The Basis of Everything

by Andrew Ramsey

  The holidays at Celyn came to an end in 1935. This was partly because Rutherford’s incessantly hectic schedule of meetings and conferences made the lengthy road trip into the unspoiled Welsh hill country impractical. But more pragmatically, the steep trails of Nant Gwynant had become ever less appealing to Ernest and Mary, while the invasive damp and chill of the stone longhouse had finally negated its rustic charm and unimpeded views.

  A search had begun the previous year for a more accessible, more comfortable alternative. After numerous reconnaissance runs into the southern counties, several acres of gently sloping pastoral land, including a grove of ancient oaks and elms, were found near the hamlet of Upper Chute. The property was on the fringe of the Wiltshire Downs, ten kilometres from Andover, in the southern corner of a larger dairy farm named, portentously, New Zealand.

  Although still many hours by road from Cambridge, it was half the travel time required to reach Celyn, and Mary Rutherford enthusiastically embraced the new project. Cambridge architect Henry ‘Hugh’ Hughes was employed to design a simple timber bungalow that – unlike seventeenth-century Celyn – included modern plumbing and central heating, as well as upstairs lodgings for guests, and a large brick fireplace in the spacious, ground-level living room.

  The Oliphants helped Mary install and arrange the furniture while Ernest was absent elsewhere, and Mark was regularly required to maintain the kitchen’s paraffin stove, which could be more fractious than the lady of the house. In line with Mary’s dogged belief that the remnant foundations at the foot of the property had formed part of an ancient chapel or chantry, the new residence was christened Chantry Cottage.

  The Rutherfords retreated to Chantry at every opportunity, although with Ernest’s schedule that became only three or four times a year. They often holidayed with the Oliphants, who also made use of the cottage when its owners could not. In recompense for that privilege, Mark was set to work in the garden whenever Mary Rutherford was in residence, and in charge.

  As Oliphant later remembered, those days began ‘with the physical labour of digging holes under her supervision, or lopping unwanted branches high up in trees’.

  While I was stretched dangerously at full length along a sloping branch, she would direct from the ground which canes of a rampant climbing rose she wished me to remove, not at all perturbed that I was ruining my trousers, or that it was impossible to reach one inch further with the secateurs.

  Although there was solid chalk beneath a very thin layer of poor soil, she insisted upon planting rhododendrons in holes which I filled with leaf mould from the woodland, but since they hate lime, they soon yellowed and died. There was a small pond among the trees where she endeavoured to establish water-loving species which I had to plant, but since it was so overhung by trees and shaded, the only result was that I was covered with mud.10

  Rutherford himself was excused from these horticultural harangues, because they typically took place in the mornings when he was ornery. He would habitually arise in time for breakfast around 8am – bread toasted over kindling that burned low in the fireplace – and the usual reproaches from his wife that he was dribbling marmalade on his jacket, or draining his tea more rapidly than were their visitors. He would then retire to a fireside chair to browse The Times and the Manchester Guardian, or leaf through mail sent on from Cambridge. If climate or circumstances meant he was not alone in the living room, he would lead lively discussions about local history or current events.

  When weather and temperament warmed, Ernest would appear in Mary’s garden late in the morning at which time he was also co-opted into action. Usually he was ordered to take the end of a crosscut saw with Mark Oliphant, and set about restocking the firewood. For years, Rutherford had suffered from a partial umbilical hernia near his navel and had worn a surgical truss. It meant that the exertion of sawing was punctuated by his grunts and grimaces, as well as regular rest breaks, during which he would slump onto a log and light his pipe, using up to a dozen matches despite the tinder-dry tobacco packed into it. He would then regale Oliphant with stories of life on the farm at Fox Hill and Havelock, where, as a teenager, he found cleaving railway sleepers from native hardwood easier work than hacking at firewood in his dotage.

  Yet Mark Oliphant’s attachment to the Rutherfords extended further than domestic navvy and saw-pit confidant. Mary Rutherford also enlisted him on occasional covert operations, such as in early 1936, when her cousin and trusted housekeeper, Bay de Renzie, vacated her post without warning or reason. She had been in the family’s employ for ten years, and Mary suspected her to be ‘messing about with some man’. So she assigned the ever-obliging Oliphant to the case.

  Bay had been granted use of the small car that Ernest had bought so Mary could run errands around Cambridge, and Mary became convinced the young girl was taking the vehicle to attend evening dinners and dances at hotels in surrounding villages. Her suspicions grew when she examined the household expenses and found that Bay was spending significant sums on having the car regularly tuned.

  Although the closest Oliphant could claim to being a gumshoe was when the laboratory mishap meant the soles of his were vulcanised into the Cavendish floor, he did solve the mystery of the missing housekeeper. He ascertained that she was not only seeing, but had also run off with the local mechanic – who was, as suspected, also over-servicing Mary’s car.11

  * * *

  Whether they were among the brutal beauty of North Wales or the more genteel Wessex landscape, the roots that linked Oliphant and Rutherford to their formative years in untamed, unhurried environments fused organically when they returned to nature. On breathless hikes across the sharp inclines of the Nant Gwynant valley, or steady ambles through the low hills of the Wiltshire Downs, it was the balm of clear air and warm sunshine, of birdcalls and soaring trees, that most readily united their kindred souls.

  Rutherford’s yearning to reconnect with the chalk hills and hedgerows of England’s south-west grew with each administrative tussle he waged at the Cavendish. He was continuously reminded by younger researchers that, while the Cockcroft–Walton accelerator had effectively disintegrated atoms of lighter elements including lithium and boron, heavy nuclei were the next frontier.

  Finally recognising the inevitable march towards big science, in 1934 Rutherford appointed Oliphant and Cockcroft to the Cavendish’s building committee. The pair undertook exhaustive research to gather information on the best design and fit-out for the high-voltage facility that Cambridge would need to keep pace in the sub-atomic race. Cockcroft also began drafting letters in an attempt to secure funds from potential donors. As rival research institutions invested in more powerful particle accelerators that demanded ever-greater energy sources, members of the Cavendish team recognised the laboratory needed to match their ambition by being able to generate electricity at 1 million volts, or even 2 million, or they would risk being left behind.

  The disconnect that Rutherford was beginning to feel from the science that had been his life’s work was starting to wear him down. By appointing Oliphant and Cockcroft to the committee charged with investigating this next phase of the Cavendish’s expansion, Rutherford had effectively outsourced due diligence on technology about which he remained volubly dubious.

  The building project soaked up most of Oliphant and Cockcroft’s time, and required numerous visits to institutions in Europe to inspect new installations and understand the latest thinking. It was at the Eindhoven research headquarters of Dutch technology giant Philips in early 1935 that Oliphant’s eyes were opened wide to what might be possible. He was immediately taken by the potential of a 1-million-volt high-tension generator that he envisaged could be doubled in voltage capacity at the Cavendish, if housed in a suitable facility. As a commercially designed set, it would also save time and effort, as it could be shipped and installed far more easily than building such a complex piece of apparatus from scratch.

  As the scope of the enterprise – the very initiative that Chadwi
ck had been advocating until Rutherford’s intransigence led him to Liverpool – grew in line with Oliphant and Cockcroft’s ambitions, so too did its costs billow. Upon his return from Eindhoven, Oliphant lobbied Rutherford (who had travelled to Manchester to address the Institution of Electrical Engineers’ annual dinner) with a breathless assessment of the Philips apparatus, including his estimation that a barn-like room measuring eighteen metres by twelve metres might suffice to generate 2 million volts. According to majority opinion, such a capacity was essential in order to continue the experimental work that was already foundering due to the Cavendish’s inadequate infrastructure.

  ‘It will take the best part of a year to set things up, and in the meantime we can carry on with our present apparatus,’ Oliphant wrote to Rutherford, while noting that preparations for the high-voltage generator’s eventual installation should begin forthwith. ‘Perhaps you will feel I am over enthusiastic and inspired too much by my trip, but I have given careful thought to the question and think I have learned a great deal about it.’12

  Within six months, however, the projected cost of this brave new addition had ballooned from £6000 to around £15,000 (approximately £1 million today), and Oliphant suddenly feared the project might be jettisoned altogether.

  In August 1935 he wrote again to Rutherford, who was then on holiday in the countryside to distance himself from the tumult.

  I can see the new lab receding into the distance if we are not careful. Of course, if we had the money, or if you thought we could raise it, all would be well . . . I am sorry to write so fully on the matter of the new lab, but it is a thing we need urgently, and not in some distant future when all the cream has been scooped off by folks whose results we dare not trust too deeply.13

  Then, in April 1936, Sir Herbert Austin, founder of the Austin Motor Company, wrote to Cambridge’s chancellor, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, pledging a staggering £250,000 building endowment (almost £17 million today) to extend the Cavendish in recognition of ‘the very valuable work done by Lord Rutherford and his colleagues’.14 On face value, it seemed manna that could solve a myriad of problems besetting the laboratory. After all, as Oliphant had observed, ‘Rutherford had no flair and no inclination for raising funds.’15 He soon found that the prospect of almost inexhaustible funding would become more of a sore than a salve for the Cavendish director.

  It was during a late spring weekend retreat at Chantry Cottage, shortly after Austin’s offer was tabled, that Oliphant noticed his friend’s mood was oddly gloomy. As the two men lolled in canvas chairs, having taken a break from Lady Rutherford’s gardening duties, Oliphant pressed Rutherford for a reason. The professor conceded it was a result of ‘all the goddam worry and trouble the bequest meant for him’.

  He said that he was damned if he was going to spend his time in planning a new Cavendish, that it would upset the whole lab and that Cockcroft would not do a stroke of work for a year or two.

  He went on to say that a new laboratory was unnecessary, anyway, if the number of people was kept down to about that present, and that thinking was more necessary than grand surroundings or elaborate and expensive equipment.16

  When Oliphant dared mention that Ernest Lawrence was reporting significant results using his powerful cyclotron at Berkeley, and that the Cavendish risked being left behind by ignoring comparable technology, Rutherford snapped.

  He then really blew up, becoming red in the face and shaking his pipe at me. He declared that luxury was not good for anyone, least of all a physicist, and that the amount of physics done per pound of expenditure was in inverse proportion to the total expenditure.17

  * * *

  Another matter weighing upon Rutherford during this period was the need to appoint Chadwick’s replacement as his Cavendish deputy. Rutherford had also confided to colleagues, including Oliphant, that he planned to retire upon reaching age seventy, which meant a further five years at the helm. But this would require that he identify a possible successor in the interim.

  In choosing his new second-in-command, he oscillated between Oliphant’s irrepressible if occasionally intemperate enthusiasm, and the more staid seniority of Charles Ellis. The decision proved too difficult for Rutherford and, as a result, both men assumed the title Assistant Director of Research.

  Oliphant’s ordination was confirmed in a typically brief and business-like letter from Rutherford dated 15 June 1935. A more expansive exchange took place days later, when Oliphant was summoned to Rutherford’s office.

  The director lit his pipe, leaned forward in a manner identical to their first meeting in that same room on a drizzling October morning eight years earlier, and imparted wisdom from which Oliphant might benefit, should he one day assume the seat on the smoking side of the desk – for which, all indicators suggested, he was now earmarked. Six years Ellis’s junior, and sharing a close relationship with his director, Oliphant was a man whose star was clearly on the rise.

  ‘You know, Oliphant,’ Rutherford began, exhaling a plume of smoke that momentarily engulfed him, ‘in this game it is rather important to choose the right experiments to do. But it is even more necessary to know when to stop. To understand when one should discard a line of work that has become unprofitable, for there are too many dead horses that continue to be flogged.

  ‘Unfortunately, in industrial and governmental labs men are often assigned to a problem, or to a class of problem and have to work in that field until they retire. It’s my belief that no man can make creative contributions to a subject through a particular line of attack for more than a few years. After that, he becomes stale.’

  The homily hung between them, suspended in the smog, for just a moment before Rutherford forged on, stressing the need to remain open to fresh theories and approaches, using nimble and unconventional thinking. ‘Don’t forget,’ Rutherford warned, with a vague irony lost on him in the haze, ‘that many a youngster’s ideas may be better than your own, and never resent the greater success of a student.’18

  It was as if Rutherford were priming Oliphant for imminent release into a brash new world that the professor himself was afraid to confront.

  Upon Mark’s elevation to assistant director, the Oliphants’ circumstances effectively changed overnight. They were able, at last, to move out of the rented property at Grantchester that was imbued with such desperate sadness. And they engaged Hugh Hughes – the architect who had designed Chantry Cottage – to produce a boldly modern, flat-roofed house on what had once been marshland on the city’s western outskirts, a few hundred metres from where the new Cavendish Laboratory would be built forty years later.

  As an homage to Mark’s Adelaide Hills upbringing, the Oliphants’ first property in far-away England bore the name Onkaparinga. There was little resemblance, though, between the eucalypts and baked-hard soils around Mylor, and the willow groves that flourished in the constant damp of Conduit Head Road.

  Within a year, the house set on a rough cul-de-sac would echo with the sound that had been so painfully absent from Mark and Rosa’s lives, when in late 1936 they finalised adoption of a four-month-old son, Michael.

  The Oliphants’ new, fair-haired child would never know his birth parents. But the clothes, the toys and the love that had been packed away since Geoffrey’s death were heaped upon the boy whose arrival completed a family that felt truly blessed after so many bleakly trying days.

  * * *

  Due to his proven talent for problem-solving, and his position on the Cavendish’s by now influential building committee, Oliphant began to assume a large share of the laboratory’s daily responsibilities. In addition to progressing the plans for the new high-voltage facility, Oliphant was called upon to deliver lectures, supervise the work of research students, set examination papers, see to much of the day-to-day administration, and effectively oversee the experimental program.

  There were times when the sheer volume of work required a touch of subterfuge. On one occasion, Oliphant was asked to pass on a techni
cal report in order to gain Rutherford’s approval: a process he saw as unnecessarily time consuming given Rutherford’s similarly hectic schedule. ‘Instead, Oliphant forged Rutherford’s signature,’ colleague Philip Dee would recall. ‘And to give it verisimilitude, dribbled over the signature and rubbed it with his finger – this supposedly to represent the dripping from the end of Rutherford’s pipe.’19

  Oliphant’s ascension to the post of Rutherford’s most trusted deputy was confirmed in 1936, when Ellis left Cambridge to take up the physics chair at University College London.

  Yet at the same time as Rutherford was grooming his young collaborator to become his successor, he effectively hastened Oliphant’s departure – to his resultant fury.

  * * *

  As the foremost presence bestriding British physics, Rutherford was regularly sought out for recommendations to fill vacancies at rival institutions – just as Thomson had been asked to do, in recommending Rutherford for McGill in 1898.

  In the early spring of 1936, with plans for the Cavendish’s high-tension laboratory being furiously formulated, Rutherford was visited by Professor Neville Moss, dean of the University of Birmingham’s all-encompassing faculty of science. Even after several months of searching, no suitable candidate had been found to fill the university’s vacant Poynting Chair of Physics.

  Moss explained that his red-brick university was shedding staff at a problematic rate, and he believed the appointment of a figure of significance from a renowned institution such as Cambridge might bolster Birmingham’s prestige.