The Basis of Everything

by Andrew Ramsey

  He realised, more than most, the importance of the application of scientific knowledge if Britain was to prosper, but he remained convinced that one of the best training grounds for physicists was the sort of fundamental science pursued in the Cavendish. His faith was demonstrated dramatically after his death, when the needs of [the Second World] war found almost all the men whom he had trained leading such practical developments as radar, atomic energy, and operational research.8

  Oliphant would continue to be fiercely protective of Rutherford’s reputation and influence, especially when it was suggested that Einstein laid a more credible claim to being the initial source of understanding that would ultimately deliver nuclear weapons. While acknowledging the undisputed intellect of theoretical physics’ most recognisable figure, and keeping a signed letter from the German among his more prized personal papers, Oliphant took every opportunity to disavow claims that Einstein was the atomic bomb’s inspiration. He used his writings ‘to describe as eyewash the effort to make Einstein the father of nuclear energy. He contributed nothing. It would all have been discovered and worked out without E = mc2. Einstein was one of the great men of science, but he was far from the greatest.’9

  That honour, in Oliphant’s eyes and in relation to the nuclear age’s dawn, lay beyond debate. ‘Much nonsense has been written and said about the early history of nuclear energy . . . In fact, this achievement rests squarely upon the work of Rutherford, who discovered the nucleus, invented the methods for investigating its properties, and showed that nuclear transformations were accompanied by emission or absorption of energy enormously greater than the energies associated with chemical reactions.’10

  Yet it was his teacher’s unpretentious, unvarnished persona that resonated most deeply within Oliphant, who was similarly devoid of bombast and artifice.

  In all ways, except in his science, Rutherford was an exceptionally ordinary man in both appearance and character. Quite naturally, he was friendly with all men and quarrelled with none. He could be moody, irritable, and on very rare occasions angry, but as with most men such deviations from the normal were rare and transient.

  His success came as much from complete dedication to his work as from his innate ability, so that even the average student was inspired to emulate him. Yet, ordinary as he was, there was something in him which raised him high above others and put him in the company of the greatest men, and this something earned for him both the profound respect and deep love of all who came under his influence.11

  Oliphant’s memories were echoed by James Chadwick, Rutherford’s long-time collaborator, who wrote in The Times:

  He had, of course, a volcanic energy and an intense enthusiasm – his most obvious characteristic – and an immense capacity for work. A ‘clever’ man with these advantages can produce notable work, but he would not be a Rutherford. Rutherford had no cleverness – just greatness . . . The world mourns the death of a great scientist, but we have lost our friend, our counsellor, our staff and our leader.12

  * * *

  Broken by Ernest’s death, Mary Rutherford called upon Oliphant to sort through his papers when time permitted, while her son-in-law, Ralph Fowler, collated his correspondence. Fowler, who five years earlier had been appointed Cambridge’s inaugural Plummer Professor of Theoretical Physics (the second physics chair for which Rutherford had pushed when he returned to the Cavendish in 1919), took a proprietary approach to his appointed task. Mindful that some of the private missives Rutherford had penned to Mary before their marriage had found their way into New Zealand’s newspapers decades earlier, he destroyed the surviving letters he considered too personal. But among the keepsakes Oliphant retained was his own final written exchange with Rutherford.

  In his formal acknowledgment of Oliphant’s eventual departure from Cambridge on 8 October 1937, the professor noted his protégé’s separation from the Cavendish and recorded his own gratitude for Oliphant’s contribution: ‘In particular, I personally appreciate how helpful you were in the whole problem of artificial transmutation and in the design of the new high-tension laboratory.’ Elsewhere in the same letter, he wrote: ‘You have been here at a time which has seen great developments and have taken your full part in them.’13

  Oliphant’s brief reply, rendered all the more poignant in light of events that followed, remains among his personal papers. ‘You may be sure that I miss the atmosphere of the Cavendish very much,’ he confessed in what would prove his parting words. ‘But I feel that I may be able to disseminate a little of the enthusiasm and the method of attack in which I have been trained by you.’14

  While Oliphant felt the loss of his mentor professionally as well as personally, his lingering hurt was not as acute as Mary Rutherford’s. She responded to a note from Oliphant shortly after her husband’s funeral: ‘Your sweet letter is very comforting and I believe every word of it. I shall always count on you to help me. At Xmas, Rosie and you and I will carry on the good work here [at Chantry Cottage]. He had planned such a lot of jobs.’15

  It would slowly become apparent that when Ernest died, Mary Rutherford lost not only her life’s companion but also the confident, sometimes brusque personality she had developed during her thirty-seven years of marriage. Formerly so comfortable as the centre of social functions, she virtually withdrew from public life in the aftermath of her husband’s death. Forced to vacate Newnham Cottage, she moved into a small flat in Cambridge, where she continued sifting through Ernest’s belongings. After ascertaining that her young grandchildren were not interested, she offloaded his many degree parchments on an elderly neighbour who liked to create lampshades from historical documents. The late professor’s collection of more than thirty scientific medals she donated to the University of Canterbury in Christchurch – previously Canterbury College. She returned to her former home town on New Zealand’s South Island after the Second World War, where she lived alone until her death in January 1954, aged seventy-seven.

  15

  ‘A SHOW OF MY OWN’

  Birmingham, 1937 to 1939

  The bright new start that Mark Oliphant had sought at Birmingham was decidedly lacking in lustre. Shortly before Christmas 1937, just weeks after taking up his new post, he wrote to Niels Bohr in Copenhagen to express his lingering sadness about Rutherford’s death. ‘I already miss him very much as many things crop up where I require his kindly advice.’1

  The heaviness of spirit that Oliphant felt from the passing of his friend and inspiration was not soon eased by his move. He continued to experience a deep yearning for the Cavendish, where Lawrence Bragg – the Adelaide-born son of Rutherford’s close confidant, William Henry Bragg, and the youngest recipient of the physics Nobel Prize (in 1915, aged twenty-five) – would be appointed the new director in 1938. Oliphant was also dismayed by the pervading gloom of Birmingham, which had little of Cambridge’s charm or academic-village feel, even though he and his family initially found rented premises in a more genteel part of the city, near the university. As Oliphant recalled years later when describing the ‘drabness’ of England’s second-largest centre: ‘There is nowhere in the city where one can stand and feel, because of the grandeur, the beauty or the character of the surroundings, that one is clearly in a great city. I know that Birmingham grew from village to city too rapidly at a time when architectural tradition was at a low ebb and when money and not beauty was the aim. But the faults do not lie entirely in the past for consciousness of the brightening effects of paint and tasteful decoration seems to exist only inside buildings and does not penetrate to the outer walls.’2

  It was not only the freshly installed Poynting Chair of Physics who was nostalgic for life in Cambridge. Although Rosa Oliphant had initially felt few qualms about leaving behind the aching memories of her early years in England, the shift also meant vacating the recently completed Onkaparinga. So when a Birmingham University colleague of Mark’s alerted the couple to the availability of a five-acre plot near the neighbouring village of Barnt Green t
hat included a neglected main residence plus a sizeable gatekeeper’s lodge ripe for remodelling, their interest was stirred.

  The land was located among Worcestershire’s green and gentle hills, and in what was reputedly one of the last remaining tracts of the Arden Forest. This had originally stretched as far as Stratford-upon-Avon in neighbouring Warwickshire, and local lore suggested it had inspired Shakespeare’s mystical woodland fantasy As You Like It. Its colossal oak trees certainly exuded an ethereal aura as they rose from a summer carpet of bluebells and azaleas, or stood impassively throughout winter above clumps of aconites and snowdrops whose tones of gold and ivory shone contrastingly bright.

  It was the setting, rather than the fixtures, that sealed the £2500 purchase (around £160,000 today). Unlike the serene countryside and rolling Lickey Hills around it – which the Oliphant family would explore as a panacea to the city grime twenty kilometres northward – the house replicated Birmingham University in its lack of aesthetic appeal. However, its bare brick walls, flat roof and steel-framed windows fitted with small cantilevered hoods were softened by the garden, to which the new owners became devoted, and which bloomed with beds of roses and daffodils and bluebells. It also came to include a lovingly maintained vegetable patch, and a couple of scrawny eucalyptus trees that stood as a comforting reminder of ‘true home’. Further familiarity came in the name they assigned the dwelling – Peto, from the original Scottish Oliphant clan’s ancient Latin motto ‘Altiora peto’, ‘I seek higher things’.

  In 1938, the idyllic semi-rural picture was completed when Mark and Rosa adopted a second child. Vivian Oliphant was only months old when she arrived at Peto. Born to a single mother who, as with older brother Michael and his biological family, she would never meet, Vivian would enjoy a bountiful British upbringing, albeit at the hands of proudly Australian parents.

  * * *

  Now that Oliphant had settled into the physics chair in Birmingham, the realities of his new life had become formidably apparent.

  Birmingham University had effectively been born in 1875 as a science training facility established by Sir Josiah Mason, whose fortune had been earned from the manufacture of pen nibs. Oliphant’s first impression of his new domain was that it bore the distinct whiff of a Victorian-era relic. The entire campus, set apart from the smoke and stain of the city’s heavy manufacturing heart, among the comparative gentility of Edgbaston’s tree-filled estates, received its light and power via steam engines that drove a series of archaic dynamos.

  The campus itself was an architectural curiosity. Its sumptuous renaissance entrance was adorned with marble columns and floors, and crowned by a soaring cupola, all within an arc of rust-red brick buildings with sandstone trim around their Tudor windows. The huge courtyard extending beyond that semicircular feature was dominated by a campanile that – at more than 100 metres high – was also the world’s tallest free-standing clock tower. Modelled on Siena’s Torre del Mangia, it carried the name of the university’s principal benefactor and former chancellor, the Birmingham businessman turned parliamentarian Joseph Chamberlain – whose son Neville was British Prime Minister when Oliphant assumed the Poynting Chair.

  Any largesse Chamberlain Senior lavished upon the institution had not found its way to the physics department, housed within the minimalist three-level structure that was the Poynting Building. Its operations also spilled over into a handful of wooden huts, initially erected as temporary measures during the First World War.

  Research work was restricted to a small L-shaped laboratory notionally reserved for the Poynting Professor, a basement used primarily for storage, and a small space that was accessed through the department’s cloakroom. The equally overcrowded workshop contained equipment so hopelessly out of date as to be largely useless.

  When Oliphant had made his first inspection of the facilities in 1936, he had found them not only inferior to those at the Cavendish, but also funded by an annual physics budget around a quarter of what Neville Moss had suggested in the informal approach made at Cambridge. When he subsequently visited Birmingham and saw how keenly his presence was sought, Oliphant felt emboldened to lodge an ambit claim under which he might consider the move – and was then somewhat surprised when the Birmingham University council agreed.

  So, in addition to his promised annual remuneration of £1300 (around £85,000 today), he was granted an initial outlay for his department of £2000, which was five times the existing yearly budget. Thereafter, he had also requested recurrent annual payments of £1000 to further help establish a nuclear physics laboratory, something glaringly absent from the Birmingham faculty in 1937. Finally, he had stipulated the employment of a full-time personal laboratory assistant to fashion and set up apparatus.

  Oliphant’s first order of business upon occupying the physics chair later that year was to prepare a detailed report on the state of the department for the university’s council. Having endured Rutherford’s reticence to seek resources for the under-funded Cavendish, which appeared lavishly appointed by comparison, he forewent subtlety in tabling his additional demands to drag Birmingham into the atomic age. His report stated bluntly: ‘the facilities required for modern work in physics are completely absent. By clearing a portion of our basement and dividing it into three rooms with temporary partitions, and by clearing two rooms used for storing instruments and apparatus, temporary accommodation has been provided for some of the research but, as a result of this, I myself have nowhere to work.’3

  He informed councillors their university could lead the world in nuclear physics – a discipline that did not even exist there in 1937 – if it outlaid £60,000 (almost £4 million today) for building and equipment upgrades.

  The council unanimously acknowledged the urgent need but told Oliphant that, with Britain’s economic green shoots still stunted by the great depression’s shadow, it was in no position to meet his curt demand. Instead, with bureaucratic timidity, the university announced it would be most ‘grateful’ to any outside entity that might fancy tipping in some cash.

  In Oliphant’s words: ‘The Council listened with respect to what I had to say, but received my request for money in stony silence. It was clearly necessary to seek the money required for ourselves.’4

  His initial attempts to solicit support from the factories and workshops around Birmingham, which were still struggling to regain impetus following years of economic scarcity, proved fruitless. However, after experiencing first-hand the lifeblood handed to the Cavendish to fulfil its new high-tension aspirations, Oliphant knew where to begin his tin-rattling.

  Lord Austin’s benevolence to Cambridge had been founded on his belief in the important work that Rutherford had been leading in the pursuit of nuclear science. Oliphant felt sure the motoring tycoon, whom he had met briefly at the Cavendish, would favourably entertain a pitch from a Rutherford acolyte looking to further that field of inquiry at the local university – particularly if that suitor was also a new near neighbour of the Austins, among the lush meadows and quiet country lanes of rural Worcestershire.

  Those hopes rose higher when Lord Austin responded to an unsolicited letter with an invitation for the Oliphants to Sunday-afternoon tea. Mark and Rosa donned their formal finery and drove the four kilometres from Barnt Green to Lord Austin’s Georgian manor at Marlbrook. That meeting might have failed before it began had Oliphant not realised that it might be impudent to turn into the curved gravel driveway of the Austin Motor Company founder’s home at the wheel of a rattling, wheezing Morris: the brand of Austin’s main marketplace rival. To avoid this potentially serious oversight, Oliphant squeezed his aged motor car against a roadside hedge not far from Austin’s entrance gates, and he and his wife completed the journey to the front door on foot.

  Oliphant’s plan was to build rapport through sharing stories of Australia, where Lord Austin had learned engineering before he returned to England to launch his manufacturing empire. Yet his attempts at small talk over tea in the stately dr
awing room were cut short by Lady Austin, whom Oliphant would recall as a ‘formidable woman of humble origin, with an abrupt but disarming frankness in conversation’.

  ‘Nobody calls on us unless they want something,’ she suddenly interjected. ‘I suppose, like all the rest, you are after the sugar?’

  Caught off-guard but red-handed, Oliphant took his chance. ‘Well, eh,’ he replied with a smile of admission. ‘I know that your husband is interested in science and I was hoping . . .’

  He made it no further before Lady Austin skewered him. ‘We have given away all that we can afford. Would you like another cup of tea?’5

  A final indignity came soon afterwards when, as they were being ushered to the door, Lord Austin noted the empty driveway and inquired how they intended travelling home. Determined not to reveal his source of shame lurking in undergrowth near the roadway, Oliphant fudged an answer but was immediately offered chauffeur service in His Lordship’s limousine.

  No sooner were he and Rosa deposited with comfort and efficiency at Peto’s front door than Oliphant climbed aboard his bicycle, tucked his trouser hems into his socks and retraced the narrow laneways to the Morris. Having roped the bike to the rear luggage rack, he made dejectedly for home. With no donation in tow.

  The challenges associated with ‘running his own show’ were by now frustratingly clear. However, Oliphant showed himself far more active than his mentor in securing resources for his work and his workers. Despite the slap-down over scones at Lord Austin’s, he redoubled his efforts with the support of faculty dean Professor Moss. Through Moss’s established network of contacts, the pair submitted an account of their financial plight to no less a personage than Edgbaston’s parliamentary representative, and Britain’s prime minister, Neville Chamberlain. Even though Oliphant felt the Conservatives’ leader was ‘not of a warm disposition and did not give the impression he would give much help . . . he did indicate that he would look into the question’.6