J D Bernal Read online

  Desmond’s last term at school was blighted by news of his father’s poor health. At the beginning of July, he and Kevin received a telegram telling them to return home at once, but then their father rallied and they stayed in Bedford. When they set foot on Irish soil again at the end of July, Desmond noticed for the first time the extreme poverty of Dublin, where ‘the contrast with England is striking. The dirty streets, the idlers and bare legged ragamuffins all wanting to do something for you.’66 It was as though the anxiety about his father had sensitized him to the misfortunes of others. With his father so ill, Desmond, as the eldest son, had to become involved in the business of the farm. On 2nd August, an auction of the standing fields of oats and wheat was held, and the lack of enthusiasm shown for the crops dismayed the naïve young man – ‘the bids came slowly and sullenly as if each shilling involved much heart wrenching, and there was not a bit of competition. I had no idea that the Irish farmer was so apathetic, miserly.’67 Perhaps the farmers of Tipperary were simply unable to shake off the habit of the ‘boycott’ at auctions, first taught them by Parnell during the Land War of the 1880s. Then any tenant who bid for a farm from which his neighbour had been evicted was to expect isolation ‘from the rest of his kind as if he were a leper of old’.68

  For the rest of the summer, Sam Bernal remained jaundiced, and he was mostly confined to bed. Desmond spent many hours reading to him and a great closeness developed between them. In mid-September, Desmond had to travel to London to take one final set of scholarship examinations. His father, who had been in and out of consciousness for the preceding fortnight, died while he was away. Desmond returned for the funeral and was humbled by the loss. The sight of his dead father ‘swept away in a moment all my philosophy and elaborate reasonings and made me weaker and more human than I have ever been before’.69

  2

  Cambridge Undergraduate

  The Great War changed Cambridge from a vibrant university town to a dark, cheerless place, where army divisions camped and drilled before going to fight in the trenches. Their officers spent a last few civilized weeks living in the colleges. Tens of thousands of soldiers returned to Cambridge from the front after being blinded, maimed or gassed, for treatment at the First Eastern General Hospital (a medical campground spread over the gardens and backs behind King’s and Clare Colleges). About sixteen thousand Cambridge undergraduates and recent graduates went to war, of whom a third were either killed or seriously wounded.1 Teaching did not stop altogether, but the undergraduate numbers for the last three years of the conflict averaged about one fifth of the pre-war level. At Emmanuel College, the photograph of the 1916 freshmen contained just five, solemn, young men – three of oriental appearance. At the end of a war that had lasted a year longer than the usual degree course, the new Master of Trinity College, Sir J.J. Thomson, was concerned that the hiatus might result in a permanent loss of traditional ways and customs. He soon realized that his worries were groundless. Within two months of the Armistice, a record number of new students matriculated, the largest contingent comprising four hundred naval officers sent by the Admiralty to complete their scientific studies. Although there was no time to organize the Boat Race in the spring, the annual cricket match against Oxford took place in the summer of 1919. Then most of the naval officers left, and Bernal was among the first regular intake of undergraduates that October, one of eighty freshmen to come up to Emmanuel.

  The routine for Bernal was established on his first morning, when his ‘bedder’ woke him with the words, ‘Twenty minutes to eight, Sir.’2 Later in the day, he met his supervisor, Mr Herman, who gave him his timetable. There would be twelve lectures scheduled each week on electricity, optics, pure geometry, calculus and particle dynamics. In addition there would be two mathematics tutorials with Herman. The first lecture, on geometry, was given in Peterhouse College by Mr Grace. Bernal was one of the first students to arrive, and the dark-beamed room with its narrow arched windows reminded him of the schoolroom in Nenagh. He sat watching the other students arrive, and at length ‘Mr Grace turned up, sharp blue eyes, lank grey hair and dry thin lips, harmonizing wonderfully with the general aspect of the place. His lecture was not a long one, he made some drily witty general remarks on examinations, set us some easy looking problems and dismissed us after ten minutes.’3 So ended his first encounter with John Hilton Grace FRS, a wayward don whose deep love of geometry was conveyed by his teaching in such a way that an interested and talented student, like Bernal, would sometimes follow him far beyond the boundaries of the undergraduate course.

  For the first few weekends at Emmanuel, Bernal gravitated towards the familiar company of his old schoolmate, Broughton Twamley. On a Sunday afternoon walk together, ‘the conversation was as usual mostly of girls’4 with Twam bemoaning the lack of female company – for Bernal it was a case of not missing what he did not know, but he could imagine the pleasures of which Twam boasted. Twam, in turn, was distressed because every time he opened a book he would soon fall asleep. Bernal was already revelling in the cavernous stacks of the University Library, and filled the end pages of his diary with lists of books read (including two books on Assyriology on 29th October, for example). Bernal’s circle of friends soon widened and he found himself in the company of more intense conversationalists, who shared at least some of his interests. The experience was liberating, and made him think that he knew relatively little outside mathematics and science. He did his best to rectify this by reading and talking with renewed energy. Bernal found himself more drawn towards the company of ‘socialistically inclined economists or historians’5 rather than to his fellow scientists. ‘Night after night, sitting over a fire and drinking more and more diluted coffee or strolling around moonlit courts, we talked politics, religion and sex.’6 It was difficult to meet members of the opposite sex: women were a small minority of students and were closely chaperoned at social events. Still Bernal’s days were fully occupied and he seemed to manage quite easily with five or six hours sleep a night. In addition to his intellectual pursuits, he rowed with more enthusiasm than technique, but was powerful enough to occupy the number three seat in a college eight.

  Although the recent war remained the dominant backdrop to life in Great Britain, wartime experiences were almost the one taboo subject for Bernal’s contemporaries. Those who served had no wish to rekindle the horrors witnessed, and their younger contemporaries, many of whom had lost brothers or cousins, understood and respected their reticence. The destabilizing political and social effects of the war were, by contrast, exciting, divisive, and fascinating subjects for debate. While Cambridge University managed, to a large extent, to preserve its pre-war institutional style, the country as a whole was undergoing radical changes, and even Cambridge students could not afford to be complacent about the future. The Bolshevik revolution in Russia was the great, unresolved event in 1919. British troops were fighting in a bitter civil war alongside White Russians, and in June the Royal Navy had sunk several capital ships of the Red Navy. It was all part of an attempt led by Winston Churchill, Secretary of State for War in Lloyd George’s Coalition Government, to ‘strangle at birth’ the Bolshevik state. Churchill was convinced that ‘of all the tyrannies in history, the Bolshevik tyranny is the worst, the most destructive, the most degrading’.7 Ultimately he could not persuade the rest of the Cabinet to support his anti-Bolshevik crusade, and he was derided in the popular press for wanting a new war with Russia. There was widespread disgust in Britain with wartime profiteers and an unprecedented level of unrest amongst the labour force (despite the introduction of an eight hour working day and weekly wages more than double what they were in 1914).8 Nearly two-and-a-half million British workers went on strike in 1919, and there was strife in the shipyards of Clydeside and Belfast. When looting took place in Liverpool during a policemen’s strike, Lloyd George feared ‘anarchist conspiracy’ and sent a cruiser to the Mersey and troops to the city.9

  The political balance within the University was not
out of kilter with that in the country at large, but what made Cambridge different was the intellectual ferment and youthful idealism of the debates inside its stonewalls. The most influential voice belonged to John Maynard Keynes, a don at King’s College and member of the secret Apostles society. He wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace in 1919, arguing against harsh reparations being imposed on Germany, partly on moral grounds and also because he feared that a weakened Germany would fall prey to Bolshevism.10 It was one of the few books that Bernal actually bought, and he was moved by it. Kingsley Martin, an undergraduate at Magdalene whom Bernal would soon meet through socialist circles, believed that Keynes’ monograph gave ‘enormous encouragement to a generation of idealistic undergraduates’,11 who were nearly all pacifists at this stage of their lives.

  Martin had been a conscientious objector in the war and served as a medical orderly in France, before entering Magdelene College in January 1919. On his first night in Magdelene, he befriended Patrick Blackett, one of the naval officers who had been sent for six months of general studies, and during the course of an all-night conversation converted him to socialist beliefs.12 Bernal’s socialist epiphany was the result of an almost identical encounter, although in his case the proselytizer was not Martin but a fellow Emmanuel freshman, H. Douglas Dickinson. Dickinson’s father was a curator of the Science Museum in London and an expert on the Industrial Revolution. The young Douglas had learned to appreciate the significance of the history of science and engineering, but came to Cambridge to read economics. Bernal’s conversion to socialism took place in Dickinson’s rooms on the night of 7th November, as a result of a conversation, which lasted until two o’clock in the morning and left Bernal feeling ecstatic. The next morning Bernal awoke ‘not very tired and perfectly happy’, and felt as though ‘my old life was broken to bits and the new lay in front of me’.13 He was inclined to melodrama in some of his diary entries so that the day before, for example, his elevation to Emmanuel’s first rowing eight was also noted as ‘a turning point in my life’.14 But the thrill of his political awakening endured and a few years later, Bernal reflected: ‘This socialism was a marvellous thing. Why had no one told me about it before? And Dick knew it all, explained it so simply in a few hours. The theory of Marxism, the great Russian experiment, what we could do here and now, it was all so clear, so compelling, so universal.’15

  Dickinson was not slow to exploit the new convert’s zeal. He called into Bernal’s rooms the following afternoon to ask him to speak in a Labour debate he was organizing. One of the speakers had dropped out, and Bernal saw it as an opportunity not to be thrown away so that ‘after a minute of hesitation’,16 he accepted. Three days later, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, Dickinson caused him two minutes of acute discomfort. The pair were walking back from a lecture when Bernal ‘realized that it was Armistice Day and that the two minutes silence was going to begin. It was an impressive sight, the silence and the people standing with the white snow gently falling. Dickinson and I walked resolutely on. I confess that left to myself I would have bowed to authority.’17

  Bernal and Dickinson cast themselves as Emmanuel’s leading radicals and as such risked occasional physical retribution from the abundant ranks of hearty, conservative students. The pair posted red notices around the college advertising future socialist meetings, knowing that this could provoke trouble, which they half expected and welcomed. Bernal was physically strong from daily rowing and, after Bedford school, no stranger to ragging. Several years later, C.P. Snow, then an undergraduate with an interest in crystallography, was told about a famous raid by five or six naval officers on Bernal’s rooms.18 Bernal heard a commotion outside his door and turned off all his lights so that his eyes became dark-adapted. His assailants burst into the pitch darkness, betraying their own positions by lighted cigarettes. Bernal collared several of them, banging their heads together, and then quietly slipped out as the attackers exchanged blows with each other.

  Dickinson, also a prominent target as Secretary of the University Socialist Society (CUSS), received his come-uppance one cold evening in February 1920, when a group of naval officers ducked him in a trough in the market square. The following week a meeting of the Union of Democratic Control, being addressed by the pacifist, Norman Angell, ended in uproar as a group of ex-servicemen tried to carry off the speaker and throw him into the river. Bernal and Dickinson got wind of the fact that the same group intended to kidnap Noel Brailsford, the speaker they had arranged for CUSS a few days later. Brailsford was a socialist journalist, who in 1914 wrote a scathing and perspicacious attack on the international arms industry, The War of Steel and Gold. Bernal had just read the book and enjoyed organizing a ‘protective force’19 to keep Brailsford safe during his visit.

  While their politics earned them a degree of notoriety, Bernal and Dickinson were certainly not outside the mainstream of university life. Indeed the theories of socialism flourished in the generally permissive atmosphere of privilege. A pink-cheeked, nineteen-year-old dandy, Maurice Dobb, gave a tea party at Pembroke College, where his guests consumed éclairs, while earnestly discussing workers’ ownership and other socialist issues. Dobb, whose family owned a small draper’s business in London, had become interested in socialism during his last year at Charterhouse school. He won an Exhibition to Pembroke, and spent the months between school and university attending as many Labour and socialist meetings as he could in London; like Dickinson, he arrived in Cambridge with some knowledge of the works of Marx and other socialist thinkers.20 On first meeting him, Dickinson in his capacity as Secretary of CUSS, interrogated Dobb briskly ‘under the impression that so spruce and conventional-looking a young man must be a provocateur’.21 Dobb read Economics and joined Keynes’ Political Economy Club; he joined forces with Dickinson as one of the most active socialists amongst the student body. One small incident from the end of the first term serves to illustrate the limits of Bernal’s non-conformity and a bourgeois talent of Dobb’s that might have atrophied come the revolution. Preparing for the Christmas dinner at Emmanuel College, Bernal was in despair about tying his bow tie, and Dobb was happy to oblige his friend.

  The only region of the British Isles close to revolution in 1919 was Ireland, where there was a new militancy amongst the Irish Volunteers (soon to be renamed the Irish Republican Army) under the leadership of Michael Collins. Collins was also a leading figure in de Valera’s Sinn Fein party, which had made stunning gains in the post-Armistice General Election of 1918 and was now assembled in Dublin as Dail Eireann (the Irish Parliament) – declaring Ireland to be a sovereign, independent state and defying the might of the British Empire. The sparks kindled by the Easter uprising of 1916 burst into flame in Tipperary in January 1919, when a pair of masked Volunteers murdered two popular Irish constables, who were guarding a shipment of gelignite being delivered to a quarry. Although these Volunteers were acting on their own volition and not under instructions from Collins, he made plain his support of such violent action a few weeks later, when addressing a meeting of the Sinn Fein executive: ‘The sooner fighting is forced and a general state of disorder created throughout the country, the better it will be for the country. Ireland is likely to get more out of a general state of disorder than from a continuance of the situation as it now stands.’22

  Collins had built up a widespread intelligence network and organized the Volunteers in Tipperary and elsewhere into strictly run military units with a primary aim of murdering those members of the Royal Irish Constabulary not sympathetic to their stated intention of ending British oppression. About a dozen policemen were killed by the end of 1919, and Ireland was headed for insurrection. Driven by Collins, Sinn Fein’s aim was to obtain freedom on its own terms and not be beholden to the British government for the grant of Home Rule.

  As Bernal was preparing to leave Cambridge for Christmas in the now lawless County Tipperary, he was asked by his college tutor, P.W. Wood, if he were a Home Ruler. Ber
nal replied, ‘No, Sir, I am a Sinn Feiner’, and recorded in his diary that this was the first time that he had dared to admit as much to a superior. He also noted Wood’s matter-of-fact, but nonetheless perceptive reply that ‘things had gone too far for any solution to be workable’.23 Back home, he found less tolerance for his new opinions. Mary Waller, an old friend from his days at Nenagh school, came to visit the Bernal family and remarked that ‘the Irish ought to be strafed’. Desmond rose to their defence but ran into a withering rebuke from his aunt, Cuddie, who argued that ‘the Irish were ignorant, changeable, dissatisfied and vindictive’, a point of view that ‘for lack of knowledge I can not deny convincingly’.24 The social highlight of his vacation was a fancy dress party, for which he decided to appear as a Bolshevik. A parcel arrived from Gamages department store, just after Christmas, containing a flowing beard and a wig – an outfit he found to be ferocious but uncomfortable. He and Kevin decided to play a prank on one of the farm labourers. After dark, Desmond donned the disguise and took an old revolver from the house, meaning to scare the worker. The two brothers, hiding behind a stone wall, heard voices – a group of soldiers talking to some local girls. The soldiers were on patrol to protect the neighbourhood against the Volunteers, and it occurred to Desmond that in his present costume he could be shot on sight. He imagined the newspaper headlines, ‘Regrettable Accident’ or ‘Practical Joker’s Fate’, and waited with his heart thumping. Eventually the soldiers moved off, and Desmond attacked the labourer’s cottage, thrusting his gun through a broken windowpane with a crash. Kevin later told him that the whole incident had been witnessed by one of the soldiers, lingering behind with a local girl. Instead of challenging the armed revolutionary, the soldier turned tail and ran back to town with the young woman following.25