by Bill Bryson
I strolled over to Trumpington Street and to the Fitzwilliam Museum, which to my mind is Cambridge’s most luscious treasure. I only recently discovered the Fitzwilliam. I had always supposed it to be small and charmingly overstuffed with treasures, like Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, but in fact it is vast and grand and airy, like the British Museum transported to a secondary street in Cambridge. Uniquely among Cambridge institutions, it was only moderately busy. Better still, the café had empty tables. Suppressing a whoop of joy, I ordered an Americano and a piece of walnut cake, which was small, dry and expensive, just the way the English seem to like it, and thus was able, twenty minutes later, to embark on an exploration of the Fitzwilliam’s echoing galleries in a refreshed state.
It occurred to me that I had no idea who the Fitzwilliam behind the museum was, so afterwards I looked it up. It was Richard Fitzwilliam, seventh Viscount Fitzwilliam, who in life never did much of anything other than spend a good deal of it in France, where he sired three children illegitimately by a ballet dancer. Beyond that his private life is ‘deeply obscure’, according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which knows a thing or two about being deeply obscure. Fitzwilliam died in 1816, never having married, and left his art and a large sum of money to Cambridge University to build a museum in his name, which it faithfully did.
The Fitzwilliam Museum doesn’t normally attract a great deal of attention, but in 2006 it leapt into the news when a visitor named Nick Flynn tripped on a loose shoelace and swept three precious Qing vases off a windowsill, smashing them to bits and causing damage of between £100,000 and £500,000, depending on how assiduously you Google the matter. Photographs of the aftermath of the occasion, available on the internet, show that Flynn’s trip was possibly the greatest shoelace fall in history for he managed to sweep clear a windowsill that was perhaps fifteen feet long and leave the vases in thousands of small pieces on the floor. Police arrested Flynn on the suspicion that the damage was intentional, but the charges were subsequently dropped. ‘I actually think I did the museum a favour,’ Flynn told the Guardian. ‘So many people have gone there to see the windowsill where it all happened that I must have increased the visitor numbers. They should make me a trustee.’ Not surprisingly, the museum did not do that. Instead, it wrote to Flynn and politely asked him not to come back any time soon. It was all it could do.
I had read that the vases had been repaired and were back on display now, though safely behind tempered glass. I asked an attendant where they were and she directed me to a glass case that I had in fact just been peering into. The repairs are so good as to be essentially invisible. I had to look hard a second time to see even the tiniest line of repair. Speaking as someone who has never glued anything without also at the same time unintentionally glueing at least three other things, I was impressed.
I spent an hour and a half in the Fitzwilliam, not counting snacktime, and then strolled around the corner to the Scott Polar Research Institute Museum, which, let me say right now, is one of the best small museums in the country, but it was closed, alas. So I went to the Whipple Museum of the History of Science, but it was closed, and then to the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, and the Museum of Classical Archaeology, and they were closed, too. The Museum of Zoology was closed altogether for refurbishment. To my joy, I found that the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology was open on a Sunday, but it was closing for the day just as I arrived.
‘Perhaps I’ll come back tomorrow,’ I said.
‘We’re closed on Mondays,’ said the man.
So I just wandered around. By happy accident, I cut down a back street called Free School Lane and chanced upon the building that was home of the famous Cavendish Laboratory from 1874 to 1974. Somebody once observed to me that probably no small patch of earth has produced more revolutionary thinking than an area a few hundred yards across in the centre of Cambridge. Here you had Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, William Harvey, Charles Babbage, Alan Turing, John Maynard Keynes, Louis Leakey, Bertrand Russell and more than we could list here. Altogether, ninety people from Cambridge have won Nobel Prizes, more than any other institution in the world, and the greater portion of these – nearly a third – came out of this anonymous building on Free School Lane. A plaque on the wall noted that this was the building where J. J. Thomson discovered the electron in 1897, but there was nothing at all to indicate that this is where the structure of DNA was revealed by Francis Crick and James Watson or where James Chadwick discovered the neutron or Max Perutz unravelled the mystery of proteins or anything else. Twenty-nine members of the Cavendish have won Nobel Prizes, which is more than most countries. Four members won in 1962 alone: James Watson and Francis Crick in Physiology or Medicine and Max Perutz and Sir John Kendrew in Chemistry.
It was in the Cavendish in 1953 that Crick and Watson were photographed together posed before a model of the DNA molecule that looked as if it had been built from parts taken from a Meccano set. I once asked someone from the Cavendish Lab why the model isn’t on display anywhere. It is, after all, surely the most famous scientific model of the twentieth century. He told me that the model in the photographs wasn’t the actual model they had used at all. That had been dismantled. Crick and Watson had to assemble a new one for the photographers. Meanwhile, people had begun taking pieces from the kit as keepsakes, many of which subsequently ended up being sold as collectors’ items. As a consequence, the model has essentially duplicated itself, just like real DNA, as there are more pieces floating about now than existed in 1953. That, I was told, is why it is not on display in a museum.
My favourite Cavendish person is Max Perutz, who spent forty years of his life working out the structure of a single protein, haemoglobin. It was such a challenging proposition that it took him fifteen years just to figure out how to go about it. Perutz was possibly the greatest hypochondriac in modern times. He carried a card with dietary instructions in five languages, which he sent to the kitchen wherever he dined. He refused to be in rooms where candles had recently been burned or that had been cleaned with any of several common cleaning solutions and disinfectants (even though he wanted everything around him disinfected). Because of chronic back pain, at symposia he would often introduce a speaker, then lie down in front of the lectern for the duration of the talk. Sometimes he delivered lectures himself while supine.
I am also an admirer of Sir Lawrence Bragg, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on X-ray crystallography in 1915. Bragg later became president of the Royal Institution in London. He loved the work, but missed gardening, so he took a job as a gardener one day a week at a house in South Kensington. The woman who engaged him had no idea that her gardener was one of the most distinguished scientists in Britain until a friend came for tea one day and, looking out the window, casually asked: ‘My dear, why is the Nobel laureate Sir Lawrence Bragg pruning your hedges?’
Late in the afternoon I walked back to the railway station. I’d wanted to take a train onward to Oxford, but it turned out I was nearly fifty years too late for that. The line from Cambridge to Oxford – known affectionately as the Varsity Line or sometimes the Brain Line – was closed in 1967. Today the fastest journey between the two cities (which are just eighty miles apart, you understand) takes more than two and a half hours and involves two changes of train.
I decided to break the journey in London and travel on to Oxford in the morning. At the station I bought a one-way ticket to London and proceeded to platform one, the London platform. When I lived in Norfolk and travelled regularly between there and London, I had to change trains at Cambridge each time. This usually meant getting off one train just in time to see the other departing. So I am well acquainted with Cambridge station and know from experience that the people who run it don’t like to give away too much information. Every visit there is a little like being a guest on the game show Would I Lie to You? On this occasion, a train looking very like a London train pulled in at platform one and stopped there. But the TV screens said ‘This T
rain Terminates Here’ and clearly intimated that it would be foolhardy to board it because it might at any moment leave to go to a depot at Royston or some place equally desperate and unwelcome, and then we would really be screwed.
So about five hundred of us stood around looking at the empty train for ten minutes or so. Eventually a few brave souls got on, and then there was a kind of rush, like when they opened up the Oklahoma Territory to settlers, as nearly everyone hurried to get a seat. But we all had to remain poised to leap off again if it turned out that this train really was headed for servicing (or, a better idea still, retirement) at Royston. In the event, it turned out we had all guessed correctly. This was and indeed always had been the London train. So we won the game. Our prize was that we got to ride to London seated. The thirty or forty people who had remained on the platform because they trusted the television screens got to play a new game called Standing in the Vestibule All the Way to London.
I noticed that I was seated at a window with a good view of the Jeremy Clarkson poster that I had noted earlier and this got me to thinking about stupidity again, in the universal sense. I had recently read about something called the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which is named after two academics at Cornell University in New York State, who first described it. The Dunning-Kruger Effect is basically being too stupid to know how stupid you are. That sounds like a pretty good description of the world to me. So what I began to wonder was this: what if we are all getting stupid at more or less the same rate and we don’t realize it because we are all declining together? You might argue that we’d see a general fall in IQ scores, but what if it’s not the kind of deterioration that shows up in IQ tests? What if it were reflected in just, say, poor judgement or diminished taste? That would explain the success of Mrs Brown’s Boys, for one thing.
We all know that regular exposure to lead can seriously impair brain function, yet it took decades for scientists to figure that out. What if something even more insidious is poisoning our brains from some other part of our daily lives? The number of chemicals in use in the developed world was more than 82,000 at the last count, and most of them – 86 per cent, according to one estimate – have never been tested for their effects on humans. Every day, to take just one example, we all consume or absorb substantial amounts of bisphenols and phthalates, which are found in food packaging. These may pass harmlessly through us or they may be doing to our brains what a microwave oven does to a tub of baked beans. We have no idea. But if you look at what’s on TV on a typical weeknight, you have to wonder. That’s all I’m saying.
Chapter 16
Oxford and About
I
I HAVE DECIDED after considerable thought that the honours system in Britain is not a good thing. I realize I can be accused of hypocrisy in this because I accepted an honour myself a few years ago. But then I have always made it my practice to put vanity before principle.
My award was an honorary OBE, which, because it is honorary and not really real, is not awarded by the Queen but by a minister of her government. Mine was given to me in a brief ceremony in her office by Tessa Jowell, who was then Culture Secretary, and jolly nice she was, too. According to the citation, the award was for services to literature, which is very kind and generous but what it really meant was that it was for services to myself, because I didn’t do anything that I wasn’t going to do anyway. That’s the problem with honours, you see. On the whole, people are rewarded just for being themselves, which in a lot of cases frankly is quite enough already.
America has only two ways to receive formal adulation. Either you single-handedly take out a German machine-gun nest while carrying a wounded buddy on your back at a place called Porkchop Hill or Cemetery Ridge, in which case you get the Congressional Medal of Honor, or you buy society’s admiration by paying for a hospital wing or a university building or something like that. You don’t add something to your name, as in Britain, but rather add your name to something. The warm glow of unwarranted prestige is just the same in both cases. The difference is that in America the system produces a hospital wing; in Britain, you just get a knobhead in ermine.
I bring this up here because I was on my way to see one of the supreme seats of privilege, Blenheim Palace, home of the Dukes of Marlborough, whose achievements over the last eleven generations could be inscribed with a Sharpie on the side of a peanut. Someone had very kindly bought me, as a present, afternoon tea and a tour of the palace, and the voucher was about to expire, so I had hastily made a booking as I was going to be in the neighbourhood.
Blenheim is a most remarkable house, no doubt about that, and I was looking forward to seeing it. I don’t know what went wrong exactly – whether I entered through the wrong door, stood in the wrong queue, or whether my ticket was restricted, but I was placed in a group of fourteen other slightly bewildered people and herded into something called ‘Blenheim: The Untold Story’. This turned out to be an audiovisual adventure that took us through seven upstairs rooms. A lady gave us a short introductory spiel and then we were left in a small room and watched in quiet horror as an automatic door closed behind us. Everything from this point on was automated. In each room there was a recorded commentary and an animatronic figure or two – a duke sitting at a desk writing jerkily with a quill pen that didn’t quite touch the paper and that sort of thing. We were treated to about two minutes of diversion and then a new door swung open and we were instructed to move on to the next space. We weren’t visitors so much as prisoners.
Each room covered a different period in the palace’s history, with the idea, I gathered, that collectively these were to provide us with a moving appreciation of Blenheim Palace’s role in the history and heart of the nation. But in fact the presentation was mostly incoherent. In two of the rooms it was simply not possible to know what was going on. One was about a plan to put on a play in the palace in the nineteenth century – the relevance of this to anything was never clear – and the other, even more confusing, was a meeting in 1939 between an eighteenth-century servant and Consuelo Vanderbilt, who was then mistress of Blenheim. No part of the experience conveyed meaningful information or provided real entertainment. The rooms were small and airless and cramped. To make matters worse, somebody in our group was making the most dreadful silent farts. Fortunately, it was me, so I wasn’t nearly as bothered as the others. After twenty minutes or so of this audiovisual extravaganza, we were decanted into a gift shop, where our attention was drawn to the many other places on the estate where we could spend our money – on tea and scones, on bedding plants and designer trowels from the garden centre, on rides on a little train. It was shit.
I had a reservation for a champagne tea in something called the Indian Room. It was very nice, but what I mostly enjoyed about it was that I wasn’t paying the £35 that it cost.
Afterwards, I strolled around the grounds, which are splendid, and then into the stately village of Woodstock, just outside the palace grounds. When I came to Woodstock for Notes from a Small Island, it had a full range of shops, including a glover’s, a gentlemen’s hair stylist, a family butcher’s, a second-hand bookshop and lots of antiques shops. Many of those have now gone, alas, though there is still a good bookshop and a popular delicatessen that didn’t use to be there. But the overwhelming theme to Woodstock now is cars. They were parked everywhere, jemmied into every possible cranny and so thick on the High Street – a road that doesn’t actually go anywhere, but ends at the palace gates – that it was hard to cross on foot. Many of the houses had signs in their windows expressing alarm at proposals to build 1,500 homes on the edge of the village. As Woodstock has only 1,300 homes now, that didn’t seem to me an unreasonable position, particularly as the designated land is part of Oxford’s green belt. The land is owned by Blenheim Palace, which said it needed to sell it to fund £40 million of palace repairs.
The problem with building big estates in places like this isn’t just the loss of land, but that the new places overwhelm what exists already. Woodstock won
’t continue to be Woodstock if you put a new town with a shiny supermarket and business park on its outskirts. I’ve no doubt that there is a powerful case for more housing for Oxford, but surely there are more sensitive and intelligent solutions than just bunging down 1,500 new houses in one giant field and hoping that the roads and doctors’ surgeries and middle schools and everything else can handle an instant doubling of local burdens. Perhaps it would be an idea to require developers to live on their own estates for five years, as a demonstration of their superb liveability. It’s just a thought.
