Homage to Gaia

by James Lovelock

  The society was like most student societies—radical. It would have fitted well with the liberation theology of present-day South America. The stuffy Catholic hierarchy, represented by the Bishop of Salford, referred to the society in a letter sent to parish priests as a place where the young would be ‘in the proximate occasion of mortal sin’. He used these strong words because he felt righteous anger over the society’s intention to host a university debate on the subject ‘God or Stalin’. They had asked the Socialist Society to provide a champion for Stalin. They proposed a debate on traditional moral theology lines and the Marxists were delighted with the chance to perform on so intellectual a stage. To add to the Bishop’s concern, his informant must have mentioned my presence as an active member of the Catholic society. This led him to warn of the dangers of mixed marriages. I found all this fuss a refreshing change from university socialism, which by then had become indistinguishable from the dull and cheerless faith of Marxism. There were also fringe benefits. The society held dancing classes for its members in the crypt of the Holy Name church close to the University. Here I met a wonderful group of attractive and intelligent Irish girls. The girl who particularly caught my fancy was Mary Delahunty. She had been a secretary in the Architecture Department and had become a member of the Ambrose Barlow Society. Her clear-minded maturity and her good looks attracted me.

  Manchester and, indeed, most northern industrial towns were deep in poverty in the 1930s. George Orwell’s book, The Road to Wigan Pier, captures the all-pervasive squalor under which so much of northern England then lived. In the north in those days women usually worked outside the home. Many were descended from those who immigrated to England to escape the famine in Ireland at the failure of the potato crop. There was little tradition of cooking among them, and consequently malnutrition exacerbated the effects of poverty. Wandering as a student around the streets of Manchester I was amazed to find no shops or street markets selling fruit and vegetables. This was something so common in London that one expected it everywhere and, indeed, this was true in most southern cities. I did manage to find two greengrocers in greater Manchester: one was near the town centre and another in Didsbury, an affluent suburb. In most parts, the corner shops stocked only potatoes. We were well fed in my digs in terms of calories and tastiness, but the fruit and green vegetables so common in the south were lacking. I experienced the poverty of Manchester briefly when there was a severe snowstorm in January 1940—so severe that it isolated Manchester from the rest of the country for at least a week. I remember living on baked beans and nothing else. At the end of this period, they admitted me to the Manchester Royal Infirmary for the treatment of scurvy, a Vitamin C deficiency. My professor, Alexander Todd, had elucidated the chemical structure of at least one vitamin and was shocked to find vitamin deficiency in one of his students. It was to be the turning point in my days as a student at Manchester. Todd became quite concerned when he learned how I was trying to survive, and he became convinced that I was far poorer than in fact I was. He excused my poor attendance and examination results and saw me, I think, as a student struggling against adversity.

  The chemistry taught at Manchester specialized in what one might call high organic chemistry, the chemistry that was to make Todd a Nobel Laureate. His award was for the discovery of the structures of the nucleoside bases, which led in its turn to perhaps the most important discovery of the 20th century—that of the structure of DNA. Perversely, I found this science, no matter how important it was, uninteresting, even boring. I would spend time that I should have spent at chemistry lectures attending lectures on history, economics, and indeed anything that seemed interesting. In some ways, this was using the university properly, but it was not part of the approved life of a student. My favourite subjects of my own syllabus were bacteriology and physics. I must admit that I chose chemistry as the main subject for my degree because it contained, in those days, relatively little mathematics. Physics was so mathematical that I feared failure if I took it. It was not that I found mathematics or its principles difficult to understand; quite the reverse. Mathematical problems still fascinate me, but I was slow in the execution of the arithmetic steps of those problems, and my slowness prevented me from answering the necessary number of set questions. Some time in the Lent term of 1940, I moved to new digs in Fallowfield, along with two other students, Malcolm Woodbine and William Griffiths. We moved partly for companionship and partly because it was considerably cheaper than the digs in town. It was much further out from the university—too far to walk, but an easy tram ride. The new digs were quite comfortable and the food was healthier and included vegetables.

  At the end of my first term in physics I was singled out with two other students and warned that, if I did not improve my performance by the spring term examinations, I would be thrown out of the university. My slowness at mathematics had struck again and let me down. Therefore, from January until March 1940, I worked hard. This was the only time I did so at Manchester. I practised endless examples of physics and physical chemistry until at last I was proficient in the handling of the arithmetic background of physical principles. As the great mathematician Euler said, and the desktop computer in front of me proves, all operations in mathematics are no more than simple addition. I remember looking with distaste at the textbook proofs of electromagnetic theory and finding them all based on trigonometrical functions like sines and cosines, arranged in a near pathological prolixity. I knew that by using the Heaviside operator based on that wonderful, outrageous, impossible number, the square root of – 1, the same proofs reduced from several pages of trigonometry to a few lines of equations. I knew that in the 1940s mathematical purists still regarded a proof using this operator as no more than a sleight of a hand. I gambled that my physics examiners would consider the use of these operational functions as quite appropriate and see that, as a good scientist should, I was using a simple device to achieve an end. I hoped that they would not see me merely as taking a short cut through what seemed to be an unnecessarily meandering path of trigonometrical equations. It worked, and after the spring examinations, they even praised me for my diligence in finding another way to solve the problem. This made me realize that Manchester in those days was a good university and one that rewarded enterprise. I was intrigued to read in Nature of September 1999 that Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls were on the staff of the Physics Department in 1940, and there calculated the size of the critical mass of uranium-235 needed for an atom bomb. They found it was astonishingly small, and that therefore the bomb was feasible.

  Teaching labs and lecture rooms at Manchester were all but unheated in that bitter winter of 1940. I recall one Monday morning entering the physical chemistry teaching laboratory. It was a large room with benches arrayed in parallel rows with wooden stools in front of them. At my place, on the bench, was set out an experiment to measure electrode potentials. Polished wooden potentiometers, galvanometers, and a large battery, and pieces of wire, beakers, etc. were all there. My task was to find the potential as measured against a calomel electrode of various solutions of sodium chloride. There was also on the bench a wash bottle half filled with distilled water. When I picked it up a wonderful change occurred. The clear water suddenly filled with lace-like crystals of ice. So cold was the laboratory that the water was well below its freezing point, but as a super-cooled liquid. The moment I disturbed the water by lifting the wash bottle it froze. Although clothed only in trousers, shirt, vest and jacket, I cannot remember feeling cold myself at that time, nor did I feel cold when sitting for a one-hour lecture shortly afterwards on the same morning. Feeling cold is a penalty of ageing.

  I registered as a conscientious objector at the Labour Exchange in Manchester. It was an uneasy experience, waiting in the queue of men enlisting and having to say, ‘I want to register as a conscientious objector.’ I half expected shouts of scorn or accusations of cowardice from the men around me. It did not happen. The clerk merely said, ‘Go to counter No. 10 and they will
deal with you.’ I went to counter No. 10 and was asked courteously to take a seat while they took down what were in those days called one’s particulars: age, qualifications, schooling, and so on. The clerk said, ‘You know, do you, that as a registered full-time student in the sciences you do not have to register here.’ I did know, but I wanted to go through with it. I wanted to feel committed; I had come too far to duck out now. When I explained this the clerk said: ‘Very well, you will receive a summons to appear before a tribunal within a few months.’ The Society of Friends ran a school for conscientious objectors, which trained them to cope with the problems raised by our odd status in wartime England. They held mock tribunals at which we faced questions from a panel of senior Quakers acting as judges. The questions were those actually asked at the real tribunal.

  My summons came early in 1940. I was to appear before the tribunal, consisting of three judges, in March, but first I must make a written statement of about a thousand words on why I was a CO. This I had to post to the tribunal and read it to them when I appeared there. All that I can recall of this statement is the start, which went: ‘A lifelong association with the Society of Friends has led me to believe that war is evil.’ The Chairman of the tribunal asked me why I was not a Quaker. I replied, ‘I intend to become one after the tribunal, whatever its conclusion.’ It seemed to me improper to present myself before them as a Friend, since Quakers were often exempted as a matter of course. They asked me other questions, mainly, it seemed, to discover how long I had held pacifist beliefs. When it became clear that they were longstanding, and that I had not joined the Cadet Corps at my school on conscientious grounds, they conferred amongst themselves and the senior judge looked straight at me and said, ‘We have decided to grant you an unconditional exemption from military service. We feel that we can rely on you to follow your conscience and do what is right.’ Oddly, he added finally, ‘We think you should make some kind of gesture, such as volunteering as a blood donor, but this we do not ask as a condition of your exemption. We leave it to you.’ I was much moved and thankful. Their conclusion placed me in deep debt to my country. It was then truly civilized. They had shown trust in me in the most remarkable way. I went to the Royal Infirmary to enrol as a blood donor, but after tests, the young doctor came back to tell me that I had a blood group not suitable for donation.

  Soon after my public appearance before the tribunal, I asked the quarterly meeting of the Quakers in Manchester if they would accept me as a Friend. They gave me the two Books of Discipline to read, which recount the experiences of the Quakers since their formation in the 17th century. A month or so passed and two Manchester Friends asked me to come to the Meeting House for, as they put it, a talk. They were young northerners of that quiet respectable kind that is common in north Lancashire. They first asked me if I had ever had a religious experience. I answered no, thinking probably rightly in their context, that they meant something transcendental such as that so well described by Bishop Montefiore in his autobiography, Oh God, What Next? Here he movingly tells how, as a schoolboy at Rugby, he saw in his room an appearance of Jesus who said ‘Follow me’. This overwhelming event changed and coloured his life from then on. For me, life had always been firmly grounded and most solid in its reality. Looking back, though, I wonder, in my own context, if the whole of life is in certain ways a religious experience. The world of good human relationships can be so delightful that the concept of Heaven seems to imply a sensory overload. Sunlight dappling the fallen leaves of a wood or glinting on the pebbles of a stream is beautiful, but to look at the sun itself is blinding.

  The two Friends did not seem put out by my saying no to their enquiry about a religious experience. They asked me about my philosophy, which was that of a Fabian socialist. They then moved on to what was their principal concern: was I merely asking to become a Friend because of my conscientious objection? Again, I replied no, thinking of my childhood and the benign influence of the Street family in Brixton. They then told me what I had known but had never fully understood: that each Friend was in truth a minister of religion, and that this was both a distinction and a burden. Was I ready to take it on? I asked if this meant that I should now become evangelical on behalf of the Society of Friends. Oh no, they said, not unless that is your calling. What you must do is always to obey your conscience, that still small voice within. I then realized that the God of the Quakers was part of the model Universe that exists in our minds. This was something that at that time did not clash with my true vocation as a scientist. Sometime later, they accepted me as a Friend.

  My inquisitors were right to be concerned about the pressures of wartime England on my mind. I doubt, if peace had continued, that I would have taken so serious a step as to become a Quaker. Only those who lived through those years of the Second World War in England can understand how intense, how certain, and how fulfilling was the tribal acceptance that we were one nation and engaged in a just war. We knew that it was not a war of conquest in any sense, but one for justice. There was something in such a Weltanschauung that left no place for conscientious objectors. All I had left was a youthful fantasy of becoming a Quaker martyr. I had for years schooled myself to cope with the thought of the cruelties, the ignominy experienced by COs in the First World War, and I was certain it would be repeated. At the very least, I would be imprisoned or have to serve as a stretcher-bearer under battle conditions. It was wholly unnerving at age twenty to receive respect, especially from old soldiers, as someone of principle. It was hard to be reminded daily that everything, from the food I ate, to my clothes and books, were dearly bought with the lives of brave sailors and merchant seamen. It was impossible not to share the pride of the nation in the brave young pilots of the Battle of Britain.

  As June 1940 approached, and with it the end of my first year as a student of Manchester University, I found that I was broke. I had spent the entire loan from Kent County Council and the smaller donation from the charity. I did not intend to return home to Orpington to be a charge on my parents for the three summer months before the next term started. I wanted to take a temporary job as a merchant seaman, but soon found that if I did I would probably find myself at some distant place abroad when term was due to start in October. My Quaker friends suggested I try for farm work and recommended a Quaker farm at the village of Nether Kellet near Carnforth, about fifty miles north of Manchester.

  Dale Barns was a large farm even by present-day standards. There were about 150 acres around the farmhouse and vast amounts of grazing land along the seashore at Bolton le Sands, a nearby village. There was also hill grazing at another farm site near Ingleborough in the Pennines. In peacetime, the sheep grazed the mountains in the summer and the shore in the winter, and the middle farm was kept mainly for cattle and dairy farming. Wartime law obliged farmers to use up to forty per cent of their land for the growing of cereal crops and similar foodstuffs. Of the many things I learned from those months at the farm was how many skills were needed, and how often improvisation and invention were required. I had, I am ashamed to say, previously regarded the farm-worker as some dim unintelligent fellow whose mind worked as slowly as his crops rotated. I also learnt that farming life was not for me. It is an unremitting occupation. Keeping animals demands seven days a week of attention and we had to milk the cows twice a day; Sunday cannot be an exception. We could not leave the sheep to graze unattended because the weather happened to be foul with the rain driving in horizontally. The thing that most put me off farm work was the healthy euphoria of every evening, which made me so contented that there was no desire for reading or thinking. The work was so hard during the day that by evening time I just fell asleep the moment I lay down on my bed.

  After a week or so I grew used to the daily round of work. I never managed milking by hand without pain and I admired Peggy, the farmer’s daughter, for her facility when occasionally she would help us out. The haymaking strengthened my arms so much that by August I could lift two fifty-six-pound weights, one in eac
h hand, above my head. The Whittaker boys and Gilbert, the Irishman who worked on the farm with us but lived in the village, were fine companions. They were forever teasing me about my love for Mary Delahunty back in Manchester. It was the daily sending and arrival of letters that stirred their interest. To them, writing was as hard a chore as milking was for me. To them, a love that inspired such a flood of correspondence must be profound indeed. Their celibacy puzzled me. The two young men never ventured far from the farm except to the Friends Meeting House on Sundays. There were plenty of eligible local girls around from other farming families, including Quakers, for this was one of the few Quaker communities in England. Perhaps even for them, the sheer drudgery of wartime farming with its shortage of labour drained them of energy and desire.

  The boys’ father, old Mr Whittaker, was a widower, and lived at the farm on the shore at Bolton le Sands. He was a tough, stern character and feared by the family. I found him critical and difficult to deal with at first. He had no patience with my learning phases and seemed to expect me to be as strong and as skilled as his own sons, but there was one thing I did that brought me his approval. He was obsessed about thistles and would nag endlessly about their growth in the meadows and ask why someone didn’t do something about it. I found that I could use Father Time’s reaper, the scythe, efficiently, and I took on voluntarily the job of mowing down the thistles from the meadows, a job the boys detested. So on days when the weather or some other event prevented haymaking and turnip-weeding, I would gladly take my scythe, walk to whatever meadow I hadn’t already mowed, and attack the thistles. It was satisfying work. I saw these plants as my imaginary enemy and rejoiced in the swish of the scythe as I mowed them down. On my 21st birthday in July 1940, to the amazement of everyone at Dale Barns, old Mr Whittaker gave me a pound note and told me to take the weekend off. I immediately went to the village on my bicycle, telephoned Mary, and arranged to meet her in Blackpool on that next Saturday. The purchasing power of £1 in those days was equivalent to about £100 now, so the weekend in Blackpool was not stinted. The boys told me that their father had never previously made such a gesture, and I can only assume that my diligence with the thistle mowing had moved him deeply.