Rosalind Franklin by Brenda Maddox Read Free Book Online

boys’ schools were just a few hundred yards apart, they were divided by more than the busy Hammer- smith Road. There was no joint instruction nor shared activities, and little fraternisation. Even chatting together at the mutual bus stop was uncommon. Paulinas, like Paulines, took their work seriously. As one of Rosalind’s contemporaries recalled, ‘We weren’t very interested in boys — we were interested in work and sport.’ The rewards for diligence were evident. By Rosalind’s time, Paulinas held prominent jobs in public life, in publishing, medicine, the law and the civil service.
    A number of Rosalind’s school friends were also her cousins: Livia Gollancz (later of the publishing company), Catherine Joseph and Ursula Franklin. But others were girls from different backgrounds and other parts of London, who, when invited to Rosalind’s home, could be overwhelmed.
    To Jean Kerslake (later Kerlogue), who lived in suburban Ealing, ‘It was goggle-making’: the heavy furniture, the maids answering the door and taking away the plates, the presence of Nannie and an under-nanny. Jean learned the rules of the household: Nannie was not a servant, she had a lot of authority over the children and lived at the top of the house. Jean was occasionally invited to stay the night, to join the Franklins for light opera in a box at the Albert Hall and to stay for Saturday lunch, when there was always roast beef and a lot of people around the table. She found Rosalind forthright, amusing, opinionated and adventurous, but was frightened of Ellis Franklin. None of the family suffered fools gladly: ‘If you said anything silly, they would laugh.’
    Another enduring friend was Anne Crawford (later Piper) from Putney. Both girls were always in the first division for mathematics, French, Latin and science — and both held scholarships and wore the scholar’s badge on their tunics. Scholarships also covered tuition fees, for which Anne’s family, professional but not well-to-do, were grateful. Rosalind’s parents never took the money. Anne knew them to be ‘a very very public-spirited family’, and very well-off. Even so, she was startled when invited to spend a part of a summer holiday at St David’s in Wales to find that the Franklins had taken a very large house and in addition to hiring local help had brought three of their maids with them.
    Ellis Franklin did not want a country house, believing it was wrong to have two homes when many people did not have one. However, his parents’ estate at Chartridge served the purpose. There were two tennis courts, a croquet lawn, a nursery lawn (with a swing and parallel bars), a kitchen garden, numbered bedrooms, a five-car garage with chauffeur’s flat above it, a farm producing the household’s own milk from Jersey cows, as well as chickens and turkeys and a resident shochet for kosher slaughtering in the approved manner.
    Rosalind enjoyed weekends there with her Paulina cousin Ursula Franklin, the daughter of Ellis Franklin’s older brother Cecil. Ursula liked Rosalind the best of all her ‘Ellis’ cousins, for her sense of humour and sparkle, and recalled the formality of Chartridge: ‘It was always “Miss Rosalind” and “Miss Ursula” and you were not allowed to answer the door even if you were sitting near it. A maid had to come from the back of the house to open it.’ Arthur Franklin, strictly orthodox, insisted on men wearing hats at table at Sabbath. He wore his yarmulke but his grandsons were more laconic: Colin sported a trilby while Roland wore his schoolcap.
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    Rosalind and Jean Kerslake became best friends in the spring term of her first year when each had returned from the Easter break having quarrelled with her previous favourite. Their joint antagonism towards Jean’s discarded friend caught the school’s attention and both sets of parents were