by Andrew Brown
Bernal’s membership of the CPGB lapsed around the time that he returned to Cambridge in 1927, and apparently was not renewed until prompted by one of his many lovers, Magda Phillips, in 1933.20 The lack of a Party card meant little, and in June 1931 it seems that Sage was at least an interested bystander when a communist cell was established at Trinity College.21 The lead was taken by David Guest and his fellow philosophy student, Maurice Cornforth; apart from holding meetings in the College, the two sought to recruit workers from the town into communist cells. The Master of Trinity, J.J. Thomson, then in his 75th year, was fully aware that the world was changing, but was far too involved with trying to keep up with the latest discoveries at the Cavendish Laboratory and thinking about his memoirs to be concerned with a few idealistic students starting a Bolshevik club. Guest’s tutor at Trinity showed a humorous indulgence of Guest’s politics when he wrote to congratulate him on his brilliant first-class honours degree: ‘I suppose you will celebrate your success in the usual way by attacking the “lackeys of the Bourgeoisie”, and being locked up for it.’22
Public criticism of the Soviet system was generally muted in those days. Winston Churchill would occasionally flare with a grandiloquent warning of the dangers of communism, and the rabid Fleet Street attacks from the Daily Mail and the Morning Post were all easily dismissed by Bernal as ‘mendacious accounts’23 of the great Russian experiment. Far more common, at least amongst progressive thinkers, was a fair-minded attitude to give the new system the benefit of the doubt, and in many cases a determination to see for oneself by making a visit to Russia. Such was the outlook of many readers of the Manchester Guardian, whose science correspondent, J.G. Crowther, was a communist and member of the Tots and Quots. In the summer of 1931, Crowther organized two short visits through the auspices of the Society for Cultural Relations. The majority of Crowther’s tourists were physicians, but there were also about twenty scientists. Bernal’s name appears in both the July and August lists, although his papers give details only about the second trip. The July visit was recorded by the zoologist, Julian Huxley, who went along with his wife and his brother, Aldous. Julian Huxley explained that it was necessary for the visitor to Russia ‘to discard some of his bourgeois ideas about democracy, religion, and traditional morality, his romantic individualism, his class feelings, his judgements of what constitutes success, and pick up what he can of the atmosphere in which the Russians live immersed’.24
Huxley regarded Russia as being in ‘a transition between a mediaeval past and a communist future’25 and as functioning like a nation on a war footing. He tried to go beyond the restraints imposed by the careful hospitality of the officials and consequently observed the overcrowded living conditions and food queues in Moscow. But on the whole, he believed ‘the level of physique and general health rather above that to be seen in England’.26 Although some of the surgeons in the party were shocked to witness women undergoing abortions at the official clinic in Moscow with no anaesthesia, Huxley was convinced by the official statistics that health care was steadily improving. Like Bernal, Huxley thought that Britain cared little for science, whereas it was the essential ingredient of Stalin’s plan; he believed that the Soviet authorities were ‘preparing to increase expenditure on pure scientific research to a scale far beyond that attempted in any capitalist country’.27 The head of the British Embassy in Leningrad, Reader Bullard, who was becoming all too aware of the grinding repressions of Stalin’s regime, wrote in his diary on 26th July 1931: ‘A party of English doctors and scientists passed through – mostly much impressed by what they had seen, and as they had been taken to all the show-places and nothing else this is perhaps not remarkable.’28
The second group eagerly set sail from England on 8th August, and was dominated by Cambridge scientists. During the visit, Crowther became aware of ‘the uniformity of outlook of Cambridge scientists, in spite of wide variations in personality and political beliefs’.29 In addition to Sage, there were John Cockcroft and a young Canadian, W.L. Webster, from the Cavendish; the Piries (Bill and his wife, ‘Tony’), both biochemists from the Dunn Laboratory, and Glenn Millikan. The voyage to Leningrad took five days; the anticipation of arriving in the promised land overcame any disappointment at the cramped, unsanitary conditions on the boat. Malcolm Muggeridge, another Manchester Guardian journalist, made the same voyage the following year in the company of a group of academics and writers. He was struck by the festive mood on board ship and sensed that each of his fellow passengers harboured some special hope like ‘meeting Stalin, or alternatively falling in with a Komsomolka, sparkling eyed, red scarf and jet black hair dancing the carmagnole’.30
Soon after arriving, Sage and his party met up with Academician Nikolai Vavilov, who of course had just been in England at the History of Science Congress. Vavilov, then in his mid-forties, was President of the Lenin Academy of Agriculture. He spoke excellent English, as a result of working with W. Bateson in England before the Great War, and was one of the world’s most knowledgeable botanists and plant geneticists. Although his family background was distinctly bourgeois (his father had been a successful merchant in Moscow before the Revolution), Vavilov had come to embrace the socialist model of scientific research. At his Institute’s field station twenty miles outside the city, there were large-scale trials in progress. These were aimed at improving the efficiency of Soviet agriculture by studying which of the huge collection of grains that he had collected from all over the globe would be best suited to grow in the climactically varying regions of the Soviet Union, and whether rice could be sown from airplanes. Vavilov’s smiling, open manner, his extensive travels through Central Europe and the Americas, and of course his family background, all made him a target of suspicion under the dour Soviet regime. Earlier in 1931, he had been publicly denounced by a jealous subordinate, who accused him of the Marxist sin of ‘a reactionary separation of theory and practice and advised him to stop collecting exotica and to concentrate on plants that could be introduced directly into farm production’.31 While he survived this unwarranted attack with little consequence, there would be far worse to follow.
The three-day programme in Leningrad was packed. Apart from Vavilov’s Institute, the group also went to the Pavlov Laboratory, met the President of the Academy of Science, A.P. Karpinsky, and spent a morning touring the geology, mineralogy and zoology museums, before going to the Hermitage Museum for the afternoon. Sage was in his element as the unofficial guide at all sites. They took the night express train to Moscow, and it may have been on this journey that Millikan awoke to find that his rucksack had disappeared. He found the guard and together they searched the entire train, rousing unappreciative passengers from their sleep. There was no sign of the rucksack, but Millikan was not inclined to accept his loss philosophically. He announced, to the amusement of his companions, that ‘if it is not in the train it must be on the train’.32 Not to be outdone, Millikan, a keen mountaineer, then climbed out of a window on to the roof of the speeding express and found the rucksack, together with a certain amount of other stolen property, tied to the ventilator on the carriage roof. Sage marvelled at Millikan’s sense of adventure and his blithe ability to pull off unlikely stunts – when they got to Moscow, he managed to get into the Kremlin without a pass.
Bernal recalled that Millikan was ‘very difficult to keep under control and would wander off on his own, but then would always turn up at the critical moment’.33 Bill Pirie, on the other hand, remembered that Bernal disappeared on his own private tour of Kiev and only rejoined his companions many hours later. They asked him what he had been up to, and ‘he replied that he had been meditating in Kiev Cathedral on the meaning of socialism’.34 Crowther’s July party had been a more orderly group and were given VIP treatment during their stay in Moscow. On behalf of the Soviet Government, Bukharin hosted a sumptuous banquet for them at the Dynamo Sports Stadium, ‘where the most lavish variety and quantity of food any of us had ever seen was piled up’ and they were ente
rtained by the massed band of the OGPU (secret police), whose ‘soft music… floated to us on the warm evening air’.35 The authorities did not repeat this level of hospitality for the August visitors – perhaps there was not enough food left in Moscow or the OGPU foot-soldiers had less pleasant duties to undertake. By travelling hard, the August group saw more of the country, and it certainly made an indelible impression on Sage:
I went round the Soviet Union in those rough, primitive and casual days when one saw very much of the difficulties as well as of [the] achievements. I saw the construction camps for the Dneiper dam, and at the same time saw something of the hard times that were produced in the period of early collectivization – a consequence of the concentration of all efforts for the building of heavy industry, very remote from immediate enjoyments… And yet there was no mistaking the sense of purpose and achievement in the Soviet Union in those days of trial. It was grim but great. Our hardships in England were less; theirs were deliberate and undergone in an assurance of building a better future. Their hardships were compensated by a reasonable hope.36
To Pirie, there seemed to be a religiose quality to Bernal’s belief in the Soviet system.37
No doubt Eileen Bernal would have liked to visit Russia with her husband that summer. It was not practical for her to go because she now had two young children – a second son Egan was born in March 1930. It was also a time when Sage’s personal life was more complicated than usual. He was having a passionate affair with his American cousin, Persis, and also trying to support his ex-lover, Ivy, who had contracted tuberculosis and was admitted to a sanatorium.38 The start of a new academic year at Cambridge helped to restrict his activities to a more manageable level again. He had completed the analysis of oestrin crystals immediately before the International Congress at the end of June and now took up work on the sterol problem again. In October 1931, Bernal addressed the Kapitza Club on ‘Methods of x-ray crystal analysis’, and his audience would have included fellow members Blackett, Cockcroft, Dirac, Fowler, Gray, Kapitza, Massey, Mott, Oliphant, Snow, Walton and Wooster amongst others.39 By attending these informal evening seminars at Trinity College, Bernal could keep himself abreast of all the latest advances in nuclear and theoretical physics: the 1931–2 session was destined to be the most dramatic in the Club’s history, largely because of research coming to fruition at the Cavendish. In February 1932, Chadwick announced his discovery of the neutron to a spellbound group in Kapitza’s rooms, and Cockcroft followed in June with news of the first disintegration of an atomic nucleus by artificially accelerated particles.
About the time that Bernal returned from Russia in August 1931, the Labour Government found itself facing unacceptable cuts in public expenditure in order to stem the sterling crisis. Over a few days, Prime Minister MacDonald was persuaded to form a Government of National Unity, with Conservative and Liberal politicians displacing the socialists from the Cabinet. For this betrayal, he was despised by the Left, but in a General Election that followed in October, the coalition candidates swept the country with only 46 Labour MPs being returned to Westminster. One MP who lost his seat was John Strachey, a friend of Bernal’s from the 1917 Club, who stood as a communist in all but name and then set about writing his first book on Marxism.40 Strachey was far from alone in believing the Labour Party had grossly betrayed the workers, and it now seemed to many that a fair deal could only be obtained by extra-parliamentary means. The desolation of England’s industrial heartland was caught by the young poet, W.H. Auden:
Smokeless chimneys, damaged bridges, rotting wharves and choked canals,
Tramlines buckled, smashed trucks lying on their side across the rails;
Power-stations locked, deserted, since they drew the boiler fires;
Pylons fallen or subsiding, trailing dead high-tension wires…41
The sense of the coming class struggle was most keenly anticipated amongst the comfortable intelligentsia rather than by the downtrodden unemployed. Recruitment to the Communist Party swelled in Cambridge, thanks especially to the efforts of Guest and Cornforth. A series of plentiful harvests in the early 1930s gathered in Burgess, Philby, Maclean and May, all destined to achieve notoriety as spies, as well as many other men of true conscience. David Guest made a commitment unique amongst the British intellectuals – he took a teaching job in Moscow. He left behind him a flourishing organization in Cambridge, and his natural successor, John Cornford, appeared at Trinity College as a history scholar that autumn. Cornford, the son of a classics don and great-grandson of Charles Darwin, was a tall, gaunt, curly-headed fire-brand, who within weeks of his arrival was a contender for ‘the title of Cambridge’s best-known revolutionary’.42
In January 1933, Adolf Hitler was invited to become Chancellor of Germany and lost no time in consolidating power by suppressing any potential opposition to his Nazi Party. Prominent amongst Hitler’s internal foes were the socialists and communists, and their comrades in Britain now had another powerful reason to believe in the necessity of their cause. That winter, Bernal, in an annotated piece ‘The scientist and the world today’43 sounded a clear alarm about the immediate dangers posed by the Nazi regime. He was especially concerned about the prospect of war and the passive acquiescence of scientists in national preparations for war, as well as the threat to the tradition of liberalism. In his view ‘as most of the practical expressions of liberalism in human welfare and education are due to the influence of science, those most affected after the immediate victims are the scientists who see the efforts of centuries purposely destroyed.’ He saw the doctrine of anti-Semitism as a direct threat to science and intellectual life. To Bernal, fascism seemed a pathological reaction to the chronic instability and impending failure of capitalism: salvation lay in the example of the USSR – the only nation showing both economic and cultural progress. He held up the USSR as providing ‘the antithesis to the whole catalogue of cultural reaction represented by Fascism. In science, in education, in religion, in the family, in the prisons, the USSR gives practical embodiment to the progressive ideas of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Communists are the heirs and the only defenders of the liberal tradition.’44
Although Bernal did not actively recruit young people to the cause in the way that student leaders like Guest and Cornford did, he was a notable figure on the University scene; his 1933 warning of the dangers of fascism was printed in the pamphlet Cambridge Left, a local staple of fenland intellectuals on their way to man the barricades. According to the historian, Herbert Butterfield, Bernal managed to influence ‘hundreds of undergraduates’ while ‘showing a cavalier disregard for ascertainable historical facts’.45 In his wide-ranging piece for Cambridge Left, Bernal had attacked organized religion for ‘showing its compatibility with fascism’ and the law for its ‘hypocrisy of impartial justice’. He was proposing a classless community free from inequalities and cultural superstitions. Whatever the influence of his writings and speeches, Sage’s brazen promiscuity was slyly regarded by many young men as an encouraging foretaste of life in the classless society. The lean and handsome John Cornford did not share Bernal’s penchant for affairs with more than one woman at a time and felt a little embarrassed by his own conventional attitude, jokingly describing himself as ‘a monopoly capitalist in love if not in politics.’46 Others like Blunt and Burgess, whose homosexual activities were illegal, surely regarded Sage’s free and easy sexuality as an example that they could happily follow after the revolution.
London’s Izvestiya correspondent had reported to Moscow after the 1931 Congress that ‘it provided tremendous impetus [to] study dialectical materialism… among growing generation [of] scientific workers’:47 this opinion was confirmed by the publication of Aspects of Dialectical Materialism48 three years later. The book was a collection of talks given under the auspices of the Society for Cultural Relations; the first in the series was by Hyman Levy, an applied mathematician at Imperial College, London and longtime member of the 1917 Club, who once memorabl
y described his friend Sage as ‘that sink of ubiquity’.49 Levy made a rather circumspect beginning, contrasting the precise language in which he conducted his academic work with ‘the vague phraseology of much that passes for philosophy’ and in particular with ‘the terminology of Dialectical Materialism, with its “unity of opposites”, its “contradiction of contradictions”, its “quantity changing into quality”, and so on’.50 Indeed it was only because ‘certain individuals, for whose intellectual capacity and integrity’ Levy held a ‘profound regard’ and who ‘appear to have satisfied themselves of the validity of it all that I have personally striven to overcome my initial abhorrence of the language’.
The identity of one of those individuals is clear from the longest and most strident essay in the book. Bernal’s contribution has an uncharacteristically forceful opening paragraph:
Dialectical Materialism is the most powerful factor in the thought and action of the present day. Even its most bitter enemies are forced to recognize its analysis and ape its methods. It is all the more essential that it should be correctly understood by all those who want to play a conscious part in the world and not be carried away by events they can neither understand nor control.51
Bernal took the orthodox Marxist position that Dialectical Materialism (DM) is more than a philosophy, it is also a blueprint for revolutionary politics: ‘from the dialectical point of view thought and action form an inseparable unity.’ The central idea in DM, Bernal stated, was that of transformation both in the physical and social universe and how transformations can be brought about. He considered some of the concepts such as ‘the unity of opposites’ and ‘the change from quantity and quality’ that bothered Levy and assured his audience that they were ‘from the Marxist point of view, universal modes of behaviour of matter, modes of the same generality as the conservation of energy’.52 This was all too much for Michael Oakeshott, the conservative philosopher of Gonville and Caius College, who accused Bernal of a ‘primitive passion for analogy [that was] almost unchecked and the result is a mystical and esoteric philosophy which can be paralleled perhaps only in the writing of the alchemists’.53 Where Bernal tried to make the case that DM ‘cuts away at one blow the whole set of idealistic, mythological, and mystical views of the universe that are expressed in all religions and all other philosophies’,54 Oakeshott observed acidly that among its followers ‘DM is like a theology turned into a gospel and a gospel turned into a dogma.’55
