Rosalind Franklin (6 page)

 

Rosalind was fed up with school. Five months short of her eighteenth birthday, she went up to Cambridge to sit the entrance examinations in physics and chemistry. As usual, she feared she had made a mess of the papers and spent a tense few days during which she saw other nervous girls — ‘nearly all north country' — trembling as they looked to see if their names were posted for interview. Rosalind did have one good interview in physics but did not enjoy a bleak halting conversation with the principal of Newnham who pointed out that if she began in October rather than spending a further year at school, in the so-called eighth form, she would be younger than the other new girls. As it turned out, however, both women's colleges, Girton and Newnham, offered her places. After ringing everybody she knew to get opinions of the two colleges she chose Newnham, to start that autumn, even though the college recommended that she wait a year as after another year's preparation, she would have a ‘reasonable chance of an award'. But she did not want to wait, and told her grandfather, ‘I am very much looking forward to going there.'

St Paul's was dismayed. An Oxford or Cambridge award brought honour to the student's school, with winners announced under ‘University News' in
The Times.
Jean Kerslake did stay on at school for the extra year and won a Newnham scholarship because, her father told her, Rosalind had taught her how to work.

 

Family duties and social responsibility combined as the Franklins all worked together to help the refugees crowding into London from Germany and the recently annexed Austria. Grandpa Franklin, now a widower, being looked after at Chartridge by his unmarried daughter Alice, invited groups of emigrés to tea and asked his grandchildren to help him to entertain them. Rosalind willingly went down to Buckinghamshire to assist, as did her two siblings not at boarding school, Jenifer and Roland.

With school pressure off, she filled her time with extracurricular interests, such as attending, under the auspices of her Aunt Mamie, who was now a member of the London County Council, a meeting of the Hammersmith Borough Council. She also attended an air raid demonstration in Kensington, the Chelsea Flower Show and a school debate on the motion, ‘A return to secret diplomacy would further the cause of world peace.' Now considering herself grown-up, she was self-conscious about looking younger than her age. When one day on the bus the conductor asked if she wanted a ‘whole or a half' — half fares were for the under-fourteens — she went and had her hair permed.

On I June she went off to France for her first visit there since her childhood trip to Menton and, now well-grounded in written French, she loved it. She joked that she was being sent to finishing school but threw herself into improving her conversational French even while disliking hearing her English friends speak with ‘French mannerisms'. She learned her way around Paris, indulged herself in lunch at a patisserie, did ‘masses' of sewing under the tutelage of a local woman, bathed in the Marne and bought dress material for frocks to be made up when she got home. Politely she asked her parents for ‘some of my own money' to buy French books and to tip the maids.

While she was away, her mother received a letter from the High Mistress of St Paul's:

 

Dear Mrs. Franklin,

You will, I know, be glad to hear that Rosalind has won a School Leaving Exhibition of £30 a year for three years.

Will you congratulate her for me and give her my best

wishes.

Yours sincerely,

Ethel Strudwick.

 

The decision was not the school's but that of external examiners who assessed the records of the leaving class. They recommended Rosalind as one of four deserving of an award for outstanding performance: ‘Rosalind Franklin showed great promise, and her work, especially in physics, revealed sound knowledge and genuine appreciation of the finer points of the subject.' The annual thirty pounds was a considerable contribution towards putting a student through university. Once more, her father would not dream of letting Rosalind accept the actual money and earmarked it for a refugee student. To be one of the best of the best: the honour was distinction enough.

The family was all the more pleased when Grandpa Franklin learned privately from their influential friend, General Maurice, former principal of the Working Men's College and a governor of St Paul's, that the Exhibition had been awarded because Rosalind had come first in the Cambridge examination in chemistry.

 

On 30 September Neville Chamberlain flew in to Croydon from Munich with his piece of paper. The new King and Queen were so happy with the promise of ‘peace in our time', that they invited Chamberlain onto the balcony of Buckingham Palace to celebrate his triumph. (With half the country divided over Chamberlain's actions, this endorsement by the monarch of a controversial political act, was, according to the historian Andrew Roberts, ‘the most unconstitutional act of the century'.)

The Munich pact looked different at the time. Viscount Samuel, no admirer of Chamberlain, thoroughly approved. The deal with Hitler, Samuel believed (and maintained long after ‘Munich' became shorthand for selling-out), bought time for an unprotected British populace to prepare their defences against attack from the air.

And prepare they did. As Rosalind left London for Cambridge, trenches were being dug in the royal parks, public bomb shelters organised, and householders issued with sections of steel from which to assemble their own Anderson shelters (named after Sir John Anderson, the popular minister for ARP). A fifty-mile journey from London delivered her to a self-preoccupied university city where the gathering storm was scarcely noticed. Rosalind's main worry was the work that lay ahead. The Exhibition scholarship was gratifying, but even so, she asked her parents, ‘Does this really mean I did the best chemistry papers in February?'

FOUR
Never Surrender

(October 1938-July 1941)

T
HE MYTH HAS GOT INTO
potted biographies of Rosalind Franklin that her father opposed her going to Cambridge. That is not true. He would not have sent her, or later, his daughter Jenifer, to St Paul's if he had wanted a mere finishing school for his girls. Ideally Ellis Franklin may have preferred his elder daughter to be like his wife, or his mother Caroline Jacob, with her diploma from Bedford College and her service on the Bucking- hamshire Education Committee. But he had long been aware that his elder daughter was nothing like them, or even like his assertive sisters who made their mark in public life but stopped short of gaining professional qualifications. But as Rosalind entered university, Ellis wanted her to do well as he did all his children. Moreover, he expected to be kept informed - weekly, at very least - of their progress and wrote them in return as his part of the dialogue.

The sound of the paternal voice, heavy with irony, comes through a letter to his second son, Colin, still at his public school, Oundle when Rosalind went up to Cambridge:

 

. . . this is the first occasion on which you have told me your place in form without being pressed for it. It is of course a mere coincidence that you happen to be top on such an occasion. I congratulate you on the new standard that you have set yourself, and assume that you will be top each week in future.

 

Cambridge had admitted women since 1869, and Jews since 1871, but unlike Oxford, which had granted women degrees since 1921, it refused to accept them as ‘members of the University'. Nor were the female students considered undergraduates, merely ‘students of Girton and Newnham Colleges'. They were not entitled to the degree of BA Cantab., or to any degree at all, but rather to ‘decrees titular'. The ‘decree tit' made a good joke. Female students were admitted to men's lectures but, at least until the early 1930s, were expected to sit together in the front rows. If they came in late, they were liable to be pelted with paper or greeted with stomping feet.

They were not offended by these restrictions. To the contrary, Newnham and Girton students considered themselves lucky to be among the chosen 500 (the quota set for women so that their numbers would not exceed 10 per cent of the male undergraduate body). They giggled to hear themselves addressed collectively as ‘Gentlemen'. They were delighted not to have to wear academic gowns, which, short as these were, might have got caught in their bicycle spokes, and to be free of the proctorial discipline enforced on the men. And they were all studying for honours degrees.

Newnham, founded in 1871, was within easy walking distance of the Cam, the city centre and the splendour of King's College. Its students were not isolated from male company. They had men as supervisors and often as research partners. Most of the university societies, and all lectures, were open to women and marriage was no bar to teaching. The second principal of Newnham, Mrs Eleanor Sidgwick who held the post from 1892 to 1910, lived in college with her husband Henry, philosopher and college founder.

Women were nonetheless anomalies in a medieval institution to which the monastic tradition still clung. Even those of high rank had no say in the affairs of the university. The mistress of Girton and the principal of Newnham were not allowed to participate in university ceremonies and functions but were required instead to sit, in hat and gloves, with the wives of the faculty at the ritual occasions when the men wore their scarlet academic robes and black velvet doctors' hats.

 

Few first-year university students could match Rosalind's diligence in keeping in touch with home. The ‘Dear Mummy and Daddy' of her schoolgirl years had long been replaced by ‘Dear Mother and Father', but she shared with them the minutiae of her new existence, from studies to clubs to the Venetian print hung on the wall. She boasted of her small economies — buying a second-hand chair, a second-hand bicycle and used textbooks, and choosing life, rather than annual, membership of the Chemical Society because it saved 6 shillings over three years — or 7 shillings, if by any chance she should stay for four years. (This was the first hint to her parents that she might stay on at Cambridge for postgraduate work). She was also:

 

being dragged into the Jewish Society, which is very expensive (30 shillings, most others are 3/) and no use to me as I have neither Friday evenings nor Saturday mornings free, but I shall have to join as Grandpa has been writing to the professor in charge, and I have been asked to lunch there on Sunday. I went to a social evening of the society at a cafe last night — they are an awful crowd of people.

 

Newnham was in many ways like boarding school. ‘This evening there is an awful thing called the college feast in which the whole college dines together in a great crush in evening dress, and afterwards scholars etc. are solemnly “sworn in” in private.' Rosalind groaned at having to participate in a fresher's play in which her role was to walk across the stage on an evening when she had wanted to go to the Cambridge Union to hear talks by the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane and the chemist Alfred Noyes. Seeing that other girls had brought their gas masks with them, she asked to be sent hers but scoffed that the college was making ‘a ridiculous fuss about ARP'.

Rosalind was not one to put up with silly rules in silence. An early victory was winning the principal's permission to be away from college overnight to attend the Founders' Night dinner at the Working Men's College in London. The principal ‘happened to know about the Working Men's College and said she would regard it for me as a sort of “family function” — apparently the only acceptable occasion for a night. She had already refused nights for other people.'

In Cambridge as in London, Rosalind found herself surrounded by relations or those claiming to be so. Attending an engagement party for a refugee couple, she was hardly in the door when the hostess, a woman from Breslau, said ‘tell me all your genealogy. I want to know if you are connected with someone called Ellis Franklin.' At a tea party a Roger Hartog appeared and claimed to be a third cousin. And ‘Who and what is Dr Redcliffe Salomone? I know him by sight, but that is all. I have been asked, through a 3rd person, to go to lunch with him some time.'

 

Rosalind threw herself into her courses: chemistry, physics, mathematics and, having bought some good instruments, mineralogy. She signed up for extra chemistry and a course in scientific German. She had come to the right place.

Cambridge had been pre-eminent in mathematics since 1669 when Isaac Newton, at twenty-seven, became Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. In 1851 Natural Sciences were added to the tripos (honours examinations named after the three-legged stool on which eighteenth-century students sat to be examined). In 1871 the Cavendish Laboratory was founded, with James Clerk Maxwell, who unified the theories of electricity and magnetism, as its first professor of experimental physics. In 1897 at the Cavendish, J.J. Thomson discovered the electron, opening the way for the development of modern physics.

Plunging into work at university level, Rosalind had the common freshman experience of thinking that everybody else was better prepared. Overwhelmed, trying desperately to keep up with the reading in order to understand the laboratory assignments (the ‘practicals'), she decided she had been poorly taught at St Paul's, especially in laboratory techniques. The elegant new science block at her old school now seemed ‘to be all show and nothing in it'. She was very glad she had not wasted another year at school.

At the same time she welcomed the stimulation of the university environment. She joined the Archimedeans, a mathematics society, and went to ‘a most exciting' lecture on the theory of fluorescence, and another on penguins and whales. She listened to the prevailing great names of Cambridge science, including J.J. Thomson and J.B.S. Haldane, whose mathematics she couldn't follow, and went to a meeting of the Association of Scientific Workers ‘over which Prof. Bragg is presiding'.

This occasion gave her a look at the father (with an assist from his own father) of X-ray crystallography. In 1915 William Lawrence Bragg, at twenty-five, had shared a Nobel prize with his father William Henry Bragg for demonstrating the use of X-rays for revealing the structure of crystals.

Bragg's Law, named after Bragg junior, not senior, builds on the fact that a crystal by its nature suggests an orderly pattern of atoms inside. When X-rays are shone through it, the atoms diffract — that is, scatter in particular directions — and leave spots on a photographic plate. Bragg's equation relates the positions of the spacing of the atoms and thus to the structure of the molecules that make up the crystal.

Rosalind was eager for such knowledge and technique (which would form the basis for her entire body of professional work). As an undergraduate she knew she was beginning at the beginning. In her new notebook which she headed ‘Mineralogy', she wrote at the top of the first page, ‘What is a crystal?'

Had she asked herself ‘What is a crystallographer?', she could have profited from talking with Bragg's son Stephen. Assessing his distinguished father, he judged: ‘By and large, people who choose to go into science are not greatly interested in psychological problems ... He liked the exactness of science, and the perfection of its truths — humanity could be rather messy in comparison.'

 

Metaphors of combat filled Rosalind's letters just as they filled the daily newspapers. By January 1939 she could report a victory.

 

The complaint about my chemistry lectures was well worth making — I now go to much better ones . . . also, to better physics and chemistry labs. I am in the midst of a struggle over maths lectures, but I'm very much afraid I'm on the losing side. The ones I want to go to (I have been to two of them) are on analysis. I have heard from several people who have done the course that they are very interesting and also provide useful short cut methods in physical calculations. The lecturer is very good, though female.

 

The lecturer judged ‘good, though female' fared better than the lecturer on solar prominences, whom Rosalind pronounced ‘not much of a scientist. He ranted when he discussed phenomena which have not been explained — but that may only be because he was American.'

‘Good, though female' was no small praise in a university that in more than 700 years had had no woman professor. Rosalind witnessed the appointment of the first, the archaeologist Dorothy Garrod of Newnham, and laughed at the embarrassment caused among the men's colleges. The Cambridge custom was to invite newly elected professors to a ‘feast' at each college, but women were not allowed at feasts. What to do about Professor Garrod? In this case, as Rosalind reported home, King's College broke with tradition and invited Garrod to a ceremonial dinner. The other colleges held back, and Newnham had its own feast.

 

For relaxation, Rosalind threw herself into strenuous sport, switching from hockey to squash in her second term. She went boating on the Cam, played endless sets of tennis, went on thirty-mile bicycle rides over the Gog Magog hills, and when the term was over, rode back to London. ‘Why,' she demanded of her startled parents, ‘are you so surprised about cycling home? I want my bike in London, and it seems the simplest way of getting it there ... It isn't very far.'

Working long hours in the lab, she made few close friends at university. Girls who lived in the adjoining rooms thought of her as quiet, and keeping to herself. She preferred her old St Paul's friends to the new girls she was meeting and stayed aloof from the social life of the college.

One who broke the barrier of this reserve was Peggy Clark from Bristol, in the same year at Newnham and taking physics and maths with the same lecturers. As their friendship developed, another Newnham student said to Peggy, ‘I don't know what you see in Ros — you know she is a Jew, don't you?' Peggy was staggered because she had no personal knowledge of antisemitism. When the flooded fens made excellent skating rinks and Peggy could not afford to buy skates, Rosalind lent her hers, skating by herself in the afternoon so that Peggy could use them at dusk. The two protested jointly about inefficient physics tutorials and a maths lecturer who wrote in such small print on the blackboard that nobody could read it.

 

The enemy, to Rosalind in 1938, was fascism and, its ally, pacifism. So opposed were some girls in her college to any form of preparation for war that they refused to carry gas masks or take part in any air raid drill. A lecture given by Lawrence Housman on ‘The Price of Peace' infuriated Rosalind. ‘I would not have gone if I had known he was pacifist — it was awful,' she wrote home. ‘The majority of people, however, believed all he said and came away converted. I have been busy to-day unconverting them, and had several successes.' Inclined to the political left but never the far left, she steered a course between the pacifists, who argued that war with Germany was unnecessary, and the Communists. She decided against joining the Socialist Society because of ‘a horrible young man' who talked of “Socialists and Communists” as one'.

Her father shuddered to hear these sentiments. Ellis was a free-marketeer and the most conservative of his family. Rosalind enjoyed stirring him up, knowing that on the issue that concerned them most — the plight of European Jews and the need to stand up to Hitler — they thought as one. In the weeks following Kristallnacht (9—10 November 1938), when Jewish shop windows were smashed, many Jews were killed and thousands dragged off to concentration camps, Rosalind was deeply upset at Cambridge's indifference. ‘Apart from your letters and
The Times,'
she wrote home, ‘I would still have no idea that anybody objected to Germany's treatment of the Jews. People do not talk politics here, but I still hear them discussing the colonial question in the same way as before.' A Cambridge Union debate that month tackled the proposition that ‘The continued existence of the British Empire is a danger to World Peace.'