Rosalind Franklin (4 page)

The College was founded in 1854, by Frederick Denison Maurice, a Christian Socialist, to bring together ‘men of the working classes and men from the Universities, in the common object of teaching and learning'. John Ruskin was one of its earliest teachers. After 1917, this ideal encompassed the hope, never spoken aloud, of staving off Bolshevist revolution through befriending and educating the labouring classes before they got hostile ideas.

The principal in Ellis Franklin's time was Major-General Sir Frederick Maurice, grandson of the founder. For his part, Ellis used his financial acumen to raise the College's endowment to an affluence beyond the founder's dreams. With the help of City friends, he bought and had developed a sports ground for the College in Edgware on the northern outskirts of London. For the children the College's annual sports day was second only to Christmas and Jewish religious holidays as a command performance for which they were expected to do their best — not least by making sandwiches. However, Ellis agreed with the governing body that women would not fit into the life of the College. Accordingly, no women — not even Muriel Franklin, who had volunteered to dust the books — were allowed in the College Library.

There was a role, however, for the pretty three-year-old daughter of the vice principal. In 1923 Rosalind was chosen to present a bouquet of carnations to the Duchess of York at the opening of the annual bazaar. The Duchess (later Queen Elizabeth and still later, the Queen Mother) complimented the College on its eighty voluntary teachers and one thousand new students united in their endeavour ‘to give the working man of London a chance of entering into real college life, and to bring all classes together in pursuit of education'. For the occasion, Rosalind wore a beautiful lace-trimmed dress and had her shiny black hair wellbrushed. Her intense interest in her clothes was already manifest when (as her mother recalled) at the same age she tore a frock because it had no ‘ribbings' in it.

Rosalind's childhood, therefore, was spent in a settled world of nursery, school, park, pets, pantomimes, birthday parties, holidays, sports days and country weekends at grandfather's. In 1929 it all changed. A new baby was on the way.

 

Dear Mummy and Daddy,

Please tell Roland we had jam pudding the other day. It is lucky Miss Falckes Lesson [the Franklin children's Hebrew teacher] did not come as they did not go to church. The first few nights we were five in the dormatory but I have been moved and now we are only four. The oldest in the room is twelve . . . We go to bed at quarter to seven. There are 10 in my form, I am the youngest, it is the second form.

 

The bracing air of the Channel coast was the family's reason for sending Rosalind, at the age of nine, to boarding school. But her dispatch from the family nest and the comforting care of Nannie coincided with the arrival of the new baby. The Franklins' fifth child and second daughter, Jenifer, was born on 5 November 1929, a welcome break in the wall of brothers which surrounded Rosalind. The school Ellis and Muriel Franklin chose for their now-elder daughter was at Bexhill on the Sussex coast, an area crammed with hotels, boarding schools and golf courses, in the belief, not groundless, that the seaside offered a healthier environment than the smoke and coal fires of London. David, the eldest boy, was at school nearby and the parents persuaded themselves that Rosalind, who had had several childhood illnesses followed by periods of forced rest, was frail and needed the change.

Visiting, her mother was satisfied that the school was curing Rosalind's weakness: she was brown, healthy and worried only about the fatness of her legs. As Muriel respectfully reported to her father-in-law: ‘She is obviously very happy & leading a healthy sensible life. Her work too seems to be on sound lines & very interesting. They do sewing in their spare hours & she is proudly making Jenifer a frock — & very nicely too.' Muriel was satisfied to see the girls at the school ‘playing & lying about the garden — it looked very peaceful & happy'.

Poignant letters show that Rosalind would have liked the pleasure of watching her tiny sister grow up and that she longed for home (‘What is the new kitten like?'), but she accepted exile with the brisk alertness she had brought to life with three brothers. Driven in on herself, she used her intelligence and self-control not to show emotion, but instead poured her feelings into her work and handiwork, in which she showed an extraordinary facility to align mind and hand.

Lindores School for Young Ladies, founded in 1912, was no grim pile. A half-timbered Victorian mansion with dormer windows and a long sloping lawn, it was the former home of a diplomat and had a rambling residential air. Yet the pleasures it offered were spartan: a half-mile brisk walk to the flagstaff near the colonnades on the seafront and, in the evening, lantern-slide lectures: ‘Travelling Across Canada', ‘The British Empire', and one night: ‘There was a lantern lecture chiefly on Palestine, and there was a large picture of Uncle Herbert, I recognised him before we were told who he was . . .'

As the school had no chapel, pupils attended St Peter's Church in the town. While ‘they', as Rosalind's letters referred to the Christian girls, were at church, she had to do the Hebrew lessons sent to her through the post. If she did not complete these fully, her parents wanted to know why not. Her answers helped to fill the compulsory letters home: ‘As they did not go to church again I did not have time to do much of the paper, I am sending it back. I missed out some qestions, because I forgot to bring a prayer book, please could you send one.'

But she liked the work, faster-paced than at Norland Place and taking her into new territories of geometry, geography and Elizabethan poetry. Her enthusiasms burst through: sports, handiwork, a fascination with foreign places, and above all, science:

 

Dear Mummy and Daddy,

There was a very interesting lecture last night, it was on the different way of a river beginning. Their were pictures the whole time, something like a cinema . . . First he showed us some wonderful pictures, mostly taken from the air of the clouds and told us what weather, all the different kinds meant. Then he showed us some of the Norwegian mountain tops with snow on them and glaciers and frozen lakes, lots of which he took himself, then he showed us some of tall rocks in Belgium, about 1,000 feet up, and absolutely straight with narrow sort of valleys, about ten feet broad, which had been worn from a stream . . . which had been running for hundreds of years, and of the Victoria and Niagara falls . . .

 

A landmark of the week was the award of marks every Monday morning. She strove to be first in the form, and in time, achieved it. Often she was placed no higher than third — sometimes unfairly.

 

Somebody must have made some mistake in the adding up and percentaging of last week's marks, for Mrs Blundle got it to 78% instead of 88%. I had 5 tens, 5 eights, a good many nines and 1 seven — I know one seven was the only mark I had below 8, and Mrs Blundle agreed with that. I was really top, but got put down as fourth, which I cannot possibly have been, as two of the people who beat me did not get one set of marks all through the week higher than me.

 

But, in the traditional terror of boarding school or prison, she could not risk complaining against the regime in case her letters were read. ‘Please do not say anything to any mistress about the wrong marks, as I should not really have been keeping my own marks at all . . .'

Every term she counted the days until the end and conquered her homesickness by making presents such as a bonnet for the baby and a knitted scarf for Nannie (made to her own meticulous colour-coded design which she sent to her parents).

By the end of the summer term, 1931, she was gaining top place or very near it almost every week. Her handwriting had matured, she had done a great deal of reading and she was skilled in hockey, swimming and drawing. She returned home, welltaught and self-sufficient. But she dismissed as nonsense her parents' belief that she had been ‘delicate' and remained later in life resentful at having been sent away.

THREE
Once a Paulina

‘At St Paul's . . . every girl is being prepared for a career.

The High Mistress considers that no woman has a right to exist who does not live a useful life.'

 

M
ISS
E
THEL
S
TRUDWICK
, the second High Mistress of St Paul's Girls' School, founded in 1904, inherited this philosophy from her predecessor and understood very well that it did not exclude motherhood as a useful occupation. However, she firmly expected the bright girls in her charge to look beyond marriage as their goal. Under her aegis, the school's magazine,
The Paulina,
ran a series on women in the professions, and a debate was held on the provocative motion, ‘That the Entry of Women into Public Affairs and Industry is to be Deplored'. Miss Strudwick herself delivered the conclusion: women should not ‘be relegated to the home'.

In January 1932, at the age of eleven, Rosalind entered the middle-fourth form of St Paul's, a west London day school known for its academic rigour. The school, on Brook Green in West Kensington, was a short bus ride from ‘5 PP' as the family called the Franklin home at 5 Pembridge Place, Bayswater. Her Aunt Mamie had been one of the early pupils at the girls' school opened as a somewhat belated counterpart to St Paul's Boys' School, founded in 1506. Both schools, run by the Mercers' Company, a City of London guild, held no church allegiance and were accordingly a popular choice for London Jewish families with academically able children.

 

St Paul's was excellent for the competitive girl; it was not good at bringing out the violet half-hidden by a mossy stone. Rosalind was a natural Paulina. She would sweep home from school, swinging her satchel, wearing her round blue felt hat with turned-up brim and her blue school uniform from Daniel Neal. She threw herself into the team sports the school held dear — hockey, cricket and tennis — and in time she joined the Debating Society. On prize day — and she won a prize every year — she wore a white dress with white gloves. In the tradition of the English public school, her St Paul's friendships would last for life.

Although the girls' and boys' schools were just a few hundred yards apart, they were divided by more than the busy Hammer- smith Road. There was no joint instruction nor shared activities, and little fraternisation. Even chatting together at the mutual bus stop was uncommon. Paulinas, like Paulines, took their work seriously. As one of Rosalind's contemporaries recalled, ‘We weren't very interested in boys — we were interested in work and sport.' The rewards for diligence were evident. By Rosalind's time, Paulinas held prominent jobs in public life, in publishing, medicine, the law and the civil service.

A number of Rosalind's school friends were also her cousins: Livia Gollancz (later of the publishing company), Catherine Joseph and Ursula Franklin. But others were girls from different backgrounds and other parts of London, who, when invited to Rosalind's home, could be overwhelmed.

To Jean Kerslake (later Kerlogue), who lived in suburban Ealing, ‘It was goggle-making': the heavy furniture, the maids answering the door and taking away the plates, the presence of Nannie and an under-nanny. Jean learned the rules of the household: Nannie was
not
a servant, she had a lot of authority over the children and lived at the top of the house. Jean was occasionally invited to stay the night, to join the Franklins for light opera in a box at the Albert Hall and to stay for Saturday lunch, when there was always roast beef and a lot of people around the table. She found Rosalind forthright, amusing, opinionated and adventurous, but was frightened of Ellis Franklin. None of the family suffered fools gladly: ‘If you said anything silly, they would laugh.'

Another enduring friend was Anne Crawford (later Piper) from Putney. Both girls were always in the first division for mathematics, French, Latin and science — and both held scholarships and wore the scholar's badge on their tunics. Scholarships also covered tuition fees, for which Anne's family, professional but not well-to-do, were grateful. Rosalind's parents never took the money. Anne knew them to be ‘a very very public-spirited family', and very well-off. Even so, she was startled when invited to spend a part of a summer holiday at St David's in Wales to find that the Franklins had taken a very large house and in addition to hiring local help had brought three of their maids with them.

Ellis Franklin did not want a country house, believing it was wrong to have two homes when many people did not have one. However, his parents' estate at Chartridge served the purpose. There were two tennis courts, a croquet lawn, a nursery lawn (with a swing and parallel bars), a kitchen garden, numbered bedrooms, a five-car garage with chauffeur's flat above it, a farm producing the household's own milk from Jersey cows, as well as chickens and turkeys and a resident
shochet
for kosher slaughtering in the approved manner.

Rosalind enjoyed weekends there with her Paulina cousin Ursula Franklin, the daughter of Ellis Franklin's older brother Cecil. Ursula liked Rosalind the best of all her ‘Ellis' cousins, for her sense of humour and sparkle, and recalled the formality of Chartridge: ‘It was always “Miss Rosalind” and “Miss Ursula” and you were not allowed to answer the door even if you were sitting near it. A maid had to come from the back of the house to open it.' Arthur Franklin, strictly orthodox, insisted on men wearing hats at table at Sabbath. He wore his yarmulke but his grandsons were more laconic: Colin sported a trilby while Roland wore his schoolcap.

 

Rosalind and Jean Kerslake became best friends in the spring term of her first year when each had returned from the Easter break having quarrelled with her previous favourite. Their joint antagonism towards Jean's discarded friend caught the school's attention and both sets of parents were summoned by the High Mistress to hear the complaint that their daughters were bullying Margaret Douglas. ‘Rosalind and I achieved a certain notoriety,' Jean recalled, ‘which strengthened our alliance.' This took them into joint projects, such as a small book on Japan, Rosalind doing the maps and drawings, and becoming patrol leaders in the Girl Guides, both winning among other proficiency badges, one in signalling — sending messages in Morse and semaphore.

Rosalind's parents were coming to recognise that their elder daughter could be difficult outside the family circle as well as within it. They sympathised with the efforts of her teachers to break through what Rosalind's mother called ‘her reserve and apparent lack of response'. She referred to it as Rosalind's ‘walking alone' stage. There were, as Ellis and Muriel well knew, strong rebels in the Franklin family. The most notorious was Ellis's brother Hugh, a pro-suffragist who in 1910 had accosted the then Home Secretary Winston Churchill on a train and had attempted to strike him with a dogwhip because of Churchill's opposition to women's suffrage. (Churchill was unharmed by the attack and continued on to the dining car.) For this episode, Hugh drew headlines in
The Times
as ‘Mr Churchill's Assailant' and was imprisoned for several months. Then there was Ellis's older sister Alice. From a conventional start — Alice had been a debutante and presented at Court in 1909 — she turned into a left-wing socialist with cropped hair and pinstriped clothes, sharing a household with a woman partner in an arrangement about which the family made no comment. (Alice's intellectual energies were diverted into the Fawcett Society and Townswomen's Guild, for which service she was awarded the OBE.) As for Aunt Mamie, during the First World War, before she married Norman Bentwich and moved to Jerusalem and shocked the diplomatic corps by driving her own car at all hours, she had been dismissed from the Woolwich Arsenal for ‘Bolshevist tendencies' — organising a trades union for women workers.

Was Rosalind going to be a younger version of these radicals? The teachers could not get through her apparent hostile indifference. As a strategic manoeuvre, Ellis and Muriel, acting either with imagination or on advice, bought Rosalind a Persian kitten. Named by Rosalind ‘Wilhelmina' or ‘Willy', the pet played its part in calming her down, waiting for her to come home from school and perching on the arm of her chair while she did her homework. What the nervous parents were probably witnessing was simply the beginning of adolescence. Rosalind's menstrual periods began when she was thirteen.

 

Trouble with teachers, anxiety over marks, delight in science, sport and sewing: the pattern from boarding school reasserted itself at St Paul's. In a sequence of revealing letters written to her parents when they were away, Rosalind poured out her schoolgirl woes, with confidence to write the way she spoke:

 

Dear Mummy and Daddy,

I was told in the drawing lesson this morning, that I was too literal-minded; We were doing designs for lino-cuts, they are lovely fun, and I did a thing something like this. [detailed diagram] She said that when there was a lot of it it would look too spotty, couldn't I put tails onto the rounds. I said I did not see how you could put tails on rounds so she said I was too literal-minded, and this was what she meant. This was the result. [another diagram] Would you have been able to guess what she meant? We spent the whole arithmetic lesson today with a lovely discussion about gravity and all that sort of stuff. I am doing my knitting on 4 needles, as Nannie said it would look untidy on two. I have come here at the right time as there is the party on Friday and we are probably going to the military tournament the following Friday . . .

 

Sadly, Rosalind never got to the Royal Tournament, held at Earls Court. Her next letter told the sorry tale:

 

I am very cross.
I was all dressed up in my hat and coat ready to go to the tournament last night, and the old pig came up to me and asked me what I was doing, she said I had told her I did not want to go, and she had given my ticket away so I could not go. I never said anything of the sort. Could I possibly go with anybody on Friday evening or Saturday, that will be the last opportunity as it stops on June 2nd. Everybody says this years is miles the best they have seen.

 

The following week the struggle continued: ‘I only got B to B+ for that essay, which is very bad (I told you she was an old pig).'

Rosalind asked her parents' permission to take the examination for a senior scholarship. There was absolutely no danger of her getting it, she assured them. Even so, ‘We are having gorgeous geography lessons, learning to weather forecast . . . We are going to keep records of the weather, clouds, signs, etc. for the next two weeks.'

Her pessimism was unwarranted. She won a Senior Foundation Scholarship, as she had won a Junior, and held it throughout her time at St Paul's. She also won the Latin prize in 1936. In English she disliked having to ‘stodge' — her verb — through
School for Scandal
and
The Rivals,
and she did as little as possible of the music in which St Paul's prided itself, with the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams replacing the late Gustav Holst as head of music in Rosalind's time at the school. She never pretended to have an ear or aptitude for music, although she did love theatre and painting.

 

At St Paul's Rosalind did not attend school prayers. What to do with Jewish pupils during morning assembly was a perennial problem for English schools. Even if they were independent of the Church of England, their day and year were structured around the ecclesiastical calendar and the statutory obligation to conduct a daily act of worship. In the 1830s when Rosalind's great-grandfather and his brother became the first conforming Jews to attend Manchester Grammar School, considerable ingenuity went into allowing them to be present at, but not participants in, school prayers. On the first day the Franklin boys were put in the front row and allowed to stand while the others knelt. That was deemed too distracting. Next day the Franklins were told to stand in the back row among the taller boys. Even so, their presence was judged discordant. The solution finally arrived at was that they come to school late, after prayers had finished.

A century later, Rosalind's school was more comfortable with such matters. While the rest of the school bowed their heads, the Jewish girls went off to a room by themselves — a practice laughingly called ‘Jewish prayers' which gave them a chance to catch up on their homework. They joined the rest for the remainder of the school assembly and for the notices.

How many Jews there were at the school is unknown because no record was kept of religious affiliation. The Mercers' Company accepted the conscience clause of Gladstone's Endowed Schools Act of 1869 which entitled pupils to equal opportunities in education regardless of faith or lack of one. Indeed, in 1946, eight years after Rosalind had left St Paul's, Miss Strudwick proposed a quota ‘to avoid too great a preponderance of Jewesses'. The Mercers flatly rejected the idea.

Rosalind was free of another problem that had plagued her forebears. Her father remained bitter about his own schooldays at Clifton College where he lived in ‘the Jewish house' and, although an avid cricketer, was prevented by religious observance from playing sports on Saturday when all the matches were held. The same restriction had hobbled his sister Mamie at St Paul's where it was understood that Jewish girls could not be in the teams: ‘the only real disadvantage I have felt in being Jewish in all my life', said Mamie.

Ellis was contemptuous of the over-literal orthodoxy which had forced his elderly father to be pushed in his bath chair and his elderly mother to struggle on foot to David's bar mitzvah in 1933 in order to avoid driving on a Saturday. His relaxed practice was fortunate for Rosalind who made the tennis, cricket and hockey teams at St Paul's. Photographs of successive hockey teams, dressed in pleated dark tunics, thick stockings, white shirts and neckties, show Rosalind maturing into a pretty, if somewhat guarded, girl with well-behaved dark hair held back by a velvet band.