Rosalind Franklin by Brenda Maddox Read Free Book Online Page B

following Friday . . .
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    Sadly, Rosalind never got to the Royal Tournament, held at Earls Court. Her next letter told the sorry tale:
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    I am very cross. I was all dressed up in my hat and coat ready to go to the tournament last night, and the old pig came up to me and asked me what I was doing, she said I had told her I did not want to go, and she had given my ticket away so I could not go. I never said anything of the sort. Could I possibly go with anybody on Friday evening or Saturday, that will be the last opportunity as it stops on June 2nd. Everybody says this years is miles the best they have seen.
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    The following week the struggle continued: ‘I only got B to B+ for that essay, which is very bad (I told you she was an old pig).’
    Rosalind asked her parents’ permission to take the examination for a senior scholarship. There was absolutely no danger of her getting it, she assured them. Even so, ‘We are having gorgeous geography lessons, learning to weather forecast . . . We are going to keep records of the weather, clouds, signs, etc. for the next two weeks.’
    Her pessimism was unwarranted. She won a Senior Foundation Scholarship, as she had won a Junior, and held it throughout her time at St Paul’s. She also won the Latin prize in 1936. In English she disliked having to ‘stodge’ — her verb — through School for Scandal and The Rivals, and she did as little as possible of the music in which St Paul’s prided itself, with the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams replacing the late Gustav Holst as head of music in Rosalind’s time at the school. She never pretended to have an ear or aptitude for music, although she did love theatre and painting.
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    At St Paul’s Rosalind did not attend school prayers. What to do with Jewish pupils during morning assembly was a perennial problem for English schools. Even if they were independent of the Church of England, their day and year were structured around the ecclesiastical calendar and the statutory obligation to conduct a daily act of worship. In the 1830s when Rosalind’s great-grandfather and his brother became the first conforming Jews to attend Manchester Grammar School, considerable ingenuity went into allowing them to be present at, but not participants in, school prayers. On the first day the Franklin boys were put in the front row and allowed to stand while the others knelt. That was deemed too distracting. Next day the Franklins were told to stand in the back row among the taller boys. Even so, their presence was judged discordant. The solution finally arrived at was that they come to school late, after prayers had finished.
    A century later, Rosalind’s school was more comfortable with such matters. While the rest of the school bowed their heads, the Jewish girls went off to a room by themselves — a practice laughingly called ‘Jewish prayers’ which gave them a chance to catch up on their homework. They joined the rest for the remainder of the school assembly and for the notices.
    How many Jews there were at the school is unknown because no record was kept of religious affiliation. The Mercers’ Company accepted the conscience clause of Gladstone’s Endowed Schools Act of 1869 which entitled pupils to equal opportunities in education regardless of faith or lack of one. Indeed, in 1946, eight years after Rosalind had left St Paul’s, Miss Strudwick proposed a quota ‘to avoid too great a preponderance of Jewesses’. The Mercers flatly rejected the idea.
    Rosalind was free of another problem that had plagued her forebears. Her father remained bitter about his own schooldays at Clifton College where he lived in ‘the Jewish house’ and, although an avid cricketer, was prevented by religious observance from playing sports on Saturday when all the matches were held. The same restriction had hobbled his sister Mamie at St Paul’s where it