Rosalind Franklin (8 page)

Rosalind's undergraduate notebook headed ‘Crystal Physics' shows her learning the space groups and properties of various crystal forms.

 

Away from the lab she experimented with cooking in her room, from the meagre ingredients available. One supper shared with a friend was composed of fried eggs, fried mushrooms, fried potatoes and fried crumpets. Another day she went into a fruit shop and saw ‘“white things looking like eggs” and was told they were and I could have four! I had lots of spare marg', so we had real fried eggs with bits of fried bread for Sunday supper, a feast which it is still quite a great pleasure to look back on.' She also dabbled in politics and worked on the election campaign for Dr John Ryle, Regius Professor of Physic (i.e., of medicine, not physics), who in February 1940 was standing as the Independent candidate for the university's parliamentary seat.

 

The war was pushing women to the centre of academic and industrial life. The proportion of women at the university had increased, as the total undergraduate numbers of men and women shrank from 5,491 men and 513 women in 1938 to 2,908 men and 497 women in 1940. There were Girton and Newnham graduates in almost every government department — in military intelligence, in signalling and code-breaking, in anthropology, archaeology, map reading, mechanical engineering. Indeed, one of the social features most sharply distinguishing Britain from Germany, the Newnham historian Gillian Sutherland has observed, was the participation of women in the war effort. It was not unreasonable of Rosalind to dream of a challenging job once she had completed her third year.

She followed closely the progress of the war, which by January 1940 had enveloped the Finns, who were first bombarded by the Soviet Union, then invaded. When a British naval ship near the coast of neutral Norway attacked the German prison ship the
Altmark
and freed nearly 300 British seamen prisoners, Rosalind declared to her parents that Britain had lost its moral advantage, giving enormous opportunities for enemy propaganda. Her father reproached her for such an unpatriotic opinion. She shot back: ‘I am
not
one of the people who always says England is wrong.' She thought it was almost as bad to say that England could never be wrong — a provocative opinion that she hoped did not mean ‘that the reply will again have to occupy 2 pages of Father's letter and so have room for nothing else'.

By the spring of 1940 the war was phoney no longer. The Nazis invaded Denmark and Norway, then Holland. The Dutch surrender after six days provoked another father-daughter skirmish. Rosalind wrote Ellis:

 

I don't understand your remarks about Holland. It doesn't seem ‘weak-kneed' to give in after they had lost % of their country, all their air force . . . and about to lose the rest and many civilians as well. You didn't say that about Finland and the Finnish losses in 3 mo[nth]s were less than the Dutch losses in a few days. It is obviously all we can do to save Belgium.

 

When Belgium surrendered, however, Rosalind was furious. She wondered if King Leopold had the constitutional right to do what he had done and wondered if ‘our King' could do the same?

Her preparations for the all-important part one of the tripos coincided with the grimmest news of the war so far. German armies were poised to push down into France and turn west towards the English Channel. The fall of Paris was imminent and the British Expeditionary Force on the Continent had withdrawn to the beach at Dunkirk. On 10 May the House of Commons forced Chamberlain to resign and Winston Churchill became Prime Minister over a national government.

Rosalind disagreed with her father's faith that common sense and right would triumph. Common sense, she argued, would say that ‘we are being beaten . . . Incidentally, America is not likely to let us lose though she seems willing to let us come very near it.'

Her personal outlook was also gloomy: ‘Exams begin on Saturday. I wish I could manage to work 10 or 11 hours a day like most people do now but I can't.' She was cutting her laboratory sessions in order to revise and did nothing but work, sleep and play a little tennis in the long evenings created by ‘Double Summertime'. As she got into the exams, she felt she hadn't ‘got a scrap of brain left . . . I have never doubted that I shan't fall below a Second but I wanted a First and don't think there's any hope of that now.'

In ten days between the end of May and early June, over a third of a million British and Allied troops were evacuated from Dunkirk. On 4 June Churchill gave his ‘We shall fight on the beaches . . . we shall never surrender' speech. On 19 June, as he broadcast the news of the fall of France, Rosalind was back in London, listening to the BBC while helping her mother sort out clothes for refugees at the Women's Volunteer Service in Eaton Square. Once again her pessimism had been unnecessary. She had got a first in part one of the Natural Science tripos, and won a college exhibition scholarship — £15 — for her final year.

 

If, as seemed possible, Cambridge might close down before the autumn term, Rosalind thought she might get work as a chemist. To have passed part one of the tripos was the equivalent of a degree. Her father suggested some form of ‘land work' — agricultural labour — but she rejected it out of hand. She would be ‘quite exceptionally bad' at anything except science. This flat declaration prompted Ellis to accuse her of being interested in nothing but science — in fact, of making science her religion. In a sense, he was right. Rosalind sent him an eloquent four-page declaration whose length testifies to his centrality in her life:

 

You frequently state, and in your letter you imply, that I have developed a completely one-sided outlook and look at everything and think of everything in terms of science. Obviously my method of thought and reasoning is influenced by a scientific training — if that were not so my scientific training will have been a waste and a failure. But you look at science (or at least talk of it) as some sort of demoralising invention of man, something apart from real life, and which must be cautiously guarded and kept separate from everyday existence. But science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated. Science, for me, gives a partial explanation of life. In so far as it goes, it is based on fact, experience and experiment. Your theories are those which you and many other people find easiest and pleasantest to believe, but so far as I can see, they have no foundation other than they lead to a pleasanter view of life (and an exaggerated idea of our own importance) . . .

I agree that faith is essential to success in life (success of any sort) but I do not accept your definition of faith, i.e. belief in life after death. In my view, all that is necessary for faith is the belief that by doing our best we shall come nearer to success and that success in our aims (the improvement of the lot of mankind, present and future) is worth attaining. Anyone able to believe in all that religion implies obviously must have such faith, but I maintain that faith in this world is perfectly possible without faith in another world . . .

It has just occurred to me that you may raise the question of a creator. A creator of what? . . . I see no reason to believe that a creator of protoplasm or primeval matter, if such there be, has any reason to be interested in our insignificant race in a tiny corner of the universe, and still less in us, as still more insignificant individuals. Again, I see no reason why the belief that we are insignificant or fortuitous should lessen our faith — as I have defined it.

 

This humanistic credo comes perilously close to a renunciation of the Jewish faith as proscribed in her grandfather's will. But Jewishness is more than a religion. Rosalind was, says her sister Jenifer, ‘always consciously a Jew'. If Jewishness is understood to mean unswerving loyalty to family, a belief in the importance of knowledge, especially in science and medicine, and the virtue of hard work — even over-work, Rosalind remained true to her tradition.

 

Holidays were not forgone, but rather taken in England. In August 1940 she went on a walking tour in the Pennines and the Lake District with another relative, this time her cousin Ursula Franklin. Rosalind was a far quicker and, Ursula felt, far braver, walker and could get quite impatient if she had to pause to wait. One night, with their backpacks, a heavy mist came down and there were no lights anywhere. They hadn't allowed for the blackout in their planning. Totally lost, they came to a road and walked for an hour without seeing a house. Suddenly there was a farm. Soaked to the skin, they knocked on the door and all was well. The farmer's wife put them up in an ancient room with a feather bed and gave them high tea, ham and eggs, for 7 shillings 6d. each. It was the kind of adventure Rosalind savoured.

On their tour, the cousins met a town clerk and his wife from the north of England. To Ursula's surprise, Rosalind paired off — in an utterly non-flirtatious way — with the married man. The two fell into rapt conversation and became such good friends that they wrote to each other afterwards. This phenomenon would occur frequently in the years to come: Rosalind enjoying the role of a non-threatening other woman in a triangle.

 

Rosalind's third year at Cambridge began during the Blitz, which started on 7 September 1940 when for four days 900 German aircraft pounded London and 1500 people died, mainly in the East End. The stoicism of inner-city Londoners spending their nights in the Underground was romanticised for American consumption as plucky English fortitude and Cockney cheeriness. Ellis and Muriel Franklin themselves took this view. (Their suggestion that the sleeping conditions in the Underground were probably more hygienic than the homes where many of these unfortunate people lived was another parental opinion which drew Rosalind's scorn.) When in November a bomb blasted out all the window glass at 5 Pembridge Place and killed two old women in a house in Chepstow Place at the rear, the Franklins decided it was time to leave and took a house in Radlett in Hertfordshire. Nannie retired to Shropshire. Rosalind, from Cambridge, was concerned about her things being moved out of her room in her absence, particularly her desk:

 

If it does not go, I would like
everything
out of it, in as little muddle as possible — I know exactly where everything in it is, though it may look confused . . . Also nearly everything from the drawer of my bookcase and my climbing boots from the cupboard underneath — I couldn't bear to have them bombed . . . As for books, I don't think there are any I can say I ‘specially want', but I would like, naturally, to have as many with me as possible. One cannot live in a house permanently without books . . . in particular, I might mention all French books, my French dictionary, and encyclopaedia — though this does not mean that I don't want any others.

 

She sympathised with her mother having to set up a new household: ‘I suppose “unfurnished” means you have to take carpets, curtains and everything, and none of them will fit.'

Rosalind entered her third and final undergraduate year at Cambridge, in October 1940, in a stronger position than she had expected. If the college were to close down, she had sufficient credentials, with her first in part one, to do war work as a chemist.

Cambridge was no longer ignoring the war. Scientists and other male faculty were vanishing into war research or, if Jewish refugees, confined in internment camps to forestall the feared ‘fifth column'. ‘Practically the whole of the Cavendish have disappeared,' Rosalind reported. ‘Biochemistry was almost entirely run by Germans and may not survive.' Among the internees taken was the young Vienna-born Max Perutz, who had been a rising star in crystallography at the Cavendish since 1936.

To prepare for part two of the tripos, she recruited a new supervisor for herself. She chose Fred (later Lord) Dainton because she was now specialising in his field, physical chemistry — the blend of the two disciplines of chemistry and physics exploring the structural characteristics and behaviour of atoms and molecules.

 

Dainton, who had a full schedule and did not want to take her on, succumbed when Rosalind presented herself at his door in October and declared, ‘I want to have you as my part two supervisor. I don't think Delia Simpson [her previous supervisor] entirely approves. Will you take me?' Dainton, a Yorkshireman, was attracted by her directness — not what he associated with ‘middle-class Londoners'. He liked her willingness to share the hour with another student to whom she was very helpful. As the year wore on, he felt he was over-working her, setting her a long essay each week and insisting that she defend her point of view: ‘something she was never loath to do'. Harder to persuade her to relax; he found her writing and her manner ‘a little crabbed'; she was, he thought, ‘a rather private person, with very high personal and scientific standards, and uncompromisingly honest'.

 

Rosalind did not choose to relax by joining the social whirl. A quarter of a century before the sexual revolution, the young men and women students of Cambridge went dancing, fell in love, had affairs, became engaged. There were belles of the university who were there for a good time and to catch a man. College rules acknowledged human nature to the extent of insisting that men had to be out of women's rooms by 7 p.m. Rosalind's St Paul's friend Jean Kerslake, caught up in parties and dates, felt that Rosalind believed she was flighty and disapproved of her not working harder.

Even so there were others, such as her friend Peggy Clark, who saw themselves, while not opposed to marriage, as wanting to be independent, to prepare to earn their own living and to make use of their academic training. It was Rosalind's personal choice to stay out of
la ronde.
When, for whatever reason, she was bold enough to invite a cousin, Stephen Waley, to Radlett for the weekend after Christmas, she was so afraid that the young man might try to hold her hand that she bribed her fourteen-year- old brother Roly with a sixpence to walk with them.