Of the college’s eighty enrolled pupils, aged from ten to twenty-one, two dozen were boarders. Each was assigned a place in one of the four-bed, draughty dormitories, with individual washing bowls the sole concession to creature comforts.
Not only had sixteen-year-old Ernest been thrust into a foreign existence, but he soon became even further removed from home. The need to find fresh sources of flax sent James Rutherford and his family to the Pungarehu area on New Zealand’s North Island. The 500-kilometre journey from Nelson would mean a lengthy steamer voyage, so it would only be during end-of-semester breaks that Ernest could contemplate returning home.
He therefore threw himself, with country-boy vigour, into college life as a salve for homesickness. He became a hefty and wholehearted, if not especially silken, forward in the school rugby team, which held powerful significance, given that Nelson College was involved in the sport’s first competitive match in New Zealand. However, it was his achievements in the classroom that convinced Rutherford his future lay in further study.
Having regularly topped grades and won prizes in mathematics, history, English literature, French and Latin during his first two years at Nelson College, he began to eye the prospect of undertaking a degree at the University of New Zealand in Christchurch, around 400 kilometres further south. Achieving that next academic goal would require exemplary grades in the matriculation exam to secure yet another scholarship. So the already driven student stepped up his study workload. He took additional evening classes, and his maths and science master noted in the end-of-1888 report that his pupil ‘overhauled the work in shorter time than any boy I ever had’.4
After sitting his matriculation exam, Ernest began summer holidays with his family on the North Island. Weeks passed before he received confirmation that he was among the thirty-one students to have passed the exam with credit, and had therefore qualified for university admission.
However, his name was not among the ten who had secured bursaries to cover the cost of their courses. Given his father couldn’t even afford a permanent dwelling at his Pungarehu mill site, with the rest of the family renting forty kilometres away at New Plymouth, he certainly wasn’t able to subsidise his son’s pursuit of tertiary education.
Once again, a heavy choice loomed for Ernest Rutherford. Although he had already sat and passed the New Zealand civil service entry test, he had foregone a bureaucratic cadetship in the hope of reaching university. Economic pragmatism now suggested that safe employment in an office would be his destiny after all.
But his heart still told him that his calling lay in science, and one faint light flickered in the middle distance.
Despite failing to secure a university scholarship, Rutherford was entitled to remain at Nelson College for an additional twelve months as the terms of his original three-year Marlborough bursary allowed. It meant he would essentially repeat the previous year’s work, but could then compete for one of the ten Junior Scholarships on offer across the entirety of New Zealand. If he was successful in that even more competitive field, then a university place awaited.
When he returned to Nelson College as Head Boy in 1889, the extroverted manner that would later shape his leadership of the Cavendish first began to take form. His boisterous humour, booming laugh and unflagging commitment to every pursuit he tackled – whether after-school lessons, rugby or bouts of boxing – became the building blocks of his adult persona.
If there was one characteristic that stood out, it was the ability he had possessed since secondary school to concentrate single-mindedly regardless of tempest raging around him. At times, that chaos came from less diligent classmates who landed good-natured blows upon him as he studied in the library.
Rutherford’s capacity to perform under all manner of pressures instilled within him crucial confidence when he again took the matriculation exam at the end of 1889: the final chance for the scholarship he needed. But past experience also prepared him for failure.
Before the exam results were known, he lodged an application for a vacant teaching post at New Plymouth High School, close to where his mother and siblings were living. To history’s enduring benefit, he was rejected for that job, and he learned soon afterwards that he had placed fourth among those contesting the ten nationwide Junior Scholarships.
His path to the University of New Zealand at Christchurch, better known as Canterbury College, was clear.
South Australia, 1914 to 1918
Six months into Mark Oliphant’s first year at Unley High School, the school’s diminutive headmaster, Major Benjamin Gates, appeared at the classroom door to announce that Australia, by dint of its imperial ties to Great Britain, was at war with Germany. While the gravity of this pronouncement was immediately obvious to his parents, Mark would remember the onset of war and the subsequent campaigns as something of a distant adventure.
The most obvious impact on his life was that, over the next year or more, many of the school’s male staff enlisted to the cause. They were mostly replaced by female teachers, some of whom had been hastily briefed on the curricula they were to deliver. Mark Oliphant’s second-year French teacher blushed as she confessed her limited knowledge of the language, her candour earning forgiveness from the class as she stumbled over Gallic pronunciations.
As Mark’s secondary education progressed against the backdrop of the Great War, the arduous Latin classes he had been compelled to complete at primary school in readiness for theological studies prepared him well for senior school exams. By then, however, Mark’s belief that science was his future had only strengthened.
‘The wonders of chemistry made me wonder whether I could satisfy my family’s “do-gooder” feelings by becoming a doctor, who used chemistry in treatments,’ he later recalled, citing his parents’ attachment to the Anglican faith that had remained devout, even during their dalliance with Theosophy.5
To realise that aspiration he would need to sit the fifth-year Senior Public Examination which, in 1917, Unley High did not offer. So, with his mother’s firm hand at his back, he transferred to South Australia’s foremost government secondary institution, Adelaide High School, located almost ten kilometres away in the city’s centre.
New Zealand, 1890 to 1892
Despite its frontier location, Canterbury College – like the settlement of Christchurch itself, planned under the systemised colonisation model – aspired to exude the very best qualities of British life. It was founded as an Antipodean bastion of Oxbridge education, and as Rutherford immediately noticed upon arrival, it strictly enforced the wearing of academic gowns and mortar-board headpieces by campus students. Frivolities such as smoking and whistling were summarily forbidden.
At the time of Ernest Rutherford’s arrival in 1890, the institution catered to around 150 full-time students and employed just five professors. Among the latter cohort was Alexander Bickerton, Canterbury’s inaugural chair of chemistry.
Professor Bickerton was as much a showman as a scholar. His theatrical classroom demonstrations routinely featured flashes of light and thunderous explosions that entranced Rutherford who, until that time, had felt more comfortable studying theory.
That preference was made clear early in his undergraduate career. In his first year at Canterbury College, Rutherford was adjudged co-winner of the annual mathematics exhibition prize. Tellingly, in addition to the initial study load for his three-year bachelor degree, which included French, Latin and applied mathematics, he signed up for a weekly Saturday-morning ‘Physics for School Teachers’ course, keeping open the option of a job in the education system.
But as he worked industriously through his degree studies, it was the thrill of experimental work uncorked by Professor Bickerton that began to dominate his time and thinking.
South Australia, 1918
Soon after the guns finally fell silent and Europe confronted the challenges of post-war peace, Mark Oliphant completed his secondary schooling and faced a similarly uncertain future. In later life, he would
concede he was no natural scholar. He blamed this partly on the deficiencies in his sight and hearing, and partly on teachers whom he pejoratively labelled ‘mumblers’. He also recognised that, as a teenager, he felt more fulfilled when he was ‘fooling about in the shed’ than when leafing through textbooks.
‘I was never a good student,’ he would later admit, with a shrug and a smile. ‘I was never top of class or anything of that sort. I was always in the middle range.’6 By his own admission, he struggled with mathematics, a drawback for any aspiring physicist.
One tepid school report from midway through his first – and only – year at Adelaide High School in 1918 noted ‘he is keenly interested in physics and chemistry and doing good work’, alongside a physics assessment of fifty-six per cent. ‘He has maintained his interest in his work and is very efficient on the practical side,’ assessed another later in the year, despite Oliphant’s being injured in a laboratory mishap involving hydrochloric acid that left him sporting more facial bandages and an arm sling.
Where Oliphant revealed himself to be undeniably gifted was in his capacity to design and construct apparatus to bolster the equipment supply at his resource-strapped high schools. His interest in laboratory equipment deepened during his final year at Adelaide High School, where Victorian-era instruments of lacquered brass and polished mahogany glinted from within a glass-fronted display cabinet. Oliphant became obsessed with an old twin-cylinder vacuum pump, which he would religiously clean and grease to improve its function – and was duly castigated by his physics teacher and headmaster for indulging in such an abject waste of time.
Other pieces of apparatus took shape in his experimental den beneath the family home. These were not mere ‘raggedy, baggedy engines’, but often intricate devices, including voltameters, gas absorption tubes, mercury air pumps, induction coils, electrometers, galvanometers, hydraulic aspirators, thermometers, glass plates, organ pipes, sirens and an automatic tuning fork.7
A science career clearly beckoned, but it would remain a dream if Oliphant’s examination results were not exceptional enough to secure one of the twelve scholarships on offer to aspiring secondary students throughout South Australia at war’s end. When results were posted at the conclusion of the 1918 school year, Mark’s showed he had matriculated in English literature, arithmetic, algebra, Latin, trigonometry, physics, chemistry (with credit), physical geography and geology. A scholarship, however, had eluded him.
So Mark Oliphant left Adelaide High aged seventeen, with no option other than to find a job. To aid that endeavour, he held a matriculation certificate and a letter of support from the school’s headmaster, who recommended his pupil as ‘a lad with undoubted bias towards science, of gentlemanly address, good mental powers and thoroughly straightforward and trustworthy’.8
What Oliphant lacked, however, was any demonstrable work history. This meant that unskilled office jobs became his starting point, and the civil servant existence that had entrapped his father loomed forebodingly.
New Zealand, 1891 to 1893
During his first year at Canterbury College, Rutherford’s principal academic rival was his boarding house roommate Willie Marris, who would subsequently achieve fame as governor of the eastern Indian province of Assam. Marris maintained that Rutherford was a superior mathematician at university, but that he (Marris) achieved marginally better end-of-year marks because Rutherford suffered anxiety under the pressure of exams.
That was doubtless a legacy of his chequered history chasing scholarships, but by the completion of his second year at university – when students were required to sit their first round of Bachelor of Arts exams – Rutherford’s confidence in his abilities had grown demonstrably. Come the end of 1891, he had completed the first part of his BA degree by successfully sitting exams in physics, pure mathematics, applied mathematics, English and Latin. A year later, he completed a clean sweep of those subjects as well as French to secure his undergraduate degree.
In his final undergraduate year, Ernest Rutherford also took part in New Zealand’s senior scholarship exams for both mathematics and physics. When the final marks were assessed, the physics scholarship was awarded to a rival student from Otago by such a narrow margin that the examiner, based in England, recommended that a new precedent be created by awarding two prizes. The scholarship board advised that that would be unnecessary, as Rutherford had finished top of the pool in mathematics, and was therefore assured of receiving a bursary.
Thus guaranteed short-term funding to continue his academic career for a further year (of honours or master’s study), the twenty-one-year-old became one of only fourteen postgraduate research students in New Zealand in 1893 – seven of whom were at Canterbury College. While the other six pursued higher degrees in languages, Rutherford’s ambition was obvious from the six courses in which he enrolled – honours maths, honours chemistry, chemical laboratory practice, practical physics, general biology and senior botany.
So unusual was his choice of postgraduate subjects that he was the lone member of his mathematics class. The results that he achieved also set him apart, and by year’s end he had attained a Master of Arts qualification with a rare double distinction: first-class honours in mathematics and physical sciences.
Despite his glittering academic record, Ernest Rutherford found employment opportunities limited as New Zealand’s economy continued to feel the impact of depressed prices for its major export commodity, wool. So, with the guarantee of modest income from tutorial work if he remained at university, Rutherford enrolled in a Bachelor of Science program that included courses in geology and chemistry.
Even though full-time work eluded him, the once-reticent, solitary schoolboy had gained such assurance from his academic achievements that he not only signed up for the college dialectic (debating) society, but also volunteered to serve as one of its office-holders. His seniority was recognised within Canterbury College’s rugby club too, where he held the office of assistant secretary. While his football acumen fell well short of his intellectual prowess, Rutherford was part of the college’s first team to play before a paying crowd, beginning the 1893 season at Christchurch’s premier sporting venue, Lancaster Park. His reputation as a scholar, and even as a sportsman, continued to grow.
While his mathematics scholarship had enabled him to continue studying during his master’s year, it did not cover the cost of board at Canterbury College. Compelled to find private lodgings in Christchurch, sometime before 1893 Rutherford took a room in the home of widow Mary Newton at Carlton Mill Corner, a ten-minute walk from the campus. Mary Newton’s husband had effectively drunk himself to death five years earlier, leaving her with three young boys and a teenage girl, also christened Mary but known to most as May.
As daughter of Christchurch’s inaugural town clerk, Mary Newton had been afforded a good education and a level of social standing, and both of these privileges were mirrored in her eldest child. The aloofness young May would sometimes display towards others reflected her mother’s former societal status, and the teenager’s strong moral code had been honed by her mother’s staunch anti-smoking and anti-drinking philosophy, a direct response to her late husband’s alcoholism.
However, as the eldest daughter of a young (forty-one-year-old) widow, May was also regularly called upon to care for her three little brothers, William, George and Charles. She then won prizes during her senior schooling – including awards in mathematics and science that prompted some to suspect she was receiving private tuition from the family’s boarder, almost five years her senior. Aged sixteen and having lost her father before she reached adolescence, May had forged a close bond with the garrulous if studious young man of the house.
Just how quickly May’s romantic relationship with Ernest Rutherford flourished under Mary’s hawkish vigilance is not known, but when the boarder returned to his family at Pungarehu for the summer holidays at the end of 1894, he was accompanied by his landlady’s then eighteen-year-old daughter.
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sp; May’s arrival on the North Island created ripples within the Rutherford household. Ernest’s five sisters found her to be snooty and spoiled. They resented the fact that May was able to accompany Ernest on his regular horse-and-trap journeys to collect mail from the nearby town’s post office, yet they were never invited. Ernest’s girlfriend was decidedly more popular with his brothers, and she once coquettishly told James Rutherford: ‘If I cannot have your Ern then I’ll have one of your other sons.’9
However, according to the custom of the time, May’s presence at Pungarehu implicitly announced that the couple was engaged to be wed, as soon as Ernest had secured suitable means. Towards the end of 1894, Rutherford had served an inauspicious stint as relief teacher at Christchurch Boys’ High School as he explored the possibility of a teaching career once his Bachelor of Science was completed. But his impatience with pupils who did not share his logical insights and grasp of difficult scientific subject matter meant that neither teacher nor students had gained much from the experience.
‘He was entirely hopeless as a school master,’ one of those disillusioned pupils would write of Rutherford the teacher. ‘Disorder prevailed in his classes . . . I do not remember myself following any of his intellectual processes on the blackboard. They were done like lightning.’10
At the start of 1895, Rutherford therefore returned to Canterbury College, with May. Their future plans were beset by uncertainty. May had enrolled to study English, French, Latin and zoology at Canterbury College; she would finish the year having failed all four. Whether her academic results reflected the turmoil of the couple’s circumstances or confirmed that her earlier successes were built largely on the expert input of her family’s household boarder is not known.
Her ‘fiancé’, meanwhile, took up tutoring to help defray the cost of his ongoing studies. He also began his first forays into dedicated research work, although he never explained his rationale for pursuing such matters as magnetic viscosity and properties of electromagnetism (as per his first two published papers in 1894 and 1895). It was a field of endeavour that also led Rutherford to explore new means of producing and detecting radio waves, seemingly in line with the great scientific quest of 1895 (also pursued at that time by Italy’s Guglielmo Marconi).
The Basis of Everything Page 4