though coming from a family where the relationship between cleanliness and Godliness was no laughing matter. Not that we ever felt like complaining. After all, we were the lucky ones.
Moreover, though I was not the first member of my family to go to university — my cousin had gone to London — I was the first Roberts to go to Oxbridge and I knew that, however undemonstrative they might be, my parents were extremely proud of the fact. Before I went up to Oxford, I had a less clear idea of what the place would be like than did many of my contemporaries. But I regarded it as being quite simply the best, and if I was serious about getting on in life that is what I should always strive for. There was no point in lowering my sights. So, excellent as it was, particularly in the sciences, I was never tempted to opt for Nottingham, our ‘local’ university, even though I would have been able to live so much nearer my home, family and friends. Another aspect of Oxford which appealed to me then — and still does — is the collegiate system. Oxford is divided into colleges, though it also has some central university institutions such as the Bodleian Library. In my day, life centred on the college (where you ate and slept and received many of your tutorials) and around other institutions — church and societies — which had more or less a life of their own. As a scientist, my life probably revolved more around university institutions and facilities, such as the chemistry laboratories, than did that of students in other disciplines. Still, my experience of college life contributed to my later conviction that if you wish to bring the best out of people they should be encouraged to be part of smaller, human-scale communities rather than be left to drift on a sea of impersonality.
Perhaps the most obvious way in which wartime conditions affected the ‘feel’ of university life was the fact that so many of us were very young — only seventeen or just eighteen, and at that age an extra year can mean a great difference in outlook and maturity. Later, from 1944, the feel of Oxford changed again as older people, invalided out, started coming back from the services either to complete a shortened wartime degree or to begin a full degree course. They had been through so much more than we had. As Kipling wrote (in ‘The Scholars’) of young naval officers returning to Cambridge after the Great War to continue their studies:
By the time I left I found myself dealing with friends and colleagues who had seen much more of the world than I had. And I gained a great deal from the fact that Oxford at the end of the war was a place of such mixed views and experience.
I began by keeping myself to myself, for I felt shy and ill at ease in this quite new environment. I continued, as in Grantham, to take long walks on my own, around Christ Church Meadow, through the university parks and along the Cherwell or the Thames, enjoying my own company and thoughts. But I soon started to appreciate Oxford life. My first years there coincided with the end of the war; so it is perhaps not surprising that my pleasures were the slightly Nonconformist ones I had brought with me from Grantham. I was a member of a Methodist Study Group which gave and attended tea parties. My mother would send me cakes through the post and on a Saturday morning I would join the queue outside the ‘cake factory’ in north Oxford for an hour or so to buy the sustenance for tea that Sunday. I joined the Bach Choir, conducted by Sir Thomas Armstrong (by a nice coincidence Robert Armstrong’s father), whose repertoire was wider than its name suggested. I especially remember our performance of the
With the end of the war and the return of the servicemen, the pace of entertainment quickened. Eights Week was revived and I went down to the river to watch the races. It was at this time that I first went out to dances and even on occasion drank a little wine (I had previously only tasted sherry and did not like it; nor do I now). I smoked my first cigarettes. I did not like them much either, though I knew I would get the taste if I persisted. I decided not to, to save the money and buy
I might have had a more glittering Oxford career, but I had little money to spare and would have been hard put to make ends meet if it had not been for a number of modest grants secured for me from the college at the instance of my ever-helpful tutor, the chemist Dorothy Hodgkin. I was also assisted by some educational trusts. I might have been able to supplement my income further from such sources if I had been prepared to give an undertaking to go into teaching. But I knew I had no such calling; and I did and do believe that good teachers need a vocation which most people just do not have. In fact, I did teach science for one vacation at a school in Grantham in the summer of 1944: this earned the money for that luxury in Grantham but near-necessity in Oxford — a bicycle. It was while I was teaching there that Paris was liberated. The headmaster called the school together, announced that Paris was free again and told us how the brave Resistance fighters had helped the Allies by rising up against the German occupiers. It was a thrilling moment. The war was evidently being won; I felt somehow less guilty for not being able to play a larger part; and I shared the joy of the British people that the French Resistance had restored French honour and pride. We may have had an exaggerated view in those days of the universality of resistance — we told each other stories of how the customers of a cafe would tap out ‘V for Victory’ in morse code on their glasses when a German soldier entered the cafe — but we had no doubt that every true Frenchman wanted to be free.
I threw myself into intensely hard work. In Dorothy Hodgkin the college was fortunate to have a brilliant scientist and a gifted teacher, working in the comparatively new field of X-ray crystallography. Mrs Hodgkin was a Fellow of the Royal Society and later made a decisive contribution towards discovering the structure of penicillin, the first antibiotic — work for which she won the Nobel Prize in 1964. (Penicillin itself had been discovered and given its first trials in the Radcliffe Infirmary, which stands just beside Somerville, two years before I went up to Oxford.) In my fourth and final year (1946–47) I worked with a refugee German scientist, Gerhard Schmidt, under Dorothy Hodgkin’s direction, on the simple protein Gramicidin B as the research project required to complete Part II of my chemistry course. Through the Cosmos Club and the Scientific Club I also came across other budding young scientists and heard many well-known scientists speak, including J.D. Bernal. His politics were very left wing, as indeed were those of many other scientists at that time. But they would never have dreamt of carrying their politics over into their professional relationships with their students.
Religion also figured large in my Oxford life. There are many tales of young people entering university and, partly through coming into contact with scepticism and partly for less wholesome reasons, losing their faith. I never felt in any danger of that. Methodism provided me with an anchor of stability and, of course, contacts and friends who looked at the world as I did. I usually attended the Wesley Memorial Church on Sundays. There was, as in Grantham, a warmth and a sober but cheerful social life which I found all the more valuable in my initially somewhat strange surroundings. The church had a very vigorous Students’ Fellowship. After Sunday Evening Service there was usually a large gathering over coffee in the minister’s house, where there would be stimulating discussion of religious and other matters. Occasionally I would go to the University Church of St Mary the Virgin to listen to a particularly interesting university sermon — though that church has about it a certain ‘official’ formality which makes it a somewhat cold place of worship. Sometimes I would go to the college chapel, especially when I knew that Miss Helen Darbishire, who was Principal and a distinguished scholar of Milton and Wordsworth when I first went up to Somerville, was preaching.
Generally speaking, though, I did not go to Anglican churches. But oddly enough — or perhaps not so oddly when one considers the great impact he had on so many of my generation — it was the religious writing of that High Anglican C.S. Lewis which had most impact upon my intellectual religious formation. The power of his broadcasts, sermons and essays came from a combination of simple language with theological depth. Who has ever portrayed more wittily and convincingly the way in which Evil works on our human weaknesses than he did in
