Rosalind Franklin (10 page)

The situation resolved itself in the form of a chance to do research in a government laboratory in the borough of Kingstonupon-Thames, on the southwestern edge of London. To Rosalind, a Londoner, the suburbs were as unappealing as the provinces. To her parents, who had now reoccupied their old home in Bays- water, she said she would take the job if it were offered.

 

I think the work sounds not too bad, but I don't like the idea of the place — miles from anything, without even the consolation of a lunch-hour in town — it'll be lunch in the lab, with lab people, all horribly shut off. But the alternatives are probably worse. I did not seriously consider the Ministry of Fuel job. I'm sure I should be very much more efficient in administrative work, but I should lose touch and never be able to go back to lab work, which would be much more exciting if only one could succeed.

 

She felt she had failed twice in Cambridge — in not getting a first-class degree and not achieving anything in her work with Norrish. When in August 1942 she accepted the job in Kingston, Dainton, who now knew her better, thought she was absolutely right to get out. Married that year, he and his wife, a zoologist from Newnham, were touched by the care and skill Rosalind took in choosing a wedding present she knew they would like. He thought it a tragedy that she had had to work for Norrish, with whom nobody could get along at that period in his life. In any case, she now had something that met all requirements: her own, her father's and her country's.

 

If she had had an ideal existence before, she improved on it now: a large house on Putney Common, shared with her cousin Irene Franklin and a friend, with a small private garden, a daily woman to help with the cleaning, and the rest left to themselves. As Rosalind had the shortest working hours, she did most of the housekeeping and cooking. Despite what she had said about her mother's life, she thoroughly enjoyed housewifery. She wrote to their young former Austrian lodger, Evi Eisenstadter Ellis, now living in Chicago (where the family, changing their name, chose ‘Ellis' as a surname out of respect for Ellis Franklin who had saved their lives). ‘Even washing-up ceases to be unpleasant,' she said, ‘when you do it in your own place and at your own convenience.'

Peace of mind came from a satisfying job at last. The new British Coal Utilisation Research Association (BCURA) under its first director, Dr D.H. Bangham, had assembled a staff of graduate physicists direct from universities to study coal and charcoal. At BCURA (pronounced ‘B'Cura' by those who worked there) young researchers were allowed to do original work in a way that would not have been possible before the war. (Charcoal, used in gas masks during the First World War, had saved thousands of lives and was a component in the masks that Rosalind and other students carried in Cambridge.)

Most British coal is derived from fern-like carboniferous plants which are transformed by degrees towards almost inorganic coal by squeezing — the process of ‘coalification'. The question Rosalind now addressed was why some kinds of coal are much more impervious to penetration by gas or water than others. She worked on bituminous and anthracite coals from Kent, northeast England, South Wales and Ireland. Using helium to see how much could pass through the imperceptible apertures in the various cellular structures, she tested the change in porosity under temperatures as high as 1,000° Celsius. She had apparatus galore - lamps, rollers, furnaces and a good supply of dry nitrogen — to conduct her experiments. As she lowered the temperature and raised it again, measuring the shrinkage in coals and carbons, she developed theories that would make her international reputation.

With the title of Assistant Research Officer, she had a fairly authoritative way about her. One day when she went into the machine shop — a vital spot in any laboratory reliant on big apparatus — and found signs declaring it out of bounds to noncertified personnel, she simply turned the signs around, and used the equipment anyway.

At home in Putney, Rosalind and Irene volunteered as air raid wardens. Their duties consisted of inspecting the blackout - wearing tin hats and cycling or walking around their assigned patch, looking for violations — or sitting in the ‘Post' for two-hour stints. Rosalind was fearless, up to a point. She was bold in venturing alone across the dark open common during an air raid, but glad that it was Irene and not she who had to go into a bombed-out house to rescue people trapped in the cellar. Irene blamed her cousin's claustrophobia yet admired Rosalind's courage in walking across the common, as she herself was too scared to do that. In many ways, from Irene's point of view, Rosalind was ‘too good at everything: work, sport, looks, cooking'.

 

Strenuous, even dangerous, holidays were Rosalind's relaxation. In the summer of 1943 or 1944, with her old friend Anne Crawford, she went climbing in Snowdonia, North Wales. The predictable crisis arrived; the mist came down as they were halfway up the ridge of Crib Goch, with steep drops on either side. Anne inched her way to safety — ‘driven more by my fear of Rosalind's tongue than of falling over the edge'. Rosalind's ability to retain close friends in spite of her capacity for scorn was remarkable.

On another holiday in North Wales, this time with Jean Kerslake, they tackled the highest peaks in the same spirit in which they had paced each other at St Paul's Girls' School. One day the pair set off on a ten-mile walk to the shores of Llyn Dinas. When they arrived, they encountered two young foresters who were living in a caravan nearby. The men gave them a lift and announced themselves as Welsh nationalists. ‘There are only two of us,' they said, ‘but it is a beginning.' In the hot sun, the lake looked inviting. None of them had a bathing suit so they stripped off and swam naked. Rosalind did not hesitate. Her attitude, to Jean, was ‘She wanted a swim, so she had one.'

The quartet repeated the escapade the next day, cycling down to the coast at Criccieth where they swam, again without burden of suits. Even so, when Jean and one of the young men took a fancy to each other and hung behind, they returned to the caravan to find an annoyed and puzzled Rosalind, waiting with the other young man. She seemed not to comprehend why the two had wanted to be alone.

 

The Putney ménage broke up at the end of 1943. Rosalind had been living at home for a time because of an attack of jaundice; Irene had married and was expecting a baby (or in Ellis Franklin's arch words, ‘Irene will be taking on the duties of motherhood in the spring'). He looked forward to having Rosalind remain under his roof, and told his son Colin, serving with the Royal Navy in the Far East, ‘the house will be that much the brighter'.

Commuting out to Kingston and back every day meant a long slow journey but she was glad of the shelter and solidity of the family home during the new round of air raids. The first of the V-is — pilotless flying bombs — struck on 12 June 1944, and just after D-Day, and on 8 September, the first V-2s. ‘Of course for anyone who suffers directly, any type of bomb is equally bad,' Rosalind commented to Evi, safe in the United States. ‘But I think most people agree that for those who are not hit, the present type of raid is much less worrying than the older variety.' Her young sister Jenifer moved out to Chartridge, Irene and her new baby in the flat over the garage. Rosalind joined them at weekends and was surprised to see her young sister's intuitive gift for holding the infant and calming its crying.

Rosalind was, and remained, a curious blend of compliance and self-reliance. Her parents did not dream of trying to choose her friends or to stop her travelling freely on hazardous journeys. On the other hand, they expected her when at home to perform her filial duties, and she did, even when these included sitting impatiently with them through a very long carol concert at the Albert Hall.

 

By the spring of 1945 ending the war was just a matter of time. Adrienne Weill had returned to Paris after the Liberation in 1944, there. Her daughter who remained for a time in London was entertained at the Franklins' and quite impressed by the way they lived, especially by the British breakfast spread on the sideboard. In January 1945 Ellis Franklin received the Order of the British Empire for his work at the Home Office Ministry of Home Security, and resumed full-time work at Keyser's bank and at the Working Men's College. With some help from his brother-in-law Norman Bentwich, he set about reorganising the St Petersburgh Place synagogue, hoping to convince younger Jews that they could be Jewish as well as English, but also to counteract the activities of ‘alien Jews who have captured some of the organisations here, and are running them for purely Zionist motives'. He was extremely upset all the while at the general scepticism in London about reports emerging about massacres of the Jews in eastern Europe. (As Rosalind was living at home, there is no correspondence to reflect her own opinions but one assumes that on the British denial of the existence of the extermination camps, she agreed with her father.)

Rosalind, who disliked abandon in any form, disapproved of the mad and, as she saw it, premature euphoria of VE Day in May 1945. Two months later she did, however, anticipate the war's end by going out to buy a pair of shoes at Lilley & Skinner. Finding a queue of 200 people, and long lines at two other shoe shops, she went to Harrods instead and bought some excellent chocolate peppermint creams.

She had begun to look for a post-war job that would take her further afield than BCURA. More immediately, she had to finish her thesis on coal. Briefly she moved back to Cambridge, staying in her old college. She savoured the good weather, the freedom, the beauty of the gardens, and was tempted to return to take up the grant she had been offered to work with Norrish.

Norrish had forgiven her, but not she him. Her parents, trying to advise her on getting along with people better, ventured that such relationships should be impersonal. It was not a
job
he was offering her, Rosalind retorted: ‘He's merely expressed willingness to have me work for him for a year as an unpaid stooge.' She would have to do whatever he told her to do ‘and he is stupid, bigoted, deceitful, ill-mannered and tyrannical'. Thus, having talked herself out of returning to Cambridge, she sent her thesis — ‘The physical chemistry of solid organic colloids with special reference to coal and related materials' — off to the typist.

 

On 26 July 1945, a general election brought the Labour Party, under Clement Attlee, to power, turning out Winston Churchill and the Conservatives with a resounding majority of 146. (In the new Parliament Viscount Samuel became Liberal Party leader in the House of Lords.) In early August Rosalind and Jenifer went to visit Nannie Griffiths at Church Stretton in Shropshire. There when the news came of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Nannie and Jenifer listened while Rosalind explained what it meant.

The post-war world taking shape in 1945 saw the admission of the first women to the Royal Society, for nearly three centuries the citadel of Britain's scientific elite. There were just two: Kathleen Lonsdale, a crystallographer with the Royal Institution in London, and Marjory Stephenson from Cambridge, a pioneer in the field of chemical microbiology. Forty-three years had passed since the Society threw out the nomination of the first to be proposed, Hertha Ayrton, an engineer and physicist, on the ground that as a married woman, she was not a legal person and therefore could not be a Fellow of a body governed by statute.

In that light, 1945 might also be described as the year in which Lise Meitner did not get the Nobel prize. A Jewish refugee from Berlin living in Stockholm, she was arguably the most distinguished woman scientist of the time. In 1939 with her nephew Otto Frisch, she had set out the concept of nuclear fission, an outgrowth of her three decades of work on radioactivity done with Otto Hahn in Berlin. In 1945, the rumours preceding the annual Nobel announcement, had it that the physics prize would go to Meitner. It did not. Hahn won the chemistry prize, but there was nothing for Meitner that year, nor in any of the subsequent years when her name was put forth. Some press reports described her as Hahn's subordinate.

 

The goal reached at last — PhD Cantab., 1945 in physical chemistry — and her first scientific paper on its way to publication, but then what? The possibilities ranged from Aberdeen to Abyssinia (there was an opening for an assistant mistress to teach physical training) as Rosalind searched for the right next step. Turning to Adrienne Weill, she wrote one of her forceful, humorous letters, and summed up her hope:

 

If ever you hear of anybody anxious for the services of a physical chemist who knows very little about physical chemistry but a lot about the holes in coal, please let me know.

 

She did know quite a lot about holes in coal. Her first paper, titled ‘Thermal Expansion of Coals and Carbonised Coals,' was written with her BCURA boss, D.H. Bangham and appeared in the British journal,
Transactions of the Faraday Society,
in 1946. At BCURA, she had developed the hypothesis of ‘molecular sieves' — that is, that various types of coal have porous properties to a greater or lesser degree. By performing careful mathematical calculations on the porosity and carbon content of her specimen coals — also by heating, wetting, grinding, measuring and examining them under the electron microscope — she concluded that the change in physical properties comes from their gradual squeezing together. The understanding of such hard substances offered intriguing industrial applications.

In the summer of 1946, with foreign travel possible once more, Rosalind packed her Norwegian hiking boots and, with Jean Kerslake, set off for the French Alps, stopping at Adrienne's flat in Paris on the way. Her usual careful advance planning had elicited a warning from the manager of a hostel in the Hautes Alpes: ‘I make you notice that, in the case you would not know it, the French youth hostels are generally too uncomfortable. They can only fit very sportive persons who are free of any prejudice.'