Rosalind Franklin

by Brenda Maddox

  Dear Mother, I’m sorry if you find my last letter distressing. It didn’t really reflect any change of attitude, nor any bitterness either. I have always preferred ‘foreigners’ to the English.

  Her proud but heavy heritage had left her uneasy in her native land.

  TWO

  ‘Alarmingly Clever’

  IN SPITE OF and perhaps because of being the youngest of six children, Rosalind’s father, Ellis Franklin, was a natural patriarch. Large, intelligent, amusing, successful, overbearing, he knew what was best for those around him and told them so. He could be quite angry if resisted. His service in France in the First World War as a captain in the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry Regiment was the defining experience of his life. Before war broke out, he had intended to study science at New College, Oxford. When he was released from the service in 1918, however, having married, he accepted the family’s judgement that he must give up thoughts of Oxford and instead join Keyser’s bank where his father was senior partner.

  Ellis worked as hard at recreation as at business and public service. Married in 1917, he took his young wife on strenuous backpacking holidays in France and also in England, where they tramped over the Berkshire and Wiltshire Downs. Even in London they walked. Ellis would lead Muriel, a small figure struggling to keep up, on marathon treks from Notting Hill to Richmond and Wimbledon.

  His children appeared in swift succession, the first, David, born in 1919. The family lived in a large double-fronted four- storey house at 5 Pembridge Place off Westbourne Grove in London W2 on the western edge of Bayswater, now fashionable as Notting Hill. To wealthier and grander Jewish families who lived in the great seven-storey stuccoed mansions of South Kensington, it was perhaps the wrong side of the park. Otherwise, the leafy squares and stuccoed terraces north of Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park sheltered a comfortable and affluent community where, in the words of a distant cousin, L.H.L. Cohen, ‘we lived like Jewish Forsytes’. Nannies of the neighbourhood wheeled their prams to Kensington Gardens, watched their charges romp around the statue of Peter Pan and the Round Pond, and escorted them to each other’s parties. The focus of the community was the New West End Synagogue on St Petersburgh Place — or, for some, the West London (Reform) Synagogue near Marble Arch; for observant Jews, it was important to walk (or at least not to be seen to drive or be driven) to synagogue on the Sabbath. Families also liked their children to live close by, so that they might dine together on Friday evenings when the Sabbath candles were lit, and on Passover. Ellis and Muriel Franklin were within easy reach of his father’s house on Porchester Terrace and that of her parents, in Norfolk Square. The London home of Sir Herbert Samuel (a witness at their wedding) was also on Porchester Terrace.

  For family holidays Ellis chose the Scilly Isles, Cornwall or South Wales, where, trousers rolled up, he would splash about with his brood, directing them where to look and what to explore. In 1926, when Rosalind was six, they were joined on the Cornish coast by Mamie Bentwich, his favourite sister. Mamie, who was childless, described the scene to ‘Dearest Norman’, her husband the Attorney General, back in Jerusalem:

  We are enjoying life here very much . . . walking, surf- bathing & lazing on the heather or sands — & eating a terrible amount.

  Friday Ellis & I started for a long walk — but it rained heavily so we spent all day indoors, except for an after-tea walk to a 7th century ‘theatre’ near here on the cliffs . . . Today, bathing & digging & playing with the children as the nurses were out. They are great fun . . . especially Colin . . . David is a charming little boy. Rosalind is alarmingly clever — she spends all her time doing arithmetic for pleasure, & invariably gets her sums right.

  ‘Alarmingly clever’: the phrase, affectionately meant, has a contemporary resonance inaudible at the time. ‘Alarmingly’ is not synonymous with ‘amazingly’. In 1926 British women had enjoyed the vote for only eight years, and then only if they were thirty or over. Mamie, born in 1892, knew all too well that superior intelligence in a female was an embarrassment. She held a diploma from Bedford College, University of London, yet had been brought up in the understanding that neither she nor her older sister Alice would have careers. Their model was their mother, Caroline Jacob Franklin, also holder of a Bedford diploma, who used her intellectual gifts as chair of the Buckinghamshire Education Committee, as a member of the Anglo-Jewish Association, and as a supporter of the Evelina de Rothschild School in Jerusalem.

  Alarm at Rosalind’s ability was therefore appropriate. It was awkward that, of Ellis Franklin’s four children, three of them boys, the girl should be the brightest and most determined. Ellis himself would not allow women employees in his office; for years Keyser’s bank had only male secretaries and telephonists.

  That Rosalind at six should be so adept at arithmetic was owed in part to a good west London private day school. Like her older brother David, she was a pupil at Norland Place on Holland Park Avenue. Many mornings Ellis walked them the mile or so from Pembridge Place to the school which was — and still is — situated in a row of small four-storey houses. Norland Place was unusual for its time in offering coeducation until the age of eleven; after that it taught girls only. For five and a half guineas per term, it gave a good grounding in history, literature and arithmetic. It was a progressive school in that it taught woodworking, called ‘Sloyd’, to girls as well as boys. ‘Sloyd’ was a Swedish method of training children in the practical beauties of wood. Norland also took a unisex approach to sports; both boys and girls were encouraged to play cricket and hockey — sports Rosalind much enjoyed.

  A group photograph was taken on the playing fields in 1926 on the occasion of Norland Place’s golden jubilee. It shows a row of women teachers, many in cloche hats, beaming broadly, while in front, seated on the grass with the smallest pupils, a serious little girl, wearing spectacles, is in no mood for putting on a silly grin and looks straight at the camera with a direct unsmiling gaze.

  Rosalind had a loving mother. In a sense, she had two. Muriel Franklin was a gentle, well-educated, intelligent woman who played (and, some of the wider family felt, over-played) the role of subservient Jewish wife according to the tradition in which woman was synonymous with wife and mother as defined in Proverbs 31:28: ‘Her children stand up and honour her, and her husband sings her praises.’ In that part, Muriel was exemplary. Highly intelligent and able, in later years an accomplished writer, she was denied a university education through her mother’s disapproval. As a married woman she threw herself into charity work under her husband’s direction. She taught her children good manners and the supreme importance of family loyalty. She insisted on respect for grandparents, which meant writing a thank-you letter for every present as soon as it was received; also inquiring about the old people’s health and reporting progress at school. One of Rosalind’s earliest letters reads, ‘Dear Grandma — I got two stars at school.’

  In rearing her large brood and assisting her husband with his myriad charities, Muriel was able to delegate day-to-day authority over the children to a loyal nanny, who came for the first baby and stayed until the last, and long after. For Rosalind, in a life that was in many ways a battle, Ada Griffiths was a source of warmth and refuge. A robust woman from Shropshire, ‘Nannie’ as the children called her (and usually spelled it), like her two sisters, accepted looking after other people’s children as the only career open to her. She had an additional obstacle to overcome: two club feet from which two toes had been amputated. The Franklin children used to watch fascinated while she wrapped her maimed feet in bandages to fit inside her sturdy surgical boots. Muriel and Nannie got on well in their mutually advantageous relationship. To Nannie, a Franklin cousin observed dryly, ‘the five Ellis children were all swans’.

  Nannie found her purpose in life with the generous employers with whom she cast her lot. With her sweet smile, her practical ability to deal with cuts, bruises, tangled hair and sibling squabbles, she was the centre of the Franklin children’s lives.
As one of them later said, ‘Mother was for extras.’

  Nannie was so much part of the family that her birthday, like one of their own, was an occasion to be celebrated and planned for. As Rosalind wrote her grandmother, ‘It is Nannie’s birthday to-morrow and we are all getting excited, Roland has bought her something which was a secret and painted a gourd which she knows about and she does not know he has got anything else.’ When Nannie went home on holiday to visit her family in Church Stretton, Rosalind’s constant plea was ‘When is Nannie coming back? ‘

  Nannie taught Rosalind to knit, to be a perfectionist about her handiwork and to succeed in her intention. Yet even she could favour the boys. Once Rosalind complained that Colin had hit her with a cricket bat and pleaded to Nannie, ‘Do something!’ Nannie’s cheery response was ‘Well dear, you shouldn’t have been teasing him.’

  That Rosalind’s mother should mention this teasing streak in a loving posthumous tribute to her daughter suggests that the trait was quite strong: ‘One recalls a smug, naughty-sounding little voice in the darkened night nursery where, with her still small though older brother — who adored their nanny — she was supposed to be asleep. “Nannie is a dustbin, Nannie is a boiled egg. I’ll take Billy [their canary] and cut him into bits and put him in a sandwich. You wouldn’t like that, would you, David?” She was not quite two years old.’

  All her life, Muriel recalled, ‘Rosalind enjoyed this trick of teasing — but with a burbling, mischievous delight, that, for anyone with a sense of fun, took the sting out of it. Only occasionally when she was vexed for some reason, or in a contrary mood, would the teasing become provocative — a tantalising naughtiness that could be quite maddening.’

  Indeed, Rosalind was a stormy child, easily roused to tears and anger. Her family never persuaded her she had equal treatment with her brothers, particularly with David, the eldest, so close in age that they had shared a double pram. If her family was a little afraid of her, so was she of them. One of her early drawings is captioned in shaky big print: ‘A child being Lifted Up by the Hair’. The child is a girl with brown hair and a yellow patterned dress, yellow socks and black shoes. The woman shown in profile has a spotted green and yellow dress, bright lipstick, a green eye and a red tongue stuck way out. She looks angry. Who was it? Not Nannie. Not Muriel Franklin, who struck those who did not know her well as being timid as a mouse.

  The Franklins were frugal rich. The joint at Saturday lunch was sliced thinly and the leftovers kept for re-serving. Ellis made his wife provide meticulous accounts for the housekeeping, down to the last penny as if home were part of the bank. The children were taught to care for small sums and to pay scrupulous attention to the cost of anything they bought.

  Theirs was hardly boundless wealth. They were well-off rather than very rich. For many years Keyser’s total profits were about £200,000 a year. Grandfather Franklin did live in the grand style: his townhouse, and Chartridge Lodge, his country estate in Buckinghamshire, were modernised by the same architect who added the facade to Buckingham Palace. Unlike his father, however, Ellis Franklin did not want a second home nor a chauffeur. He went by Underground from Notting Hill Gate to Bank. The one indulgence was foreign travel.

  It was a habit acquired from his parents. The Arthur Franklins travelled widely, through the Middle East, Scandinavia, Serbia, France and Italy, all without relaxing their orthodox practices during their travels. They went without meat rather than risk the chance of eating a forbidden food.

  Ellis on his own, after finishing his public school — Clifton College in Bristol — spent a year in Breslau (now Wroclaw in Poland, a city on the Oder between Prague and Warsaw) where there were still family connections. There he studied science and became fluent in German, as a preparation for the scientific career he was not to have. When he returned from Breslau ill, he was sent on a round-the-world sea voyage with his older sister Alice as chaperone. Travel in itself carried responsibilities: long detailed letters home showing what had been gained from it. Ellis’s letters from Australia and New Zealand were kept in the family archive, and probably read aloud. He returned in July 1914, just before war broke out. He enlisted immediately.

  For Rosalind, the exhilaration of foreign travel began early. Her Franklin grandfather had suffered from tuberculosis in 1925 and, with his wife, spent winters at Menton on the French— Italian border. During the second of these Ellis and Muriel took their two oldest children to visit them. Since childhood Ellis had loved riddles and crosswords, and as a father worked to sharpen the minds of his own brood. He turned each stage of the trip — P&O liner to Marseilles via Gibraltar, then train — into an improving game. On the ship he led the children every morning in skipping energetically on the deck, taking care to skip as long and hard as they did. As for the train journey, as Rosalind explained in her prompt thank-you, from the Hotel Splendide, Marseilles (in childish print on paper with hand-drawn lines):

  Dear Grandma,

  Thank you very much for asking us. In the train, we had a game. Daddy put a lot of things — Pen Pencell Ring bag Coin Pen Knife Note book Cigarette case and Papper on a shelf took it off and we had to look and when he put it on again we tried to see who could remember the most things. With love from Rosalind.

  In a later letter, Rosalind reported, ‘They are having a bazaar at the College for which we have started making things even Roland.’ (Roland, the youngest, was four at the time.) ‘The College’, like ‘the Bank’, was a cornerstone of the Franklin children’s existence. The Working Men’s College, a Victorian redbrick institution stretched along Crowndale Road between Regent’s Park and King’s Cross Station, was Ellis Franklin’s favourite charity. Into it he poured his thwarted scientific talents and gave long unpaid hours two or three evenings a week on his way home from the City. He taught electricity, magnetism, and the history of the Great War, and became in succession director of the Science Group, treasurer, and vice principal. As one of its goals was to heal the divisions between the educated and the uneducated, Ellis stayed on for conversation and chess after classes. He rarely reached home before 11.30 p.m. on teaching nights.

  The College was founded in 1854, by Frederick Denison Maurice, a Christian Socialist, to bring together ‘men of the working classes and men from the Universities, in the common object of teaching and learning’. John Ruskin was one of its earliest teachers. After 1917, this ideal encompassed the hope, never spoken aloud, of staving off Bolshevist revolution through befriending and educating the labouring classes before they got hostile ideas.

  The principal in Ellis Franklin’s time was Major-General Sir Frederick Maurice, grandson of the founder. For his part, Ellis used his financial acumen to raise the College’s endowment to an affluence beyond the founder’s dreams. With the help of City friends, he bought and had developed a sports ground for the College in Edgware on the northern outskirts of London. For the children the College’s annual sports day was second only to Christmas and Jewish religious holidays as a command performance for which they were expected to do their best — not least by making sandwiches. However, Ellis agreed with the governing body that women would not fit into the life of the College. Accordingly, no women — not even Muriel Franklin, who had volunteered to dust the books — were allowed in the College Library.

  There was a role, however, for the pretty three-year-old daughter of the vice principal. In 1923 Rosalind was chosen to present a bouquet of carnations to the Duchess of York at the opening of the annual bazaar. The Duchess (later Queen Elizabeth and still later, the Queen Mother) complimented the College on its eighty voluntary teachers and one thousand new students united in their endeavour ‘to give the working man of London a chance of entering into real college life, and to bring all classes together in pursuit of education’. For the occasion, Rosalind wore a beautiful lace-trimmed dress and had her shiny black hair wellbrushed. Her intense interest in her clothes was already manifest when (as her mother recalled) at the same age she tore a frock because it had
no ‘ribbings’ in it.

  Rosalind’s childhood, therefore, was spent in a settled world of nursery, school, park, pets, pantomimes, birthday parties, holidays, sports days and country weekends at grandfather’s. In 1929 it all changed. A new baby was on the way.

  Dear Mummy and Daddy,

  Please tell Roland we had jam pudding the other day. It is lucky Miss Falckes Lesson [the Franklin children’s Hebrew teacher] did not come as they did not go to church. The first few nights we were five in the dormatory but I have been moved and now we are only four. The oldest in the room is twelve . . . We go to bed at quarter to seven. There are 10 in my form, I am the youngest, it is the second form.

  The bracing air of the Channel coast was the family’s reason for sending Rosalind, at the age of nine, to boarding school. But her dispatch from the family nest and the comforting care of Nannie coincided with the arrival of the new baby. The Franklins’ fifth child and second daughter, Jenifer, was born on 5 November 1929, a welcome break in the wall of brothers which surrounded Rosalind. The school Ellis and Muriel Franklin chose for their now-elder daughter was at Bexhill on the Sussex coast, an area crammed with hotels, boarding schools and golf courses, in the belief, not groundless, that the seaside offered a healthier environment than the smoke and coal fires of London. David, the eldest boy, was at school nearby and the parents persuaded themselves that Rosalind, who had had several childhood illnesses followed by periods of forced rest, was frail and needed the change.