This humanistic credo comes perilously close to a renunciation of the Jewish faith as proscribed in her grandfather’s will. But Jewishness is more than a religion. Rosalind was, says her sister Jenifer, ‘always consciously a Jew’. If Jewishness is understood to mean unswerving loyalty to family, a belief in the importance of knowledge, especially in science and medicine, and the virtue of hard work — even over-work, Rosalind remained true to her tradition.
Holidays were not forgone, but rather taken in England. In August 1940 she went on a walking tour in the Pennines and the Lake District with another relative, this time her cousin Ursula Franklin. Rosalind was a far quicker and, Ursula felt, far braver, walker and could get quite impatient if she had to pause to wait. One night, with their backpacks, a heavy mist came down and there were no lights anywhere. They hadn’t allowed for the blackout in their planning. Totally lost, they came to a road and walked for an hour without seeing a house. Suddenly there was a farm. Soaked to the skin, they knocked on the door and all was well. The farmer’s wife put them up in an ancient room with a feather bed and gave them high tea, ham and eggs, for 7 shillings 6d. each. It was the kind of adventure Rosalind savoured.
On their tour, the cousins met a town clerk and his wife from the north of England. To Ursula’s surprise, Rosalind paired off — in an utterly non-flirtatious way — with the married man. The two fell into rapt conversation and became such good friends that they wrote to each other afterwards. This phenomenon would occur frequently in the years to come: Rosalind enjoying the role of a non-threatening other woman in a triangle.
Rosalind’s third year at Cambridge began during the Blitz, which started on 7 September 1940 when for four days 900 German aircraft pounded London and 1500 people died, mainly in the East End. The stoicism of inner-city Londoners spending their nights in the Underground was romanticised for American consumption as plucky English fortitude and Cockney cheeriness. Ellis and Muriel Franklin themselves took this view. (Their suggestion that the sleeping conditions in the Underground were probably more hygienic than the homes where many of these unfortunate people lived was another parental opinion which drew Rosalind’s scorn.) When in November a bomb blasted out all the window glass at 5 Pembridge Place and killed two old women in a house in Chepstow Place at the rear, the Franklins decided it was time to leave and took a house in Radlett in Hertfordshire. Nannie retired to Shropshire. Rosalind, from Cambridge, was concerned about her things being moved out of her room in her absence, particularly her desk:
If it does not go, I would like everything out of it, in as little muddle as possible — I know exactly where everything in it is, though it may look confused . . . Also nearly everything from the drawer of my bookcase and my climbing boots from the cupboard underneath — I couldn’t bear to have them bombed . . . As for books, I don’t think there are any I can say I ‘specially want’, but I would like, naturally, to have as many with me as possible. One cannot live in a house permanently without books . . . in particular, I might mention all French books, my French dictionary, and encyclopaedia — though this does not mean that I don’t want any others.
She sympathised with her mother having to set up a new household: ‘I suppose “unfurnished” means you have to take carpets, curtains and everything, and none of them will fit.’
Rosalind entered her third and final undergraduate year at Cambridge, in October 1940, in a stronger position than she had expected. If the college were to close down, she had sufficient credentials, with her first in part one, to do war work as a chemist.
Cambridge was no longer ignoring the war. Scientists and other male faculty were vanishing into war research or, if Jewish refugees, confined in internment camps to forestall the feared ‘fifth column’. ‘Practically the whole of the Cavendish have disappeared,’ Rosalind reported. ‘Biochemistry was almost entirely run by Germans and may not survive.’ Among the internees taken was the young Vienna-born Max Perutz, who had been a rising star in crystallography at the Cavendish since 1936.
To prepare for part two of the tripos, she recruited a new supervisor for herself. She chose Fred (later Lord) Dainton because she was now specialising in his field, physical chemistry — the blend of the two disciplines of chemistry and physics exploring the structural characteristics and behaviour of atoms and molecules.
Dainton, who had a full schedule and did not want to take her on, succumbed when Rosalind presented herself at his door in October and declared, ‘I want to have you as my part two supervisor. I don’t think Delia Simpson [her previous supervisor] entirely approves. Will you take me?’ Dainton, a Yorkshireman, was attracted by her directness — not what he associated with ‘middle-class Londoners’. He liked her willingness to share the hour with another student to whom she was very helpful. As the year wore on, he felt he was over-working her, setting her a long essay each week and insisting that she defend her point of view: ‘something she was never loath to do’. Harder to persuade her to relax; he found her writing and her manner ‘a little crabbed’; she was, he thought, ‘a rather private person, with very high personal and scientific standards, and uncompromisingly honest’.
Rosalind did not choose to relax by joining the social whirl. A quarter of a century before the sexual revolution, the young men and women students of Cambridge went dancing, fell in love, had affairs, became engaged. There were belles of the university who were there for a good time and to catch a man. College rules acknowledged human nature to the extent of insisting that men had to be out of women’s rooms by 7 p.m. Rosalind’s St Paul’s friend Jean Kerslake, caught up in parties and dates, felt that Rosalind believed she was flighty and disapproved of her not working harder.
Even so there were others, such as her friend Peggy Clark, who saw themselves, while not opposed to marriage, as wanting to be independent, to prepare to earn their own living and to make use of their academic training. It was Rosalind’s personal choice to stay out of la ronde. When, for whatever reason, she was bold enough to invite a cousin, Stephen Waley, to Radlett for the weekend after Christmas, she was so afraid that the young man might try to hold her hand that she bribed her fourteen-year- old brother Roly with a sixpence to walk with them.
Despite her wariness of sexual attraction, she took great care with her appearance. Although not conventionally pretty, she had a trim figure and intense dark eyes set off by a pronounced widow’s peak. Even as an undergraduate she showed a flair for understated sophisticated elegance in her clothes and seldom made a mistake. For a commemoration dinner at the college, she sent home for a very precise selection from her wardrobe:
please send my evening dress (tulip one), evening shoes and evening petticoat. Shoes in bottom drawer of the wardrobe (gold or silver). As for suggestions for a gift, P.S. I forgot to answer the most important part of your letter I should very much like a handbag — my present one is the first and only one I have ever possessed and is falling to pieces inside and out I should like it black, because my present one is brown and I have to leave it behind when I wear my one and only silk frock which is black.
In the first term of her final year, Rosalind encountered, like an apparition sent from on high, a woman entirely different from any she had known. Adrienne Weill was a French-Jewish scientist: commanding, handsome, inspirational, intellectual — and also a widowed mother brave and shrewd enough to get herself and her daughter out of France in response to de Gaulle’s call for French people to join him in England.
Her own mother’s life seemed impoverished in contrast. In a letter to Muriel, who was now organising her temporary country home, Rosalind said:
I can’t think why you spend so much of your time cooking and washing up and thinking about nothing else. You have got Nannie Alice and a daily . . . and though they might not be quite as efficient as ordinary maids you couldn’t possibly have more than two in a house that size. When I said all of this to you at home . . . You used to [have] a huge house of many floors, many stairs, numerous rooms, a large and i
nconvenient basement kitchen and pantry miles from the dining and front door, etc. etc. None applies now. I really think you ought to be able to manage better. I hope I shall not find that life consists of preparing and cleaning and meals when I am home — at least at any rate not as long as you have got any maids. I shall have a lot of other work to do — more than ever before.
And in the next breath:
Last week I went to a talk (in French) by a Madame Weill on Marie Curie. She is a French physicist — ‘eminent’ — who came in response to de Gaulle’s appeal for scientific specialists and has been ‘adopted’ by Newnham and is now researching in the Cavendish — She was a pupil of Mme Curie and later researched with her in the lab. I have made several attempts to meet her, but have so far failed.
The encounter with Adrienne Weill was a turning point in Rosalind’s life. Not only could she follow the lecture, in French, but she was deeply impressed by this elegant cosmopolitan woman of science and public affairs. Madame Weill became even more fascinating a few days later when she met Rosalind twice and asked her if she were related to Viscount Samuel:
It was all rather exciting . . . Her mother, a Mrs Braun- schweig (she doesn’t like her name mentioned as she is still in France), is a philosopher and met Uncle Herbert frequently at conferences, etc., in Paris. She (Mme W.) has instructions to write to him about any difficulties she has in England. Her father is Braunschweig the philosopher.
Suzanne Braunschweig (1877—1946) had served as an under- secretary of state for public education in the Blum government in 1936, and had also been leader in the movement for women’s suffrage. (French women did not get the vote until 1947.) Adrienne Weill had served as her mother’s chef de cabinet. Rosalind thought an extraordinary coincidence what was no coincidence at all: ‘that of all the French people now in England she should be the first I met — or that of all the families in England, she should be the most closely connected with mine. She is a delightful person, full of good stories and most interesting to talk to on any scientific or political subject . . .’
By early 1941, the Blitz intensified. On 5 January the City of London was devastated in a Sunday night sequence of attacks that left the powerful symbol of the intact dome of St Paul’s Cathedral silhouetted against the blazing sky. The cathedral had been protected by volunteers — ‘fire watchers’ — who dealt with the incendiaries as they landed. In Cambridge Rosalind volunteered as a fire watcher. She was casting about for what she might do once she had finished her course. New possibilities were opening up. The Second World War, far more than the First, was making irreversible changes in attitudes towards women and work — half a million would be needed in industry. Even The Times thundered, ‘The general attitude of the community to women’s work required revision,’ and called the barriers to women entering fields such as engineering ‘intolerable and irrational’. However, Rosalind learned from a talk by ‘Appointments Board Women’ that her name would have to go onto the central register, which might place her in the deadly dull job of an ‘experimental assistant’ in the Ministry of Supply. She could only hope something better would turn up.
She was in her usual fearful mood as her final exams approached, her jitteriness exacerbated by the progress of the war. Her parents scolded her for pessimism about the war: good was bound to win over evil in the end. She denied that she was ‘plunged in gloom’ but refused to be cheered by the news of Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy party leader, landing in Scotland on 10 May 1941; it represented no change of heart, she said, merely a wish to save his skin.
Privately, Dainton, her supervisor, told Newnham that he did not expect Rosalind to get a first in her final examinations. Not for lack of ability. She had, he said, a first-class mind, and was industrious and devoted to science — if anything, too devoted — and therefore unprepared to pass on from a subject which had captured her interest to the next pressing one. Yet she was inflexible and liable to misjudge her time, answering the first questions so thoroughly that she left no time for the others.
It was an accurate forecast. Overcome with exam nerves and a bad cold, Rosalind could not revise or sleep and took what she referred to as ‘dope’. She entered the examination slowed and dulled, and did indeed misjudge her time. In two papers she completed only two questions out of a required three, finding herself ‘almost incapable of thinking’. Her sense of ineptitude was particularly annoying because, once again, the papers were ‘almost too good to be true’.
She blamed the head cold and the sedative: ‘I’m sure it sounds silly to say so after the event when I did not think so before, but I really feel certain that I could have got a First on those papers if I had been fit. Anyway there is now absolutely no question of a First.’ Out of the question too, she believed, was any chance of a government grant for research. She did not expect the college would sympathise with her illness as there was great competition for the single available studentship — ‘not sleeping will naturally be considered my fault, the result of trying to do too much’.
Once more, however, she had not done as badly as she feared, nor was she blamed for her insomnia. Sleep problems are common before exams. It was known that the great William Bragg could not sleep the night before his tripos. But she had not done as well as she ought to have done. Her degree was a good second — a creditable conclusion to her three years — and she was told privately that in the physical chemistry exam she had come out on top. Although she had failed to achieve a ‘double first’, a first in both parts of the tripos, her overall performance was distinctive enough for Newnham, with Dainton’s endorsement of her qualities of intellect and tenacity, to award her a college scholarship of £15, to remain for a further year, and for the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research to give her the research grant she hoped for.
Cambridge, in spite of the war, did almost everything for Rosalind that a good university should. It changed her life. It gave her a profession and a personal philosophy. It enabled her to distance herself from her parents and become a mature adult with a sharp political and social conscience. That she achieved all this amidst the self-doubt, the confrontations to which she was prone, and the terrors of war in the years when Britain stood alone is a measure of her inner steel. What three years at Cambridge did not do was end her astonishing ignorance about sex. Rosalind confessed to her cousin Irene Franklin (Ursula’s sister) who had just become engaged and came to visit her that summer, that she had never been kissed. The talk turned to having babies. The cousins discovered that although each knew vaguely how a baby was born, neither knew how the ovum was fertilised. (A few months later, Irene informed Rosalind that her fiancé had enlightened her. Rosalind was wiser too. She said she had asked a medical student.) But such things were remote from her mind. She was now ready to be a working scientist. The question was where to work.
FIVE
Holes in Coal
(1941 - 46)
R.G.W. NORRISH, FRS, Professor of Physical Chemistry, holder of the Royal Society’s distinguished Davy medal, was having a bad war. In his forties, recognised as one of the pioneers of photochemistry, much later to win a Nobel prize, he was under great strain. His laboratory had shrunk in size, with so many men away, and had no clear objectives. His wife had taken their twin daughters to Devon to escape possible bombing. He was left to fend for himself in Emmanuel College, drinking heavily. (The college fellows had wisely stocked up the cellars to withstand the siege.) This failing cost him a high security rating; he was not entrusted with serious war work. His discontents found outlet in what Fred Dainton, then senior research adviser to the Physical Chemistry Laboratory, observed as ‘bad tempered and autocratic treatment of juniors’, of whom Rosalind had the misfortune to become one.
Norrish gave her what Dainton, having supervised her the previous year, could see was a trivial problem - the polymerisation of formic acid and acetaldehyde. Rosalind would have preferred something that more directly related to defeating Hitler. In the room next to hers, salvag
ed fuel from crashed German planes was being analysed with spectroscopic techniques.
Her St Paul’s friends were clearly aiding the war effort: Anne Crawford at the Bristol Aircraft Corporation, Jean Kerslake at the code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park. Her cousin Ursula Franklin was in the women’s army service — the ATS. However, when Newnham awarded Rosalind a fourth-year scholarship, she was spared military service and allowed to remain at university, to her father’s dismay. Yet what exactly she ought to have been doing instead was hard for him to say, as a woman’s place in the war effort had not been defined.
At times she must have felt that no one was nice to her. Norrish gave her a small dark room to work in even though (as Dainton knew) she suffered from claustrophobia. When she asked her college, where she was still living in college and serving as an air raid warden, if she could come back a few days early in the autumn, her old adversary, Mrs Palmer, was disagreeable. First she declared, as if speaking to a schoolgirl, that Rosalind was old enough to make arrangements for herself until term began, then allotted her a horrid room — ‘on the pretext’, Rosalind wrote home, ‘that I managed the blackout badly where I had lots of windows’.
The solution was a rented room on Mill Road, a working-class area near the railway station: 45 shillings a week, heating excluded. Living alone for the first time, she proclaimed the virtues of solitude: ‘I’ve never had so much time for reading. I read at and after every meal, and in the evenings when I’m doing nothing else.’
She had no difficulty filling her time. She finished a dress that she had begun making a year and a half before. She made meals in her room and invited friends in, treating one to a lecture on the nutritional value and cheapness of sprats (small fish). She was trying to get by on her scholarship money, and living on a shoestring suited her.
Rosalind Franklin Page 8