Rosalind Franklin (9 page)

Despite her wariness of sexual attraction, she took great care with her appearance. Although not conventionally pretty, she had a trim figure and intense dark eyes set off by a pronounced widow's peak. Even as an undergraduate she showed a flair for understated sophisticated elegance in her clothes and seldom made a mistake. For a commemoration dinner at the college, she sent home for a very precise selection from her wardrobe:

 

please send my evening dress (tulip one), evening shoes and evening petticoat. Shoes in bottom drawer of the wardrobe (gold
or
silver). As for suggestions for a gift, P.S. I forgot to answer the most important part of your letter I should very much like a handbag — my present one is the first and only one I have ever possessed and is falling to pieces inside and out I should like it black, because my present one is brown and I have to leave it behind when I wear my one and only silk frock which is black.

 

In the first term of her final year, Rosalind encountered, like an apparition sent from on high, a woman entirely different from any she had known. Adrienne Weill was a French-Jewish scientist: commanding, handsome, inspirational, intellectual — and also a widowed mother brave and shrewd enough to get herself and her daughter out of France in response to de Gaulle's call for French people to join him in England.

Her own mother's life seemed impoverished in contrast. In a letter to Muriel, who was now organising her temporary country home, Rosalind said:

 

I can't think why you spend so much of your time cooking and washing up and thinking about nothing else. You have got Nannie Alice and a daily . . . and though they might not be quite as efficient as ordinary maids you couldn't possibly have more than two in a house that size. When I said all of this to you at home . . . You used to [have] a huge house of many floors, many stairs, numerous rooms, a large and inconvenient basement kitchen and pantry miles from the dining and front door, etc. etc.
None
applies now. I really think you ought to be able to manage better. I hope I shall not find that life consists of preparing and cleaning and meals when I am home — at least at any rate not as long as you have got any maids. I shall have a lot of other work to do — more than ever before.

 

And in the next breath:

 

Last week I went to a talk (in French) by a Madame Weill on Marie Curie. She is a French physicist — ‘eminent' — who came in response to de Gaulle's appeal for scientific specialists and has been ‘adopted' by Newnham and is now researching in the Cavendish — She was a pupil of Mme Curie and later researched with her in the lab. I have made several attempts to meet her, but have so far failed.

 

The encounter with Adrienne Weill was a turning point in Rosalind's life. Not only could she follow the lecture, in French, but she was deeply impressed by this elegant cosmopolitan woman of science and public affairs. Madame Weill became even more fascinating a few days later when she met Rosalind twice and asked her if she were related to Viscount Samuel:

 

It was all rather exciting . . . Her mother, a Mrs Braun- schweig (she doesn't like her name mentioned as she is still in France), is a philosopher and met Uncle Herbert frequently at conferences, etc., in Paris. She (Mme W.) has instructions to write to him about any difficulties she has in England. Her father is Braunschweig the philosopher.

 

Suzanne Braunschweig (1877—1946) had served as an under- secretary of state for public education in the Blum government in 1936, and had also been leader in the movement for women's suffrage. (French women did not get the vote until 1947.) Adrienne Weill had served as her mother's
chef de cabinet.
Rosalind thought an extraordinary coincidence what was no coincidence at all: ‘that of all the French people now in England she should be the first I met — or that of all the families in England, she should be the most closely connected with mine. She is a delightful person, full of good stories and most interesting to talk to on any scientific or political subject . . .'

 

By early 1941, the Blitz intensified. On 5 January the City of London was devastated in a Sunday night sequence of attacks that left the powerful symbol of the intact dome of St Paul's Cathedral silhouetted against the blazing sky. The cathedral had been protected by volunteers — ‘fire watchers' — who dealt with the incendiaries as they landed. In Cambridge Rosalind volunteered as a fire watcher. She was casting about for what she might do once she had finished her course. New possibilities were opening up. The Second World War, far more than the First, was making irreversible changes in attitudes towards women and work — half a million would be needed in industry. Even
The Times
thundered, ‘The general attitude of the community to women's work required revision,' and called the barriers to women entering fields such as engineering ‘intolerable and irrational'. However, Rosalind learned from a talk by ‘Appointments Board Women' that her name would have to go onto the central register, which might place her in the deadly dull job of an ‘experimental assistant' in the Ministry of Supply. She could only hope something better would turn up.

 

She was in her usual fearful mood as her final exams approached, her jitteriness exacerbated by the progress of the war. Her parents scolded her for pessimism about the war: good was bound to win over evil in the end. She denied that she was ‘plunged in gloom' but refused to be cheered by the news of Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy party leader, landing in Scotland on 10 May 1941; it represented no change of heart, she said, merely a wish to save his skin.

Privately, Dainton, her supervisor, told Newnham that he did not expect Rosalind to get a first in her final examinations. Not for lack of ability. She had, he said, a first-class mind, and was industrious and devoted to science — if anything, too devoted — and therefore unprepared to pass on from a subject which had captured her interest to the next pressing one. Yet she was inflexible and liable to misjudge her time, answering the first questions so thoroughly that she left no time for the others.

It was an accurate forecast. Overcome with exam nerves and a bad cold, Rosalind could not revise or sleep and took what she referred to as ‘dope'. She entered the examination slowed and dulled, and did indeed misjudge her time. In two papers she completed only two questions out of a required three, finding herself ‘almost incapable of thinking'. Her sense of ineptitude was particularly annoying because, once again, the papers were ‘almost too good to be true'.

She blamed the head cold and the sedative: ‘I'm sure it sounds silly to say so after the event when I did not think so before, but I really feel certain that I could have got a First on those papers if I had been fit. Anyway there is now absolutely no question of a First.' Out of the question too, she believed, was any chance of a government grant for research. She did not expect the college would sympathise with her illness as there was great competition for the single available studentship — ‘not sleeping will naturally be considered my fault, the result of trying to do too much'.

Once more, however, she had not done as badly as she feared, nor was she blamed for her insomnia. Sleep problems are common before exams. It was known that the great William Bragg could not sleep the night before his tripos. But she had not done as well as she ought to have done. Her degree was a good second — a creditable conclusion to her three years — and she was told privately that in the physical chemistry exam she had come out on top. Although she had failed to achieve a ‘double first', a first in both parts of the tripos, her overall performance was distinctive enough for Newnham, with Dainton's endorsement of her qualities of intellect and tenacity, to award her a college scholarship of £15, to remain for a further year, and for the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research to give her the research grant she hoped for.

Cambridge, in spite of the war, did almost everything for Rosalind that a good university should. It changed her life. It gave her a profession and a personal philosophy. It enabled her to distance herself from her parents and become a mature adult with a sharp political and social conscience. That she achieved all this amidst the self-doubt, the confrontations to which she was prone, and the terrors of war in the years when Britain stood alone is a measure of her inner steel. What three years at Cambridge did not do was end her astonishing ignorance about sex. Rosalind confessed to her cousin Irene Franklin (Ursula's sister) who had just become engaged and came to visit her that summer, that she had never been kissed. The talk turned to having babies. The cousins discovered that although each knew vaguely how a baby was born, neither knew how the ovum was fertilised. (A few months later, Irene informed Rosalind that her fiancé had enlightened her. Rosalind was wiser too. She said she had asked a medical student.) But such things were remote from her mind. She was now ready to be a working scientist. The question was where to work.

FIVE
Holes in Coal

(1941
-
46)

R.G.W.
NORRISH,
FRS, Professor of Physical Chemistry, holder of the Royal Society's distinguished Davy medal, was having a bad war. In his forties, recognised as one of the pioneers of photochemistry, much later to win a Nobel prize, he was under great strain. His laboratory had shrunk in size, with so many men away, and had no clear objectives. His wife had taken their twin daughters to Devon to escape possible bombing. He was left to fend for himself in Emmanuel College, drinking heavily. (The college fellows had wisely stocked up the cellars to withstand the siege.) This failing cost him a high security rating; he was not entrusted with serious war work. His discontents found outlet in what Fred Dainton, then senior research adviser to the Physical Chemistry Laboratory, observed as ‘bad tempered and autocratic treatment of juniors', of whom Rosalind had the misfortune to become one.

Norrish gave her what Dainton, having supervised her the previous year, could see was a trivial problem - the polymerisation of formic acid and acetaldehyde. Rosalind would have preferred something that more directly related to defeating Hitler. In the room next to hers, salvaged fuel from crashed German planes was being analysed with spectroscopic techniques.

Her St Paul's friends were clearly aiding the war effort: Anne Crawford at the Bristol Aircraft Corporation, Jean Kerslake at the code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park. Her cousin Ursula Franklin was in the women's army service — the ATS. However, when Newnham awarded Rosalind a fourth-year scholarship, she was spared military service and allowed to remain at university, to her father's dismay. Yet what exactly she ought to have been doing instead was hard for him to say, as a woman's place in the war effort had not been defined.

At times she must have felt that no one was nice to her. Norrish gave her a small dark room to work in even though (as Dainton knew) she suffered from claustrophobia. When she asked her college, where she was still living in college and serving as an air raid warden, if she could come back a few days early in the autumn, her old adversary, Mrs Palmer, was disagreeable. First she declared, as if speaking to a schoolgirl, that Rosalind was old enough to make arrangements for herself until term began, then allotted her a horrid room — ‘on the pretext', Rosalind wrote home, ‘that I managed the blackout badly where I had lots of windows'.

The solution was a rented room on Mill Road, a working-class area near the railway station: 45 shillings a week, heating excluded. Living alone for the first time, she proclaimed the virtues of solitude: ‘I've never had so much time for reading. I read at and after every meal, and in the evenings when I'm doing nothing else.'

She had no difficulty filling her time. She finished a dress that she had begun making a year and a half before. She made meals in her room and invited friends in, treating one to a lecture on the nutritional value and cheapness of sprats (small fish). She was trying to get by on her scholarship money, and living on a shoestring suited her.

She also listened to the radio. For her twenty-first birthday, her aunt, Mamie Bentwich, had given her at her request, ‘a baby wireless . . . the sort that goes off the light'. Up to 50 per cent of the total population listened to the BBC nine o'clock evening news. As winter approached, the Germans were driving towards Moscow and great hope was placed in the RAF's night raids over Germany. Only the men of Bomber Command knew how inaccurate these were; in the early years of the war, only one bomb in three fell within five miles of the target. One pilot told the Cambridge crystallographer, J.D. Bernal, then serving as Lord Louis Mountbatten's scientific adviser: ‘You can think it damned lucky, old boy, that we drop the bombs in the right country!'

In her evening reading, Rosalind tackled the just-published memoir
Wanderer Between Two Worlds
by her Aunt Mamie's husband, Norman Bentwich, but did not like it. ‘Considering the experiences and opportunities he's had, it could have been more interesting,' she told her parents, ‘and I think the catalogue of leading Jews, nearly all titled, whom he's met, are most objectionable.' Impatience with self-indulgent prose prevented her from finishing Virginia Woolf ‘s
To the Lighthouse: ‘I
like long sentences when well put together, but hers are so arranged that the beginning is meaningless until the end is reached, which I consider quite unjustifiable.'

 

When her work was going badly and tension was in the air, however, Rosalind found herself once again ‘quite incapable' of concentrating as when, early on, she spotted a fundamental error in the project Norrish had given her. Dainton, who had recommended her for the research scholarship and had a high opinion of her ability, agreed that she was right. The long-brewing crisis came to a head early in 1942. Rosalind wrote up a summary of her findings showing why it was impossible to get the result Norrish expected. The professor, however, declined to read what she had written, refused to change his approach and ordered her to repeat the experiments. There was no alternative but a showdown:

 

When I stood up to him he became most offensive and we had a first-class row — in fact, several. I have had to give in for the present but I think it is a good thing to have stood up to him for a time and he has made me despise him so completely that I shall be quite impervious to anything he may say to me in the future. He simply gave me an immense feeling of superiority in his presence.

 

Confrontation when cornered was Rosalind's tactic. The alternative — passive acquiescence in something she knew to be wrong — was intolerable, totally contradictory to her faith in the provable truth of science.

She had been trained in a hard school. A civil servant who was working with Ellis Franklin on refugee applications at the Home Office witnessed the training in action. He was spending a weekend with the Franklins at their temporary home in Radlett, when Rosalind suddenly turned up from Cambridge. She and her father immediately engaged in fierce political debate — ‘he on the right, she on the left' — in a manner so heated that the visitor, K.C. Paice, thought that Rosalind must be an ‘uncompromising Communist', which seemed ‘a violent contrast with the extreme luxury in which she appeared to have been raised'. He observed that neither Rosalind nor her father tolerated dissent from their views: Ellis was a ‘domestic martinet'; she was ‘her father's daughter'. However, the visitor also noted that Rosalind was ‘strikingly good-looking'.

Many people over the years observed similarities between Rosalind and her father. The same description (in essence, ‘did not suffer fools gladly') was repeatedly used for one or the other. Yet Ellis Franklin seems to have paid no professional price for combativeness. The same was not true for his daughter.

 

Rosalind's stand did, nonetheless, wring a new project out of Norrish — ‘not thrilling, but it MUST be better than the last'. She also made new friends, thanks to the French scientist she so admired, Adrienne Weill, who had gathered a group of French refugees to live at a hostel near the Cam. Spending time with them, she discovered an unexpected dimension to her personality.

 

I don't know whether I meet here a particularly select French crowd but I always revel in their company. Their standard of everyday conversation is vastly superior to that of any English gathering I have been in and they are all so much more quick-witted and alive — I love listening to their language . . . though I find myself unable to take part, the pace is much too fast for me . . . I'm thinking very seriously of moving to 12 Mill Lane — Mme Weill's place.

 

In the summer of 1942, she had to decide whether to apply for permission to stay on at Cambridge as a research student in a programme that would lead to a PhD or risk being drafted into the Ministry of Supply or some other government agency.

Ellis Franklin did not like the sound of it: his daughter strolling the groves of academe while his elder sons were putting their lives at risk for their country. Her stay in Cambridge seemed to him like his German year in Breslau. Taking the risk of arousing her fierce temper, he wrote Rosalind what he thought, adding several other complaints on his mind and enclosing the gift of one pound to soften the blow. Return fire was not long in coming. ‘Dear Father,' she began, on 1 June 1942, ‘I certainly don't resent criticism as such.' But:

 

On one point you are quite unjust — I don't know where you got the idea that I'd ‘complained' about giving up a PhD for war work. When I first applied to do research here a year ago, I was asked whether I wanted war work, and said I did. I was led to believe that the first problem I had was war work. I soon found that I had been deceived, and since then have made repeated requests to Norrish for war work — it's one of the many things over which we have differed — and I have explicitly stated on several occasions against the advice of my elders and betters, that I would rather have war work now and a PhD later.

 

Another way in which she had offended him was by saying that her mother's life was dull. She was sorry but rather than apologising, stood her ground: ‘I am extremely sorry that it should be so, but, as you say, she is tied to the house most of the time, doing all sorts of domestic work alone, and I can't see how it can be anything but dull . . .'

She herself was bored with her work, she said. She despised her professor and disliked her colleagues who ‘resent and generally ignore my presence'. Therefore, it should not be surprising that she was, as he accused her, thrown back upon herself. In any event, her life at present bore little resemblance to his at Breslau.

Diversion in a difficult time was once more supplied by members of her family. Twelve-year-old Jenifer came for a visit and Rosalind put herself out to give her sister a good time — indeed, providing one of the most memorable weekends of Jenifer's childhood. Rosalind showed her sister the grand buildings of Cambridge as well as her own laboratory where she demonstrated blowing and assembling glassware. They then went to see the wartime epic,
49th Parallel,
starring Laurence Olivier and Leslie Howard. On another occasion her aunt, Mamie Bentwich, accepted being put up in ‘a room full of junk and two beds kept for casual visitors'. In the evening they went to the theatre and at breakfast sat in their dressing gowns and gossiped. Mamie reassured Rosalind that the war, in spite of the German advance on Moscow, would not last for another ten years.

 

At the end of the summer Rosalind packed up her wireless and shifted herself away from the bleak room near the station and down to 12 Mill Lane, to join Adrienne Weill's small hostel. She hesitated slightly before moving. She knew enough about herself to know that she liked people better when she didn't have to live with them. However, she felt that she had become a more tolerant person, although she knew, she said, her parents would not agree.

Adrienne Weill remained impressive. The French scientist was now working at the Cavendish Laboratory on a salary from the Ministry of Supply, thanks to the ingenuity of the Cavendish's director, Lawrence Bragg, who found her a subject that could be considered war work but not too secret to be dealt with by a foreigner. For Rosalind the chance to speak French on a daily basis was hard to resist, and she soon decided she had found the ideal existence. She got along well with the other members of the hostel. Marianne Weill, Adrienne's daughter, studying at the Perse School in Cambridge, formed a teenager's view of Rosalind: ‘she was extremely kind, good and serious; you didn't see her smile very often'.

The move to Mill Lane coincided with Rosalind's twenty- second birthday and a parental deposit of five pounds in the bank, for which she was grateful: ‘as I can never see it so shan't know when it's gone, and will therefore feel justified in spending anything on everything for ever'.

 

So should she stay in Cambridge? The choice was between applying for permission to stay on, continue research and work towards her doctorate. Or to see what jobs might be offered her in the wartime lottery: the Ministry of Fuel or Ministry of Supply, or even women's military service. The decision was forced by an announcement from the Ministry of Labour that all women research students, even those doing war-related work, were to be ‘de-reserved' — that is, made eligible to be called into military service. Rosalind, who never complained about inequality of treatment of the sexes, was surprised that all male researchers of comparable status were to be allowed to keep on with their university work. Norrish astonished her by urging her to apply to remain ‘reserved' and thus able to stay on. Recognising (although he never told her directly) that she was a brilliant experimentalist, he painted a bleak picture of the horrors of industry. ‘I could hardly keep from smiling,' she told her mother. Working with a commercial company might be tolerable, but not if the war dragged on for years:

 

In industry there undoubtedly
are
better jobs but they never go to women. If it's only a matter of a year or so it doesn't much matter, but if it's 5 or 10 — it probably would be better here. I favour Cambridge . . . if the job offered is reasonable. As long as one stays in a university — even on a utilitarian work — it is science for knowledge — I'm so afraid that in industry, I should find only science for money.

 

It was not easy to find the right environment in which to continue physical chemistry. Rosalind, struggling with all scientists' problem of conveying the substance of their work to family and friends, tried to explain to her parents that her particular line of research needed probably more apparatus than any other branch of chemistry. She had for her exclusive use about £100 worth of equipment, many more thousands of pounds' worth at her disposal — ‘and a daily supply of liquid air is essential!'