Rosalind Franklin

by Brenda Maddox

  In that milieu Rosalind seemed ‘a sound and cheerful young lady’ who spoke perfect French with a very slight English accent and who was totally committed to her work. On occasion the group would go for a swim at a pool nearby. At night they sometimes went dancing, Rosalind riding pillion on someone’s motor cycle. UnEnglished, she was having the time of her life.

  She alerted her parents to a gallic indulgence of temperament:

  I’ve been told several times my French is best when I’m angry. I had a glorious row this a.m. in a shoe shop that sold me a pair of straps of wildly different length. I enjoyed it immensely. I haven’t felt the language flow so freely since the row which Roly witnessed with the hotel keeper in Pralognan. It’s odd but I couldn’t do it in English with a straight face. Here a battle of words is a sort of game which nobody takes seriously. I hate it when it happens to people I know but with disagreeable hotel keepers and shopkeepers it can be a satisfying pastime.

  Then in the next breath:

  Are skirts seriously getting longer in London? Here any thing that hasn’t been lengthened is really coming to look ridiculous — a most tiresome business. And new things are only 8—10 inches from the ground (not mine). People take it seriously (and that’s most people) chop up their skirts and put extra bits in and cut down their waists to ¾ length.

  Paris affected Rosalind as it does many women who suddenly find themselves trying harder to match the scarf to the jacket. She had always taken clothes seriously and combined good taste with restraint and propriety but now she was challenged to change. The imperative to smarten up became urgent when — world news in 1947 — Christian Dior introduced his ‘New Look’. Utterly out of step with bankrupt Britain and the masculine look of women in uniform, it set off an international controversy with its exaggerated femininity — nipped-in waistlines, small shoulders and extravagant use of material in long voluminous skirts. Rosalind was an immediate convert. ‘I’ve had dress material made into a handsome [pronounced] NEV Look frock and bought some nylons,’ she wrote home, ‘but need a new petticoat forty-four inches long to wear under this long-line.’ Could her mother’s seamstress make her one out of parachute silk (more easily available in London than in Paris) and also some silk underclothes so she could throw away her pre-war collection? She sent, along with a diagram of the shape of knickers she wanted, her measurements: bust 34, waist 27, hips 38. She also followed prevailing post-war style by registering her small waist with a neat belt.

  A lab visit to Nancy with Mering at her elbow, shows her in a classic New Look bold-checked suit: with small neat shoulders, a dramatically cinched waist, and exaggerated full skirt: with her hair side-parted and held off her forehead with two combs.

  Away from the ‘labo’, Rosalind began to explore her new environment. She went with friends on walking trips to the forest of Chantilly; she found a ‘delightfully clean’ place to swim in the upper Seine, she took in exhibitions at the Grand Palais, and she mastered the shops. Certain commodities were scarce, but as a travailleur de force, she got extra shares of cooking oil, wine and bread, and she gloried in the street markets, full of fresh fruit and vegetables long unseen in London. The maid at the flat tutored her in cooking and she enjoyed improvising: ‘Bananas suddenly appeared’ and before they disappeared again, almost immediately, ‘I had time to invent a pudding — tinned milk, cream cheese, sugar, Fry’s chocolate and chopped banana. Excellent.’

  Visitors from London began to descend on her — relatives, mainly. Jenifer and Colin were among the first, and she found them a room four minutes away. She was delighted to entertain her mother, who came to visit while the widow was away. Rosalind made up a bed in the drawing room, got tickets to the Comédie Française, organised a visit to an exhibition of Impressionism and prepared meals, which they ate in her room. Her friend Jean Kerslake, now Jean Kerlogue, and pregnant, stayed on the way to Geneva. The formidable Ellis himself came over to Paris for a two-day visit and Rosalind cooked him a dinner too. For all their disagreements, her father was the only one in the family with whom she could talk about her work.

  She had a steady list of requests for things to be brought from London. Sweetened tinned milk was top of the list (‘if you have points to spare’, she told her mother), which included other essentials of the English diet, such as Bovril, marmalade, Fry’s drinking chocolate and dehydrated potatoes; also, toothpaste, plain postcards (‘an invention unknown to the French who only have them covered with the Eiffel Tower’), a rubber bathing cap, tennis balls and tyres and inner tubes for her bicycle.

  Her bicycle was important as she did not like using the Metro. The claustrophobia remarked on by her supervisor in Cambridge and her cousin in Putney made her feel in the Metro that she could not get enough air. By cycling, she argued, she was breathing the pure Paris air which allowed one to work better than in London. However, she knew enough about the Metro to contradict her father: ‘As for your remark about Paris “decadence”, Paris crowds particularly in the Metro are no worse than before the war. The manners and general behaviour of the police have most strikingly improved and manners in polite society are as perfect as ever.’

  Installed in the room next to hers at the Quai Henri IV within a few months of Rosalind’s arrival was a young Italian crystallographer recently arrived from Argentina. Vittorio Luzzati, born in Genoa, had emigrated to Buenos Aires at the start of the war. Now in Paris, married to a French doctor who had also been in Argentina, he got along well with Rosalind from the start. He liked her intelligent, expressive face and thought she had good French for an Englishwoman. To him her facility for experiment was remarkable and he quickly saw that she had ‘golden hands’. They had a mutual taste for fierce argument and there was plenty to argue about. He was a trained X-ray crystallographer; she was a physical chemist. ‘When Vittorio and Rosalind were together,’ said an onlooker, ‘it was hammer and tongs and quite exhausting.’ Rosalind would never let anyone get away with a careless or unsubstantiated statement. Also, as foreigners both proud of their French, they were gleeful in spotting each other’s errors. (However, in what was to be a long friendship, they never used anything but the ‘vous’ form of address to one another.)

  One day she asked Luzzati’s advice on what to wear to a Christian funeral service. How should he know? He was Jewish. When Rosalind said that she was too, they had a good laugh. Each had been fooled by the other’s assimilated surname.

  Rosalind all her life felt more comfortable with Jewish people. By no means were all her close women friends Jewish, but most of her men friends were. While it is hardly rare for any scientist to have Jews as colleagues, it is a fact that, throughout her career, Rosalind’s most imaginative and productive research was done with male scientists of Jewish background.

  As fate would have it, the expert guide to her introduction to X-ray crystallography was not only Jewish but also the archetypal seductive Frenchman, the deliberate charmer who plays on any woman’s susceptibility. ‘Toutes les jeunes filles au labo étaient amoureuses de Mering’ (‘All the girls in the lab were in love with Mering’), said one who saw him in action. Jacques Mering, with high Tartar cheekbones, green eyes and hair combed rakishly over his bald spot, found in Rosalind the best student he ever had: brilliant, hungry to learn, incredibly dexterous in her research techniques and ingenious in experiment design. At the same time, she was highly attractive to him, with her trim figure, lustrous hair, glowing eyes, and eagerness to catch his every word. Mering, not being a professor, was inexperienced in teaching students in a group and was more comfortable on a one-to-one basis. He and Rosalind would spend whole days and on into the evenings deep in discussion and lively argument over the internal arrangement of atoms in irregular crystals.

  Mering was known to be married — that is, he had a wife from somewhere in his pre-war existence, but not in immediate evidence. It was a cruel dilemma for Rosalind: a man who was magnetically attractive and intellectually inspiring, yet who did not see the need for a
divorce to sort out his private life, courting adoration all the while.

  Rosalind, to the French observers around her, was puritanical, in what seemed the English manner. Adrienne Weill, well- acquainted with Rosalind’s background, attributed her emotional immaturity to her family, particularly to her father, but also to her education — to St Paul’s, which turned out ‘terrible, hearty hockey-playing English girls who are embarrassed to be women’ and to Newnham College, which (Weill felt) gave out the message that intellectual women should not expect to combine a family and career.

  Rosalind’s English friends noticed a change in her appearance on her visits to England — the first occasion perhaps being her brother David’s wedding to Myrtle Montefiore in March 1947. Seeing the smart New Look, the make-up, the new hair-do and necklaces, they drew the conclusion that Rosalind was in love. ‘Something happened to Ros in Paris,’ decided her cousin Ursula. Anne Crawford sensed that there might have been ‘some sort of sexual involvement’. However, another Cambridge friend ascribed the transformation to scientific success.

  From what has come to be known of the principals in this small drama, it seems fair to deduce that Mering was very drawn to Rosalind and made advances of some sort, and that she allowed herself to be tempted farther than was usual for her but eventually, incapable of a casual liaison, drew back and dreamed only of scientific collaboration, of their names linked in papers of their joint work. Mering would later admit there had been ‘something’ between them, that he loved her very much but that she took things ‘seriously’ and was naive and inexperienced.1

  Did her parents sense danger? Muriel Franklin was quite upset when Rosalind asked if Mering, who was about to visit London and return an overcoat that Roland had left behind in Paris, could stay the night at Pembridge Place. Muriel did not welcome the thought of putting up a French-speaking stranger. At this, Rosalind blew up; she could hardly expect Mering to deliver the coat, she said, and then to go out and look for a hotel. That, in the end, seems to have been what happened.

  Rosalind never drew back from her passion for high mountains. In the summer of 1947 (which was extremely hot) she went with a walking party in the Haute Savoie. After nearly a decade of climbing, she had developed a Wordsworthian capacity to conquer precipitous peaks, walk miles in fog and storm, then come home and write rapturously about it. In a letter to Colin she de scribed a tough sixteen-hour hike along the Peclet-Polset Arêtes and Aiguilles; then, next morning, ‘We started out in cloud at 4.30 a.m. and the cloud lifted suddenly at sunrise, just as we came onto the glacier, revealing pink summits above a “mer de nuages”. I cannot describe the effects, I can only tell you that the sheer beauty of it made me weep.’

  With her fluent French and her knowledge of Paris, Rosalind became a point of call for her family’s wide London circle. ‘The Cousinhood’ could be demanding. In the spring of 1948 she was sought out by one of her new in-laws, Harold Montefiore, and at the same time by her Cambridge friend Rachel Caro, plus Rachel’s brother Anthony (later the renowned sculptor). Rosalind organised an evening party that included Rachel’s cousin Pierrette who lived in Paris. The evening was not a success. Harold Montefiore turned up ‘in black hat, large white silk scarf and white gloves, looking more like the Mad Hatter than anything I’ve ever seen. It turned out that he and Tony Caro had been bitter enemies together at “prep school” and had succeeded in avoiding one another ever since. And Pierrette doesn’t get on with the Caros anyway. However,’ Rosalind concluded revealingly, ‘we all felt we’d done our duty.’ Capable as she was of fierce defence of her rights, she never protested against demands made in the name of family.

  Harold’s return was followed by another request from the Montefiores, apparently parsimonious although much richer than the Franklins:

  I’ve just had an absurd telegram signed ‘Montefiore’ and sent by the Wayfarers! [The Wayfarer’s Travel Agency was one of the extended Franklin family’s businesses.] I’m very pleased to book rooms for any of them but I rather object to being dealt with through a travel agency. And I think they might have paid for one more word to let me know which of them to expect. I shall book expensive, and this side of the river because I haven’t the time to go the other side.

  Rosalind also continued her intense interest in the plight of Jews driven out of Europe and, although no Zionist, read the papers attentively as the day for the end of the British Mandate and the proclamation of the new state of Israel approached. A birthday letter to her father in late March 1948 answered his request for information on the French press’s coverage of Palestine — ‘less concerned’ than the British, which she found too pro-Arab. ‘Who,’ she demanded a week later, ‘is responsible for the shocking article in The Economist?’ (The Economist s leader, ‘Realities in Palestine’, said bluntly that ‘There can now be no settlement in Palestine of any kind but force.’)

  She was far more worried that the developing arms race between the West and the Soviet Union could only lead to another war, and she scolded her father — and his whole generation, who had ‘seen the 1914 war and consequences’ for having been ‘so little cynical about the last war’. She favoured Western European union and thought national sovereignty nonsense.

  However, she picked up the BBC on her wireless and asked her parents to substitute a subscription to the Radio Times for The Economist. She remained faithful to the New Statesman. She saw Laurence Olivier’s Henry V three times, and in at least one other respect, was proud to be British. Seeing France torn between de Gaulle and a very militant Communist left, she diagnosed the weakness of the French left as ‘the absence of a strong and efficient socialist party . . . the French are extremely envious of the effective British system of equal sharing of food and the relatively scarce necessities’.

  From the very start, she accepted that her main reason for working abroad was that she had not found a suitable job at home. She regarded her return to London as inevitable — quite apart from the steady drumbeat of letters from her parents asking when she was coming home. (It was only London that she would consider: for her the English provinces or Scotland were unthinkable.) She calculated (correctly) that her employment prospects would improve once she had published more work, which would not be long. Five papers on the density, structure and chemical composition of coals were now either published or accepted for publication. The first which gave her institutional affiliation as the Laboratoire Central, although it was based on her BCURA work, appeared in Transactions of the Faraday Society in 1948: ‘A Study of the Fine Structure of Carbonaceous Materials.’ On her frequent return trips to London she renewed old contacts and visited labs at the Royal Institution and Birkbeck College with an eye out for possible openings.

  France, seen from Britain in the late 1940s, was a faraway country and getting there was not half the fun. The Channel crossing, before the ferries were equipped with stabilisers, was an ordeal. Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies opens with the spectacle of embarking passengers:

  to avert the terrors of sea-sickness they had indulged in every kind of civilized witchcraft . . . some had filled their ears with cotton wool, others wore smoked glasses, while several ate dry captain’s biscuits from paper bags . . .

  Still:

  Sometimes the ship pitched and sometimes she rolled and sometimes she stood quite still and shivered all over, poised above an abyss of dark water; then she would go swooping down like a scenic railway into a windless hollow and up again with a rush into the gale . . . and sometimes she would drop dead like a lift. It was this last movement that caused the most havoc among the passengers.

  By her second year in France Rosalind — almost certainly dipping into her personal money in England — discovered air travel. It was so easy, she announced, she would continue to use it. She had arrived at Heathrow with ‘a good five minutes in the waiting room’, during which she watched late passengers drive up to the plane in their own cars. Arriving at Le Bourget, having no luggage, she was first through customs. It m
ade a short visit worthwhile.

  Even so, she remained utterly absorbed in her X-ray work in Paris. The apparatus, sophisticated for its time, consisted of a demountable X-ray tube evacuated by a double oil and mercury diffusion pump. These demanded considerable maintenance and cleaning. Michel Oberlin, a young recruit to the lab in October 1948, recalled seeing her first crouched on all fours, reassembling a vacuum system. It was a messy job; litres of benzene were needed to free the pumps of sludge and clean off vacuum grease but she did not mind. Another day, she saw that he noticed dirt on her face and explained, ‘It’s not dirt. It’s graphite.’ As she worked, neither she nor her colleagues were overly concerned with the dangers of radiation. In comparison with later tight safety standards about shielding and protection, safety procedures were lax, and the staff were comparatively insouciant about the dangers. Jacques Maire, a research student who was assigned to her, caused a permanent injury to his finger through his haste and indifference to safety while processing X-ray film in the darkroom; decades later, he shrugged it off as a small matter. Rosalind, for her part, was very annoyed when her radiation monitoring badge showed that she had exceeded the permitted levels and had to stay away from the lab for several weeks.