Rosalind Franklin (7 page)

Rosalind was disgusted too by the Home Office's reluctance to admit refugees without sponsorship or means of support, which (she felt) accordingly let in only a small number compared to those being admitted to the United States. The Board of Deputies of British Jews appealed to the government to give larger opportunities for resettlement elsewhere in the Empire and in Palestine. However, the Board, fearing a resurgence of British anti-semitism, which it suspected was endemic in the Foreign Office, instructed those refugees who did arrive not to make themselves conspicuous, talk in a loud voice or engage in politics.

Caution was advisable. The young American historian Arthur Schlesinger, then a student at Cambridge, stood in Piccadilly Circus and watched the Blackshirts surging through, shouting ‘Mosley! Mosley!' and ‘Down with the Jews!' and a crowd of young men beating up people ‘of Jewish appearance'.

In November Neville Chamberlain issued a statement to the effect that, regrettably, the number of refugees Britain could admit was limited by the capacity of the voluntary organisations to receive them. As for resettling them in ‘the Colonies and Protectorates and Mandated Territories', His Majesty's Government did not wish to prejudice the interests of native populations there by permitting unlimited immigration. Nor could the government ignore the fact that many of these areas were ‘unsuitable either climatically or economically for European settlement'. The statement effectively limited Jewish immigration to Palestine to 75,000 within the next five years and forbade the selling of land to the Jews. It was a harsh blow to Zionist aspirations.

Rosalind felt isolated. ‘I cannot see why there has not been more criticism of the inadequacy of the Prime Minister's “statement”,' she wrote home. ‘Why is France so indifferent?' She joined a group in Cambridge trying to raise money for refugee aid. But Cambridge was the last place to look for militancy. In the Amateur Dramatic Club's Christmas show in 1938 a joke about ‘one man's small moustache' was taken out (at the Lord Chancellor's insistence) for fear of causing offence to Herr Hitler.

 

A reminder to the Franklins of the obligations of faith came when Arthur Ellis Franklin — ‘Grandpa' — died in January 1939 at Chartridge. He left the estate to his eldest son, Cecil, who sold it to a London firm seeking a country refuge during the war. Only the gardener's cottage at Chartridge, with its five bedrooms, plus a two-bedroom flat over the garage, were kept for the family's use. Rosalind, like the other grandchildren, inherited £100 immediately.

Grandpa Franklin had had two conspicuous failures in his attempt to persuade his children to marry within the faith, as his own father had succeeded in doing with all seven of his. Arthur's eldest son, known to the family as Jack, had married an Agnes Foley at a registry office. His radical second son, Hugh (of the Churchill dogwhip incident) had twice married non-Jewish women named Elsie. The first (from whom Rosalind got her middle name) converted to Judaism before dying of the Spanish flu in 1919. The second Elsie did not convert. His father cut Hugh off with a pittance and never saw him again.

Making his will, Arthur Franklin sought to ensure that none of his eight grandchildren would make the same mistake. In a lengthy, tortuously worded legal clause, he proclaimed:

 

W
HEREAS
my forefathers have been steadfastly loyal to the Jewish Faith and I have to the utmost of my ability followed in their footsteps ... I
EARNESTLY REQUEST
my named children to uphold these principles and to inculcate them in their children and especially I trust that no descendant of mine will intermarry with a person not of the Jewish Faith or renounce Judaism or the Jewish Faith.

 

Any descendant who married a non-Jew would be treated as having died unmarried within Arthur Franklin's lifetime — that is, with no entitlement to any income from capital or property. Moreover, none of his estate was to go ‘to any person born out of wedlock' or ‘strangers in blood to myself though adopted by a member of my family'. (Many years later, such legal ingenuity was struck down by a court ruling against testamentary attempts to rule lives from beyond the grave.)

This wording had no practical meaning for Rosalind or her siblings, not having finished education nor entertained thoughts of marriage. But the constraints within or against which they would make their future choices were clear.

 

By spring Rosalind's thoughts had turned to the holiday she wanted to take before the May examinations — for which she felt desperately behind in her preparations, especially in physics and chemistry. She wanted to go hostelling in the Peak District, with her brother David and her second cousin Catherine Joseph (their old St Paul's feud long forgotten). Months earlier, she had sought parental permission: ‘Please don't just say “no” ... I know lots of people who have been on these NUS [National Union of Students] trips and they have all been very successful ... I am sure you will say next “how are you going to pay for it?”' In anticipation of this objection, she itemised various savings, gifts and receipts which gave her nearly £50 in hand (not to mention her recent inheritance). ‘So you see I could almost pay for the whole family to go (this does not mean I intend to).'

Planning the trip was a pleasure in itself. She was proud of her equipment — her hiking boots, her field glasses and guidebook collection — as well as of her skill at route planning and reading timetables with an eye out for the cheapest or most unusual route. She also felt glee in pointing out (in her mother's tart memory) to the travel clerk that the information given her was wrong.

The holiday was a temporary respite from the apprehension about exams. She still lacked confidence. However, she was not shaken by her supervisor's report from Newnham, which included two comments: ‘she knows her work but does not always keep to the point' and ‘she does not seem to take criticism kindly'. Both meant — Rosalind interpreted for her parents — ‘she doesn't agree with me'.

The exam ordeal, when it came, was worse than she had expected. Her confessional letter of 20 May 1939 makes painful reading for anyone aware of the female capacity for self-doubt:

 

I have made a frightful mess of exams . . . fairly easy papers which I should have done really well. Mineralogy, which I expected to do best, was a lovely paper but I wasted the first ¾ hr completely — going about a question the wrong way, and having to do it all again later. The result was a terrific rush and a lot of bad blunders. I think I did best in maths — the one subject which doesn't matter ... I have never done anything so badly as yesterday's physics practical. I did ½ instead of 2 experiments — and I don't think I can possibly get more than a third in physics now.

 

Rosalind was wrong. She did not get a third, she got a first in these preliminary examinations. Her total marks, for physics, chemistry, mineralogy and maths, put her in joint second place. The way was now clear to sit part one of the Natural Science tripos the following year. You could spend three years preparing for part two, she explained to her parents, ‘if you are less intelligent'. She was highly motivated to do it in two. Only those women who got a first in part one of their tripos were allowed to go on to part two, which was considered the more important and interesting part of the university course.

As she turned nineteen in July 1939, Rosalind still found it important to maintain the attention of Ellis and Muriel. When her parents not only visited but sent four letters and a cake, she joked, ‘Now I really feel I am being treated as I should be, and can forgive you for all the letters you have ever not written to me.'

That summer the Franklins once again went to Norway
en famille
— taking all five children this time, and Nannie too, who arrived later, with Jenifer who was recovering from chickenpox. It was an ambitious undertaking when barrage balloons were floating over London, when there was talk of a possible German invasion and the children had already built their own air raid shelter in the garden of ‘5 PP'. But the Franklins crossed the North Sea anyway, for Ellis reasoned that if war broke out Jenifer would not have a chance to go abroad for many years. So off they went and found their familiar guide to lead them through their old haunts for fishing and climbing. They were in Fjaerland, with David and Rosalind planning a trek across a glacier, when news of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact of 24 August 1939 reached them. Ellis immediately bundled the family onto the ferry from Bergen to Newcastle. It was the next to last boat to leave.

 

As Britain waited for Hitler to strike, Rosalind returned to Newnham to begin her second year. Her father at first refused to pay for it, thinking she ought to do war work; David had left Oxford after two years to join the army. But Rosalind's mother and her Aunt Alice said they would pay instead and he relented. Cambridge was full of evacuated children and RAF servicemen, and there were queues outside all the shops. At the college, black shades had been put on bright lights because no weaker bulbs were available. To save gas, there was no toast for breakfast. Rosalind was put in charge of waking ten people when there was an air raid alert, the signal for the whole college to go into the trenches dug nearby. Fear of attack was not unreasonable as Cambridge was surrounded by airbases.

The raids never came. The ‘phoney war', to hard-working Rosalind, was time utterly wasted. Irritated by the meaningless ritual and constant false alarms, she sought a confrontation with Mrs Palmer, college tutor for her hall of residence (Peile Hall). Once more she won — at the price of hearing some ugly words applied to her character:

 

I have just had a great triumph, though a somewhat disagreeable one. I and a few others decided it was time something was done about the . . . going out to the trenches . . . for every warning — we have had only
I
quite undisturbed night — yesterday the thing went at 7.30 and lasted until 11.15. I
had
to do some work. We were the only college being handicapped in this way — and I was getting badly behind. So three of us stayed in on the first floor and boldly left the light showing through the door. Mrs Palmer came in in a storm and turned us out, saying we were ‘disloyal, deceitful and untrustworthy' and were to see her today. Before we saw her she had called a meeting to say that nobody need go to the trenches before 11 PM!

 

Rosalind did have a lot of work to do. There was no less science to master just because there was a war on. In ‘optics' she drew a great many diagrams of lenses and light passing through a slit, and traced the history of the subject back to Newton, Descartes and Doppler. In physics, she studied the first and the second law of thermodynamics, and read Linus Pauling's classic text,
The Nature of the Chemical Bond
(explaining how electrons hold molecules together). She learned about proteins that fold; about the infectious tobacco mosaic virus that could be extracted from a tobacco plant and crystallised in a bottle, and also about the nucleic acid contained in chromosomes. She noted the experimentally useful form of nucleic acid, sodium thymonucleate (obtained from calf thymus glands), with its high molecular weight of 800,000 (now known to be much greater) and its bases stacked up at 3.4 Ängstroms along its chains. (Bases are the opposite of acids, chemical compounds that take up the ionised hydrogen produced by acids. In the nucleic acids each base is linked to a sugar and a phosphate group, making up a nucleotide.) A sketch in her workbook represents a helical structure. She made a note to herself: ‘Geometrical basis for inheritance?'

Getting deeper into crystallography, which would become her expertise, she joined the small band of the human race for whom infinitesimal specks of matter are as real and solid as billiard balls. She easily met the first requirement of the profession, the ability to think in three dimensions. The ‘Ängstrom' (named after the nineteenth-century Swedish physicist Anders J. Ångström) was now part of her working vocabulary as the unit for measuring extremely short lengths. One Ängstrom represents a hundred- millionth of a centimetre.

After Lawrence Bragg, crystallography was developed further at Cambridge in the 1930s by the brilliant and ebullient J.D. Bernal, who refined the nineteenth-century classification of ‘space groups' — the 230 forms into which the seven recognised crystal systems are organised. Rosalind made notes on ‘Methods of approaching structure from space group', which included the observation that ‘A molecule which is long or flat may in general be entirely contained within a space having the same size and shape as the unit cell of the crystal.' She drew diagrams of all types, and noted: ‘Monoclinic all face centred.'

She understood very well what is easily confused by an outsider — that the marks appearing on a photographic plate were
not
of the atoms themselves inside the crystal, but rather of the spots that X-rays make when scattered by hitting the atoms. The spots vary in intensity as the X-rays reinforce each other in some directions and cancel each other out in others. From the position and the intensity of the spots, the atomic structure of the crystal may be guessed at. She learned also about the best angles from which to aim X-rays for efficient diffraction, and how to rotate the crystal to take photographs from many angles. ‘Absorption of X-rays depends only on number and kind of atoms present,' she reminded herself in clear handwriting.