Meanwhile, back in England I. M. Heilbron, Professor of Chemistry in Manchester, was appointed to succeed the late J. F. Thorpe in the chair at Imperial College, thus rendering vacant the most important position for a British organic chemist after Oxford and Imperial College. Clearly there would be a bit of a shuffle, but as I never for a moment expected I would be a candidate for Manchester, especially after my experience with the King's College chair, I wasn't unduly perturbed. However, it is only fair to say that, on the night before we left Pasadena, Joe Koepfli told me that he reckoned that I would join the CalTech unless I were offered Manchester; such an offer, he felt, I could hardly refuse, as Manchester was much more in the chemical swim than CalTech and he and (he claimed) Pauling and Millikan considered it more than an outside possibility.
Early in May Alison and I, having already had a look around for a possible house, left Pasadena and travelled in leisurely fashion by the Santa Fe railroad to the east coast, making a brief side-trip to the Grand Canyon en route. Thence we proceeded to Cambridge, Massachusetts and stayed for some days with Oliver and Alice Cope. Oliver, a young surgeon at the Massachusetts General Hospital, had been associated earlier with Sir Henry Dale and in that way knew my wife. We met a variety of the Harvard people there, including the Fiesers, with whom we enjoyed mutual recognition from the Portofino days! Thereafter we returned to New York and sailed for England on the Queen Mary, then the pride of the Atlantic and certainly the largest and most luxurious ship of the day.
(I look back on the various trips made to and from the United States by ship with nostalgia. The 'Queens' in particular were magnificent ships in every way, and the leisurely days spent on the ocean are an abiding memory. I think the last ocean voyage I made was on the Queen Elizabeth about 1954. Air travel has spoiled transatlantic trips!)
We left ship at Plymouth and proceeded to our little flat in Wimbledon where, to my considerable surprise, I found awaiting me a telegram from Sir John Stopford, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Manchester, telling me that Heilbron was going to Imperial College and asking me to come to Manchester on the following Thursday to talk with him about the situation. This I did; I had never before been in Manchester, but I was met at London Road Station and taken to the university. I sat in an anteroom for, I suppose, about fifteen minutes before Sir John appeared, introduced himself and took me along to the Senate Room where, to my astonishment, a group of professors was assembled and it dawned on me that this was in fact a formal interview and that there were probably other 'candidates' there that day also. (This I found later was correct; J. W. Cook and R. P. Linstead had been on the mat before me.) I was cross-questioned about this and that for a quarter of an hour or thereabouts, and then taken by the Vice-Chancellor to his room. By this time I was getting slightly alarmed, and I decided that I really would have to be completely frank with him about my position. I told him that it was clear to me that our 'little talk' had been in fact an interview and that, while I wished to make it clear that I was in no sense holding a pistol at his head, the time available was short. I said I had in my hands a firm offer from CalTech in Pasadena and that I had promised to give Dr Millikan my reply by cable ten days after returning to England, i.e. on Monday, three days hence. I also said that, unless I had an equally firm offer from Manchester before Monday, I would accept the Pasadena offer. Sir John smiled and said ' Don't worry - I quite understand. Sit down with the newspaper - I'll be back in five minutes.' Off he went - and he came back as promised in about five minutes. 'Well,' he said, 'will you take the job?' 'Yes,' said I. And that is how, at the age of thirty, I became Sir Samuel Hall Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Chemical Laboratories of the University of Manchester.
4. Manchester and the move to Cambridge
Having found a house in Withington my wife and I moved to Manchester in late September 1938. It was not a very comfortable month with war-clouds looming in Europe; this was the time of Hitler's annexation of Czechoslovakia and Chamberlain's Munich Agreement. I remember taking a pretty dim view of the situation. Indeed, shortly before we finally quit the Lister Institute I remember being with Franz Bergel (who was just starting up as Director of Research at Roche Products Ltd, Welwyn Garden City) in a pub not far from the Institute and we discussed whether we shouldn't perhaps join the army forthwith rather than wait a few weeks for the actual outbreak of war! However, the worst was not to happen for another twelve months when, as it turned out, we were as chemists kept out of the army to undertake other work of national importance.
At the time I went there, the Manchester school of organic chemistry had a high reputation. The traditions of Perkin, Dixon, Lapworth and Robinson had been upheld by my immediate predecessor Heilbron, who left a well-equipped and progressive department behind him. It was a large school -third in the country after Oxford and Imperial College London (Cambridge, although physically large, had got into a very low state under the ageing W. J. Pope). In those days Manchester was (so Heilbron told me) generally known in the academic world as 'the first-class waiting room'. I could hardly believe that I had been given the job, and I viewed it with some trepidation since I knew that I would be the youngest member of the teaching staff of the chemistry department. I needn't have worried on the latter score - I was welcomed by the whole staff, who were without exception extremely helpful.
(Stopford, tackled in the Athenaeum Club about my appointment, said it was like managing professional football - he would always sign a good man when he saw one, and offered bets that Oxford or Cambridge would be around very soon to try to arrange a transfer!)
Having now got a settled position with a large school and extensive laboratories, I could begin to spread my wings a bit and especially to start something really big even if it might take a number of years and a lot of co-workers to produce any results. My position in research at the time I went to Manchester was roughly as follows:
(1) I had to clear up some of the vitamin E work.
(2) Having found cannabinol inactive and having a supply of Cannabis resin I wanted to get on with my pursuit of the active principle.
(3) In continuation of my vitamin interests I was following up a liver filtrate factor of the B complex and also pursuing anti-anaemic factors in liver extracts.
(4) I had some minor pieces of work, e.g. on Erythrophleum alkaloids of which we had a sample obtained many years earlier from Merck of Darmstadt and from which Blount (in Oxford) had isolated the crystalline erythrophleic acid and done some preliminary work on its structure.
(5) Already in my work with vitamin B1 I had become very interested in the reasons for the importance of vitamins and how they could function. By this time evidence had been accumulating which showed their participation in coenzymes like co-carboxylase, cozymase and flavin-adenine-dinucleotide.
I wanted to go into this field which, certainly from a synthetic point of view, was largely untouched but too difficult and chancy for a young worker without the facilities and scope of a big school like Manchester behind him. Several of the coenzymes including adenosine triphosphate (ATP) contained nucleosides or, perhaps more properly, nucleotides, and there was a lead through them to nucleic acids which, even at that time, I believed were in some way tied up with transmission of hereditary characteristics (from their presence in chromosomes). Here then was just what I wanted - a big field, relatively unexplored, and which, though difficult, could yield in the end results of great importance. I therefore laid out a three-pronged attack: (a) nucleoside synthesis; (b) phosphorylation (about which astonishingly little was known) and (c) nucleotide synthesis covering phosphorylation of nucleosides, coenzymes and possibly later nucleic acid structure and synthesis.
Altogether a tall order, but the field in view had few if any occupants. P. A. Levene had, of course, done quite a lot of work following on the lines of Emil Fischer's early studies, and Gulland was working with a small group on nucleic acids but not as a serious competitor in the directions I wished to pursue. There was thus
one great advantage - the literature was small and there was therefore little to read up! (I always tell youngsters looking for a field of research that they should (1) choose an important one; (2) choose one large enough to give room for changes in direction; and (3) avoid fashionable fields and choose if possible one in which they themselves would be the authors of all or most of the relevant literature.)
Such then was my general philosophy, and I put all these lines into operation beginning in the major new field with some preliminary skirmishes in the nucleoside and phosphorylation areas.
I was extremely fortunate to have as my colleague in the chair of physical chemistry that remarkable scholar and scientist Michael Polanyi. Prior to my interview for the Manchester post I had not met him, and on that occasion I had no more than a passing word with him. As soon as my appointment was officially announced I therefore went up to Manchester to meet him and discuss plans for the future. It was a fine summer day when my train drew into London Road Station and there was Polanyi to greet me. We went outside, bundled into his small Ford car, and set off. By the time we reached the foot of the sloping approach to the station Mishi (the name by which I always knew him) was already well embarked on a theoretical discussion which was brought to an abrupt halt when, emerging into the traffic of London Road, we collided with a stationary tramcar. We drove the slightly dented car without further incident to the university, had a brief chat, and proceeded to the Staff House for lunch at the end of which Mishi discovered that he had forgotten to bring any money with him that day; it is only fair to say that the indulgent way in which this confession was received by the cashier and her polite refusal to let me help suggested that this was not the first time such a thing had happened. I tell the story only because it serves to underline the essential unworldliness of Michael Polanyi. Usually deep in his own thoughts (which were always well worth listening to), he paid little attention to everyday life around him. He began life as a medical man, served as such in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War and thereafter, in his long career, was, in succession, experimental and theoretical physical chemist, economist, social scientist and ultimately philosopher. He was a truly remarkable man and one whose close friendship I was privileged to enjoy during those Manchester years, when he was moving gradually away from physical chemistry to economics, a move which accelerated after his main Manchester disciple, M. G. Evans, moved to the chair of physical chemistry in Leeds during my stay. Mishi left the running of the chemical laboratories almost entirely to me, which may have been just as well since his administrative technique usually involved issuing on impulse some sweeping directive to Dr A at lunch time and then spending most of the afternoon seeking subterfuges which he hoped might ensure that the directive (now regarded by him as bad) would in some way become inoperative without his having directly to countermand it.
I had the good fortune to be able to make the move from London to Manchester with scarcely a break in my research; I took with me two of my Lister Institute colleagues - Dr Anni Jacob and Dr Marguerite Steiger. Both of them were not only outstanding research chemists but also women of strong character. They quickly organised not merely the young research students but also the technical staff of the laboratory and got them going in their work; no slackness was tolerated! But our quick start and rapid progress thereafter also depended very largely on a new appointment which I made. When Heilbron left Manchester he took with him to Imperial College his laboratory steward F. G. Consterdine. Fred Consterdine was a very efficient person, and was generally regarded in chemical circles as the country's outstanding laboratory manager; he had built up a smooth-running organisation in Manchester, but it was clear that unless someone equally talented and efficient could be found to replace him, that organisation would be unlikely to survive for long. Such a man I found in A. R. Gilson. At the time of my appointment he was a junior member of the Manchester chemical laboratory staff. His potential had not passed unnoticed by Polanyi (nor, as I soon learned, by Consterdine), who mentioned Ralph Gilson to me as a promising youngster whom I ought to look at. I did, and was enormously impressed both personally and professionally. I therefore appointed him laboratory steward, gave him carte blanche with my full confidence, and I never did a better day's work. Appropriately enough, he was by far the youngest applicant being about five years junior to me - I being the youngest member of the teaching staff of my department. Ralph Gilson and I struck up not only a partnership but an enduring friendship; between us I like to think that we put, in turn, Manchester and Cambridge on the scientific map and he, over the years, has probably done more than any other man I know to guide the development of chemical laboratories both in design and equipment. Much later our ways parted - but only superficially - when he left university work in Cambridge in 1956 to become managing director of Perkin Elmer (Great Britain) Ltd. I must add that the entire chemistry staff, teaching, research, and technical, gave us their full support right from the start; I shall always be grateful to them and to the Vice-Chancellor, Sir John Stopford, who backed me at every turn and from whose wise advice on administrative problems I greatly benefited. The only occasion when my youth got me into a bit of trouble was when, late one evening a few days after taking up office, I went down to the chemistry department to do some writing. In this endeavour I was unsuccessful, for the night watchman on duty refused me admission on the grounds that students were not allowed in the laboratories after normal working hours unless they had written permission from the Professor!
Manchester University was a lively place in those days. Although I had only one year to see it in peacetime conditions, life in it had zest and vigour even during the war years. It certainly had no fear of appointing young professors. Three other very young men in addition to myself were appointed to chairs in 1938 - Willis Jackson (later to become Lord Jackson of Burnley) in electrotechnics, J. R. Hicks in political economy and R. A. C. Oliver in education. P. M. S. Blackett (later Lord Blackett) had come only a year earlier to succeed W. L. Bragg. I had little to do professionally with Blackett apart from skirmishes on the Senate - physics and chemistry being the two dominant departments in the university we were careful to treat one another with respect on Senate. However I used, from time to time, to find myself a minor participant in the frequent wordy battles between Blackett, Polanyi, L. B. Namier the historian, and Wadsworth, the then editor of the Manchester Guardian on political and economic matters or on the nature of science (one of Polanyi's hobby-horses). Disagreement between Blackett and Polanyi on the social responsibility of scientists and the freedom of science was profound. Patrick was endlessly pressing left-wing socialism while Mishi would have none of it: Wadsworth and Namier were somewhere in the middle. I was not, as I have said, deeply involved but, even if I did not go quite as far as Mishi, my political views were nearer to his and distinctly to the right of the others. There were, of course, all sorts of currents within the university and with something approaching a constant state of war between Lang and Drummond (the professors of botany) on the one hand and H. Graham Cannon, our zoologist, who had the lowest opinion of their subject on the other, there were few dull moments.
One of the pleasantest features of life in the University of Manchester in my time was that most of the teaching staff lunched at common table in the Staff House each day and, as a result, one quickly came to know colleagues in subjects far removed from one's own. A wide circle of friends could thus be built up quite quickly and with much less effort than is the case in a university like Cambridge, where the staff is broken up into small groups on a college and departmental basis. It is, of course, also true that in Oxford and Cambridge the lack of any body corresponding to the Senate of a university like Manchester tends to make inter-professorial contacts more difficult. In Manchester, staff from the Manchester College of Technology (which, although the Faculty of Technology of the University, was located about a mile away near the city centre) also came from time to time to the Staff House. My colleague there, James Ke
nner, Professor of Technological Chemistry, used to lunch with us fairly regularly and it was thus that I came to know him well. Kenner, a much older man than I, had a fearsome reputation as a quarrelsome man and, indeed, when I accepted the Manchester job there were several people who warned me that I would get a rough passage from Kenner, who would not take kindly to seeing a mere stripling in the senior chemical chair. They were quite wrong. Kenner could be quarrelsome and difficult and he relished chemical polemics, but this was largely because he had become embittered through what he regarded - perhaps not without reason - as lack of recognition of his chemical contributions and lack of support in the College of Technology. This is not the place to discuss the problems of a strange and difficult man; to me he showed only kindness, and I am grateful to him for many helpful discussions on various aspects of organic chemistry.
A Time to Remember Page 6
