J D Bernal

by Andrew Brown

  Bernal’s second question was about a new Soviet policy to build rural power plants. In his opinion, it seemed that these relatively small plants were ‘essentially uneconomic, as they involve higher capital costs than the giant plants you are building’. Khrushchev conceded that the power they produced was much more expensive, but it was still advantageous to collective farms to build small electric stations, because industry took the output from the big ones. By generating their own power, the farmers could use it for their own needs, and run equipment to increase the mechanization of agriculture. Khrushchev thought that as a national grid for distribution was developed, even the farms would obtain their power from large stations. In his answer to Bernal’s next question about the allocation of resources in agriculture, Khrushchev took the opportunity to emphasize his view of the Soviet Union as a whole rather than balancing the needs of one region with another.

  While the content of Bernal’s interview was quite limited, it was noteworthy as one of the only direct contacts between the new Soviet leader and a Westerner. The international situation was extremely tense – the Soviets exploded their H-bomb in 1953 and seemed to the West to possess an overwhelming superiority of conventional forces in Europe. So when a summary of Bernal’s interview was published in The Times and the New York Times three months later, it provided an almost unique opportunity for Kremlin watchers to glimpse Khrushchev in a spontaneous exchange of ideas. Some of them found the delay in releasing the transcript to be significant, reflecting friction within the Kremlin: Bernal thought it was just because he (and Khrushchev) had been away in China.

  The reason for the visit to China was to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the People’s Republic. It was Khrushchev’s first trip abroad as Soviet leader, and he held talks with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. Sage had been invited by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and was to carry out an extensive survey of science and technology in the country, as well as to take part in the festivities. His journey from Moscow to Peking was more makeshift than that of Khrushchev and his entourage. Flying off the day after his Kremlin interview, the first leg of the journey was about 750 miles south-east to Sverdlovsk. There he had an amusing talk with an interpreter, who was a fan of Mark Twain; Sage explained many words and phrases to him, not found in the Russian dictionary.27 The other passengers on the plane were a Bulgarian delegation, who had visited Moscow and were now also going to Peking. They took off again at sunset, and were able to see the large factories around the city, before flying through the Siberian night to Novosibirsk, where they landed at dawn. This sprawling city, where the Trans-Siberian railway crosses the River Ob, was an important transportation centre. A sumptuous banquet was laid on for the important visitors, but they just had time to swallow some soup before taking off again. They flew east, a few hundred miles north of the border with Mongolia. Their destination was Irkutsk, a city in eastern Siberia, which they approached in the pink dawn light, flying over range upon range of the Altay mountains.

  Sage enjoyed breakfast with a young woman interpreter before resuming what he described as the ‘most beautiful and exciting air trip ever’.28 There were mountains, lakes, forests, grassy hills and dry valleys as they flew south into Mongolia. They landed at Ulan Bator and were received by a deputation in a ceremonial yurt that was identical to those Sage had read about, except for the addition of a wooden door, and an iron stove instead of an open fire. Ornamental rugs hung on the walls and silks lined the roof – their patterns were those that had existed for many thousands of years. There was plenty of local fiery spirit to drink, but little food on offer. As a consequence, Sage found it difficult to stay awake over the Gobi Desert, which appeared from the air to consist mostly of red and yellow patches of rock and clay.

  The further east they flew, the more signs of habitation they saw. First there were small villages with square, flat-roofed houses and small enclosures (always on the windward side, Sage noted). Then came forts and walled cities, some grasslands and soon a modern town with a church. The Great Wall appeared ‘stretching up and down and round, and winding like a Chinese dragon over the fantastic hills as far as the horizon to the east and the west’.29 Then came the Great Plain of China, covered with trees, and at last Peking ‘with its walls, its great palace in the middle, the lakes that go through it from north to south, the pagodas, the whole plain around dotted with other buildings, old and new, palaces, factories and universities’. They landed at an airfield five miles from the city, near the ancient Summer Palace.

  The Bulgarian delegation was let off the plane first, and Sage had to remain in his seat while formalities were completed on the tarmac. He listened to a band playing what he took to be the Bulgarian and Chinese anthems, watched the inspection of a guard of honour through his window and then sat while lengthy speeches were exchanged. Eventually he was allowed to leave the plane, and enjoyed his own ‘very discreet reception’ by a small group from the Academy of Sciences. He was driven into the city, very excited to have arrived and be so close to the teeming peasants: ‘endless rows of donkey carts – very reminiscent of Ireland – people with baskets slung over their backs on poles, with an enormous impression of people and people and people, all busy, all dressed very much alike – blue or black – men and women hardly different…. then the first impressions of the city itself – the wall with its many-storied towers’.30 The sun was setting and suddenly he was overcome with fatigue – the last few miles of the journey felt interminable. Entering the city at last, he was struck by ‘streets very wide but so full of people and so covered with shops of all kinds, with bustle, with more bicycles than Cambridge’.31

  The car dropped him at the Peking Hotel, ‘a vast rather colonial edifice with nothing Chinese about it’, and from his room he could see crowds gathering with flags to celebrate the new constitution that had been declared that day. He went straight into a banquet, ‘which seemed to last a long time and probably did’. He loved authentic Chinese food ‘crisp, delicious and so varied’. Toast after toast was drunk with warm wine and after dinner, he went out into streets, full of people dancing and singing in the ‘most confused, delightful and spontaneous way imaginable’. He got to bed at midnight.

  He woke late the next morning and received a visit from Felix Aprahamian and Ivor Montagu, who had travelled from London. They spent the day sightseeing together, and naturally their first destination was the Forbidden City, or Emperors’ Palace, which they entered through the Tiananmen Gate. Awestruck they strolled across the five marble bridges in the first courtyard and came to successive courtyards of ‘ever increasing dignity’. Sage was moved by the extraordinary effect of repetition and symmetry in the architecture. The pavilions and halls were all constructed from wood, which surprised him; their decorations with red lacquer, dragons, phoenixes, and the sweeping, gold-tiled roofs contrasted brilliantly with the grey roofs of the dismal buildings in Peking. Thinking no doubt of Jane, his baby daughter in London, Sage was delighted by a group of small children in the first courtyard, ‘sitting on the ground with their bare behinds’. He noted with satisfaction, ‘The Chinese have a most practical system of maintaining a slit in the trousers, while we stuff them with nappies’.32

  Sage decided that his favourite art was from the Sung period ‘when art depicted the lives of ordinary people, and in such a wealth of figure and gesture that made it all become enormously alive’. Later, he found how little life had changed in the succeeding seven or eight centuries in terms of everyday implements. In a museum in the Forbidden City, he made his first acquaintance with that great piece of Chinese machinery – the crossbow lock – ‘the ancestor of all military lock mechanisms and of such mundane articles as the common typewriter.’ His only regret was that his friend, Joseph Needham, was not with him to illuminate the experience.

  The next day he visited the Temple of Heaven, where he found the architecture to be of the same order as St Peter’s or the Taj Mahal. He reflected on the naïve preoccupation of the Chinese with
astrology: ‘so peculiar that people so wrapped, as they were, in careful calendrical observations should ever have bothered to go beyond the elements of astronomy, and it was only when these astrological aspects had been forgotten that the real advances in astronomy were to come.’ That evening there was a reception given by Zhou Enlai. The entertainment was provided by Bulgarian and Indonesian dancers, who looked like fairies, dressed in silk. Among the guests were mayors of Chinese cities, and the Dalai Lama. The gregarious Zhou Enlai showed ‘terrific joie de vivre, shaking hands and drinking toasts’. Mao himself came and said a few words to the assembled company. Bernal’s spirits were dampened by news from England of the Labour Party Conference, where a controversial vote on the rearmament of West Germany had just passed by a very narrow majority. He wrote up his interview with Khrushchev after the banquet, so that Aprahamian could take it back to London.

  The next morning, Sage set off for the Summer Palace with Ivor Montagu and his wife. There they were confronted by a ‘mounting set of horrors of bad taste’ – restorations undertaken by officials not by artists and archaeologists. In the afternoon, he went to the parliament house to hear about the new constitution and listened to four hours of speeches in various languages by foreign envoys, including Khrushchev. Sage was excited by the auspices for Liberation Day: the Korean War was over, the Indo-China war in Vietnam appeared settled after the Geneva Conference in June, and prospects for economic production and peace around the world were, he thought, better than ever.

  On Liberation Day, 1st October, Sage got up before dawn. He breakfasted in his room on fried eggs, which the Chinese insisted on giving him as a foreigner – ‘always three, always cold.’ He put on his suit and pinned the Stalin medal on his lapel, before making his way through jam-packed streets to the stand reserved for foreign delegates. Two little schoolgirls led the procession, followed by ranks of troops and then 100–200 people passed every second for four hours. There were trades unionists, miners carrying picks, textile workers, railwaymen, steel workers, peasants, and then different religious groups. The mood was one of humour, gaiety, and ease. There were balloons, banners, streamers and whistles adding to performances by dancers, athletes, and a final troop of tough, well-drilled school sports teams. ‘Chairman Mao and others smiling and extending a greeting, which was clearly taken up by each group as they passed the grandstand. It was the most intimate linking of the people with their leader because one thing seems to be clearer than anything else in China – the simple affection that Mao creates.’

  In his overexcited state, Sage decided that Peking was one of the cleanest and liveliest cities in the world. He thought that the Chinese economy, in which nothing was wasted, was extraordinary. He saw ‘in one little back street they are occupied with stone rollers in rolling out galvanized iron quite flat and then in another part of the workshop rolling it up again to make drainpipes out of it’.33 These peasants were the forerunners of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, in which the modernization of China was to be forced by the spread of industrialization throughout the country. As an economic strategy, it was indeed extraordinary, and caused millions of useful tools and household utensils to be melted down to produce millions of tons of poor quality steel, useless for any industrial purpose, at the cost of enormous labour and energy consumption.

  As part of the nationalist celebrations, there were exhibitions from various other countries and Sage went to see the Soviet one. Although there were electron microscopes, spectroscopes and computers on display, demonstrating the scientific excellence of the USSR, he was disappointed that the cultural element was represented by rooms full of old pictures and Russian books. The following week was taken up with more sightseeing around the city, preliminary visits to various scientific institutes and some adventurous tours. He took an overnight train to inspect the Kuangting water reservoir, where workers had constructed a dam by hand, moving two billion cubic metres of earth and facing it with stone. The work was scheduled to be completed within three years, and Sage observed ‘nothing bigger than small concrete mixers, and with stone cutting, shifting and earth shifting done by gangs. There was plain evidence of very finely-built workers villages including not only canteens but a theatre… When it is completed it will be a good if somewhat minor source of power for the Peking area, but will also serve for a great deal of irrigation…’34

  A few days later, Sage was in the hills to the west of the city and insisted on hiking up them, dressed in his suit, in sweltering weather. From the crest of the main ridge, he was rewarded by magnificent views in all directions: to the north, ridge after ridge as far as the Great Wall; higher mountains to the west; to the south, the river on which the dam was being built, as well as iron works and the Marco Polo bridge; to the east, the Ming tombs and the city itself, shrouded in haze. He descended through a wooded valley, rather steep and rocky, with a stream gushing from under rock. He came across a little temple, the Temple of Quiet Happiness. As he was walking through a village, he heard a child cry for the first time since he had been in China – it was a little girl who had fallen and cut her face. This small incident made him reflect on the most remarkable change in New China – ‘an internal human and moral change in the people.’

  Sage became friendly with a man called Rewi Ali, whom he found ‘amusing and enlightening’. The pair took breakfast together and Rewi would tell him about Chinese history as well as modern China. One morning, he discussed agriculture and land reform in China. From the first year of communist rule, the redistribution of land to peasants and the punishment of exploitative landlords were given a high priority as a way to bring revolutionary fervour to the rural areas and to guarantee loyalty to the Party. Rewi told Sage that the policy of liquidating landowners was exaggerated because out of several thousand in his area, only three had been executed.

  Bernal began a series of lectures at the Institute of Applied Physics, given to huge audiences. He found the first lecture on teaching and research in crystallography ‘rather heavy going’ because everything he said had to be translated and written on the blackboard in Chinese characters. The second lecture, a day later on crystallographic apparatus and technique, was more practical and he thought more successful. That night there was a full moon and Sage went back to the Forbidden City with Mr Wu from the Academy of Sciences. They persuaded the night watchman to let them inside and enjoyed walking round in magical conditions. ‘Incongruously, Mr Wu still wanted to talk about crystallography and this occupied us all the way back to the hotel.’35 The next evening Bernal gave a four-hour talk on dislocations in metals, attracting the biggest audience yet and provoking the liveliest discussion.

  He spent 15th October touring the huge Peking University and was invited to give more lectures to the physics and chemistry departments. The Arts faculty also asked him to contribute to a meeting that they were planning to mark the tercentenary of the death of the English writer, Henry Fielding. The following day Bernal gave a five-hour talk on the social function of science at the Peking Library. After his week of lectures, Sage was taken to the site southwest of the city where the bones and teeth of Peking Man, homo erectus, had been excavated. These remains were found in caves at the edge of the plain and Bernal was impressed with the number of bear and hyena bones in the same caves, suggesting that life had been brutal and short. The pace of his activities increased again over the next week as he visited various national laboratories, the Ministry of Heavy Industry, and gave lectures on subjects ranging from ‘The origin of life’ to ‘Recent advances in understanding of the role of hydrogen in inorganic and organic substances’.

  Nehru brought an Indian delegation to Peking for the Liberation Day celebrations. The end of his visit was marked by an official banquet and he insisted on taking Sage as his guest. Sage found himself sitting with Dutch and Pakistani diplomats, and was intrigued that the Dutch Ambassador was van Zeeman, the nephew of the discoverer of the Zeeman effect.* An even more pleasant surprise was the Ambassador’s attractive y
oung wife, with whom he had a lively conversation about opera and cooking in Peking. At the end of the evening, Nehru took his guest back to the French Embassy, where he was staying, and the two sat up for hours discussing science in China. Nehru asked Sage to stop in New Delhi on his journey home. The day after the banquet, Bernal went to the Fielding celebration at the university and gave his talk on ‘Fielding and the Industrial Revolution’.

  His hosts loaded more and more onto Sage’s broad shoulders, and he was so engrossed by everything he saw that it never occurred to him to protest. He had now been in Peking for a month and was still able to produce a new lecture every day. One of the modern customs that amused him was the sight of mass physical exercise. He thought that ‘exercises in China are very much what prayers are to the Mohammedans – something which goes on regularly three times a day’. Before leaving Peking, Bernal made a radio broadcast. He told the listeners that he never expected to see such a scientific effort built in such a short time. The history of science in China was much older than in Europe, but ‘the new science of China can be said to date almost entirely from the liberation in 1949’. It was an enormous effort, ‘compared with anything elsewhere and even to a certain extent compared with what is going on in the Soviet Union and the other popular democracies today, the scale of effort in China is really stupendous’.36 He thought that the Chinese authorities were essentially copying the Soviet model of institutes attached to specific industries and attempting to have everything in place in just five years.

  On 12th November he embarked on the two-day train journey south to Nanking. He had two companions from the Academy of Sciences – Mr Wu and Mr Chien. Loudspeakers in their compartment blared Chinese opera incessantly as they sped over the Yellow River and across the flooded Yangtze plain. The chef on board would come and discuss menus with the two Chinese; Bernal found that they could not possibly eat all the delicious chicken and pork that he prepared for them. When the train needed to cross the wide Yangtze River itself, there was no bridge and it was loaded onto a ferry. Arriving in Nanking in the afternoon, Bernal managed to visit four scientific institutes before retiring to bed with a fever, looking very green indeed. The next morning a doctor was called and visited with ‘a very demure nurse called Miss Chien’, who took his pulse and temperature and gave him some ‘rather peculiar medicine’. He dozed for the rest of the morning, but the temptation of seeing the Suchow Opera got him out of bed. He watched four plays, with the common theme that women have the best of life, which so delighted him that he felt perfectly cured. Over the next few days he paid official visits to the observatory, the institutes of soil research, palaeontology, geophysics, geography, botany and history as well as reviewing university laboratories of physics, chemistry, geology and biology. He sailed down the Yangtze, taking note of the great number of junks on the river, to see a fertilizer factory. There he saw that, just as at a steel works he had visited in the north, the production process was quite automated, but the finished product was all manhandled.