by Andrew Brown
Bernal’s fame was burnished in the summer of 1934 by the publication of a novel, The Search, by C.P. Snow. The narrator of the story is engaged in X-ray crystallography research at Cambridge, and Bernal appears in the guise of Constantine, ‘the most original, the wildest mind in England’.56 While the book makes the standard disclaimer that all the characters are drawn from the author’s imagination, the descriptions of Constantine bear more than a coincidental resemblance to Sage. After Constantine treated the narrator to a disquisition on sanitation in ancient civilizations, he feels magnified by Constantine’s assumption that they were equally knowledgeable on the subject. And when describing his revolutionary discoveries about proteins, Constantine is ‘inexhaustible, full of facts and speculations… happy, exuberantly at home, overflowing with a sort of scientific wit’.57 Constantine makes a fundamental discovery – a method for synthesizing proteins – and is a member of a Royal Society committee looking into the possibility of a National Institute for Biophysical Research. At the first committee meeting, he makes a plea for a purpose-built Institute with multi-disciplinary teams of scientists. Surrounded by staid academic figures, Constantine, throwing back his unruly hair, launches into a passionate, undiplomatic, argument for the rejection of a traditional university model ‘which will keep our scientific organisation mediaeval’. To him the universities are: ‘Accidental agglomerations for the study of Christian theology with Latin and Greek appended. And they didn’t even do that well. And in their later days, they called what they had been doing humanism – which meant that it was chittered up with superstitions and religion and morals and social barriers, and that they lived monastically while they were doing it and added on a little science as patronisingly as they dared.’58
In the autumn of 1934, Bernal was invited to the USSR to give a series of lectures. He decided to go with his new lover, Margaret Gardiner, who thought it would be a good opportunity to see the November celebrations in Red Square. A spirited and perceptive young woman, Gardiner had been introduced to Sage at a party in London. During their first conversation she said to him: ‘Everybody tells me that you’re so wonderful and so intelligent, and I haven’t noticed it yet.’59 He replied, ‘That’s because you don’t really know me.’ Their relationship did not develop immediately because she was in love with Solly Zuckerman, but in 1933 decided not to follow him to the United States, and at some point her friendship with Bernal melted into a love affair. Her father was a well-known Egyptologist and she had private means, which allowed her to pursue her interests in a spontaneous fashion. After graduating from Cambridge in the mid-1920s, where she was a regular member of the Heretics and friendly with Ivor Montagu and Patrick Blackett, she taught for a time in a village school. She met and became a close friend of W.H. Auden, and although not overtly political, her sensibilities led her towards the Left, and she was always concerned for those less fortunate than herself.
So on a blustery grey morning, Margaret Gardiner found herself anxiously looking down from the deck of a dowdy Russian ship at Tilbury docks as the crew pulled up the gangway. Standing on the quayside below was Bernal ‘wild-haired and shouting to me against the wind. “I haven’t got my visa”, he yelled. “They haven’t given me a visa… I’ll fly out as soon as I can.”’60 It was a remarkable reflection of Gardiner’s self-confidence and generous nature that she neither asked to get off the ship nor blamed Sage for the muddle. Instead she got to know her fellow passengers (mostly from a trade-union delegation, ‘excited at the prospect of visiting the workers’ paradise’) and settled down to a routine of caviar for breakfast every morning, followed by a bitterly cold walk on deck. On her arrival at the Intourist hotel in Leningrad, she was greeted by Peter Kapitza, who was disappointed but not surprised by Sage’s non-arrival. A few weeks earlier, Kapitza, who had been making his annual summer visit to Russia to see his mother, was refused an exit visa by the authorities so that he could not return to Cambridge. The Soviets had decided that he was too important a scientist not to have under their direct control. Kapitza was outraged by the decision and told Gardiner that he felt ‘like a woman who has been raped when she would have given herself for love’.61
Bernal arrived in Moscow in time for the November celebrations, which he and Margaret watched from their hotel. She was bored by ‘column after marching column, gun carriages, tanks, all the grisly paraphernalia of power and war, with that row of grey men sitting there hour after hour to take the salute and acknowledge the applause’.62 Gardiner managed to have her visa extended, and she and Bernal moved into a hostel for visiting university teachers. The weather was as cold as any Muscovites could remember, but while Bernal was lecturing, Gardiner would risk frostbite while wandering the streets to watch the people. Her ‘general impression was drab, a pervasive sort of shabby greyness: people wrapped shapelessly in their padded jackets and heavy fur coats, shops poorly stocked with goods of poor quality, long queues quickly forming when anything new appeared. Nevertheless, there was a feeling of hope.’63 She was a good linguist and was able to talk to ordinary members of the public, she thought, without being watched. She encountered a depth and breadth of bureaucracy that were in striking contrast to the happy-go-lucky tendencies of the Russian character.
Gardiner and Bernal were often invited to the Moscow flat of Ivy Litvinov, the English-born wife of Maxim Litvinov, Stalin’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs. The Commissar, it seems, was determined not to meet the British visitors: they were never invited when he was in residence, and although he did once come home while they were there, he turned and fled as soon as he saw them. Maxim Litvinov was a leading Bolshevik revolutionary from the opening decade of the century, when, like so many, he was exiled from his Russian homeland. He came to London in 1908 and was adopted by the Fabians of the Bloomsbury set (which is likely where he first met Ivy). They married in London in 1916 and, after the Revolution, he became Lenin’s envoy in London. Ivy, who was ten years Bernal’s senior, was an affectionate woman who was ‘unfaithful almost on principle’.64 Sage had enjoyed her faithless favours during the summer of 1924, when she had been in England without Maxim, and their affair may have been briefly rekindled when he was in Moscow in 1931. Ivy now accepted that she had no further claim to Sage and was very friendly towards Margaret Gardiner. The Litvinovs had a sixteen-year-old daughter, Tanya, dark and demure, who delighted in talking to Sage about history. One weekend, when Maxim was away, they went to the family’s dacha outside Moscow. While walking through the countryside, Sage spotted a tall building, standing on its own. He asked Tanya what it was, and she replied that it had been built by a rich landowner whose wife had borne seven daughters in succession. The landowner longed for a son and had built this tower so that on the arrival of each new daughter, he seized her in fury, climbed to the top of the tower an flung the baby off. Desmond, utterly convinced of the wickedness of the Tsarist landowners, was mortified and took some moments to realize that Tanya was pulling his leg. The tower was, in fact, a granary.65
Sage’s gullibility again became apparent to Gardiner when they reached Leningrad, where he was to give some lectures in December. While the city looked splendid in the snow, Gardiner thought the grandiose socialist statues threatened to disfigure the landscape, and in particular she ‘disliked the ubiquitous, inescapable, huge portraits of Stalin’.66 She confessed to Sage that she hated Stalin because he had such a horrible face; Sage mildly rebuked her for her irrationality and observed that ‘It’s just a nice, simple Georgian peasant face.’ On the morning of 2nd December, Bernal went off to the university to lecture and Gardiner took her customary walk. She was immediately aware of something different – the posters of Stalin in the shop windows had been replaced by portraits of a different man, surrounded by black ribbon and laurel leaves. The whole city seemed hushed, and the few people on the streets were wearing black armbands. Gardiner asked a shopkeeper what was going on, and he told her that Kirov had been assassinated. She met Bernal for lunch and he explained
that Kirov was the Party leader in Leningrad and a member of the Politburo. She remembers Bernal being very perturbed. Later in the day, she told Sage that there were strong rumours that the killing had been ordered by Stalin because Kirov was too popular. Bernal dismissed this idea as malicious gossip.
Bernal and Gardiner returned to Moscow, where Kirov’s body lay in state for three days before a lavish funeral that seemed to plunge the whole city into mourning. Tanya Litvinov was distressed and told her mother that several older boys at her school had stopped attending; no one dared ask what had happened to them. To Gardiner there seemed to be ‘caution and unease on every side’.67 She asked Bernal: ‘Isn’t it horrible? Don’t you feel it?’ He answered ‘No I don’t.’ Sage took a train to Vienna, where he had a conference to attend. Gardiner remained in Moscow for another few weeks, and nothing changed her impression that the nascent optimism of Russia had been snuffed out with Kirov’s life, to be replaced by a heavy pall of suspicion and fear.
7
The Shadow of the Hawk’s Wings
About the time Hitler was grasping control of Germany in 1933, students in an Oxford Union debate passed what Churchill later described as ‘their ever-shameful resolution’ that ‘This House refuses in any circumstances to fight for King and Country.’ Yet those Oxford undergraduates were more in tune with the national mood than was Churchill, a brooding backbencher. Peace and national security were not seen by most as mutually exclusive goals, and there was no appetite for militarism in a country still trying to expunge the raw memories of the previous war. The Prime Minister himself was putting the final touches to ‘The MacDonald Plan’ to be presented to the Geneva Disarmament Conference. There was a widespread feeling, artfully exploited by the Nazi Party, that the Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919 had been unfair to the extent that it was now threatening the stability of Europe, and that the restitution of equal rights to Germany would enhance the prospects of security for all nations. To this end, Ramsay MacDonald proposed, amongst other measures, that the deliberate imbalance between the French and German militaries should be removed by reductions in the size and firepower of the French Army and Air Force. Churchill had just visited Germany and was distressed by what he saw there: ‘the tumultuous insurgence of ferocity and war spirit, the pitiless ill-treatment of minorities, the denial of the normal protections of civilised society, the persecution of large numbers of individuals solely on the grounds of race.’ He reminded parliament in March 1933 that they should ‘Thank God for the French Army.’1 This heartfelt and reasoned plea was greeted with ‘looks of pain and aversion’ in all parts of the House.
If Churchill could not convince more than a handful of his cronies that a strong French Army was the best guarantor of a belt of small countries stretching from the Balkans to Belgium, and that parity between the French and German Armies would increase the risk of a general European war, it is not surprising that he was regarded as a baleful figure by those seeking peaceful coexistence. Even Ramsay MacDonald, the unspeakable traitor of socialism, could see that disarmament was essential. Aside from any political considerations, the moral imperative for avoiding war was unanswerable and had been powerfully restated a decade after the end of the Great War by the publication of books like All Quiet on the Western Front, Goodbye to All That and Journey’s End.
While Oxford students grabbed the headlines with their ostentatious debate, Cambridge scientists were quietly forming grassroots organizations. The first of these was the Cambridge Anti-War Council, set up with the encouragement of the Communist Party (CPGB) in 1932. Membership was not confined to communists and its first public meeting was chaired by Joseph Needham, a devout Christian and loyal supporter of the Labour Party. The Cambridge pacifists soon moved beyond debate and pamphlet distribution, staging a public demonstration on Armistice Day in November 1933. They marched in the procession to the town War Memorial, where they were planning to lay a wreath, ‘To the Victims of a War They Did Not Make, from Those Who are Determined to Prevent All Similar Crimes of Imperialism.’ One of the marchers was Eric Burhop, who had recently arrived from Australia on an Exhibition of 1851 Scholarship, and was just starting research in physics at the Cavendish Laboratory. Burhop, the son of two Salvation Army officers, wore a lapel badge which read ‘Christ Claims You for Peace’. The procession was waylaid by a group of Conservative students, ‘fascists… [who] attacked and seized the banner’. Burhop, tall and well built, had his Sunday-best suit spoiled by eggs and tomatoes, and was then insulted by the coverage in the evening paper under the headline: ‘Hooligans at Cambridge’. On reading the article, Burhop discovered that ‘we were the hooligans, and not the fascists who had attacked us. I think this was the first thing that brought home the realities of the political situation… in Great Britain.’2 From that day, Burhop was committed to the socialist cause. Nearly forty years later, he still described the students who disrupted the march as fascists – it never seemed to occur to him that some of them probably lost fathers or uncles in the First World War and that many of them subsequently fought against Hitler – so deep were the impressions formed as a young man in 1933.
Burhop was readily convinced by Bernal’s argument that fascism was a symptom of the failure of capitalism, and for the first time he stopped to consider what the social responsibilities of a scientist should include. In his wide-ranging polemic, ‘The scientist and the world today’,3 Bernal pointed out that scientists could exert a powerful influence in modern states only by organizing into cohesive groups. He saw the opportunity to display their implacable opposition to war and fascism as the rallying cry around which scientists could unite. Sage quickly emerged as the movement’s most important strategist.
Prior to 1933, there was no general issue on which scientists could campaign, and trade union entities such as the Association of Scientific Workers (AScW) were poorly supported. With such a preponderance of left-wing scientists, the Dunn and Cavendish Laboratories were the perfect recruiting grounds, providing the AScW with a rush of new members to replace those lost in other parts of the country. Bernal, Wooster and Pirie became prominent local organizers of the Association’s liveliest branch. They were fortunate that Hopkins, the head of the Dunn Laboratory and President of the Royal Society, was using his status to promote closer contact between science and society at large, and the editor of Nature, Sir Richard Gregory, was a long term supporter of increasing state funding for scientific research.4 This confluence of forces resulted in a Nature editorial at the end of 1933 announcing the setting up of the Parliamentary Science Committee. In the words of the editorial, the aims and aspirations of the Committee were
to promote discussions in both Houses of Parliament on scientific matters in their application to economic policy and national well-being; to arrange periodical addresses by scientific authorities to the chief Parliamentary committees and groups; to consider Bills before Parliament which involve the application of scientific method; and to urge the proper representation of science on public committees… In the very forefront of the programme will be the modernisation of the system of financing scientific research, with the view of ensuring that State aid to science should either take the form of block grants or outright endowment. It is felt that the present system of fluctuation in annual grants alternating between foresighted vision and nervous gusts of parsimony must be relegated to the limbo of oblivion if wise and prudent progress is to characterise national policy.5
Realizing that the AScW could now become a significant force in the shaping of national science policy and could also serve as a means to imprint socialist philosophy on British scientists in the universities and in industry, Bernal stood, successfully, for election to the National Executive. What had been until recently a moribund body was revitalized by his arrival; within two years he had rewritten the AScW’s policies and had engineered the appointment of the dogmatic Peter Wooster as its Honorary General Secretary.6
Wooster, with his wife Nora, was also the organizer o
f the Cambridge Scientists Anti-War Group, (CSAWG), which met most lunchtimes in a basement room on King’s Parade. Sage was an irregular presence, but would always energize the small group on the days he attended. Although he saw war as the worst perversion of science, he thought there was a dangerous tendency ‘to deplore war while admitting its inevitability and doing nothing to prevent it’.7 In his opinion, scientists could play a role by obstructing the material preparations for war – refusing to undertake any research on armaments – but what was required ultimately to remove the antecedents of war was opposition to ‘the state, particularly one’s own state, in so far as it is an organ for war’.8 Sensing the depth of pacifist feeling in the country in 1934, the British Government introduced the Incitement to Disaffection Bill. This prompted letters to the News Chronicle and Cambridge Review from the CSAWG, protesting that the Bill threatened to restrict their civil liberties by hindering them from dissuading fellow scientists from conducting research for the military. The letters were signed by 79 faculty members, researchers and post-graduate students, representing nearly 40% of the combined staff of the Cavendish and Dunn and about 10% of the pure scientists from other laboratories.9 Another vigorous letter-writing campaign was undertaken by CSAWG in October 1935, urging the University to refuse a gift from Sir John Siddeley, the founder of the Armstrong–Siddeley Company, to fund aeronautical research that could obviously have military applications. This protest came during the same month that Churchill urged the Government to make up for lost ground by making ‘a renewed effort’ to establish air parity with Germany, and the month that the Italian Air Force started to bomb defenceless Abyssinia.
