J D Bernal Read online

  Yuletide 1917 was a lethal festival for British seamen.44 Five days after Desmond and Kevin sailed across to Kingstown, an armed British steamer, Stephen Furness, was torpedoed in the Irish Sea by a German submarine and sank with the loss of a hundred men. The same day three British destroyers ran into a German minefield in the North Sea and two hundred and fifty more sailors died. The worst tragedy came a week later, when another destroyer, Attack, picking up survivors from a troopship that had been torpedoed, herself struck a mine and sank. The Bernals decided it was unjustifiable to expose their sons to such risks and they did not return to Bedford in January 1918. Initially Desmond was to go back to the old Diocesan school in Nenagh with Kevin, and was delighted with the prospect of living at home for the spring. After one day it became apparent to the schoolmistress that she had nothing to teach Desmond, and so his mother took him to Mountjoy School in Dublin.45 They had an interview with the headmaster there, who, sensing that his school could not meet Desmond’s requirements either, suggested that they should engage the services of a special tutor or ‘grinder’ to teach him mathematics and science in preparation for the Cambridge scholarship. So they found themselves at Trinity College, interviewing a rather desiccated character named Mr Moore, who was engaged to grind Desmond ‘from now till Easter, five hours a week, for a fee of twelve guineas’.46 Desmond would live on his own in a hotel and attend Mr Moore in his room at Trinity for an hour each afternoon. Even for a young man as studious and self-motivated as Desmond, the expanse of free time was impossible to occupy. He would walk for hours, through the parks, through the city, watching the reconstruction take shape where buildings had disappeared in the Easter uprising. Some hours could be whiled away in the cinema and there were daily trips to museums, but there were still hours of solitude. One Saturday morning in January, he bought some books, but had read them all by 3.30 pm ‘so there is seven-and-sixpence wasted’. By that evening he was ‘bored to death with this hotel, I have hardly spoken twenty words all day’.

  After the Battle of the Somme the previous summer, there had been an understandable reluctance, unmistakable in the South of Ireland, to enlist voluntarily in the British Army. While conscription had not been applied to the Irish, there was talk of it in 1917, and just the threat of such coercion was deeply resented by the constitutional Nationalists and used as an effective rhetorical lever by Sinn Fein.47 The Dublin in which Desmond found himself in the winter of 1918 was bristling with anti-English sentiment that had not been in the air even at the time of the Easter rebellion, two years before. He was experiencing this change in public mood for the first time, and the new political ardour left him cold. After attending Mass on 27th January, ‘there seemed to be a sort of flag-day on so I bought a flag. It was green and had something Irish written on it so I suppose it was Sinn Fein. The worst of these flag days is that they never tell you what they are for.’48 Hardly the words of a young revolutionary committed to throwing off the British yoke. Sinn Fein had a new leader, Eamonn de Valera, who was the most senior commandant of the 1916 uprising to escape execution (probably because he was an American citizen). Garnering support from many quarters, including the Catholic church by stressing that ‘religion and patriotism were combined’,49 de Valera had won a landslide victory in a bye-election in East Clare in 1917. Further success at the polls followed; on Saturday, 2nd February 1918, Desmond was disturbed by cheering in the streets while he was working on a planet chart. He ‘immediately suspected that the Sinn Feiners had won the Armagh Election’. Walking outside, he ‘saw a huge crowd outside the Sinn Fein bank cheering like anything’. Not everyone in Dublin believed that Sinn Fein would renounce violence: Mr Moore ‘punctuated his trigonometrical arguments with references to the Sinn Feiners and their atrocities’.50

  The Bernal brothers were not the only Irish boys who did not return to Bedford at the beginning of 1918. Desmond ran across a fellow student in Dublin named ‘Tulip’ French. Tulip was attending another grinder in preparation for the army examinations to allow him to attend Military College at Woolwich and be commissioned. Desmond offered to help him with science and concluded after a few days that he was ‘an Absolute Idiot’. He was good company though and together they would occasionally go to the Abbey Theatre or to the opera (which Desmond found wonderful). Tulip’s home was in Bray, on the coast south of Dublin, and he would take Desmond there for weekends, when they would go off hiking and rock climbing in the Wicklow Mountains. Tulip was not such an idiot that he was not useful to the army, and he would be killed before the end of the year.

  Desmond left Dublin at the end of March having enjoyed ‘a very free and pleasant life there’. After a month at Brookwatson, he and Kevin returned to England on board a ferry camouflaged in black and white stripes. The Irish Sea was rough and they shared the boat with a large number of cattle, which resulted in smells familiar to them but not welcome to most other passengers. Arriving at Bedford, Desmond was mobbed by friends and resumed the office of house prefect, enforcing the rules with some vigour. On 4th June, ‘I went up to the dorm tonight and slippered Whistler for being out of bed, it was 10 pm.’51 The rule of law and Desmond’s attempts to project authority did not always run smoothly. A new boy, who was ordered by Bernal to bend over to receive the customary punishment for not being in bed, ‘refused… started arguing… argued and demanded justice all the time’. A few weeks later, the unhappy boy carried out a complicated escape plan, which involved stealing a motorbike, money and clothes.

  In June 1918, King George V and Queen Mary visited the school.52 The King inspected the ranks of the Officer Training Corps after taking the salute. In Desmond’s mind he was not much of a king in appearance: ‘he looks shifty and weak and his voice is curiously husky.’ The shortage of able-bodied young men was now an acute problem for farmers, who needed casual labour at harvest times. In the first week of July, the weather was sunny and boys were sent to local farms to help with haymaking. Although Desmond had been rowing every afternoon and was used to farm work at Brookwatson, he felt utterly worn out after the first day and did not see how they were going to survive the week. That week too, another ominous shadow was cast over the school by the arrival of the ‘Spanish fever’, which ‘laid out a number of victims’.

  The influenza epidemic continued for months, and on 1st November 1918, Bernal fell ill. He was put to bed in the sick bay ‘with three other victims’,53 and given a diet of fluids. The only consolation was the presence of ‘a funny little night nurse… she has bobbed hair and is quite pretty’.54 He was still unwell with a fever on 11th November when the end of the war was finally announced, but his thoughts on hearing the news were lucid:

  Peace at last. Mrs Tearle rushed into the sick room before eleven this morning saying that the armistice had been signed and the fighting had stopped and we all cheered. I cannot explain my feelings at the news. There seemed to be a kind of relief but no joy, in fact I think I did not realize peace any more than I did the war, it was all a dream and now it was over. Individually it affects me quite a lot. I will now not have to try for a temporary commission and will be able to go up to Cambridge in due course in October 1919 if I get a scholarship, what next I do not know. I had quite counted on being killed in the war so I had made no plans for the immediate future except of course my dreams which seem to recede as I approach the time of their fulfillment. Am I to fail or have I failed already? I have certainly done so in my efforts at authority here, but is that a guarantee that I will do the same in the outside world. Do the same forces act and will I react on them in the same way? I do not know so I have recourse to the weak policy of ‘Wait and See’.55

  He was not allowed outside to join in the general rejoicing, but could hear bells ringing, cheering and, later, fireworks popping. He recovered steadily and two weeks later made a return to the boxing ring, where not surprisingly he was ‘hardly ten seconds in the ring’ before being tired out.

  While Bernal was aware of his lack of authority as a pref
ect and worried to some extent about his relationships with other students at Bedford, perhaps the only unusual aspect of his behaviour as a seventeen-year old was to commit these anxieties to paper in his voluminous diaries. As one might expect at that age, another more perplexing force was beginning to disturb him. The time for his Cambridge scholarship examinations was rapidly approaching, and one of his friends introduced him to his sister, who lived in Cambridge: ‘She is a very pleasant girl but as usual I was so perturbed that I made an absolute idiot of myself.’56 Desmond in fact had been exposed to female company as much as any other young gentleman of the day. There were often parties at home, and his mother was friendly with Miss Gaskell, ‘a pretty young dancing mistress’ from Dublin, who was a frequent visitor to Brookwatson. She would give lessons to the children and organize dances, which Desmond had enjoyed hugely as a young boy, once describing Irish jigs to his mother as ‘the mathematics of the feet’.57 Now with the insecurities of adolescence weighing on him, he was more aware of the ‘humiliating proficiency’ of his dance partners and an accompanying ‘vague, indefinable distraction that did not even become sexual’.58

  The extent of his embarrassment became plain when he spent the first week of December in Cambridge, trying for admission to Emmanuel College. Another Bedford student, Broughton ‘Twam’ Twamley, was his companion and together they explored the streets around the University. They looked at all the colleges they came across, but where Twam would walk boldly into the quadrangles, Desmond stayed back, in case it was a women’s college. When they discovered Newnham College later in the week, the audacious Twam watched some young ladies playing fives, while Desmond waited nervously down the street.59

  They stayed in rooms in the town and had their first experience of Emmanuel, with the other scholarship candidates, the night before the examinations began. Dinner was taken at long tables with half a dozen students sitting each side on heavy polished oak benches. Before the meal a procession of dons filed into the panelled hall and took their places at the high table: ‘Then one of them said a long Latin grace at breakneck pace and we all fell to.’60 The dinner was not elaborate and contained no meat because of continuing wartime shortages, but Desmond was pleased to find the food ‘infinitely superior’ to that served at Bedford. He talked to some of his competitors and formed the opinion that about half were from the larger public schools and ‘the rest from obscure grammar schools or board schools’. He also met a mathematics tutor, P.W. Wood, who assured him that the papers were not half as bad as they looked. He left feeling quite cheery about his prospects for the morrow.

  By the next morning, he was too nervous to eat breakfast. He found the first paper very easy, but attempted only seven questions out of ten. Things got worse on the second day – ‘algebra, trigonometry and differential calculus… made an awful mess of it, forgetting even how to do continued fractions.’ The next morning brought a note of triumph as he wrote ‘a startling essay’ on the newly formed League of Nations. That afternoon the candidates were entertained to tea and given a tour of Emmanuel by the Master’s wife. No doubt she told them that the College was founded by the Charter of Queen Elizabeth in 1584, and from the first earned a reputation as a stronghold of Puritanism. The College chapel, designed by Sir Christopher Wren, rises above a long gallery flanking either side, the whole supported on cloisters. The architecture did not immediately appeal to Bernal, perhaps still trying to come to terms with the anti-Catholic tradition of the College that he was seeking to join, and he found the chapel ‘not a very imposing one’.

  Back at Bedford, Desmond was excused from the end of term school exams and amused himself by studying crystallography. As a microscopist, he would of course appreciate the beautiful colours and forms of crystals, but what really engrossed him was the regularity of their shapes, their external symmetries. Mineralogists had long known that each crystal type shows a characteristic and constant angle between adjacent faces, and for a crystal of a given chemical composition that angle will not change regardless of the size of the crystal. There was also a firm belief that these invariant external features of a crystal were determined by its internal structure. A French crystallographer, Delafosse, wrote in 1843 that ‘This [atomic] structure, as we are considering it here, appears without question to be the primary characteristic in crystals, that which dominates all others. External form, which until today has been privileged to absorb all the attention of crystallographers, is in our eyes now but a secondary characteristic, of importance only because modifications to it are always found to be subordinated to the particular laws of the internal structure and of the molecular constitution of the crystallized body.’61

  Although nineteenth-century science had not been able to supply much knowledge about the molecular construction of crystals, studies of their physical qualities, such as the optical properties, had led to the realization that crystals were solids with homogeneous structures, and that this homogeneity resulted from the repetition of identical components in a three-dimensional array.62 This property of homogeneity in space allowed geometers to analyse the varieties of crystal shapes, regardless of the nature of the material comprising them. From a general consideration of the possible symmetry of solid plane-faced structures, a German mathematician named Hessel had deduced that there were only thirty-two possible crystal shapes. His work though published in 1830, at a time when many of the crystal shapes he described had not yet been discovered in nature, did not gain any attention until it was unearthed sixty years later. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Hessel’s observations were recognized by mineralogists and chemists as providing a way of classifying crystals. Bernal spent his time drawing crystal structures, exploring the thirty-two symmetry classes and also making two-dimensional projections, whereby the faces of any crystal can be represented by points within a circle. Crystallography appealed to him as a naturalist, a mathematician, a physicist and a chemist.

  A week after sitting the examinations in Cambridge, Bernal received a telegram informing him that he had been awarded a scholarship for £60 to Emmanuel, but ‘strange to say I was not as elated as I ought to have been, in fact I was more depressed than anything else’.63 End of term fighting started on a large scale, and Bernal was at first the irritated victim of high spirits running through the house: ‘I was mobbed a few times by the kids and then someone hit on the brainy idea of putting me in a clothes basket. It was a tight fit but John Gates’ weight on the lid eventually squashed me in.’ Later that night, Bernal had given up any attempt at imposing order and was the leader of a raid on an adjoining dorm. He was captured after a fight, stripped, and doused with cold water – an experience he found ‘refreshing rather than otherwise’. On the final morning of term, Mr Tearle received a letter from Emmanuel describing Bernal’s performance as very uneven. ‘He wrote a miserably poor essay on the League of Nations (a poor subject to choose). Had you not vouched for his general intelligence, I would have thought him a mathematical grub.’ Desmond seems to have been unmoved by these unflattering remarks and on New Year’s Eve wrote that 1918 had been an annus mirabilis for the whole world but especially for him. It had been the ‘most glorious year of my life thus far’, and he felt the Cambridge scholarship ‘will make my future career’.

  Bernal’s strengths in science and mathematics had been achieved at the expense of more conventional study of classics. He had tried to teach himself Greek, but at the scholarship examinations in December had managed to translate just one sentence. He was therefore required to go back to Cambridge in the spring of 1919 to take the ‘Little Go’ exam in Latin, which he duly passed. When he returned to Bedford, he was devastated to find that his closest friend, Lovell Hodgkinson, had died from influenza. The two had planned to start a school magazine, and in a letter home Hodgkinson once described Bernal as ‘the cleverest chap in the school… He is not a bit conceited – he has got a very keen sense of humour and is simply a topping chap.’64

  During the Easter break, De
smond concentrated on chemistry, causing occasional alarms when experiments did not always go as planned. While he was distilling some methylated spirits in the kitchen, using a large flask with a reflux condenser, the flask cracked and the spirit caught fire. ‘I had the presence of mind to unclamp the condenser, take it out to the scullery still burning brightly with a beautiful blue flame.’65 Brigid Murphy, the redheaded housemaid, enjoyed practical jokes and was ‘in fits of laughter’. Her friend the cook, Kate O’Meara, had a more sedate disposition and stayed in a ‘blue funk’ for several hours. The next morning, Desmond was banished to the fields to shoot crows. No doubt he received emphatic instructions from his father because a previous shooting outing had resulted in tragedy, when the only bird that sat still enough for Des to hit it was Kevin’s tame magpie. Kevin never entirely forgave him for this. On this fresh spring morning, Desmond took with him to the hide a piece of paper and ‘tried to solve the problem of finding an expression for the number of isomeric hydrocarbons. I did not get very far however. Some crows appeared eventually. I shot at them and missed them.’ A month later, back at school, Bernal solved the problem he had set himself and devised a notation for isomeric hydrocarbon derivatives.