Homage to Gaia

by James Lovelock

  By modern standards, it was a hard life. The alarm clock woke me at 6.30 am and I caught the 7.45 train to Victoria from Orpington. After work ended at 5.30 I travelled by Tube to Birkbeck and spent the hour before lectures began either in the Students Union or having supper at the canteen there. Lectures and practical work occupied the time from 7 until 9. I arrived home usually about 11 and was rarely in bed before midnight. Sundays were for walking in what was then the perfect English countryside. I set out after breakfast and walked as far south as Ide Hill and as far east as Wrotham. Favourite places on my route were the Pilgrim’s Way and Magpie Bottom. The latter was one of those dry green valleys that one finds in the chalk country. In those days, it was ‘unimproved’ and wild-flowers studded the turf, including numerous species of orchid. I usually called to have tea at a cottage in the village of Shoreham. An old lady of the village ran it and it faced the River Darrent. After tea, usually sandwiches and cake, I ran the six miles back to Orpington up the downs and across the two valleys that lay between. A typical Sunday’s walk and run would be about twenty miles. The most I ever walked in a weekend was forty-two miles, but this meant starting out on Saturday night and walking all night as well as all Sunday.

  One of the firm’s customers made gelatine of photographic quality for Kodak. One day they were in serious trouble, for the photographic emulsion made with their gelatine was only weakly sensitive to light. Humphrey suspected a lack of sulphide in the gelatine and sent me, together with Riley Ratcliffe, the more experienced technician, to have a look at the process and find out what had gone wrong. It was my first look at the industrial world; I had never realized that gelatine came from the indigestible leftovers of the meat industry. Hoofs and skin were boiled in vast vats to make the thick soup that was allowed to gel and then dried as sheets of gelatine. We asked the foreman if he could think of anything that had changed in the process during the past few weeks. He replied that nothing had changed; everything was exactly as before. My colleague noticed an empty, rusty bucket next to one of the vats and asked what it was. The foreman replied, ‘That is the old bucket from which we add the hydrogen peroxide to clear the gelatine at the final stage of cooking. As you can see it rusted away, so we bought a new one last week. Here it is.’ Light began to dawn. We knew that the lack of sulphide could have come from an excess of oxidant and here the new bucket was visibly larger than the old one. We soon solved the firm’s problem when we found that the new bucket was twice the volume of the old one. This small experience made real for me the academic fact that volume increases as the cube of the linear dimensions. The foreman buying the new bucket thought that an increase of one-quarter in diameter and depth was of small consequence. Universities can rarely supply golden experiences such as this.

  My most vivid memory of apprenticeship days was the preparation of several hundred grams of the dye pigment carmine. The recipe was hand-written in an exercise book emblazoned with stains of the dyer’s craft. Take one hundred-weight of dried cochineal beetles, it said. Boil them in the copper with five gallons of ten-per-cent acetic acid. There was the 112-pound sack of beetles and the jars of acetic acid and in front of me was the copper. It looked just like the pictures I had seen of equipment in an alchemist’s laboratory. A semicircular stone parapet supported the large copper vat. A large wooden lid closed the top of the vat and heat came from a gas burner beneath it. The instructions said to bring the acid to a boil and then adjust the gas so that it slowly simmered. This I did, and then began to ladle in the beetles until they were all in the copper. The beetles cooked for four hours while a strange vinegary and musty odour filled the outhouse. I decanted the dark red-brown liquor from the beetle stew through a strainer into a set of jars. The next step was to add alum solution. Then, while stirring the mixture, to add ammonia. I watched the carmine lake precipitate. The last and most rewarding step was to filter the suspension of lake through a foot diameter filter paper held in a large porcelain funnel. I washed the powder several times and then put it in a vacuum desiccator to dry. At this final stage, it was a pure red colour so intense that it seemed to draw the sense of colour out through my eyes from my brain. What a joy to participate in the transmutation of dried beetles into immaculate carmine. I felt more like the sorcerer’s apprentice than merely Humphrey Murray’s junior technician.

  A more down-to-earth business experience was the discovery that the firm profited by buying kilogram cartons of dye from ICI and packaging it in one-gram bottles. They then sold this back to their customers, which included other ICI departments, for as much as the kilogram cost. I stayed with the firm until July 1939. Humphrey Murray was by then, I think, fed up with my unbridled curiosity and chose to transfer me to work with one of their customers, the blueprint manufacturers, Norton and Gregory. I had an extraordinary sense of fulfilment as I worked out my apprenticeship as a scientist. I am full of gratitude to Humphrey Murray and to Tyrell, and my friends of that extraordinary firm.

  In the spring of 1939, the students at Birkbeck and other evening-class colleges in London received a rude shock. The government announced its intention to conscript all fit young men for military service. Full-time students would be exempt but not part-time students like those at evening classes. My fellow students at Birkbeck shared my view that this was monstrously unfair. Here were we working both in the daytime and at night, the most diligent of students. How dare they penalize us? The political blood in my veins began to boil and I drew up a petition that the Student Union then circulated for signing. We addressed it to the vice-chancellor of London University. My first draft petition was a cry from the heart and not too well expressed. Before it had gone too far, a copy fell into the hands of the Principal of the John Cass College, another evening-class college in London. The Principal’s name was E de Barry Barnett. He asked if I would come to see him and he received me, a young student, most courteously. He asked if I would mind reading his revision of my text. He said he agreed with the general tone of what I was saying and that it was a most unfair and insensitive action by the government, but he wanted to be sure that we presented the best possible case. His revision was three pages of carefully drafted wisdom. He converted my two paragraphs into a plea that would stop a charging lawyer. I welcomed gladly his intervention, but not his request that I left him out of it. I was not happy to pretend that I had composed his wise words. We finally agreed that I would say that I had taken advice before drafting the second version of the petition. The Student Union at Birkbeck was delighted with it. The President at that time was Lena Chivers, now Lady Jeger, a Labour Peer. She gave her unstinted support and sent copies to all of the evening-class colleges of London.

  Many of the students signed, and the large bundle made its way to the Vice-Chancellor. Soon afterwards, he invited me to see him. It is not usual for a vice-chancellor to invite a part-time first-year student to have sherry with him and I was nervous, but he soon put me at ease and listened. He agreed to present our case to the government. But this was by now August 1939 and, whatever was his intention, the invasion of Poland took the matter from our hands. The intense activity of this piece of politics did not seem to affect my studies at Birkbeck and luckily for me, as it happened, the end-of-term summer examinations produced a far better result than I had expected. Soon after the declaration of war, the government announced that all London colleges, evening and daytime, would close and the students would be evacuated to other universities. This of course was not an option for evening-class students. It was clear to me that my efforts for part-time students, although appropriate in peacetime, would not succeed now that we were at war.

  During my childhood in Brixton, I attended Quaker meetings and they led me to let my conscience dictate my actions. Or, as the Quakers put it, ‘Listen to the still small voice within.’ A wonderful family named Street ran the Brixton Friends Meeting House. The men among them had been conscientious objectors to national service in the 1914 war, and their transparent honesty and decency made th
eir pacifism honourable. Their example made me believe that it was right and proper to register as a conscientious objector. I was prepared for unpleasantness and shame. In the First World War, conscientious objectors had had a tough ride, and I expected that something similar would happen during the coming war. To those who find it difficult to understand how I could hold pacifist and warlike views—such as my feelings about the Spanish Civil War—in my mind simultaneously, I can only say it often seems to happen in wartime. We are by nature tribal carnivores, and at such times it is difficult to be rational. At the same time, I knew it would be at least one, if not more, years before my time of testing began, so I applied to enrol as a full-time student at a university outside London. I chose Manchester solely because I had fallen for a girl I met when staying at a youth hostel in the Lake District in July 1939. She was taking a degree in chemistry at Manchester University and was one year ahead of me. Even before I arrived in Manchester to enrol I had discovered that she had no interest in me whatsoever. But at that time I was young enough to hope that perhaps she would change her mind. Meanwhile, on the strength of my Birkbeck examination results I was able to persuade Kent County Council, the county in which I lived, to provide me with a student loan of £60 a year. Lodgings, food, clothes, and tuition fees cost more than this, but with the help of one of my mother’s friends, a Miss Cameron, I was able to get a small grant of £15 a year from a private charitable trust. With £75 a year, I could manage, even though it was less than half of my wage from Murray, Bull, and Spencer.

  I took the train from Euston to Manchester carrying all my possessions in my rucksack and having with me a raglan overcoat and umbrella to protect me against the well-known rain. All southerners in England believe that it rains every day in Manchester. It was a scary moment arriving at Manchester’s Victoria Station. I had no idea where to stay and knew I had to find somewhere that was inexpensive. I asked the taxi driver at the station if he could take me to a cheap but decent hotel nearby. Luck was with me. He was a kind man and when he knew that I was a student took me the few hundred yards to a commercial hotel where, for a minute sum, they provided bed and breakfast. In those days, students were uncommon, particularly in the north of England, and people regarded us with touching respect. They thought that by going to college a young man could escape the traps of working-class poverty, and everyone cheered you on.

  Next morning I walked through the centre of Manchester to the Oxford Road and down to the university. I joined the group of would-be students waiting to enrol. When my turn came, I told the secretary I had to start as a second-year student since I was from a London college now closed. This was not part of her programme and I was ushered into Professor AR Todd’s room to explain myself. He was a tough, gruff young Scotsman. I showed him the letter of recommendation from Birkbeck and the results of my first year’s examination. He harrumphed and said, ‘This is very irregular, you know, to ask to start in the second year. You won’t have been doing the same things there as we do here in the first year.’ He paused, looked me in the eye, and said, ‘I can see your problems, and so what I would like you to do is write an essay saying why you’ve chosen to come to Manchester and why you want to start in the second year.’ This I did, not mentioning the girl who had attracted me to Manchester, or that Birkbeck was an evening-class college of London University. I did include the fact that I could only afford two years, and this seemed to impress him. He signed the forms for my enrolment and sent me back to his secretary. Soon she gave me my pack of papers, membership of the Student Union, and the address of landladies approved by the university. Most lived in a rather pleasant set of semi-detached suburban villas, about a mile from the university and close to the Manchester Royal Infirmary. I soon settled in comfortably, sharing accommodation with a history student, and was looked after by a kindly landlady.

  At the end of my first month as a student, Professor Todd summoned me to his office and when I got there, he was angry. ‘Lovelock,’ he said, ‘you’ve let me down; you have cheated.’ I was dumbfounded and searched my mind for anything that would explain his accusation. ‘How have I cheated?’ ‘You know full well,’ he said. ‘Students never get the exact result for their gravimetric analyses and certainly not twice running. You are not only a cheat, you are stupid. If you had thought of putting down something close to the right answer, you might have got away with it. No, you just looked at the demonstrator’s book and copied down the composition of the solution you were supposed to be analysing.’ What he was on about was a student exercise in analytical chemistry, the gravimetric analysis of the strength of a solution of potassium bromide. I did it by precipitating the bromide ion with silver nitrate solution, filtering the suspension of silver bromide, drying it and weighing it, and then calculating the amount of bromide in the solution. As a technician in London, I had done many such analyses. I could almost do them while sleepwalking. I was a professional and was expected and trusted to get the right answer. It took me twenty minutes to deflect Todd’s anger with this explanation, and I do not think that he believed me even then. He was not convinced until he came a few days later to see me do the very much more difficult gravimetric analysis of the sulphate ion. Both of us then realized how inadequate is the training of university students. They often leave, qualified with a degree, but unskilled in the craft of chemistry. It made me thankful once more for Humphrey Murray’s patient and unstinted tuition and his insistence on excellence; more than this, I give thanks that Murray taught me to be a professional. Having once learnt the dedication and discipline needed to do something well, professional behaviour in other fields is easier to acquire.

  In the first year at Manchester I joined the Mountaineering Club. This student society had a club hut at a place called Tal-y-Braich in the Ogwen valley in North Wales. Thanks to the fact that medical students and young physicians were over-represented in the club, somebody nearly always legitimately had a car and could drive to Wales for a weekend of climbing from the Mountaineering Club’s hut. Here I learned some of the tougher aspects of mountains and in the company of experienced climbers and hill walkers. I remember one day we left the converted farm cottage at Tal-y-Braich to satisfy an older member’s wish to complete his list of Welsh 25s. A 25 is a mountain higher than 2500 feet. There is a curious obsession amongst mountain walkers to climb every mountain that high in some given area. The peak we were making for was Drum, one of the Carneddau—a mountain mass of mostly smooth moss and grass punctuated by small crags, rather like Dartmoor, only higher. The Carneddau ran to the east of the Ogwen valley, and we set out one day in a full gale from the northwest with snowflakes descending from a cold grey sky. It was over ten miles to Drum and we passed over Carnedd Dafydd, Carnedd Llewylen, and two prominent peaks on the way. By the time we reached the 3000-foot coll that links these two mountains the wind was storm force and the snow whipped into a horizontal sandblast abrading our exposed faces. Was this the stuff of Antarctic exploration, I wondered? Suddenly, the dangers we faced became real when one of us crested the sharp rise between the mountains and a gust lifted him into the air. He fell in the snow on the slope just beside me and did not fall further. But our leader pressed on like the Bellman in ‘The Hunting of the Snark’. His desire to collect the last of his 25s overcame common sense. In all, we walked about twenty to twenty-five miles. It would have been nothing on a fine day, but in the blizzard it was memorable.

  In the years between puberty and the mid-twenties, young males are strangely impulsive. They do fear danger, but they suspend their fear while they meet some self-imposed challenge. For some, it is driving faster and furiously; for others, a gang fight; for me, it was the mountains. I would have scorned any suggestion that my choice was the most dangerous of them all, more dangerous than riding a motorbike. I should have known from the fate of other students that it is indeed the most dangerous of activities. Mountains then claimed a high proportion of the lives of those who climbed them. More than ten climbers and hill walkers
I knew personally died in the years that I was a student, and mostly from exposure, although a few did fall.

  After the day of the storm, the Welsh hills were covered with a snow blanket, and beneath a clear and sparkling blue sky, it was an exhilaration to look at it and to feel it. We rewarded ourselves with a quieter walk over the Glyders. We felt so good as we stood on that high mountain range in the snow, gazed down through the clear air, and enjoyed the exhilaration of the endorphins raised by the effort of climbing. Dangerous it may be but few other sports can offer such a reward.

  My companion at the student digs was a history student who came from Redcar in Yorkshire, and I think his family was closely associated with the Navy. He was a civilized and companionable man but I think my pacifist views appalled him. We were well fed and warm, but for me as a young male it was a lonely existence.

  Towards the end of my first term I met two young men in the Student Union and made friends with them. Kevin Cave and Frank Johnston were both Catholics and arts graduates. Kevin was tall, bespectacled, and had the air of a natural editor. Frank was a postgraduate student in the history department and so much an academic that no gown was needed to mark his credentials. They were also members of the university’s Ambrose Barlow Catholic Society. Our friendship reached a point where they asked me if I would be interested in joining. At first I said, ‘Well, no. I’m far from being a Catholic. I am about to become a Quaker.’ They seemed to think that this did not matter, so I joined and it was fortunate that I did. The university’s Socialist Society, part of which was in the pocket of the Communist Party, was recruiting many students like me. Had I joined this, it could have led to many difficulties in my scientific career, including travel to America in later life. In those days, it was not seen to be subversive to join a society run by Irish Catholics.