The singular focus that had characterised Ernest Rutherford’s childhood was channelled into organised study, as the twelve-year-old student began to understand that academic achievement offered him the surest path away from his dad’s life of relentless physical toil and economic uncertainty. What also became apparent at this time was Ernest’s capacity to block out all distractions and narrow his concentration to the single task in front of him. This was likely honed in a household shared with so many siblings, and then at Havelock school, which was so oversubscribed that its senior students took their lessons in the town hall.
The previously self-absorbed boy responded to the tough academic benchmarks set by Reynolds, and the methods his teacher employed to help him reach them. Reynolds’s unapologetic quest for excellence saw him criticised by some indignant Havelock parents for demanding that students complete homework during their summer holidays. Yet despite being two years younger than others who sat the standard six examinations to provide the qualification, if not the means, to progress to secondary school, Ernest passed with quiet certainty.
South Australia, 1910s
At around the same age that Ernest Rutherford was nearing secondary school, Mark Oliphant’s horizons were also broadening. The fascination for the world, and curiosity as to his place within it, that grew as he approached teenage-hood had been nurtured by what was in some ways an unconventional upbringing.
As Baron Oliphant sought escapism from his stifling desk job, his political views had become increasingly shaped by the Fabians’ social-democratic ideologies. His search for further answers had taken him beyond the High Anglican Church and into the faddishly popular Theosophy movement. For years, Baron served as president of Adelaide’s Theosophical Society, which promoted the revival of ancient Hindu wisdom as a panacea to growing global materialism and societal fragmentation.
The Oliphant boys would later recall visits to their home by a parade of eclectic souls. Faithful to Theosophy’s central belief that followers could be reincarnated in human form, these men and women gathered around Mark’s hand-made kitchen table in spectral light, attempting to contact the departed. Their means of communication was a wooden planchette, fitted with a writing implement that would scratch and dance across the table top under the lightest touch from the wide-eyed participants, supposedly scribbling notes from the spirit world.
It was one of several episodes during Mark’s developmental years that had helped galvanise his abhorrence of fundamentalist religious or political ideologies. It had put paid to any thoughts of following his father’s wish for him to pursue a calling to the High Anglican priesthood – a wish that meant Mark had taken additional Latin classes at primary school.
During their flirtation with Theosophy, Beatrice and Baron Oliphant had also embraced vegetarian eating. When Mark and his younger brother Nigel visited the farm of a schoolfriend and witnessed pigs being slaughtered, the chilling squeals and gushing blood had traumatised them both to the extent that they too swore off meat for the remainder of their lives. ‘Ever since I could make decisions for myself, I’ve been a vegetarian . . . because I do not want to kill things in order to remain alive,’ Mark later explained. ‘I think it’s totally unnecessary.’7
Theosophy and vegetarianism might have set them apart, but in other ways, the Oliphants were no different from most families of the pre-war era. The bookshelves that Mark had expertly fashioned through his boyhood passion for woodworking held many of the same classics that had enthralled the Rutherford family. And while Ernest Rutherford’s entrée to science was Balfour Stewart’s Physics primer, Mark Oliphant had found inspiration in a more seminal text. Despite Baron’s long-held hope that his first-born should follow a divine path, in the course of wider reading recommended by his mother, the boy happened upon Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.
‘The final chapters described in simple language the fascinating story of Darwin’s theory of evolution,’ Mark recounted decades later. ‘The story of Genesis suddenly became, for me, an allegory. This first introduction to the scientific method, its logic and its appeal to reason rather than to blind faith, was the turning point in my life.’8
Although Mark Oliphant’s creativity had initially found expression in the perfectly proportioned tables, bookshelves and garden furniture he crafted from saplings sourced in the Adelaide Hills, his intuitive feel for practical science had likely been nurtured in the self-styled engineers’ shed that Baron’s younger brother assembled behind the senior Oliphants’ family home in Dulwich. As a young boy, Mark had been captivated by the lengths of pipe, reels of wire, boxes of bits and bolts, and the regular parade of hard-bitten characters who would arrive nursing lifeless items, only to see them brought back to health after minor tinkering. Or through ferocious hammering.
Mark’s own experiments began with dismantling clocks that he would then rebuild. By age twelve he had designed an electric alarm clock that he presented to his parents, along with responsibility for waking him in the mornings. He then moved on to more elaborate devices, often involving an electric charge administered by a hand-cranked magneto, or his potent home-made recipe for gunpowder.
At a school fête, he set up a sideshow scam that involved dropping a dozen pennies into a tub of water, through which he would discreetly send a low-voltage electric current. Unsuspecting punters were told they could keep as many of the coins as they could fish out once they had thrown their own penny in, from where they stood on a strategically placed damp burlap sack that acted as conductor. According to Keith Oliphant, another of Mark’s younger brothers, it was a foolproof trick until one student, clad in rubber-soled boots that negated the shock, reached in and cleaned out their kitty.9
New Zealand, 1880s
Ernest Rutherford’s first recorded science experiment was an amateur attempt to make a miniature battle cannon from the brass tube of a hat peg, outside the family home at Foxhill in the early 1880s. After filing a small hole in the tube’s base to take a touch paper, he clamped the cylinder to a loosely constructed wooden frame and placed it twenty metres from its intended target. He poured a healthy dose of gunpowder into the tube, then jammed the marble that was to act as a cannonball inside too. So tightly was the marble packed that when the powder was lit, the brass casing blew apart. Mercifully, the only damage inflicted was to the splintered frame.10
Whereas Mark Oliphant gleaned practical skills from his uncle and his friends, Ernest Rutherford benefited from the insights of his artisan father. James Rutherford might not have received formal schooling, but he was conscientious and resourceful, and could produce, by his own hand, much of the equipment required for his milling operations and the family farming property. When first establishing his various enterprises around Foxhill, James was known to have travelled on a bicycle whose frame was constructed entirely from wood, a product of his own design and manufacture.
His son’s interests were not quite so entrepreneurial, but often as methodical. Ernest Rutherford created working models of water wheels studiously copied from those that drove his father’s mills. He too enjoyed dismantling clocks and studying their inner workings, and while his timber-turning skills were never as refined as Mark Oliphant’s, the wooden potato masher Ernest lovingly carved as a kitchen aid for his grandmother was considered of such rare value that, after his death, it was displayed by London’s Royal Society. Perhaps most remarkably for a boy of barely twelve, he built his own camera from parts he accumulated, and delighted in photographing daily life in rural New Zealand.
New Zealand, 1880s; South Australia, 1910s
Among the academic and pragmatic symmetries of Ernest Rutherford and Mark Oliphant’s upbringings on either side of the millennium and the Tasman Sea, perhaps the strongest similarity was their respective relationships with nature. In large part, that affinity stemmed from the financial constraints within which both their families lived.
In lieu of exotic vacations and expensive toys, Rutherford and Oliphant –
like so many children who fortuitously grew up removed from the soot and stench of Victorian-era industrial cities – found adventure, enlightenment and independence in the pristine bushland, limpid streams and abundant wildlife found just beyond their front doors. For both boys, the outdoors was a world of wonder that demanded close and repeated exploration.
The Oliphant boys were known to trek far afield, on expeditions led by Baron when he arrived from his city office job for weekend and holiday stints. To reconnect with life and family, and grant Beatrice some overdue respite, he would take his four eldest sons on epic walking adventures the length and breadth of the Adelaide Plains.
One of these followed the course of the Onkaparinga River that runs through Mylor. It was a journey of some 250 kilometres through mostly unmapped bushland, and it provided Mark with the most vivid memories of his treasured rustic upbringing.
We carried swags and billies, and slept in the open on fragrant beds of gum leaves and bracken. The Mount Compass area was then just being developed for vegetable gardens. Near Clarendon, one could buy magnificent strawberries, and on the slopes below the road outside Willunga we picked the largest and tenderest mushrooms I have ever tasted. Mount Compass potatoes boiled in the billy or roasted in glowing embers to have crisp shells, split and plastered liberally with the very salty local butter, and eaten at dawn in the open, made a breakfast with royal qualities for hungry walkers.
We bathed without hindrance of costumes in pools along the Onkaparinga and other streams, in the mouth of the River Murray and in the sea. The beauty of the Inman Valley, and the country between Cape Jervis and Yankalilla, with its heat-haze of eucalyptus on a summer’s day, and glimpses of the cool sea, the road lined with dusty Christmas bush in flower, are memories of a wonderful boyhood.11
Mark Oliphant’s connection to the quartzite-studded, baked-earth tracks that wound through the thickly wooded Adelaide Hills would remain inherent to his soul, regardless of where work and life subsequently took him.
In Rutherford’s case, outdoor adventures during his New Zealand boyhood were sometimes undertaken on horseback, and often involved venturing to burbling creeks with his brothers, where they would spear eels and hook trout. He also became something of a small-gauge rifle marksman, and to supplement his family’s food supplies would pick off wild pigeons attracted by the berries of the South Island’s native miro trees.
As intrepid as their oneness with nature emboldened them to be, these two products of isolated rural communities also carried a keen awareness of the dangers inherent in country colonial living. But while Mark Oliphant’s scrapes were usually salved with bandages and a stern talking-to, Ernest Rutherford’s childhood was beset by the harrowing mishaps and desperate tragedies that were ever-present among frontier families.
While bathing in the Wai-iti River with his brother Jim during his primary school days at Foxhill, Ernest found himself in difficulty when swept out past his depth. He was rescued by his attentive younger sibling, who hauled Ernest to safety just as he began to disappear beneath the surface.
The next two boys in the Rutherford lineage were not so blessed. Percy, then aged nine, and Charles, eight, went sailing with an older friend on Pelorus Sound one afternoon in 1884. The young brothers both slipped overboard when the boat tipped in a wind shear, and although James Rutherford and his elder sons frantically scoured the shoreline for months after they disappeared, their bodies were never found.
The tragedy deeply affected Ernest, who had planned to be part of that sailing expedition until required to make an urgent delivery to his father’s flax mill. Instead, he received the news of the double drowning on his return home, and then had to break it to his inconsolable mother.
Martha Rutherford’s demeanour changed forever that afternoon. No longer able to find lightness in life, never again did she play the Broadwood piano she had previously polished so lovingly every day.
2
THE WORLD AWAITS
New Zealand and South Australia, 1885 to 1919
Ernest Rutherford’s response to his brothers’ deaths was less outwardly conspicuous than his mother’s. In what would become a template applied to tragedies that awaited later in his life, he immersed himself in scholarly pursuits as refuge from the grief and sadness that enshrouded the family home.
The reality of life in small, unsophisticated rural communities throughout New Zealand at that time was that only half the eligible students stayed on at school beyond age thirteen. The rate of those who remained even longer, to gain secondary education, was around one child in fifty. Secondary schools were invariably privately run, and the fees were a luxury clearly beyond Ernest’s already overworked father. If Ernest were to escape the fraught and fragile existence his forebears had endured, a scholarship stood as his only hope.
He engaged in after-hours tutoring from his teacher Jacob Reynolds in preparation for the Marlborough Scholarship Examinations, which he was to sit over two days in December 1885. But when the Marlborough results were announced, Ernest had finished runner-up, fifteen marks adrift of the prize’s winner.
It meant that, as he neared his fifteenth birthday, he had no choice but to remain at Havelock school to take a second shot at earning a scholarship at year’s end. Failing that, he seemed destined to take up a career in government bureaucracy, having also successfully completed the junior civil service entrance exam late in 1886. Or he could join his father in milling timber, and perhaps even muster a few head of cattle.
So driven was Ernest Rutherford to reach secondary school that he would rise at 5am in the bitter chill of the South Island winter to attend the extracurricular classes in Latin and algebra that the dedicated Reynolds offered. When the examination results were announced in December 1886, Rutherford had scored 580 out of a possible 600: top of the Marlborough Scholarship list.
His path to further learning was assured, at least for a few more years.
South Australia, 1914 to 1917
In his early teens, Mark Oliphant moved away from the Adelaide Hills with his family, and settled back into life in the outer suburbs. The aptitude for learning that Mark had shown at Mylor spurred Baron Oliphant to find rented accommodation at Mitcham in Adelaide’s southern foothills, near a reputable government school at Unley. It was early 1914, and the political storm-front building in Europe was yet to deliver its direct impact on Australia.
Keith Oliphant, almost four years Mark’s junior, would recall that a precedent was thus set: from then on, Oliphant family life would be moulded to enable Mark’s academic ambitions.
Mark seemed to sense things rather than learn them. He seemed to possess an instinctive mechanical insight.
Our parents had to make real sacrifices for the sake of their sons’ education, but Mark was so outstanding that that the rest of us had to wait our turn. Mark always gave me an inferiority complex. He was extremely unusual in his ability to understand things so quickly.
Learning has never been a problem for Mark. The teachers would all say to me ‘you’re not like your brother’. Mind you, he was a dominant, arrogant boy, always full of self-confidence. You can’t embarrass Mark by pointing out when he has made mistakes. He’ll admit any mistakes readily, but it doesn’t worry him.1
At Mitcham the family rented a large stone cottage, featuring a couple of basement nooks that made ideal retreats for a teenage boy with a penchant for inventing. While Mark quickly claimed those spaces for designing and building what were dubbed ‘raggedy, baggedy engines’2, a greater challenge was to deter his inquisitive brothers.
Although they usually padded about the house barefooted, Mark could sense when his siblings lurked outside the room’s heavy wooden door. That was his cue to start hand-cranking his magneto, which he had sourced from a wall-mounted telephone cabinet rendered obsolete by Australia’s recently federated telecommunications system. The small electrical charge that the magneto would deliver to the phone was instead directed to the wired-up door handle of Mark�
�s room. Even with the obligatory damp sack laid outside as an unwelcome mat, the low conductivity of the brass doorknob meant sufficient current was administered to elicit a yelp and a retreat from a would-be intruder, but no risk of more serious injury.
Mark then set his sights on more ambitious experiments. Conspiring with a neighbouring youth, he turned to telegraphy. The friend’s older brother was an electrician, which allowed Mark and his mate to borrow his tools to string up a single-wire telephone connection between their two houses, around 150 metres apart.
The most daring of Mark’s devices were saved for Guy Fawkes Night each November. Having co-opted Keith to sneak into a nearby mansion one year and stealthily remove a few brass doorknobs, Mark transformed them into mini-grenades by filling them with gunpowder. He once boasted that his recipe for the chemical explosive was so volatile it was likely to explode ‘if a fly walked over it’3 – as he once proved, when he brushed his thumb into a pile being otherwise carefully prepared in his basement ‘laboratory’ and it ignited in his face. A similar misfire from a home-made ‘throw down’ bomb saw him attend school for a week with his head wrapped in bandages.
The mishaps did not dissuade the Oliphant boys from roaming the foothills of Mitcham, drilling holes in farmers’ fence posts, filling the recesses with powder and detonating them via a length of touch paper. They would watch from a safe distance as the blast brought a cloud of splinters and the acrid burn of saltpetre.
New Zealand, 1887 to 1889
Courtesy of his Marlborough Scholarship, Ernest Rutherford arrived at Nelson College from Havelock at the start of 1887 to begin his two years of senior schooling. In itself, that represented a significant achievement for the son of a flax farmer in the still-developing colony.
The Basis of Everything Page 3