by Andrew Brown
It is particularly hard that the Czechs should have to bear the burden of the occupation and to accept the virtual validity of the doctrine of ‘peaceful counter-revolution’ which they have done so little to further themselves; but the Soviet rulers whose suspicions, nourished by the cold war, really originated it, are intensifying their reactionary policies. Now, at last, however, there is some evidence that the Russian people – and not just the rulers – are reacting to the events in Czechoslovakia. It must be difficult for them, despite the propaganda barrier, to understand why Russian soldiers and those of their allies should be sent suddenly and without explanation to occupy the territory of what they have been told had been a model socialist state. The barrier that has served to shelter the ordinary people from outside events is beginning to break down.71
Sage was probably unfamiliar with the Russian word glasnost. Paul Barnes started his studies on polywater at Birkbeck in October 1968, but did not meet Bernal for some weeks. He noticed that staff at the college spoke about the old professor with ‘a mixture of love, awe and apprehension’.72 Harry Carlisle, still working on ribonuclease, had taken over as head of the crystallography department on Bernal’s retirement two years earlier. But everyone, especially Carlisle, still worked in Bernal’s shadow. Barnes was invited to join a small group who were going to Albert Street to report on progress to Sage. He noticed in the car on the way that Carlisle was anxiously poring over papers and results – he presumed that he was one of those highly active scientists who could not bear to waste even 15 minutes of his precious research time. On arrival, they were ushered into a waiting room by Anita, and Carlisle was the first to be admitted to the inner sanctum. After some minutes, Barnes was astonished to hear a strangulated cry of ‘More results’. It was then his turn to go in with Finney and Cherry to discuss the polywater project, where of course there were no positive results. Bernal’s frustration was immediately evident. He turned to Barnes, the new boy, and asked through Anita, what he was going to do about this sorry state of affairs. Barnes, his brain working feverishly, suggested that he would try to seed the elusive polywater between narrowly spaced plates rather than in capillary tubes as Deryagin had done. This random proposal found favour with Sage, who then proceeded to hold up Barnes as an example to the others on how the problem should be tackled.
Within months Sage suffered another stroke and had a heart attack (which was the only time Jane thought he was afraid). He was now completely dependent on the care of others and essentially speechless. He spent measureless days watching television and was incapable of any outward expression. In 1968 he endowed an annual lecture to be given at Birkbeck in his name, asking that the lectures should reflect some ‘aspect of the purpose of the College and the lecturers should be in sympathy with those purposes’. The inaugural lecture was given by Dorothy Hodgkin in October 1969, with Patrick Blackett in the chair, but Sage was too ill to attend.
Visitors to Albert Street became fewer. Jane would come to see her father every afternoon on her way home from school. Although she could not be sure that he understood what she was saying, she would describe her day to him in loving detail. Just occasionally she would be rewarded with a reaction, as when she was talking about her A-level biology course and evolution, and Bernal suddenly uttered ‘Axolotl’. In 1970, Olga Kennard dedicated the first two volumes of Molecular Structures and Dimensions, produced at the Cambridge Crystallographic Centre, to Bernal. She carried the books to Camden for Sage to see. Eileen said to him ‘If you realize what Olga has brought, just raise your hand.’ Sage tried to kiss Olga’s hand. On his seventieth birthday, tributes poured in from around the world. Linus Pauling sent the following message:
For 50 years he has, over and over again, astounded the scientific world by his extraordinarily original and fertile concepts, which show a depth of understanding and brilliance of thought possessed, in my opinion, by no other living man. He is one of the greatest men in the world. I am glad to have him as my friend.73
Desmond Bernal stopped breathing on 15th September 1971. By his own lights, cut off from all communication with the world, he had been as good as dead for the previous two years. When he was contemplating the transformation of the human frame in The World, the Flesh & the Devil, Sage mused that consciousness might escape the close-knit organism, ‘ultimately perhaps resolving itself entirely into light’.74 His was one of the brightest stars.
Postscript
In The Social Function of Science, Bernal wrote about science and culture. He observed that the separation whereby ‘a highly developed science stands almost isolated from a traditional literary culture, is altogether anomalous and cannot last’.1 For mixing to occur, science would have to shed the ‘dryness and austerity’ that ‘had led to its widespread rejection by those of literary culture’. Certainly the scientific method, a critical way of thinking that depended ultimately on experimental verification of facts, could be included in general education, but there was a common lacuna in the understanding of human creativity, whether in the arts or science.
The really positive part of science, the making of discoveries, lies outside the scientific method proper, which is concerned with preparing the ground for them and with establishing their reliability. Discoveries are usually unthinkingly attributed to the operations of human genius, which it would be impious to attempt to explain. We have no science of science.2
Sage expected that science, over time, would lead to a more complete understanding of the world and form a universal backdrop to human activity, gradually incorporating history, the literary and visual arts. Two decades after he wrote this, his vision was so far from being realized that his rotund friend C.P. Snow, the novelist and civil servant, was able to make great play out of ‘The two cultures’.3 In his Rede Lecture at Cambridge University, Snow cast physical scientists at one pole and writers at its opposite, where there was total incomprehension of science. This incomprehension gave a pervasive unscientific flavour to the traditional culture, which in turn, Snow thought, was threatening to become anti-scientific. In The Social Function of Science, Bernal had identified ‘romantic reactionaries’ as one group who reject science, as a result of an understandable dislike of the despoiled nature of contemporary civilization and ‘an idealization of the mediaeval world which is usually seen from the castle rather than from the hut’.4 Snow proposed that scientists have ‘the future in their bones’ and the traditional culture (still in the ascendancy in the West) responded by wishing that the future did not exist. To illustrate his point, Snow compared Orwell’s 1984 (which, in a strange interpretation, he stated as demonstrating the ‘strongest possible wish that the future should not exist’), to Bernal’s World Without War. In 1959, Snow believed that a scientific revolution, characterized by the introduction of electronics, atomic energy and automation, was already underway: his analysis was broadly anecdotal and, within the context of a lecture, necessarily less detailed than Bernal’s treatment of the societal transition in The Social Function of Science. Like Bernal, Snow thought ‘the Russians have judged the situation sensibly’ in their approach to education and training.
‘The two cultures’ became an instant classic on both sides of the Atlantic, and established Snow as an authority on Western civilization. Snow did nothing to dispel the notion that he was the only man capable of spanning the great divide between the intellectual camps. This proved too much for F.R. Leavis, the acidulous Cambridge English don. While he stood at the lectern to give the 1962 Richmond Lecture in Cambridge, Leavis seemed to be on the bridge of a battleship, directing all its firepower onto the luxury yacht, Two Cultures, with its skipper Charles Snow at the helm. In Leavis’s estimation, Snow was ‘intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be’ and his Rede lecture exhibited ‘an utter lack of intellectual distinction and an embarrassing vulgarity of style’.5 Assuring his audience that as a novelist, Snow ‘doesn’t exist; he doesn’t begin to exist. He can’t be said to know what a novel is’, Leavis p
icked on one theme from the Rede Lecture.
Such a phrase as ‘they have the future in their bones’ (and Snow repeats it) cannot be explained as a meaningful proposition, and in that sense has no meaning. It emerges spontaneously from the cultural world to which Snow belongs and it registers uncritically (hence the self-evident force it has for him) its assumptions and attitudes and ignorances… And Snow rides on an advancing swell of cliché: this exhilarating motion is what he takes for inspired and authoritative thought.6
Having predicted that Snow would leave no trace as a novelist, Leavis admitted to ‘the gravest suspicion regarding the scientific one of Snow’s two cultures’. His remarks were printed in detail in The Spectator and led to an avalanche of letters, mostly (but not all) in support of Snow. Prominent amongst these was one from Sage, who defended Snow as a scientist (‘a brilliant physical chemist’) who had voluntarily abandoned a research career because he ‘was more interested in scientists, as people, and in their effect on the world they lived in [sic]’.7 Perhaps it was fortunate that Margot Heinemann wrote separately to defend Snow as a novelist. Sage was quite effective at demolishing Leavis’s method of logic: ‘there are no premises or arguments and the conclusions are simple assertions on the authority of Dr Leavis himself, speaking as an unchallengeable representative of the Great Tradition of English culture.’
After the startling success of ‘The two cultures’, C.P. Snow was invited to deliver the Godkin Lectures at Harvard University in December 1960. He chose for his title ‘Science and government’,8 which no doubt Leavis would have dismissed as typically portentous. In fact, the lectures comprised mostly a lively narrative about the friendship, and the subsequent intense dislike, between Henry Tizard and Lord Cherwell. The two leading antagonists of the area bombing policy had both died a short time before, and this was the first public airing of the great wartime controversy. Snow could not help reminding the audience at frequent intervals that he was both a novelist and a senior civil servant. He gave the dispute a moral dimension, asking whether those responsible for the bombing offensive had ‘resigned their humanity’. In England, it provoked passionate argument, especially after a series of articles in The Times by R.V. Jones, an Oxford-trained physicist, called ‘Scientists at war – Lindemann vs. Tizard’. In the spring of 1961, Sage was away in India and the Soviet Union and so missed the start of the debate. He wrote to Snow, on his return, asking if this was ‘a private fight or can anyone join in?’9
Snow had based his account on personal knowledge of Tizard and Cherwell, and on Tizard’s papers. In his long letter to Snow, Bernal set out his own involvement with the setting up of the Butt Report and the general atmosphere at Bomber Command in 1941. He also told Snow about the Hull and Birmingham survey that he had conducted with Zuckerman. Where Snow merely stated in his lecture that Cherwell’s scientific judgment about bombing policy had been wrong, Bernal was less bloodless and saw Cherwell’s advocacy of area bombing as dishonest and deliberately misleading. But overall Bernal approved of Snow’s account, as did Blackett, who wrote that Snow had correctly emphasized Cherwell’s fanatical character that had led to his complete belief in the efficacy of bombing to ‘the almost total exclusion of wider considerations’.10
Sage was contemplating his own letter to The Times, and sent a draft to Solly Zuckerman, hoping that he might co-sign it. Zuckerman, at the time, was Chief Scientific Adviser to the Ministry of Defence, where undoubtedly he would encounter, on a regular basis, senior RAF officers who had risked their own lives and lost many friends during the bombing of Germany. Zuckerman made the following observation to Bernal: ‘I’m amazed at the partial truths that are emerging about the 1942 change in bombing policy. My files are complete – and I have a fear that both Charles Snow and Patrick Blackett are jumping much further than the facts at their disposal justify. Have you any of the 1942 papers still?’11 A few weeks later, Zuckerman wrote again to say that he had unearthed a crucial note from Tizard to Sir Archibald Sinclair, the Air Minister, dated 20th April 1942, in which Tizard concedes ‘I should like to make it clear that I don’t disagree fundamentally with the bombing policy, but I do think that it is only likely to be decisive if carried out on the scale envisaged by the Air Staff.’12 Snow had not seen, and later chose to disregard, this document. Blackett certainly had deep moral misgivings about the targeting of civilians in modern war, and Bernal thought the longer area bombing was continued the less justifiable it became. But in 1942, the dispute had been waged on operational and not moral arguments. To some extent dissuaded by Zuckerman, Bernal decided not to add his voice to the chorus attacking Cherwell.
In January 1972, Lords Blackett, Snow and Zuckerman each spoke at a memorial service for Bernal organized by Birkbeck College. Snow spoke grandly and with warmth of Bernal the man and the scientist. At one point, he ventured to say that his Irishness was not important, provoking an outburst from Gigi, who shouted out, ‘Our boys are being killed in Derry.’13
Zuckerman’s contribution was the most surprising. After reviewing his joint work with Sage during the early years of the war, he came to the following passage.
There are many apocryphal stories about Bernal’s war activities, but most miss the real point. He made no contribution to the conduct of actual military operations. He neither designed a new type of radar, a bomb nor a depth charge. He did not contribute to the emergence of nuclear weapons. The artificial harbour, Mulberry, was not his idea. He planned no assaults, nor did he go on any. His great contribution was to exercise in Combined Operations Headquarters the same kind of general catalytic influence, which he was already doing in the Ministry of Home Security. He imparted a point of view, a way of seeing things – the same quality which characterized his whole life as a scientist.14
Contrast these begrudging words with those Bernal wrote about Zuckerman in a book review, a few years earlier. As a result of security vetting, Bernal found it ‘a most impersonal book’ in which there was ‘no reference to the enormous contribution which he [Zuckerman] himself made to the theory and practice of the war effort’.15 He was, Bernal wrote, ‘the first of the new military scientists, a field which was virtually created in the last war’.
It can in fact be said that the final victory on the Western Front was very largely due to his collaboration with the air force under Lord Tedder… Sir Solly’s career is marked by extraordinary persistence and steady advancement. It calls to mind that of his predecessor, Lord Cherwell, who exemplified the kind of influence which Snow characterizes as ‘Court science’, and who entirely depended on personal loyalty to his patron, Sir Winston Churchill. Sir Solly is a contrast to Cherwell in most ways, although he, too, depends very much on his ability to get on with people. This has been exercised not on one patron but many – the Service Chiefs to start with, but the scientific world as well… If he had a fault, it was being too easily influenced by the military opinion of the time. He was King Log to Cherwell’s King Stork.*
All branches of the Bernal family were shocked by Zuckerman’s unleavened remarks. After all, Bernal’s wartime stories, especially about the build-up to D-Day, were often recounted at social gatherings; indeed, they had featured in the recent obituaries. Nor were they the only ones disappointed by the tenor of Zuckerman’s address. He sent a copy of his speech to Mountbatten, who thanked him for his ‘brilliantly written piece’, but said ‘I don’t think you have made it clear how very highly I thought of him.’16 Snow, whom Zuckerman had little time for, was outraged and wrote to Margot Heinemann saying, ‘Typical Solly, small-minded.’17 Margaret Gardiner was angry with Zuckerman and sent him a copy of Bernal’s unpublished D-Day diaries. Eileen took up the matter with Mountbatten, who wrote to Zuckerman again to express his concerns. Zuckerman replied, referring to Eileen as ‘the authentic Mrs Bernal’, saying that he happened to know that the obituary in The Times, which implied that Bernal went to the Normandy beaches before D-Day, was ‘totally wrong’.18 He agreed that it did appear that Bernal was
taken over and landed on the Normandy coast on D-Day+3. ‘I was sent by the Mrs Bernal who wrote to me after the Memorial Meeting a copy of a personal account he had written, apparently shortly after this trip, which struck me as pretty fanciful in places.’ He doubted whether Bernal could have wandered about the beaches without being arrested or blown up.
Margaret Gardiner was one of Solly’s oldest and closest friends: indeed the two had been lovers in the early 1930s. But in his letter to Mountbatten, she was dismissed as ‘the Mrs Bernal’. This was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that Margaret reproached Solly for his attitude towards Sage. In 1968, the Queen appointed Zuckerman to the Order of Merit.* Bernal wrote him a note of congratulation,19 in his painfully slow scrawl.
