by Andrew Brown
Like all Bernal’s ‘wives’, or principal women, Margot had to be forgiving and independent – and she was. She jokingly referred to herself as ‘a genius’s moll’.1 Such were the demands on Bernal’s time, there were often periods when he played his role as father in absentia. Take 1957, the year before Bernal succeeded Joliot-Curie to the presidency of the WPC and dramatically increased his commitment to the peace movement. There were no long trips, but the extent of his foreign travel during the year was extraordinary, even for a scientist of international renown. In April he was in Hungary; during the summer vacation, he attended the Congress of the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) in Montreal in July and the international conference on the origin of life, organized by Oparin in Moscow in August. He was back in Moscow in November 1957 as the guest of honour at a two-day meeting held by the Academy of Sciences to discuss his book Science in History.2 In between those two visits, he had attended the Comenius international meeting in Prague and a WPC committee meeting in Stockholm. He was not just an observer at any of these events, delivering scientific papers at the summer meetings in Montreal and Moscow and long addresses at the others. His travel arrangements were made by Anita Rimel. Klug remembers going into the office one day, when she was on the phone to Helsinki airport (a stop en route to Moscow) saying, ‘The professor will be arriving at Helsinki and please make sure there is some hot soup waiting for him.’3
The day after flying back from Moscow in November, Bernal chaired a day-long meeting at the Royal Society on the physics of water and ice.4 His opening remarks were cogent and expectant, and he displayed an undiminished ability to integrate fresh information in his discussion of a paper read by Dr B.J. Mason, from Blackett’s department at Imperial College. Mason reported how ice crystals grown carefully from supersaturated water vapour at controlled temperatures took on different shapes – plates, needles, hollow prismatic columns – but could not explain the mechanism. The chairman came to his assistance:
If Dr Mason does not venture an explanation of the phenomena of the different morphological forms of ice formed at different temperatures, I will take the risk of putting forward one which, to be honest, I only thought about this morning. If it is right, and I think there should be fairly simple means of testing it, it would apply in general to all crystallizations from the vapour which occur in conditions not far removed from equilibrium …5
Sage went on to expound a thermodynamic approach to the phenomenon (which occurs naturally in snowflake formation), and explained that his hypothesis was based on a paper he had heard on the formation of quartz crystals, at the Montreal IUCr congress that summer. In his closing remarks to a meeting that he clearly enjoyed, he admitted that he was both humble and anxious to push on with research in the face of continued ignorance about the essential properties of the commonest of all liquids, water.
When Sage was at home, he took delight in the company of Jane and her friends. He would return from trips with wonderful presents and a fund of entertaining stories. He was good at assessing children’s interests. When Martin was young, Sage read the whole of H.G. Wells’ Outline of History to him. With Jane, he encouraged her curiosity about natural history, and they would discuss the names and types of plants, animals and birds. Invertebrates were included, and if Jane said ‘Yuk’ when faced with a creepy-crawly, he would tell her, ‘It’s just a question of scale: everything is beautiful if you just get the right scale.’6 At her birthday parties, he would provide the entertainment with science tricks, which were wildly popular with her friends. He would bring home a flask of liquid nitrogen from the lab and freeze a rose, before shattering it with a hammer. He would set fire to steel wool in pure oxygen and tell the audience about Priestley’s dramatic life. For many years, Jane was confident that her father knew everything until she uncovered one or two gaps, such as music. When she was about ten years old, Jane sang in a school production of Noye’s Fludde. Sage came and wept throughout, ‘making noises like a sea-lion’,7 to the distraction of the audience. If they went to a museum, a small crowd would often gather round to hear Sage’s commentary, assuming him to be the curator.
Summer holidays were usually spent in West Cornwall, on the same beaches he had gone to with Mike and Egan in the thirties, and Martin early in the war. The journey from London would involve multiple diversions to see friends, such as Dorothy Hodgkin in Oxford, as well as prehistorical sites – the Rollright stones, Avebury and Stonehenge. His archaeological pastime in Cornwall was to investigate small subterranean passages, known as fogous, that date from the Iron Age. Many fogous would be too small for him to enter, and Jane, inspired by stories of children discovering cave paintings and other art treasures, acted as his willing accomplice.
Any decent holiday spot had to have rocks emerging from the ground. One year, Sage was in Budleigh Salterton, where he was told there was uranium in the rocks.8 While he was taking samples with a hammer and cold chisel, some local boys came along and asked him what he was doing. Instead of shooing them off, he squatted on his haunches, and drawing diagrams with the chisel in the sand, proceeded to give a condensed lecture on radioactivity without using long words or being patronizing. On another holiday in the West Highlands of Scotland, Sage took everyone to a bleak, windswept, road construction site, where an unconformity in the rock strata had just been revealed.9 He scrambled up the cliff to take a closer look, watched by a line of small, cold, children who had been grounded by their mothers.
The Christmas rituals caused Sage some difficulties. On Christmas Eve, he would often go with Margot and Jane to have dinner at Margaret Gardiner’s house in Hampstead. Margaret, by this time, was completely relaxed about her relationship with Sage. She once introduced herself to someone as ‘Mrs Bernal’, to be told that she did not look like the Mrs Bernal the person knew. ‘Oh’, she said, ‘There are hundreds of us.’ Sage’s legal wife, Eileen, was living in rural Suffolk with a female companion, named Foffie; on Christmas afternoon, Sage would drive up to see her, Mike and Egan.
He still retained the flat at Birkbeck, which could be used to arrange a social life in parallel. One Christmastime, Eileen’s presence there saved the lab from serious damage. As Bernal wrote in a letter of complaint: ‘On Boxing Day afternoon, Mrs Bernal, who was fortunately in the building at 21 Torrington Square, noticed water coming down from the second floor occupied by the Chemistry Department Lab.’10 She phoned Stan Lenton, who came in from home and spent five hours locating the leak from a perished rubber waste pipe. In Bernal’s opinion the condition of the Torrington Square houses ‘is approaching one of criminal negligence’. There was danger to a large number of people, and the potential for major scandal since, he thought, the insurers might reject any claim in the event of fire or personal injury. He urged the removal of the chemistry department, and suggested the Master should call an emergency meeting of all heads of department. It was a very cold winter and there were many more leaks from frozen pipes; Lenton became understandably resentful about the amount of time he spent mopping up, and complained to Bernal that ‘the primary cause of flooding is the neglectful and irresponsible methods of the chemistry department and their chaotic water and waste pipes’.11 There was another serious flood in May that ruined papers, an X-ray set and cameras.
When the crystallography group first moved into the Torrington Square houses in 1948, they were meant to provide temporary accommodation for five years or so, until a purpose-built lab materialized. Bernal spent many hours reviewing plans and making suggestions for a new crystallography department, but by the early 1960s the timetable for the lab was perpetually five years late. Yet the mere spectre of a new building meant that the College was extremely reluctant to spend any money repairing Torrington Square. Ever since the appointment of John Lockwood as Master in 1951, Bernal had been petitioning to have crystallography made a separate department from physics. Lockwood was a classicist, who had become an experienced university administrator and also served as the Vice-Chancel
lor of London University during the late 1950s. He was about the same age as Bernal, and the two men shared an interest in the organization of tertiary education in postcolonial Africa. But they did not get on and found themselves on opposite sides in a debate about the future of Birkbeck College. Lockwood favoured ending the tradition of part-time students and thought the College should move to a new site away from central London.12 For once, Sage found himself in the role of the traditionalist. According to College folklore, Lockwood was right-wing, anti-science, and blind to the world-class crystallography department that Bernal had built up.
Even in the late 1950s, many of the crystallography staff were still idealistic about communism and, like Sage, quite open about their political views. He would visit the CPGB headquarters in King Street after returning from trips behind the Iron Curtain, and would also give a lunchtime talk about his experiences to the Birkbeck staff. John Mason, the lab steward, listened to accounts of how good things were in the Soviet Union with distaste.13 Mason had become friendly with Dr Douglas Dakin, the Registrar of Birkbeck, as a result of commuting together on the Underground. He knew that Dakin was anti-communist as a result of his wartime experience with the army intelligence corps in Yugoslavia. In 1961, Britain was rocked by the Portland spy case, when several Russian spies were convicted of stealing secrets from the naval underwater weapons research establishment. This triggered a memory in Mason’s brain from Bernal’s last lunchtime talk on the USSR, when he alluded to some anti-submarine research that he had seen. Wondering whether this could be connected to the Portland material, Mason mentioned it to Dakin. Dakin still had contacts with the intelligence services and arranged a meeting for Mason. It took place in the Lyons teahouse in the Strand, where Mason talked to an anonymous man he presumed to be from MI5. At the end of the rather inconsequential story, the agent just said, ‘So you had a hunch about the submarine work.’14
A few days later, Anita Rimel came into Mason’s room and said, ‘The Professor wants to see you.’ Mason thought this was odd because their rooms were close together and normally Sage would just walk over to speak to him. As soon as he entered the office, he could tell that there was something wrong because Bernal would not look at him, but stared down at his desk. An argument ensued and Mason lost his temper. Bernal said quietly, ‘You can go now’, and never referred to the incident again. Mason was convinced that Bernal had learned of his interview, and that the information must have come from within MI5.
There is no way of knowing whether Dakin communicated any concerns about Bernal to the Master – if he did, it would have hardened Lockwood’s dislike for Sage. Regardless of the antipathy between Sage and the Master, the very success of the physics department created a severe case of academic jealousy amongst the smaller departments (most notably the chemistry department), and this, as much as Lockwood’s influence, thwarted Bernal’s plans.
By 1962, Sage had persuaded the Academic Board to approve the separation of crystallography from physics, but during the summer vacation, the Governors resolved to ask the Academic Board to reconsider this decision. Sage learned of the change, when he returned from the tumultuous World Congress on Disarmament and Peace in Moscow and must have been stunned by the news. He discovered that Professor W.G. Overend of the chemistry department (and Dean of the Science Faculty) had persuaded the Governors to set up an inquiry into the future of X-ray crystallography in teaching and research. Sage wrote to J. Monteath Robertson, Professor of Chemistry in Glasgow and a distinguished crystallographer himself, to explain that Overend was predicting the demise of X-ray crystallography as a separate discipline.
The view expressed here is that whereas it did have some interest twenty years ago, it has now become so much a routine matter that it should be left to appropriate people in the departments of physics, chemistry or geology. Naturally, while I welcome the spread of crystallographers into these departments – I feel no chemistry department is complete without someone who can do a crystal analysis – I do not think this is enough, and more specifically I feel that there should be at least two or three centres in the country which are centres of crystallographic research, where new methods may be developed and new fields opened up.15
Bernal asked for a letter of support, which was quickly forthcoming. Robertson began by saying, ‘I must confess to feeling rather shocked that this matter should be raised at all, or questioned at all, in view of the ever growing importance of the subject.’16 The fact that Robertson had been made President of the Chemical Society was some recognition of the crucial importance of crystallography, he thought. He agreed wholeheartedly with Sage, and believed Birkbeck to be one of the most important centres in the UK. Armed with this letter and others like it, Bernal went on the counteroffensive and pointed out that the separation into two departments had been adopted as official policy for the 1962–67 quinquennium, but not put into practice due to shortage of funds. He thought that it was up to those who now objected to the policy to show cause as to why it should be altered.
A meeting of the Academic Committee was arranged at Birkbeck for 1st November. The opposition was led by Overend and the professor of zoology, W.S. Bullough. During the meeting, Lenton smuggled a note into Sage because he heard on the radio that Perutz and Kendrew had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in recognition of their X-ray analysis of haemoglobin and myoglobin. Despite this piece of intelligence, the outcome was not a clear-cut victory for Bernal. The committee did recommend the establishment of a chair in crystallography within the department of physics, but in order that the situation might be clarified, crystallography should remain with physics until 1967. Bernal and his staff were extremely disappointed by this compromise, which would further delay the establishment of a separate department. The staff registered their grievances with Sage, fearing that the previous ‘lack of active protest against our slum conditions has been taken by the authorities as acquiescence’. Their overriding complaint was ‘the filth and squalor of the buildings 21–22 Torrington Square’. There had been no redecorating since 1955, and they had to cope with dirt, dust, floods, storage of flammable liquids under wooden stairs, and a blocked toilet on the third floor. Given there was no prospect of a new lab before 1966, they suggested that temporary buildings should be erected. In a show of loyalty to Sage they said: ‘Privately, we are resolved to increase the quality and quantity of our research to exhibit our conditions as an even bigger disgrace to the University than they are at present.’17
Sage’s difficulties at Birkbeck prompted him to write a paper on the future of X-ray crystallography that he intended to present at the IUCr congress in Rome the following year.
I have felt for some time that the position of what we have called X-ray crystallography, but might be more correctly called structural diffractometry, or structure determination by diffraction, requires consideration by the Group …Until now, as we all know, progress has depended largely on the accidents of university appointments and on the ability and drive of individuals … the subject had the inestimable advantage of starting in this country with the combined abilities of the Braggs, which gave it a long lease of life, first at the Royal Institution, and Manchester and Cambridge. [They attracted] young men of exceptional enterprise and scientific ability, who were subsequently appointed to chairs of physics and chemistry.18
He warned that the first generation of students of the original masters was now reaching retiring age. There needed to be more concerted effort to establish the subject as a regular part of teaching, not necessarily in all universities, but at least in a sufficient number of them. There was no established chair in crystallography in Britain and there were only two institutions (Cambridge and Birkbeck) that provided regular courses lasting more than a year. But, he wrote, ‘the continuity of both these schools is at the moment threatened’.19
From the time he was a boy at Brookwatson, Sage opted out of the quotidian chores of life. He rarely set foot inside a shop – Margot or Anita bought his cloth
es for him. At Birkbeck or at conferences, he would usually wear a suit with a waistcoat, but preferred an old tweed jacket and baggy flannel trousers. He hated to have his hair cut. Stan Lenton often picked him up from Highgate in the mornings and drove him to Birkbeck. By the early 1960s, Sage’s prewar Austin was showing its age, and Lenton finally persuaded him that he should buy a new car. Sage gave him a bundle of banknotes and told him to choose one. When Lenton asked him what make of car he wanted, Sage replied, ‘I know nothing about cars. I am sure you will know what suits.’20 Francis Aprahamian functioned as his amanuensis for non-technical writing, and Anita Rimel dominated the content of his working day. Jane remembers, as a small child, listening to her father taking a phone call at home from Anita: ‘Yes, Anita.’ ‘No, Anita.’ ‘I am sorry, Anita.’ ‘I will try not to do that again, Anita’ he said apologetically. She turned to her mother and asked, ‘Is Anita Daddy’s teacher?’21 For Anita, he was the Professor and nothing was good enough for him. The scene at Torrington Square in the early 1960s was caught by a writer, who came to interview Sage about his role in planning Overlord.
We sat on two old wooden Windsor chairs, warming our knees before a small, asthmatic gas-fire, which, before the war, cost a few shillings. The floor was covered with old brown linoleum: the surroundings – in a late Georgian private house, requisitioned by the University authorities – far from luxurious. Dr Bernal’s secretary, leading me through the house, along uncarpeted corridors, past open doors, past finger-printed walls of dingy distemper – the air sour with the rank smell of the Student – muttered irritably: ‘Only a little while more. It’s a crying shame they have to ask him to see people – and work – in such surroundings. In a civilized country, they’d see to it that he’d be properly housed.22
