Free Rosalind Franklin by Brenda Maddox Page B

liked the exactness of science, and the perfection of its truths — humanity could be rather messy in comparison.’
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    Metaphors of combat filled Rosalind’s letters just as they filled the daily newspapers. By January 1939 she could report a victory.
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    The complaint about my chemistry lectures was well worth making — I now go to much better ones . . . also, to better physics and chemistry labs. I am in the midst of a struggle over maths lectures, but I’m very much afraid I’m on the losing side. The ones I want to go to (I have been to two of them) are on analysis. I have heard from several people who have done the course that they are very interesting and also provide useful short cut methods in physical calculations. The lecturer is very good, though female.
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    The lecturer judged ‘good, though female’ fared better than the lecturer on solar prominences, whom Rosalind pronounced ‘not much of a scientist. He ranted when he discussed phenomena which have not been explained — but that may only be because he was American.’
    â€˜Good, though female’ was no small praise in a university that in more than 700 years had had no woman professor. Rosalind witnessed the appointment of the first, the archaeologist Dorothy Garrod of Newnham, and laughed at the embarrassment caused among the men’s colleges. The Cambridge custom was to invite newly elected professors to a ‘feast’ at each college, but women were not allowed at feasts. What to do about Professor Garrod? In this case, as Rosalind reported home, King’s College broke with tradition and invited Garrod to a ceremonial dinner. The other colleges held back, and Newnham had its own feast.
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    For relaxation, Rosalind threw herself into strenuous sport, switching from hockey to squash in her second term. She went boating on the Cam, played endless sets of tennis, went on thirty-mile bicycle rides over the Gog Magog hills, and when the term was over, rode back to London. ‘Why,’ she demanded of her startled parents, ‘are you so surprised about cycling home? I want my bike in London, and it seems the simplest way of getting it there ... It isn’t very far.’
    Working long hours in the lab, she made few close friends at university. Girls who lived in the adjoining rooms thought of her as quiet, and keeping to herself. She preferred her old St Paul’s friends to the new girls she was meeting and stayed aloof from the social life of the college.
    One who broke the barrier of this reserve was Peggy Clark from Bristol, in the same year at Newnham and taking physics and maths with the same lecturers. As their friendship developed, another Newnham student said to Peggy, ‘I don’t know what you see in Ros — you know she is a Jew, don’t you?’ Peggy was staggered because she had no personal knowledge of antisemitism. When the flooded fens made excellent skating rinks and Peggy could not afford to buy skates, Rosalind lent her hers, skating by herself in the afternoon so that Peggy could use them at dusk. The two protested jointly about inefficient physics tutorials and a maths lecturer who wrote in such small print on the blackboard that nobody could read it.
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    The enemy, to Rosalind in 1938, was fascism and, its ally, pacifism. So opposed were some girls in her college to any form of preparation for war that they refused to carry gas masks or take part in any air raid drill. A lecture given by Lawrence Housman on ‘The Price of Peace’ infuriated Rosalind. ‘I would not have gone if I had known he was pacifist — it was awful,’ she wrote home. ‘The majority of people, however, believed all he said and came away converted. I have been busy to-day unconverting them, and had several successes.’ Inclined to the political left but never the far left, she steered a course between the pacifists, who argued that war with