married Mary Elizabeth Burdon-Sanderson, from Northumberland, a daughter of the well-known nonconformist Richard Burdon (later Burdon-Sanderson) (1791–1865). John Scott’s maternal uncle, and hence JBS’s great-uncle, was John Scott Burdon-Sanderson, Waynflete Professor of Physiology at Oxford, later Regius Professor of Medicine. One can go on like this for some time—JBS himself claimed to be able to trace his male ancestry without interruption back to the thirteenth century.

  JBS’s mother, Louisa Kathleen, was a daughter of the leisurely geographer (and amiable hypochondriac) Coutts Trotter (1831–1905), a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, who wrote reviews in the periodical press. William Robertson Smith persuaded him to contribute articles on Polynesia, which he had traveled in, to the Encyclopædia Britannica. Her mother, Harriet Augusta Keatinge, was the daughter of a judge of the high court of Dublin, the Right Honourable Richard Keatinge (1793–1876). Keatinge had married Harriet Augusta Joseph (1792–1869), who, as JBS’s maternal great-grandmother, provided an obscure connection that might have interested JBS had he been aware of it. Harriet Augusta Joseph was a cousin of the great Victorian mathematician James Joseph Sylvester (1814–1897), who was actually born James Joseph and later added the surname Sylvester. Her father, Samuel Joseph, was Sylvester’s uncle. Haldane was therefore homeopathically Jewish himself. It is likely that JBS was not aware of this, as he would have delighted in even a small dose of a very potent ability—Joseph Sylvester and Arthur Cayley are commonly considered the two most eminent British mathematicians of the nineteenth century.

  As a child, JBS was clumsy and accident prone, developing a hernia in the crib, fracturing the base of his skull as a boy, breaking his arm when a young teenager, cutting his foot badly when bathing, and more besides. These accidents persisted throughout his life. His mother called him “Jack,” no doubt to distinguish him from his father John, also known as the “Senior Partner.” He started his schooling in Oxford at the Preparatory School run by the “Skipper,” Mr. Lynam. He quickly established himself as their top pupil, demonstrating a tenacious memory and excellent analytical skills. His vocabulary and reading skills were far in advance of his peers. He was also outsize, always the largest and strongest physical specimen in his class, but never good at team sports.

  JBS went up to Eton as a King’s scholar in 1905, after coming first in the scholarship exams, which in those years stretched over a full four days. He preferred to solve the higher-marked questions first. Success meant that the fees were modest, but he was exposed to bullying until his physical strength could protect him; he was twelve years old. One week he was caned by the senior boys on every night, including a bastinado. Of course, “the diet was monotonous and the cooking shocking.”1 He fagged—that is, acted as a boy of all work—for Julian Huxley.2 He was eventually elected to Pop and made the captain of “School” (as opposed to the “Oppidans,” or paying pupils), but he was personally unhappy throughout, which disappointed his mother. “There was a very great deal of homosexuality, occasionally reaching the point of sodomy,” and worse, “where there was much disparity of age the younger boy was not always a free agent.”3 Bitter memories predominated, colored by social alienation in later years. “The Eton Society, or ‘Pop’ included the most distinguished and popular athletes. The shapely youths who were alleged to assuage the desires of this august body, often in return for presents, were known as ‘Pop bitches’. Some of them have since risen to positions of high distinction and trust.”4 One of JBS’s contemporaries was Harold Macmillan, the future prime minister. In after years, JBS suggested to an acquaintance, Woodrow Wyatt, that Macmillan had been expelled for buggery.5 Julian Huxley thought Haldane “always eccentric, even as the boy of thirteen whom I remember in College at Eton.”6

  Nevertheless, JBS conceded that by the time he left Eton in 1911 at age eighteen, he had received a good education; the Oppidans’ fees paid for competent instruction. “I could read Latin, Greek, French and German. I had won a mathematical scholarship at Oxford. I knew enough chemistry to take part in research work, enough biology to do unaided research, and I had a fair knowledge of history and contemporary politics.”7 In 1908 he read a paper to the Scientific Society on “Respiration.”8 (The previous year it had been “Parasitic Worms,” which was described as a “delightful paper.”9) In 1909 he won the Chemistry Prize10 and in 1910 he was second on the English Essay and History Prizes.11 That year, Haldane and Clarke also read a paper to the Scientific Society on “The Structure and Functions of the Blood.”12 He developed “a mild liking for the Anglican ritual and a complete immunity to religion,” but when at games was “utterly bored.”13 Records from 1908 show two cricket batting innings with a highest score of 2, and one not out, for a run average of 2.14 Before he left, one of his duties as Captain of School had been to receive the king there; but his mother complained that her son generally found the duties expected of him an imposition. It had been her idea to send him there in the first place, despite the misgivings of his father. She was pleased, though, that he joined the Volunteers.

  With his mathematical scholarship in hand, Haldane went up to Oxford in 1911. At New College, he read a year of mathematics and took a First Class in Mathematical Honours Moderations in 1912. A term of biology under Edward Stephen Goodrich (1868–1946), a former artist noted for his skillful blackboard drawings, was followed by a switch to Greats, that is, classical literature and philosophy. In this he took another First Class in the Honours Moderations of 1914. The switch to Greats may have been due to a feeling of his father, who distrusted “mere mathematicians,” or it may have been showing off. In any case, if Haldane had taken mathematics seriously, as his primary interest, he would during that era have been drawn to Cambridge—G. H. Hardy would only be lured to New College eight years later, when Haldane would get to know him in a d
ifferent capacity. Still, he found the abstractness of Greats and the discipline acquired in the composition of essays useful. “The successful Greats Man, with his high capacity for abstraction, makes an excellent civil servant, prepared to report as unemotionally on the massacre of millions of African natives as on the constitution of the Channel Islands.”15

  Haldane thought of himself at this time as “a liberal with leanings further left.” He particularly remembered that he was “considerably influenced by my contemporary Herron (killed in 1915) who was a syndicalist.”16 Alec Rowan Herron was the son of a ship broker and entered New College in 1911 with a scholarship in modern history, after attending Gresham’s School in Norfolk. Herron was active in the Oxford Union and was a friend of the young Harold Laski. He served during the war as a 2nd lieutenant in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps and was killed during an attack near Givenchy on March 10, 1915. Following Herron would have made Haldane a mild socialist, of a kind not unknown among the dons, who included A. J. Carlyle and G. D. H. Cole. JBS relished some early agitation at least.

  My only serious political gesture was, I think, in May 1913. Oxford was then served by horse trams, which could readily be overtaken by a runner, but went definitely quicker than most people can walk. Neither the drivers nor the conductors earned so much as £1 per week. Wishing to remedy this state of affairs, they struck. Their places were taken by blacklegs. On the first three evenings of the strike trams were stopped and the horses taken out. The police made baton charges, and finally order was restored. I was unable to participate in these riots, I think because I was in training for a race. On the fourth evening the streets were quiet. I walked up and down Cornmarket Street chanting the Athanasian creed and the hymeneal psalm ‘Eructavit cor meum’17 in a loud but unmelodious voice. A large crowd collected. The police ineffectively pushed pious old ladies into the gutter. The trams failed to penetrate the crowd and their horses were detached and wandered off in an aimless manner.

  The strike was successful, and as the trams could no longer yield a profit, they were replaced by motor omnibuses, which were capable both of higher speed and higher wages. I was subsequently martyred by the proctor to the extent of two guineas. This was, I suppose, the first case for over three centuries when a man was punished in Oxford for publicly professing the principles of the Church of England.18

  Since the tram could not proceed due to his physical blockade of it, he was punished for obstruction and not for recitation. Tricks of this type set in early. Other reports mention less delicate physical battles between Oxford undergraduates and the police, with stiff fines handed out by the magistrates.19 The tram drivers blamed the students for drawing the strike out. Though the strike quickly collapsed and was by any reasonable definition a failure, contrary to Haldane, stories about his involvement in it continued to do the rounds in New College for another decade at least. Christopher Hollis, who was there in the early 1920s, recalled one anecdote that had Haldane causing some surprise by emerging from under a manhole cover over a drain in Oxford Street.20 (It was not certain what the advantage of this tactic was supposed to be for the strikers, but Hollis thought it was considered unbecoming conduct by the authorities. Haldane was quite comfortable in tunnels.) Other Oxford socialists seized on the strike in a more genteel way. Magdalen’s G. D. H. Cole rushed out a pamphlet (The Tram Strike) arguing that wages should be based on need rather than on profit. The university’s Fabian Society was usually excited by industrial unrest, but seemed to hold aloof in this case. One of its members was Harold Laski, a friend of Herron’s and soon a friend of Haldane’s, too, in a circle that included Victor Gollancz.21 Both Laski and Gollancz would play leading roles in radical British politics in later life, but it is hard to tell how much influence they had on Haldane’s thinking. It was certainly not lasting. Much later, in a letter to Laski’s biographer Kingsley Martin, Haldane remembered the Harold Laski of his Oxford days as a compulsive liar.22 Since they had fallen out over politics, this may have been spite. But in those days, they were allied at the Oxford Union, where Haldane argued that “this house approves of the principles of eugenics.”23

  Later that year, on Guy Fawkes Day, Aldous Huxley attended “Jack’s” twenty-first birthday party at the family home in Cherwell, Oxford.24 They played “Nebuchadnezzars,” a variant of charades peculiar to the Haldane family.

  I have been having a good dose of one part of the north lately, in the shape of the Haldanes, who carried off their double event birthday party on Friday and Saturday. Friday was their dance . . . in honour of Jack’s twenty-firster . . . and on Saturday was the common or garden birthday party. The dance was very amusing . . . the Haldanes always contrive to know and invite very good people to their functions: however, I must get to dance better, or otherwise everyone suffers. But the Saturday party is the really wonderful affair: I came at 4.30 and left at 11.30: the first half of the time was occupied in eating tea and playing other essentially childish games, for the benefit of the hordes of infants: the H’s have a most admirable device for breaking the ice. They turn the whole party . . . about forty, with the children . . . into a large and empty room, in the middle of which stands a bran pie, where bran is replaced by confetti. Everyone having dived in the pie and removed something, one proceeds to take the confetti and throw it at everyone else. After half an hour of this . . . ones hair, pockets, stomach and inmost underclothing being completely filled with confetti . . . shyness, as such, almost completely ceases to exist. One then comes out into an ante-chamber, where seven highly trained, amateur officials remove as much of the confetti from one’s hair and outer garments as is humanly possible. . . . Fireworks ensue, then (children dismissed) supper and afterwards, the most magnificent Nebuchadnezzars, and finally a good form of blind-man’s buff, where everyone stands round the room in a circle and the blind man walks up and prods someone, telling him at the same time to make a noise . . . such as the sound of rain falling on mu[d]—and the speaker has to be recognised by the sound of his voice.25

  When he left in 1914, Haldane did not get a science degree from Oxford, nor did he ever complete one in later life (though he received many honorary degrees once his name was made)—an idiosyncrasy that he was proud to proclaim. His father had already given him a long apprenticeship in science at home, involving him there in his laboratory, his notorious self-experiments, and his many industrial excursions. At age six, JBS helped his father capture samples of sooty air on the London underground by leaning out of the moving train to stopper vacuum bottles—his father recommended more ventilation. Even earlier, at the tender age of four, JBS had been taken down a mine, and remembered being terrified. Recurring Easters in Cornwall made the tin mines, which his father tested for firedamp and air circulation, feel like home. Visiting North Staffordshire, father and son were lowered down a nonoperational shaft in a bucket on a chain. John Scott then hoisted his son to the roof of a tunnel gallery, there to declaim Mark Antony’s speech from Julius Caesar (he knew it) while breathing methane—all to see how long young Jack would last before he passed out. He made it from “Friends, Romans, countrymen” to “the noble Brutus.” Lowered back down to ground level, he recovered quickly in better air.

  As a teenager, he even went deep-sea diving off the coast of Scotland, in an ill-fitting leaky suit meant for adults, as one of his father’s human “rabbits.” He consented to being sealed in a “coffin” with only his head protruding in order to measure volumes of air breathed in response to more carbon dioxide (panting) and less oxygen (normal). This experiment suggested that we breathe more to expel carbon dioxide than we do to inhale oxygen. Self-vivisection seems to have been involved, too. When it became clear that his son loved to make calculations, his father turned to him for arithmetical and then mathematical help. Work on problems of ventilation on the new naval submarines meant that JBS was asked along to keep track of the soda-lime. John Scott: “Do you know the formula for soda-lime?” Jack: “CaHNaO2.” All these practical activities were s
ummed up by Haldane as “bottle washing” for his father, and meant that he could get by without needing more extensive scientific training. But necessity may pass for virtue. There was universal agreement among his colleagues in later life—John Maynard Smith, N. W. Pirie, C. D. Darlington, Julian Huxley, Peter Medawar, to name a few—that Haldane was clumsy in a laboratory and not a practical experimenter where precision was needed. The only exception to this was with gas measurement equipment, which he was an expert at from long use in his father’s lab at home.

  What JBS did know a lot about by the time he left Oxford, without requiring formal tuition, was genetics. Although he had heard A. D. Darbishire speak on Mendel’s laws in 1901, he was only eight years old at the time and could not have retained more than the impression of excitement. Teenage experiments with a large stock of guinea pigs, when he was home from Eton, had set him thinking and reading up on the new literature about genetics; this interest was kept up when he went up to Oxford. There he noticed that one of the papers he had read (by Darbishire himself, on mice) contained data that didn’t make sense.

  The frequencies of some traits—albinism, pink eyes, and pigmented coat—were wrong; some seemed to vary together. This was known to happen in plants and was thought to be caused by “reduplication,” but had not so far been noticed in animals. (“Reduplication” was soon replaced with the concept of “linkage,” where genes coexist close to each other on chromosomes.) The result was Haldane’s first genetics paper, which he read to one of E. S. Goodrich’s seminars at Oxford in 1912. Next, he got his own data to bolster this finding by breeding mice in collaboration with a friend at New College, Alexander Dalzell Sprunt, with some assistance at home by his young sister, Naomi.