by Andrew Brown
Anita never married, and looking after Sage was her life. She could not help but resent any new figure, especially a female, who might come between her and the professor. Vivien Pixner felt this antagonism as soon as she became his peace secretary in 1960. Sage asked that foreign trips should be arranged to combine WPC work with a scientific meeting, when possible; according to Anita’s diary, it was usually impossible. The first time it was tried, Sage was flying to Rome with Vivien for a WPC committee meeting, and arranged to speak to the Italian Academy of Science on the structure of liquids. He arrived at the airport, cradling a cardboard box with a large ball-and-spoke model packed inside. At the check-in, he realized that he had left his suitcase at home. Vivien’s first job in Rome was to go out and buy him a change of clothes and toiletries.23
Sage’s life was always full to overflowing. His mental drive was rooted in a strong constitution, but he constantly pushed himself to the point of exhaustion. As he got into his sixties, he seemed surprised that sometimes his body could no longer keep up. When he was spending twenty-hour days in Chile in 1962, he noticed that walking high in the Andes was a real physical effort. His main exercise in England, apart from summer walks along cliff tops in Cornwall, was the annual Aldermaston march. At Easter 1963, he had to rest after going about five miles and sat for three hours watching the thousands of marchers go by. He decided to seek medical attention and went to the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases in Queen Square. He was admitted as a private patient at the end of May under Dr Kremer. After blood tests and X-rays, Kremer diagnosed cervical spondylosis, a degenerative disorder of the neck that can compromise blood flow to the brain and cause limb weakness. He recommended a soft collar, which Sage wore for about a week, finding it extremely uncomfortable; as a method of spinal fixation, it stuck him as ‘ad hoc and crude’.24 He wrote the neurologist a note asking whether the collar needed to be worn continuously and saying that he was unimpressed by the single paper he had been able to find in the British Medical Journal supporting the therapy. He wanted to know:
Is there any proved medical benefit to be got by fixing the vertebrae of the cervical spine?
If beneficial, what is the optimum position?
Having settled the desirable position and the amount of freedom to be allowed, the design should be left to competent mechanical designers, whether or not they have any orthopaedic experience.25
He had been invited as a guest speaker to a Gordon Research Conference on cell structure and metabolism in June. The Gordon Conferences are designed to be stimulating and informal affairs, where innovative thinking is encouraged by publishing no proceedings and by guaranteeing that ideas expressed will remain off the record. The conferences are traditionally held at New England prep schools, and the thought of spending a few days in rural New Hampshire seemed very attractive at the end of what had been a frustrating academic year in London. Sage was invited to speak on the ‘Properties of water and its role in biological systems’. The opportunity was too good to miss and he thoroughly enjoyed the conference. In his lecture, he likened the structure of the cell to a Dutch seventeenth-century city, where there were many gates in the wall, but at any time few would be open.26 The analogy appealed to Herman Barendsen, a post-doctoral physical chemist from Groningen, who struck up a friendship with Sage. On the last afternoon of the conference, the pair took a canoe onto the Connecticut River in nearby Vermont and spent four hours paddling in quite strong currents.
Greatly invigorated, Sage made his way to New York, which was experiencing an intense heat-wave. He boarded the plane to fly back to London and found himself ‘wedged between the fattest people’ on board.27 The plane was held on the tarmac for two hours, during which time there was no ventilation, and Sage found it very difficult to breathe. After they took off, he ate ‘the very inferior meal provided’ and could not sleep. When he went to the toilet at the rear of the plane, he stumbled in the doorway but thought it was due to tail vibration. He found he had to hang onto the seatbacks to return to his place. Breakfast was served, and he could not grip the coffee cup. On arrival at Heathrow, he had to struggle with his luggage through customs and then queued to get a bus to Victoria station.
Stan Lenton had driven to the airport to meet him, but there was no arrival information about the New York flight; after waiting for four hours, he returned to Birkbeck. There was a phone message to pick Sage up from Victoria, and when Lenton saw him, there was clearly something wrong: ‘The prof wasn’t with it, didn’t react and just slumped into the back seat.’28 Lenton drove him to Birkbeck where Sage immediately went to a meeting of the Academic Board. Eric Hobsbawm, who was there, remembered that he ‘looked like death’ and noticed that his speech seemed slurred.29 The future of crystallography was again on the agenda, but Bernal felt too tired to continue. His last words before leaving the meeting were ‘I object.’ He walked slowly to his office, where he signed letters and started to read the mail that had accumulated. He dragged himself upstairs to his flat and fell into a deep sleep.
When he awoke an hour later, he felt very strange and knew that he had suffered a stroke because he could not move his right side, nor walk or speak properly. He crawled into the next room and his symptoms improved considerably. Eileen called to see him and arranged for him to be admitted to the National Hospital in Queen Square straightaway. While waiting for the ambulance to collect him, Sage attempted to monitor his condition by repeatedly signing his name and walking around the room to see if he could avoid bumping into the furniture. Once in hospital, he felt comparatively cheerful, and reflected on his past life and what he might expect for the rest of it. He hoped to be able to tidy up his work on liquid structure. His condition steadily improved over the next few days. He wrote his scientific will, leaving problems for others to solve.
Dr Kremer decided that he should have a cerebral angiogram, an investigation that required a general anaesthetic. Sage pointed out to the anaesthetist that his last experience of one had been in Ireland in 1905, when he had his tonsils removed. ‘He assured me that anaesthetics had improved out of all recognition in the interval. That may be so as far as unconsciousness is concerned because it worked perfectly … [afterwards] I felt iller and more sick than I have ever been even in the worst sea storms.’30 The angiogram showed no abnormality and Sage was discharged. He went to stay with his friend, the actor Miles Malleson, who lived in a large house in nearby Rugby Street so that the hospital physiotherapists could attend him. Miles had divorced Eileen’s friend, Joan, years before, and was remarried to a much younger woman. Sage, much to Miles’ amusement, took a shine to her. The tryst was interrupted by toothache and a fever. Arrangements were made for Sage to go into the private Italian Hospital, next door to the National. He was ‘assured that it was a civic hospital but when I got there it was full of nuns. The room was very clean and neat and rather forbidding. As I sat there while Anita put my things away, I thought what a complete waste of time and life it was to be there.’ Sage walked out, ‘moving with surprising rapidity’, until he was well out of sight and sound of the hospital.31
At the end of July, Eileen took him to Stoneland Park in West Sussex to recuperate. They stayed in a bungalow with a beautiful rose garden, which Sage enjoyed. It was while he was there that the partial test ban treaty was signed in Moscow. Unfortunately, the toothache returned to plague him, until he persuaded a dentist to extract the tooth even though X-rays showed no abscess. He spent the remainder of the summer vacation in St. Ives with Margot and Jane. He was vexed by the Chinese attitude to the WPC, and exchanged letters with Khrushchev. Ivor Montagu came to visit him to be briefed for an upcoming WPC committee meeting in Helsinki. Montagu described Sage’s attitude to rest.
Before lunch he had one walking up the hilly point, puffing to keep pace, desperately trying not to miss what he said about signs of possible life in hundreds-of-millions-of-years-old Canadian meteorites. At last Desmond was prevailed upon to return home to sleep after lunch. Using the
opportunity I got into bathing shorts and sneaked across the sand for a swim. Suddenly I heard a shout and there was Desmond similarly clad, insecurely testing his footing at the water’s edge.32
Bernal was soon knocked over by a wave and found it difficult to get back up, but nothing could lessen his lifelong habit of pushing himself. The International Union of Crystallography held its triennial meeting in Rome in September; they elected Bernal to be president of the organization, in his absence.
He would need all his tenacity of spirit to survive the next term at Birkbeck. When the original decision to split the physics department during 1962 had been made, Ehrenberg had been given a personal chair in order for him to become the new head of the smaller physics department. As a corollary to this, the University appointed Sage to a new chair in crystallography, starting on 1st October 1963, even though the College had decided no split would now take place before 1967. In a remarkably cynical gesture, Overend now wrote to Sage to inform him that physics could not have two representatives on the heads of department meetings, and he would be inviting Ehrenberg alone.33 Sage immediately complained to the Master that this snub was ‘actuated by a narrow and exclusive spirit’. As the senior professor of 25 years standing, he thought it would be ‘vexatious and injurious’ to the College to exclude him from these most important discussions on the future and suggests he might appear in a personal capacity: ‘Such a compromise might meet the immediate situation and prevent these administrative and constitutional points from causing more bitterness in the College that they have already done.’34
Overend’s miserable tactic backfired, and Bernal’s cause was taken up by many who had previously been agnostic on the future of crystallography. The Academic Board met on 3rd December and voted 22–5 to support Bernal’s suggestion that the Governors again consider the setting up of an independent department of crystallography. Bernal pointed out at the meeting that his illness left him unable to cope with running the physics department, but he could still manage the smaller crystallography department. In Hobsbawm’s opinion, ‘now the cause of Bernal was the cause of all adversaries of Lockwood’. He sensed that Bernal’s colleagues were moved by his physical plight and revolted by ‘the idea that his wishes should be refused in such circumstances’.35 In February 1964, the Professoriate Committee voted narrowly to create a separate department of crystallography before the next academic year, and in July the University Senate amended the terms of Bernal’s chair so that he would become Head of the Department of Crystallography. In Hobsbawm’s words:
Crystallography at Birkbeck thus survived Bernal. The whole miserable episode is an example of the tangled and trivial civil wars with which anyone with experience of colleges and universities will be familiar …It is difficult for anyone who was involved in these disputes at the time, or who surveys the record impartially, to look back on them with anything but a sense of shame. They forced a scientist of extraordinary gifts to pursue his and his colleagues’ work under constant threat of strangulation, in constant uncertainty about its very survival.36
More good news followed later in 1964, when Dorothy Hodgkin won a Nobel Prize. Sage had first proposed her for the Chemistry Prize in 1956, only to be told that he was supposed to be recommending a scientist for the Physics Prize. So in 1957 he proposed her for the Physics Prize, and again in 1959 (when he also suggested Charles Frank from Bristol).37 When news of her overdue success reached London, Sage wrote a celebratory piece for the New Scientist. A few years earlier, Paul Ewald had written to Bernal after reading Dorothy’s paper elucidating the complex structure of vitamin B12. Ewald said, ‘if you had not done anything in science but to train this woman your name should never be forgotten’.38 While singing her praises, Sage uncharacteristically exaggerated how much of the work she had carried out in his lab at Cambridge. Describing her as ‘one of these masters [sic] whose method of work was as exciting and beautiful to follow as the results that flowed from it’, Sage went on to say that ‘wherever she went she won acclaim, far beyond the understanding of her work, by her rare sweetness and generosity. If ever a Nobel Prize has been fully and fairly won, it is this one.’39
Dorothy, for her part, always maintained that Sage should have shared the prize with her. In her opinion, it was impossible to overstate his influence and inspiration. The crystallographers in Cambridge gave Dorothy a lunch, and Bernal was able to attend. Although he was incapable of jealousy, Olga Kennard noticed how depressed he was, surrounded by the likes of Crick, Kendrew and Perutz. He admitted to her that he would have enjoyed some official recognition for himself, and realized that he had given away so many fruitful ideas to others.40
Sage decided to step down as president of the WPC at the Helsinki congress in July 1965. He stayed with some friends in a small house on the outskirts of the city and was taken in to the meetings every day. The long hours of speeches and argument exhausted him. While he was there, word reached him that John Lockwood, who had done so much to hinder his plans at Birkbeck, had died unexpectedly. Although he had been introduced to Mrs Lockwood only once or twice, Bernal insisted on missing a session of the congress to write her a letter of condolence. As he explained to Ann Synge, who was with him, ‘she would expect a letter from me and would be upset if I didn’t write, and one shouldn’t wantonly upset people when they are bereaved’.41
The precipitating factors for Bernal’s stroke in the summer of 1963 are easy to identify. He had taken four hours of unaccustomed exercise and was probably still dehydrated when boarding the plane. Sitting in the heat, breathing foul air and then being immobile in a low-oxygen environment for a total of ten hours, with no liquid intake, were conditions sure to make his circulation sluggish. The coup de grace may have been attending the contentious committee meeting, when his blood pressure shot up. He made a good recovery, suggesting that the event was thrombotic – a blockage that subsequently cleared (he was treated with intravenous heparin at the National Hospital). Unfortunately, his blood pressure remained dangerously high – a year later it was 160/112 – despite being under the care of one of the country’s leading specialists, Max Rosenheim at University College Hospital. While in Cornwall in 1965, one of the blood vessels in the right side of his brain could no longer withstand the surges of pressure, and burst. The result was immediate and complete paralysis of his left arm and leg (in addition to the residual weakness on the other side from the first stroke). Even more devastating for the man whom Perutz described as the most brilliant conversationalist he ever met, was the realization that he could no longer speak clearly.
He was transferred from sunny Cornwall to the dreary surroundings of St. Ann’s Hospital, Tottenham. Eileen wrote love letters to him every day and made plans to move from Suffolk to London so that she could help to look after him. There were letters from old friends and colleagues such as Barbara Hepworth, Aaron Klug and Solly Zuckerman. There was also a letter from 14 Rugby Street:
Darling heart … Des my love take care. We’ll talk and love – soon, soon. I love you more than I can understand. Your Polly. PS Miles (who is in Moscow) sent all wishes to you.42
Poor Polly felt jilted by Sage earlier in the summer, when she wrote to ask:
What sort of idiot do you take me for? Forgive any note of bitterness … ring me and blow kisses. Most women buy a new hat under these circumstances but – privately – I never wear a hat. Thank God you need a licence to buy a gun. LoveXXX
After languishing in St Ann’s for a month, Sage scrawled his frustrations on an envelope.
My room is in danger of being cluttered up with old papers. My voice is getting worse not better. I find it most depressing. I cannot get my ideas across …43
Eileen set up home at 44 Albert Street in Camden, where his sister, Gigi, lived in a flat upstairs. Eileen and Margot had no reasons to like each other, but for Bernal’s sake they came to a civilized arrangement for his care. Margot worked as a teacher at Camden School for Girls, and it was agreed that Sage should live with Eil
een during the week and come to Highgate for the weekends and school holidays. Anita Rimel would often help out, and was one of the few who could understand his distorted speech. Gigi kept to herself upstairs.
When Sage resigned from the WPC in July 1965, he was still the president of the International Union of Crystallography and was hoping to attend their next congress in Moscow the following summer. He had been closely involved with the planning, and indeed had received some criticism from the conference programme committee for always acceding to the wishes of the USSR National Committee without consultation.44 Following his second stroke, his old friend Kathleen Lonsdale took over the presidency from him, and it was clear that he would not be able to travel to Moscow. He wrote to Katie Dornberger in Berlin regretting that he would be unable to attend and enclosed an abstract for a paper on ‘The Range of Generalized Crystallography’ that he hoped someone would read at the congress. He told Katie that the paper was intended ‘to explain the structures of proteins, nucleic acids and a variety of cell contents such as flagella, muscle fibres and virus surfaces whether cylindrical or polyhedral’.45 The main emphasis was the consideration of linear, sheet-like and 3-D structures in living forms. He had been thinking about cell organelles that ‘exist in 3-D aggregates which lack a true lattice, but which nevertheless can be made to fill space approximately. The one- and two-dimensional structures of the generalized type are much simpler and much more akin to restricted crystallography. The helical cylinder which when unrolled has the appearance of an infinite, regular, 2-D lattice, is one such form. It would seem to occur even in the inorganic field with the tubes of asbestos … where a non-integral helix is imposed by sterical considerations. Similar but different principles are applied to the quasi, irregular filling of polyhedra, which Klug particularly has studied in the so-called spherical viruses. Here the irregularity is shown by the fact whereas most of the molecules have identical coordination, usually 6-fold planar coordinates, some of them, for instance in the adeno virus, have 5-fold coordinates in the form of flat pyramids.’ One of the consequences ‘is the concept of selfassembly of identical but polyvalent particles. It is possible to conceive particles which are not spherical but are covered by a number of attachment points. When held together such spheres can adhere appearing to satisfy rules … These are what I call the arrangement of self-assembly which depend only on the properties of the particle. There may be more than one such arrangement for given identical particles and of course an infinite number of arrangements when the parts are different … It is for us a fortunate accident that atoms and ions themselves mostly lack these different assembly valencies and so only show the simplest kind of structures, readily forming indefinite 3D lattices.’