J D Bernal

by Andrew Brown

  Desmond’s stupid prank would have been even more dangerous had he staged it in his next vacation. The level of IRA violence against the police continued to escalate and inevitably led to reprisals by the police. Even Desmond, a notional party supporter, was appalled by the spate of Sinn Fein inspired murders because they ‘seem such a waste, and done in so cruel and cowardly a manner’. The police retaliation in kind began on 15th March 1920 with the assassination of the Lord Mayor of Cork, Thomas MacCurtain, who was also a well-known Sinn Feiner. His death was greeted with some joy in the Bernal household, where the general attitude towards Sinn Fein was ‘hang the lot of them’; Desmond sensed this was based on a fear that it might otherwise be their turn to be killed first.26 MacCurtain was shot by a gang of masked men, some of whom spoke with English accents.27 The Royal Irish Constabulary was now recruiting men from England, often ex-servicemen, to replace those Irish policemen killed and the growing number who had resigned from the force because of Sinn Fein threats. The overall strength of the police force needed to be increased since they were to bear the brunt of the struggle with the IRA. Lloyd George was not prepared to commit troops and accept that there was a civil war in Ireland, but he encouraged ‘unauthorized’ reprisals.28 There were not enough bottle-green uniforms for the new recruits, who were instead issued with khaki trousers or tunics. Many members of the new force were British Army veterans of the Great War and when they first appeared in County Tipperary, they were nicknamed the Black and Tans, after a local pack of hounds. The Black and Tans acted as an autonomous mercenary force, matching the IRA for viciousness, and thereby solidifying anti-British sentiment in many quarters. Not at Brookwatson though, where Cuddie continued to believe that the Irish were about the worst nation on the face of the earth; by the end of the Easter vacation, she and Desmond had got beyond arguing and ‘into quarrelling’.

  In his academic studies, if not in other areas of his life, Bernal was already beginning to show a level of maturity and a depth of interest, which paradoxically interfered with his mastery of the undergraduate courses. At the beginning of the Lent Term, he switched courses in order to attend Grace’s lectures on analytical geometry, which he soon liked ‘more and more, everything is so symmetrical and neat’.29 Analytical geometry is the bridge between algebra and geometry: it brings numerical values to points in space (e.g. latitude and longitude) and also allows an algebraic function to be represented graphically by points on a plane. The basic examples using two-dimensional coordinates at right angles (x- and y-axes) were already very familiar territory for Bernal, as were conic sections comprising the equations of circles, ellipses and hyperbolas. From his study of astronomy, Bernal also had a good working knowledge of polar coordinates where the position of a point is determined by its distance from a fixed origin or pole and the angle between a fixed polar axis and the line joining the pole to the point. Polar coordinates are particularly useful for studying spirals, symmetrical forms often found in architecture and nature. Grace’s mathematical treatment of different spiral forms, such as the logarithmic spiral of the snail’s shell, delighted Bernal.

  Grace was at the top of his form as a teacher during that academic year. In 1918, while deputizing at Aberdeen University for a professor away on war service, he published half a dozen notes and papers – the highest total of a career, in which consistently ‘he tackled a problem simply because he found it interesting’.30 It seems that the pressures of teaching at Cambridge blunted his aptitude for original work, and a few years after returning from Aberdeen, he withdrew from academic life permanently. One of his major papers in 1918, ‘Tetrahedra in relation to spheres and quadrics’, concerned three-dimensional shapes, and another short note, ‘An analogue in space of a case of Poncelet’s porism’, involved projective geometry (the study of transforming three-dimensional objects into flat, two-dimensional configurations). Projective geometry has a long history in that it was unwittingly applied by the architects of the ancient world and by Renaissance painters, but it was not until after the Napoleonic Wars that a French mathematician and engineer, Jean Victor Poncelet, published a textbook, A Treatment of the Projection of Figures, that set out the basic laws of perspective and projection.31

  Grace divulged his particular enthusiasms in his lectures, as on 13th February 1920, ‘Mr Grace is more and more interesting – a lot of beautiful mathematics about Poncelet’s porism and 22 symmetric relations.’32 Aside from the beauty of his ideas, there was a fragility about Grace himself that was attractive. In 1895, he had been in the running for Senior Wrangler, the most prestigious prize for the Mathematical Tripos examination, but according to legend celebrated a day too early and came in second. Bernal learned that Grace’s subsequent career had been blighted by drink and ‘now he walks about the town in his disreputable old clothes with some old crony… leading a miserable existence only enlivened by maths or visits to the Blue Boar’.33 Grace would continue to publish short, ingenious, papers for many years after leaving Cambridge in 1922, always with the pure spirit of an amateur, and only because he found the topic inherently worthy.34 Bernal, while appreciating the elegance of the mathematics, was always far more interested in what he could do with the techniques. What Grace gave him was an invaluable set of tools with which to attack the intricacies of crystalline structure.

  Bernal’s attraction to Grace’s teachings meant that he ignored some of the core content of the curriculum, and of course there were plenty of other distractions outside the curriculum. In the Lent Term of 1920, he was still a sexual innocent, while Twam enjoyed the status of a man of the world. He told Bernal that he would be bringing two sisters, Joan and Jose Kingsley, family friends from Bedford, to Emmanuel for a visit. He suggested that they might take tea in Bernal’s rooms. Desmond expended considerable energy clearing the general debris in his sitting room for the occasion, and then spent an equal amount of time rearranging furniture and placing books in just the positions to create the ambience of a distracted but creative young genius. Bernal was bewitched by Jose, the smaller of the two young women. At tea, he held forth about the laziness and aimlessness of Cambridge life. Twam became annoyed by his friend’s affected pose and said that Desmond only held these attitudes because he was a socialist. Jose was intrigued, and Bernal needed no extra prompting to launch into a diatribe, talking of ‘capital and labour, of control and nationalization and entered into eulogies of the Bolsheviks’.35 Jose attacked his ideas, defending capitalism ‘with all the old fallacies’. Bernal, finding that he could not easily counter all her arguments, switched to abstract ideals, and then ‘brought in pure science and my discursiveness led me to talk about Einstein and hormones and what not’.36 Twam and he walked the sisters to the station to catch their train back to Bedford. Bernal wanted to ask Jose if he might write to her, but his courage failed him. As the train pulled out of the station, Twam told Desmond that he was an ass, for although Jose was the smaller of the two sisters, she was twenty-three years old and engaged to be married. This news made no difference to Bernal, who was convinced that he was in love, and he wrote to his mother two days later, describing Jose’s soft brown eyes and lovely teeth.37

  At the start of the Easter vacation, Bernal invited himself to stay with the Twamley family in Bedford in order to see Jose again. He found her even more adorable than she seemed six weeks earlier, and during Mass on the Sunday felt a ‘higher pitch of emotion’ than he had experienced for a long time. After church he met some boys from the school, who told him that Mr Tearle had warned the House to beware of socialism and of Bernal in particular. The previous day, while watching the annual cross country race with Jose, Bernal had handed out some socialist leaflets. Now Bernal went back to his old House, and was set upon by a gang ‘with coats off and sleeves rolled up’. They challenged him to sing God Save the King, and when he refused, set upon him. Just as Bernal thought he could hold out no longer, the lookout warned that Mr Tearle was approaching, and Bernal was left to stagger to his feet. Tearle
asked accusingly, ‘Are you at the bottom of all this row?’ to which Bernal replied, ‘I am, Sir, very much at the bottom of it.’ While his wit delighted his assailants, Bernal regretted the ‘almost irreparable’ breach with the master who had shown him such kindness.

  During his short stay in Bedford, Bernal was relentless in his efforts to impress Jose, and talked continuously, without ever thinking that she might have things to say to him. After telling her of his conception of God and the Trinity, he ‘dropped into psychology, palming off my garbled second-hand knowledge culled from McDougall or Freud about various instincts which I called emotions.’38 Jose seems to have treated him kindly, perhaps unaware that she was being wooed, but Bernal worried later that he was ‘a selfish windbag’ who talked incessantly to satisfy his own vanity.

  The Freudian emphasis on sexual drives gave lustful young males the opportunity at least to talk about some of their frustrations, and to claim an intellectual basis for doing so. No doubt this liberating influence was largely responsible for the cult status that Freud enjoyed in post-war Cambridge. Freud’s reputation was also enhanced by the success of psychoanalysis in aiding some sufferers of shell shock or war neurosis. In Vienna, Freud listened to the terrible dreams of soldiers in German, while a military psychiatrist, W.H.R. Rivers, at Craiglockhart Hospital near Edinburgh undertook the same psychological analysis of British soldiers. Before his wartime clinical work, Rivers had followed a varied career as a physiologist and anthropologist. In 1919 he returned to Cambridge and was given the free-ranging position of Praelector of Natural Science Studies, which he used as an opportunity to get to know as many undergraduates as possible and to introduce them to friends of his like H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Robert Graves and his ex-patient, Siegfried Sassoon. His rooms at St. John’s College, were according to the novelist Arnold Bennett, ‘like a market square’, with undergraduates coming ‘at nearly all hours to discuss the intellectual news of the day’.39 Bernal would not get around to reading any works of Freud for another year or so, but when he did they made such an impression on him that he wrote ‘the laying bare of the unconscious basis for human desire and action will rank with that of the cosmologies of Copernicus and Newton and of the process of Evolution as one of the greatest liberating discoveries of mankind’.40

  Apart from Rivers’ rooms, there was another lively forum where discussion often turned to psychology. This was the Heretics, an elite gathering of iconoclasts, where the spirit was open, vigorous and heterosexual, (in contrast to the secret, precious and predominantly homosexual society of the Cambridge Apostles). The Heretics had been founded before the Great War, initially to question the religious orthodoxy of university life when attendance at chapel was still compulsory; the original object was ‘to promote discussion on problems of religion, philosophy and art’.41 Membership of the Heretics implied ‘the rejection of all appeal to Authority in the discussion of religious questions’, or as Bertrand Russell quipped, the Ten Commandments should carry the same rubric as a term examination paper, where ‘only six need be attempted’.42 In his first year, Bernal listened to the querulous, squeaky-voiced, Lytton Strachey address the Heretics on the proper attitude to sex.43 Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, his caustic debunking of such revered figures as Florence Nightingale and General Gordon of Khartoum, had appeared in 1918: there was no one better qualified to appeal to the irreverent audience. The certainties of Victorian times were in tatters as a result of the Great War and the civil wars in Europe that supplanted it; any remnants of the old order were now being dissected in Cambridge by intellectuals using the varied instruments of humanist philosophy, anthropology, economics, politics and psychology. The same forces that undermined rigid social mores could corrode an individual’s religious faith, unless he or she took determined measures to repel them. Bernal, for one, found them irresistible.

  Bernal had arrived in Cambridge as a devout Catholic and on his first Sunday went to a solemn High Mass, where he was struck by the smallness of the congregation and its homogeneity: ‘not two hundred souls all told and mostly well off. The absence of the poor is a distressing sign.’44 Their absence may have been just as well since Bernal had neglected to bring any money with him and so suffered ‘the usual tortures at the collection’. He continued to attend Mass regularly, in Cambridge and at home, for the first two years of his university life. As his political views hardened, the Church’s emphasis on the individual’s redemption and such moral entreaties as ‘thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’ seemed to him to become increasingly irrelevant. On rare occasions, there seemed to be some common ground between his religion and his politics – notably, a fiery sermon in Nenagh at Easter 1920, when the priest used the resurrection as a metaphor for Ireland’s struggle for independence, predicting that the country would rise from the darkness of oppression by the will of God to become the leader of the civilized world.45 More usual was the sense of growing exasperation, as when Bernal ‘sat in church crushed by the weight of an appallingly dull and empty sermon… [wondering] what force of inertia was preventing the congregation from rising and slaughtering the preacher on the spot’.46

  The weather in Ireland over Easter 1920 was wet and windy, in keeping with Bernal’s low spirits. On his return to Emmanuel, he had ‘a short and rather terrifying interview’ with his tutor P.W. Wood, who admonished him to concentrate on revision for the end-of-year exams. Bernal was feeling dejected and even seemed depressed about his appearance: ‘my pallid haggard face, my shock of hair, my podgy dirty hands, my bent shoulders, my untidy clothes and my slovenly walk.’47 He cheered up after a long walk with Dickinson, who had been to a University Socialist Federation meeting during the vacation, where there had been a split between the reformers and the revolutionaries. Dickinson supported the reformers and Bernal agreed with him implicitly, although he was in awe of Dickinson’s grasp of the facts and his lucid exposition of them – when it came to politics he still felt that he had ‘the status of a disciple’.48 It is difficult, based on the evidence of Bernal’s diaries, to avoid the conclusion that his political beliefs at this stage were shallow. Together, Bernal and Dickinson attended the usual round of Heretics, socialist, and Union meetings, including a speech by Ernest Bevin, the transport union leader, at the Guildhall on the aims of Labour. Bernal was impressed by Bevin: ‘an enormous man with a fine voice – immensely inspiring.’49

  For a few days, Bernal seemed to heed the warnings of his college tutor and worked hard on revision, but this was too boring to capture his full attention. He constructed a billiard table in his sitting room, using library books as the cushions, and a poker and a tennis racket as the cues. Such a simple invention brought a stream of visitors to his room, and led to hours of idle amusement and chatter that were far more enjoyable than time spent learning formal theorems. Inevitably, the first week of June arrived, and the weather was beautiful as he took the Part I Tripos examinations. At the end of the week, he felt no sense of relief that the exams were over because he felt that he had not done himself justice; but with luck, he hoped that he might still gain first-class honours. The results reached him by letter at Brookwatson a fortnight later and were bitterly disappointing. He was awarded Class II, causing the ‘hardest blow my self-esteem has ever had to bear’. He had always been confident that his ‘scholarship could surmount all obstacles in its path’ but now, ‘baulked by the first ditch which [he] had scorned and thought to take in stride’, Bernal felt a failure, and could not imagine facing his friends, family or tutor.50

  His family was sympathetic, knowing how much academic success meant to Desmond, but over the summer became increasingly impatient with his self-indulgent moods and political posturing. He would help out in the cowshed and with other jobs around the farm, but could not hide his resentment for such menial work. The family was worried about the escalation of violence in Tipperary, which apart from threatening their physical safety was also undermining the local economy. The standard form of reprisal by th
e police and the Black and Tans had been to raze the homes of suspected IRA members and sympathizers, but now they were also destroying cooperative dairies or creameries, causing devastation to the milk trade.51 While, as Michael Collins correctly predicted, this policy stoked anti-British sentiment in the population as a whole, middle-class dairy farmers like the Bernals felt their way of life threatened from both sides and saw no reassurance in the prospect of Irish independence. Desmond, who spent most of the year in England and was not inclined to bother himself with the business of the farm, was oblivious to the daily pressures and as a matter of principle supported the concept of an Irish Republic. At tea one afternoon, there was ‘such an acrid argument on the Irish situation that Cuddie was driven to say “If you have got views like that I can’t see why you do not join the Sinn Feiners”’.52 Her contemptuous shaft struck home as he later reflected, ‘What had I done for Ireland – nothing at all.’ His first direct encounter with the Black and Tans came while biking to Tullaheady to play tennis one afternoon in late August. He was searched by soldiers, picketed at the roadside, and noticed that they had one prisoner in their lorry, who wore ‘an expression of sheepish embarrassment’ as if to say ‘this is not quite the place I expected to find myself’.53

  On 1st September, recorded by Bernal as ‘a hateful day’, there was a much more disturbing occurrence when a neighbour, Dr Galway Foley, was shot in his home by raiding Sinn Feiners. The violent attack carried out in the name of the Irish Republic led to bitter denunciations at the Bernal dinner table: ‘Sinn Fein was called many dreadful names and I was fool enough to object and to try and justify things, pointing to parallel cases on the other side. I was not only quarrelling violently with the lot of them, but they were eyeing me with absolute loathing. I felt like doing something desperate, joining the Volunteers, but I am much too much of a sensible coward. After this, of course, I could not possibly go and meet all the people at the tennis and was rude to Eva in refusing. Instead I worked at reaping which settled my mind…’54 There were repercussions the next day when he had a ‘fierce row’ with Cuddie, who criticized him for not helping the family more and for avoiding his responsibilities as the eldest son. Desmond candidly admitted that he cared more about his education and scientific work than the immediate ‘bread and butter for the family which is secured amply even without my assistance’.55 Privately, he regretted that he did not do more to help around the farm, but his main misery remained that his work was going badly.