by Peter Graham
Henry Rainsford Hulme was born in 1908 in Ormskirk, a village a few miles from Southport, Lancashire, and twenty odd miles north of Liverpool. His Manchester-born father James Hulme was a director of Hulme Brothers Limited of Southport, manufacturers and distributors of fancy goods, leather and aluminium trunks and portmanteaus. Hulme Brothers had two shops in elegant Lord Street, another in the ultra-smart Leyland Arcade, and manufacturing works in King Street. Henry was brought up in a substantial but by no means grand semi-detached house in Belmont Street, within an easy walk of Lord Street: a comfortable middle-class home.
Displaying outstanding brainpower from a young age, Henry won a scholarship to Manchester Grammar, the most famous of the great grammar schools of England. Founded in the reign of Henry VIII, the school was, and still is, an intellectually élite establishment. Bright young minds were worked hard, and to no one’s surprise Henry Hulme won a place reading mathematics and physics at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. In 1929 he graduated with honours in mathematics; two years later he won both the Smith’s Prize and a Rouse Ball Studentship, the most coveted awards for young mathematicians at Cambridge,and was elected to the Isaac Newton Studentship in astronomy. His particular interest was quantum mechanics, the revolutionary branch of mathematical physics that dealt with the motion of sub-atomic particles.
After receiving a Ph.D. in 1932, Hulme went to Germany to study at the University of Leipzig under Werner Heisenberg, who had just won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery at the root of quantum theory: that Newtonian dynamics did not apply to the behaviour of electrons and nuclei within atoms and molecules. Nineteen thirty-two was a momentous year for physicists, with the discovery of the neutron and the positron making it possible, for the first time, to produce nuclear transmutations in large quantities using artificially accelerated protons. Nuclear physics had arrived.
Returning to Cambridge the following year, Hulme was elected a fellow of Gonville and Caius. He had unquestionably made the grade as a young mathematical physicist with a specialist interest in astronomy. While lecturing in mathematics, he continued to study quantum theory, especially the effect of light on the orbits of inner electrons of atoms, and became friendly with a fellow mathematical physicist who would come to play an important part in his later career. Bill Penney was the son of a sergeant-major in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps. A brilliant student, he had had a stellar career at Imperial College, London, and been awarded a senior studentship at Trinity College, Cambridge. Still in his mid twenties, he had an international reputation for applying quantum mechanics to the structure and behaviour of metals.
In 1936, Hulme accepted an appointment as lecturer in mathematics at the University of Liverpool. The previous year, James Chadwick, who had worked with Ernest Rutherford to develop the nuclear theory of atoms at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, had accepted the Lyon Jones chair of physics at the university. Chadwick needed first-rate mathematical physicists such as Henry Hulme, and Hulme saw opportunities under his patronage that did not exist for the time being at Cambridge.
In Liverpool, Hulme met and married twenty-five-year-old Hilda Reaveley. Three years younger than him, Hilda was coolly elegant, beautiful, outspoken, theatrical in temperament and sexually outgoing. To a man more worldly-wise than Henry Hulme, such an exciting combination might have spelt trouble.
Hilda’s ancestors, the Reaveleys, were an old Northumbrian family who, in the fifteenth century, had occupied a manor house in the Breamish Valley at the foot of the Cheviot hills. By the sixteenth century they had become substantial landowners in their own right, as well as hereditary bailiffs of Chatton to the earls of Northumberland in the barony of Alnwick. A Major William Reveley, married to a niece of the earl of Stafford, was killed in the royalist cause at the battle of Naseby of 1645. By the nineteenth century the most distinguished branch of the family was the Reaveleys of Kinnersley Castle, Herefordshire, although the Reverend John Reaveley, born in Spennymore, County Durham, was sufficiently notable to be included in the 1938 edition of Kelly’s Handbook of Distinguished People.
Hilda’s connection with these distinguished Reaveleys was real but distant. She was born in Alnwick, where her father, Joseph Reaveley, was the minister of St James’s Presbyterian Church. He, too, had been born in County Durham, only a short hop from Spennymore, but he was the son of a coal miner.
Hilda did not, as far as anyone knows, have a university education and indeed, as one of two daughters of a Presbyterian minister who was a coalminer’s son, it is unlikely she received anything out of the ordinary in the way of schooling. What she did after leaving school, or what took her to live in Birkenhead, is not known. The best guess is that she became a schoolteacher. Somewhere along the way she acquired a self-confident and polished manner: Hilda could hold her own in any company in a cut-glass accent that bore no trace of the north of England.
Not long after he and Hilda were married in 1937, Henry Hulme was presented with a wonderful opportunity when the position of chief assistant to the Astronomer Royal became vacant and he was appointed. He was the perfect man and it was the perfect job. Hilda must have been delighted. Living in London, the wife of the chief assistant to the Astronomer Royal—it was a thrilling prospect. But just before the move to London took place she found she was pregnant.
One of the joys of being chief assistant to the Astronomer Royal was having the run of Christopher Wren’s delightful red-brick Royal Observatory in Greenwich Park, overlooking the Thames. The original part, Flamsteed House, had been built in 1675 at the command of Charles II in the hope of finding an astronomical solution to the problem of determining longitude at sea. The Hulmes bought a two-storeybrick semi-detached house at 79 Foyle Road in the Maze Hill area east of Greenwich Park. From the house it was a short walk to the observatory.
Although Harold Spencer Jones, the Astronomer Royal, would become little more than a footnote in the history of astronomy, his thirty-year-old chief assistant was as ambitious as he was able. Hulme set himself to a theoretical study of the spectra of stars—the electromagnetic radiation produced by rearrangements of the innermost electrons of atoms. Had he continued to devote himself to astronomy, he may in a few years have attained the Plumian chair at Cambridge, and even in time become Astronomer Royal himself.
Henry and Hilda Hulme’s first child, Juliet Marion, was born at Greenwich on October 28, 1938, as ominous clouds were massing over Europe. At Munich a month earlier the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia had been handed to Germany, after Hitler’s assurance that it would be his last territorial claim in Europe. Fortunately, the British government’s preparations did not falter. The month Julietwas born Sir John Anderson took charge of air raid precautions: the bombing of Guernica by the Luftwaffe in April 1937 had left few illusions in official circles about what the civilian population of Britain was in for in the event of war. Expenditure on civil defence increased from nine million pounds in 1937 to fifty-one million in 1938. Millions of gas masks were issued, with instructions for making blackout curtains, and how to tape up windows to prevent their being shattered by bomb blasts.
At 79 Foyle Road, Henry and Hilda acquired, at a cost of six pounds and fourteen shillings, an Anderson shelter. These structures consisted of arched sheets of corrugated steel sunk into the ground. Sandbags were stacked on top and around the small entrance and the whole thing was dug into four feet of soil. The shelters were no protection against a direct hit but could withstand the blast of a 250-kilogram bomb landing as close as ten feet away.
On September 3, 1939 war was declared. Juliet was not quite a year old.
Hilda did not take naturally to motherhood. In her book, babies had to learn their place and not be pandered to and fussed over. And the war made things difficult: it was impossible to get nursing help. While everybody else had exciting and glamorous war work, Hilda was stuck at home with a baby. It cannot have been the life she had imagined for herself when they moved up to London.
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nbsp; Greenwich was badly affected by bombing: the oxbow bend in the Thames enfolding the Isle of Dogs created a landmark conspicuous from high altitude. German bombers crossing the channel from their bases in France to attack London would establish their positions visually from the Isle of Dogs before making their runs. The Luftwaffe’s major navigation point over London was just a mile from the Hulme’s house.
At half past four on the afternoon of September 7, 1940, 350 German bombers escorted by 600 fighter aircraft flew up the river. Woolwich Arsenal took a terrible hammering and the Royal Victoria and Surrey Docks were flattened. At the Surrey Docks—in Rotherhithe, just upriver of Greenwich—bombs set vast stacks of Norwegian timber ablaze, creating a beacon that guided in further waves of bombers throughout the night. Four hundred and thirty people were killed and 1,600 seriously injured in that first major raid, effectively the start of the Blitz.
Bombs fell around Greenwich noon and night. Even in the comparative safety of a dank Anderson shelter the experience would have been terrifying. The corrugated steel walls amplified the racket outside: the unending drone of aircraft, the high-pitched whine and express-train roar of falling bombs, the thunderous crashes of walls collapsing, the clashing of splintering glass, the “boom-ker-boom” of ack-ack guns, and wailing sirens hour after hour after hour. Like many other children, two-year-old Juliet suffered bomb shock. For a month afterwards she had nightmares so severe she would wake up screaming. Hilda would later suggest this had scarred her deeply, perhaps permanently.
The Blitz went on for nine months until the end of May 1941. In seventy-one major raids, the Luftwaffe succeeded in killing nearly 20,000 Londoners, and wounding 72,000 more, but after that first big raid hundreds of thousands of children were evacuated from London to safer parts of the country. Although the government organised a scheme for the children of the poor, the better-off were expected to make private arrangements to billet their offspring with friends or relatives.
Hilda would later reveal little about the comings and goings of Juliet and her during the war years. She resided in London “some of the time”, she said, implying she was mostly elsewhere. Her health was “very indifferent” and after her second child was born she was seriously ill for some months. That and “war conditions” caused periods of separation from Juliet. Evacuees under school age were usually accompanied by their mothers. It is possible some part of Juliet’s early years were spent in northern England, perhaps with her grandmother in Alnwick.
Hilda had difficulty controlling her “very demanding and sensitive daughter”, who resisted discipline and resented correction. Juliet was excitable and lived in a world of fantasy. She found it difficult to stop playing games and re-enter the family circle, always wanting to remain a fairy or some other imaginary creature. Although she was quick to laugh and often enchanting, she had a strong will and temper. There was an incident in the wartime streets of London when Hilda wished to go one way and Juliet insisted on going the other. Hilda stood debating the point with her for half an hour before the child was persuaded to do as her mother wanted.
When Jonathan was born on March 22, 1944, there was serious trouble. At first things seemed to go well: Juliet, then aged five and a half, was taken to visit her mother and new brother in the nursing home and seemed to accept the baby. Unfortunately, however, soon after arriving home Hilda became ill in the night, and as Henry was otherwise engaged she left Juliet home alone in bed while she and the baby returned to the nursing home. Juliet was deeply distressed to wake and find her mother and the baby gone, and to be told for days afterwards that her mother was too ill to be visited. From that time on, Hilda would say, she “definitely resented” Jonathan and was a problem to her parents.
Soon afterwards, supposedly because of Hilda’s continuing ill health, Juliet was sent away. She must have felt cruelly rejected by her mother, in whose affections she had been displaced by the hated baby. Where was Juliet packed off to? Hilda would later give an account of the period to her friend Nancy Sutherland. With Hilda the truth was always malleable and open to embellishment—someone who knew her well in New Zealand went as far as to say she was a chronic liar—but the story may well be true in its main particulars. Hilda described being pregnant with Jonathan during the dreadful English winter of 1944. As German bombing intensified, she said, she and Juliet had to run down to the Anderson shelter at the bottom of the garden in all weathers. There they would take refuge until the all-clear siren sounded. If a stick of bombs was falling close by, Hilda would go on ahead, leaving Juliet to follow. Juliet would lie under a bush or shrub until the immediate danger had passed and her mother called her.
One particularly atrocious night towards the end of her pregnancy, Hilda opened the shelter, called Juliet, and then, because of her size, got stuck in the entrance as the bombs began to rain down. Left lying in the snow until her mother extricated herself, Juliet contracted pneumonia. A mobile X-ray unit found she had shadows on both lungs, and doctors advised Hilda they must get her to a warmer climate at once if they were to save her life. It was decided she would go to Barbados in the care of a nurse. The little girl was sent, as Nancy Sutherland put it, “with a stranger to a strange land” until the war ended. When she was reunited with her family “she found she had a small brother who took all her mother’s attention, and hardly saw anything of her nuclear scientist father”.
Although the Blitz was over by early June 1941, bombing was briefly resumed by the Luftwaffe in February 1944 in retaliation for the Allies’ “Baedecker raids”. If Nancy Sutherland accurately recalled what Hilda told her, Juliet must have been dispatched to Barbados early in 1944 and remained there until the end of the war.
The damage caused to infants by inadequate attachment to, or prolonged separation from, their mothering figures was little understood at the time, although as early as 1939 the psychiatrists John Bowlby and Donald Winnicott had warned about the psychological dangers of evacuation programmes that involved separating infants and young children from their mothers. It was hardly surprising that Juliet became an even more difficult child who escaped the profound hurts of her everyday existence—sibling jealousy and the sting of maternal rejection—by retreating into an imaginary world.
CHAPTER 6
Strains of War
Even Henry Hulme, although distracted by his work, could hardly fail to notice he had an unhappy wife and troublesome little daughter, both in poor health. These problems, he might have thought, could be readily ascribed to the stresses and strains of the war. His mind was on other things—important things—at the Admiralty. At the outbreak of war he had been transferred on loan from the Royal Observatory, and in 1940 he had become head of the degaussing section of the mine design department, in charge of fifty tweedy bespectacled scientists incongruous among the suave naval officers and glamorous Wrens.
The future of Britain depended on the ability of Hulme and his team to find the solution to a serious problem threatening Britishsea lanes. By September 1939, forty-one ships had been sunk by German U-boats, but an even greater menace to shipping were the thousands of electromagnetic mines the enemy had dropped around the British coast. In the course of being built, a steel-hulled ship becomes charged with magnetism—in effect a floating magnet. The mines, dropped by parachute, lay on the sea bed. When a ship passed overhead, the needles inside these mines would be pulled upwardsby magnetic force, complete a circuit and touch off a detonator. Degaussing is the technique for demagnetising an object by passing through it a decreasing alternating current. Henry Hulme’s degaussing section at the Admiralty would succeed in devising equipment that, when fitted to individual ships, effectively protected them against magnetic mines. It was a development of the most critical importance to both the Royal Navy and merchant shipping.
In 1942, the distinguished physicist Patrick Blackett was appointed director of operational research at the Admiralty and Henry Hulme became his deputy, at the same time maintaining his credentials as an astrono
mer by becoming secretary of the Royal Astronomical Society. The great challenge now facing the Admiralty was how best to protect merchant ships crossing the Atlantic to bring back the material of war and food on which Britain’s survival depended. The navy’s resources were badly stretched and U-boats were picking off British shipping with appalling frequency. It was essentially a mathematical problem: how to optimise the use of the available escort vessels to maximise protection for the convoys? Hulme and a small group of mathematicians were set to the task.
These human computers, known as “Blackett’s circus”, established that there was no relationship between the size of a convoy and the number of ships sunk in any one attack. By doubling the size of a convoy it would be possible to halve the overall loss rate: with fewer convoys to escort, the protective screen could be twice the usual size. Conventional wisdom had been that forty ships in a convoy was ideal, and more than sixty dangerous in the extreme. By the end of the war, as a result of the work of Hulme and his colleagues, convoys often comprised as many as one hundred and sixty ships. The importance of this to the war effort cannot be exaggerated. The Battle of the Atlantic was won and in 1945 Hulme’s contribution was recognised when he became director of operational research as Patrick Blackett moved onwards and upwards.
Around June 1944, Hulme travelled to the United States. The Normandy landings took place on June 6. What mission was so important it required the presence in America of Britain’s deputy director of naval operational research at such a critical time? The answer, almost certainly, was the nuclear fission bomb: Hulmewas closely connected with a number of the British scientists involved with the Manhattan Project, including Blackett, his mentor from Cambridge University James Chadwick, and Bill Penney. Penney had become the recognised expert on the mathematics of blast waves, and been enlisted as a member of the small British team that went to Robert Oppenheimer’s Los Alamos laboratory just before D-Day, along with Chadwick and German scientist Klaus Fuchs, later unmasked as a Soviet spy. Penney went to New Mexico in June 1944 and it is likely Hulme accompanied him. Hulme’s rare knowledge of quantum theory and mathematical physics would certainly have been of great assistance to Penney in his work there.
