The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist

by Simon Winchester

  A passion for steam trains was born that moment—a passion for railway locomotion that would underline another of his father’s axioms: “No knowledge is ever wasted or to be despised.” But the hours he spent that day talking to Alfred Blincoe also spawned in Needham an enduring belief that politics based on enlightened ideology could perhaps alleviate the very obvious trials of the laboring classes. It convinced him that he had a moral duty to become party to such ideologies as could help improve the lives of his country’s workingmen.

  Besides, this was 1917—a year that was most decisively marked by the events of the Russian Revolution. The teenage Needham immediately supported the Bolsheviks, and later horrified his father by marching into the family home one winter evening with a friend from Oundle, Frank Chambers, declaring that the Russian communists were “a jolly good thing,” and that the dictatorship of the proletariat was the way of the future. How he came to this view intellectually puzzled him: he had never read any of the Marxists’ classics, and in later years he suggested that his voracious appetite for the works of George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, whom he came to know well, led him to believe in the possibility of a political utopia. Perhaps, he remarked later, his socialism was born more from an emotional response to his encounters with laboring men like Blincoe than from listening to theory or studying radical polemics.

  It was also in 1917 that Needham formally acknowledged his talent and interest in science, and applied to a university with a view to studying medicine and, like his father, becoming a physician. He was accepted quite readily in 1918, and despite being inducted into the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve as an acting sublieutenant—the armed forces were by now critically short of medical personnel and tried to press into service anyone who knew how to tell a tibia from a fibula—he was able, by the great good fortune of the war’s coming to its end in August of that year, to make it into the university in October. He chose Cambridge: it was here that his entire life would undergo a profound and utterly unimaginable change.

  Cambridge University was a quiet, intense place, solemn and depleted at the end of the Great War, but brimming with brains and ambition. And perhaps in no other college was this more true than the one that had readily accepted Needham—the fourteenth-century gem known formally as Gonville and Caius, more generally referred to by its second name only, and that pronounced like the original surname of its second founder, John Keys.

  Needham knew little enough of Caius when he applied. A friend at Oundle, Charles Brook, had opted for the college, and one summer afternoon, while he and Needham were idling in the long grass in the school fields, he had suggested that Needham might profit from going there too—not least because the Master was then a doctor, Hugh Anderson, a specialist in the muscles of the eye, and Needham had thoughts of becoming a doctor himself.

  His first days there were far from inspiring. Most of the rooms were still occupied by staff officers who had been billeted there during the war, their quartermasters apparently having forgotten about them. So Needham was given the only place available—a miserable ground-floor room, C-1, in what was then a most unfashionable college court, Saint Michael’s, in a gloomy new annex across Trinity Street from the principal building.

  As if being consigned to the college’s social Siberia wasn’t bad enough, in November 1918 Needham promptly came down with the flu—becoming one of perhaps 50 million victims of the infamous Spanish influenza epidemic. His college tutors took his infection with the greatest seriousness. One, W. T. Lendrum-Vesey, a somewhat mad minor Irish aristocrat who was a sportsman and classicist, very generously fed the patient grapes—but he tied them to the end of a borrowed walking stick and proffered them through the door in order to avoid approaching Needham’s bed and catching his germs.

  Initially Needham remained the shy and introspective young man he had been at school, given to taking himself for long walks into the wintry countryside, pondering the great questions of science and medicine—and also, more important, the great questions relating to God. His Anglo-Catholic upbringing, half forgotten while he was at Oundle, reasserted itself in Cambridge, and he found it a comforting balm, a means of helping assuage his loneliness.

  He joined a variety of societies that brought him into contact with churchly matters: he belonged to the Sanctae Trinitatis Confraternitas, for example, which organized plainsong recitals in various college chantries; and he became secretary of the Guild of Saint Luke, a body that helped to bring notable scholars to Cambridge to talk to medical students and doctors about the attractions and contradictions of humanistic scholarship. These talks impressed Needham, but not so much by their philosophical scope: he was most impressed, he recalled later, with the vast history of science they covered—with how the astonishing activity of the human mind in ages past had led to so vast an array of scientific experiment, thought, and theory.

  Almost immediately on his arrival, he abandoned his schoolboy ambition of becoming a surgeon. The craft of a “sawbones,” as he called it, was simply too mechanical, too nonintellectual. His first tutor, the great food biologist Sir William Bate Hardy, insisted that he instead learn chemistry. “The future, my boy, lies in atoms and molecules,” Hardy was fond of saying, and he cautioned Needham not to rein himself in by studying merely anatomy and dissection. Since Hardy was so romantic a figure—he was a deep-sea yachtsman of legendary skill and courage, a black-bearded figure with the cut of the jib of an Elizabethan admiral, and almost certainly the model for the heroic Arthur Davies in Erskine Childers’s great spy novel The Riddle of the Sands—and since Needham found chemistry infinitely more absorbing than slicing up frogs and dissecting the knee joints of cadavers, he switched courses.

  Three years later, by dint of a great deal of both work and, he insisted, prayer, he won his degree. He celebrated his success with a poem—one of a number of unfortunate pieces of doggerel he would write on the all too frequent occasions when he felt moved to do so. Some of his limericks and clerihews were mercifully brief; but his celebratory Ode to the Chemical Laboratories of Cambridge, perhaps not the most promising of titles, is longer. It is inconvenient to quote in full, but one stanza will suggest Needham’s style, which some might describe as by Wordsworth out of McGonagall, with nods to Betjeman and Rupert Brooke, had either been writing at the time:

  And so to work: distilling oils by steam

  Titration, or whatever it might be

  Until the hour of four o’clock shall seem

  Convenient for making ourselves free

  Then back in high gear straight down K Parade

  In overcoat and scarf arrayed

  At home, with Robinson of Christ’s, to tea.

  Despite now being armed with a degree, Needham was still somewhat rudderless; and since his father had just died—unexpectedly, at sixty—Needham felt he badly needed a father figure to help him decide on a career. So he turned for advice to a man whom he had met once before, at Oundle, and who was by now the unchallenged reigning monarch of the new science of biochemistry at Cambridge, Frederick Gowland Hopkins—known to all, even when in due course he was given a knighthood (for his part in the discovery of vitamins), as Hoppy.

  Hopkins, who promptly asked the very willing and enthusiastic Needham to come and work with him, would provide him with both intellectual guidance and the benign paternal invigilation he needed. In addition, however, and purely fortuitously, Frederick Hopkins and his remarkable new laboratory in central Cambridge would offer Needham limitless access to one unexpected source of good cheer that would continue to amuse him for the rest of his days—an abundance of clever young women.

  “His place bristles with clever young Jews and talkative women,” remarked one of Hopkins’s colleagues. In those early days the department counted among its most distinguished members Muriel Wheldale and Rose Scott-Moncrieff, who both worked on plant pigments; Marjory Stephenson, who specialized in the chemistry of microbes; Barbara Hopkins (the professor’s daughter), who worked on the metab
olism of the brain; Antoinette Patey, whose field was the biochemistry of the eye; and three Dorothies—Dorothy Foster, whose interests lay in the inner workings of frogs; Dorothy Jordan-Lloyd, a protein chemist; and, most important, considering that she would one day become Joseph Needham’s wife, Dorothy Moyle, who would become a world-famous authority on the chemistry of muscles.1 To all of them, Joseph Needham, the clever, tall, rumpled, amusingly eccentric doctoral student from a smart college and with a reasonably exotic family background, a man who was known for being a chain-smoker, a singer, and no mean dancer, became an object of immediate and studied fascination.

  And as he did, the formerly shy, reserved young man began to blossom. Armed with a qualification and now occupied with a settled calling in the Biochemical Institute, Needham started to make the most of his stature and his studious good looks. As soon as he returned from a stint researching in Freiburg—during which he added a fair fluency in German to the seven other languages (including Polish) that he now spoke with comfort—he seemed to burst with a new enthusiasm and confidence. Moreover, since his father’s death he now had a small annuity, with a sum of £6,500 invested in stocks. His uncle Arthur Needham was helping him look after it and draw its modest dividend income.

  His academic standing began to rise. He was much liked by Hopkins, and was favored from the moment when he joined the team, in short order winning a coveted (and paid) research studentship. His position at the institute then evolved with some speed as he advanced from student to researcher to demonstrator to reader, the last post giving him a respectable salary. Before long he was able to show in both his work and his personal life the truth of an adage that was popular at Cambridge among those who admired and rather envied Hopkins’s close-knit team: “All of Hoppy’s geese,” they said, “turn into swans.”

  Needham eventually acquired a little sports car—the first of a series of vehicles that prompted a keen tinkerer’s interest and led to a lifelong fascination with speed and dash. In due course he bought a most remarkable vehicle, an Armstrong-Siddeley Special tourer, a bright blue six-cylinder monster machine that could thunder through the Cambridgeshire lanes at almost ninety miles per hour. This car, moreover, had quite a pedigree: it had once been owned by Malcolm Campbell, who during the 1920s and 1930s achieved worldwide fame by capturing, repeatedly, the world land speed record—and indeed managing, in a variety of cars all called Blue-Bird, to double it, from 150 to 300 miles per hour, in the ten years between 1925 and 1935.2

  It was also during this time that Needham became an avid follower of what in the 1920s was called, with a somewhat necessary degree of tact, gymnosophy. He became an avid nudist.

  He first embraced nudism when the newly formed and very daring English Gymnosophist Society, its membership hitherto confined to a small claque of metropolitan sophisticates, spread its influence close to Cambridge, to the little Essex town of Wickford, where a highly secretive gathering of East Anglian naturists named themselves the Moonella Group. The members gave each other nicknames, swore not to divulge to outsiders the address of the house and garden where they took their naked ease, and encouraged one another to wear nothing except colorful headbands and sandals, so long as they looked Greek.

  Nudism soon became tolerated to a limited degree in the ancient universities, where most eccentric behavior was excused, just as long as it didn’t frighten the horses. So like his counterparts at Oxford who flung their pink (and all too frequently flabby) bodies into the Cherwell at the site known as Parsons Pleasure, Needham knew he could not only cavort bare in the Moonellas’ garden at Wickford but also swim naked in an informally reserved stretch of the river Cam, conveniently close to the college, more or less whenever he pleased. Charles Darwin’s granddaughter, Gwen Raverat, remembered from her childhood that any gentlewoman passing through this reach in a punt on a hot summer day “unfurled a parasol and, like an ostrich, buried her head in it, and gazed earnestly into the silky depths, until the crisis was past, and the river was decent again.”

  But Needham liked a little more privacy than this. So he would either take the branch-line steam train or cycle to the small village of Stow-cum-Quy, five miles east of the city. Here he could disrobe, and here was the nearest of the cool, limpid, almost motionless watercourses of The Fens, described by Needham quite memorably as a place that brought him bliss. The pool, he would write some twenty years later, was

  surrounded with reeds whose stems are almost white, but bear at the top their long green blades which stream unanimously out in one direction if there is a little wind. If you lie flat on the bank of the diving place and look along the pool you see a picture of the reeds in the best Chinese manner.

  Though now certain of his academic heading, Needham had yet to direct the spiritual side of his life. For two years during this time of apparent flamboyance he seriously considered becoming immersed in a fully organized religion. He went so far as to enroll as a practicing lay brother in an Anglo-Catholic monastic organization, the Oratory of the Good Shepherd; and for a while he tried to follow the strictly disciplined routines of the Oratory House.

  But there was a problem: among the many strictures Needham was obliged to obey was celibacy—a vow that proved far too much for him. And so in 1923, after two full years, he left and returned to worship the deity on his own terms. In doing so—and because his bindings had now been loosed—he found himself allowed, among other things, to develop a keen personal interest in one of his young female fellow researchers in Hoppy’s biochemistry lab—Dorothy Mary Moyle, five years his senior.

  “Dophi” Moyle, as she was generally known—though Needham in his diaries referred to her rather more economically, using just the Greek letter delta—was born into a London family of Quakers. Her father was a senior official in the patent office. After attending a private school in Cheshire run by her aunt, she went to Girton, then still a women’s college at Cambridge, and was soon summoned by Hopkins to work in his biochemical seraglio.

  Her work on the chemistry of muscles—she specialized in the little-understood processes inside the cells of an animal’s muscle whenever it is made to contract3—was very different from Joseph Needham’s research, which involved the processes inside eggs, mostly those of chickens, as they progress toward the moment of hatching. So when the pair met they did not do so for the purposes of comparing notes: their mid-morning coffee-room sessions rarely went beyond the purely social. But she overheard him often enough, and what she heard turned out to be much more intriguing.

  For Needham had suddenly become exceptionally and unexpectedly boisterous. He was now recognized within the department for talking loudly and with wild enthusiasm to all who would listen about the secret mechanics of his calling—especially about the process of cell division, which he saw as a fascinating amalgam of pure science and deep philosophy. He was especially proud of one celebrated experiment that he conducted, in which he placed a morsel of boiled mouse heart into a living human embryo, and watched as it formed what he believed were the beginnings of a second human brain inside the unborn mass. This, he told his fascinated listeners, was science that delved into matters connected with the very origins of life.

  Dorothy Moyle found herself quite swept away by the man. Late in the spring of 1923, he asked her out. They first took coffee and tea together in the cafés on King’s Parade. Then they went bicycling, and as the friendship strengthened and the summer came and the days stretched out and warmed, they went to swim at Quy (though Dorothy shyly kept her clothes on while Joseph plunged in naked). They visited churches and railway stations. (Joseph was still fascinated with railways, and although not a train spotter, collected photographs of engine types and of stations he thought architecturally remarkable.) And during the university vacations they went away together, on trips—they were, after all, graduate students, and not subject to most college rules of decorum and celibacy.

  They first went to Great Cumbrae Island in the Clyde estuary, outside Glasgow. Soon after
that came more ambitious journeys, paid for by grants for the pursuit of biochemical knowledge: the following years they went together to Monterey in California, to the Woods Hole Institute on the south coast of Massachusetts, and to a French marine laboratory in Brittany. Ostensibly they went away to work on matters embryological, and specifically to check on the varying pH of the nurtured fish eggs they found in each of these places. But in fact they spent much of their time talking about their shared interests in Christianity and socialism—and to judge from their rather saucy holiday snapshots, they had adequate time for erotic amusements, too.

  In early 1924 Needham introduced Dorothy to his mother in London, and they then visited her parents in the Devon village of Babbacombe. He proposed to her in midsummer, and they married in the autumn, just before the start of the academic year, choosing Friday, September 13, as the date for the small ceremony, in a deliberate snub to convention and superstition.

  Before the rites they had made it clear to each other and to their friends—though not to their parents—that theirs would be a thoroughly “modern” marriage. Whenever the need seized them they would pursue encounters with others. They would not be hobbled by the tedious, irksome, and thoroughly bourgeois demands of sexual fidelity.

  If they had had a child, all this might have changed. But they were not able to conceive: Joseph’s diary records encounters with Harley Street specialists concerned by his low sperm count, which may have been the reason. Still, they were philosophical about their situation. Having a child, they concluded much later, would have cramped their style—or at least his: from almost the very moment they exchanged vows Joseph began to pursue his erotic enthusiasms with great and unstinting gusto.