WISENET Journal No. 32, July 1993, pp. 23-25
It was not until I started writing my book that I realised that I am a pioneer. I am rather distinctive as being an Australian woman who went into physics in the 1930s, and tben went to England and had a career there. I am sort of a collector's piece!
I thought I would like to give you the feeling of how I got into physics, and why it was that I was successful. I pretend that I am a very ordinary person. There was no genius, or any other particular distinctions. How was it that I was able to blaze a trail in this direction?
It was unlikely that I should get into physics from my origins because I was an only child. I was born in Perth in Western Australia. My father was an accountant, my mother was a musician. She tumed to teaching, when she had to, in the Depression years. I moved to Sydney whdn I was four years old. The Depression hit us. My father lost his job, and my mother had to make ends meet for the family and took on a little kindergarten school.
My mother was a great guiding force. She did a great deal to support me, and I owe her a great debt. Her father lost a fortune in the goldmining era in Western Austfalia. My mother was frustrated because of the crash of the family fortune, as well as being frustrated because she had also had ambitions to go to university and she was determined that her daughter would have this opportunity, which she had missed outon. This was the guiding light.
As far as science was concerned, there was no real reason why I should do it. There were no relatives, no-one to lead me in to this. It was just a spontaneous interest that I developed. The only thing I can say is that being an only child, and rather a loner, I did not come under the influence of my young peers. I dld not learn about 'what the girls should do' as opposed to 'what the boys should do'. It seemed quite natural to take an interest in what the boys liked. I was not inhibited in any way. I believe that a lot of young chiklren are lead along the wrong path, sometimes, because of this very deep dark tradition that little girls do not do things where they get dirty. They like to study birds and butterflies and things like that, but when it comes to getting dirly that is the boys' regime.
I was always interested in mechanical things. One of my flrst recollections is of this doll of mine. It was one of those dolls where the eyes shut when it is horizontal, and they open when the doll is vertical. It was probably quite an expensive and rare doll back in the 1920s. My interest, however, was in finding out how it worked. I can remember partially dismantling it by accident! My mother always wondered what happened to it! Then when I was about seven I saw a 'Mechano' set that the little boy next door had acquired. I thought this was a wonderful thing. It offered endless possibilities. I finally acquired a set of my own and I developed the mechanical skllls, with my 'Mechano'. I do not think that there has since been anything to compare to it.
What really influenced me, more than anything, in my childhood, was S.C.E.G.G.S. It was a very fine school and they gave me a very good, liberal education. As far as science was concemed I did not acquire very much that way. But what I did acquire was a children's encyclopedia. It was there that I learnt the ideas of physics, chemistry and astronomy. I acquired the feeling for the structure of nature, the structure of the solar system, of gravity and so on. I learnt a great deal from that. In school I had learnt a little elementary chemistry and had a good grounding in mathematics. Still, the interest in science perststed.
There was one very memorable occasion, to me. ft was in 1932, when I was about 14. Armed with the 5ydney Morning Herald, my mother pointed out to me an announcement which read "Splitting the atom at the Cavendish Laboratory." It was a short paragraph which described, in incomprehensible terms, how Crockcroft and Walton pertormed the first artificiai disintegration of the nucleus. I went rushing off to school with this and presented it to my chemistry teacher. I said, "Look at this! You taught me that the atom is the smallest quantity there is." She was taken aback. I must have seemed like such a precocious pupil.
Despite all this, it did make a tremendous impact on me and brought home the realisation that facts and laws set out in text books are not inviolate. It also taught me that research permits people to find out the deficiencies of their present knowledge and to discover, or prove wrong, existing laws. I discovered that this is what scientific researh is all about. It is about finding out about new things that are not yet known.
I had a feel for what research was about when I was fourteen. I acquired a book called Science for All. It was quite advanced for a school girl and gave scientific information about physics and chemistry. I struggled with this book. In retrospect I don't think I got too much out of it, yet it made me realise that science was a topic that was exciting and new.
It was about this stage that I realised that I wanted to have a scientific career. A teacher from one of the boys' cchools in Sydney advised my mother that if I wanted a scientific career, and if I wanted to go to University to study science, I should have either physics or chemistry on my matriculation. Without this I would have great difficulty getting into science at university. S.C.E.G.G.S, in common with most girls' schools of that time, did not teach chemistry beyond the elementary level, and I do not think that they had heard of physics. What were we to do?
A teacher suggested to my mother that at Sydney Technical College there were evening classes intended for apprentices at engineering firms and the like. It was suggested that I might be able to do a course in either chemistry or physics, while still continuing at my school. My mother made an appointment with the head of chemistry because we both thought that I understood a little bit of chemistry, so it was better to go on with chemistry. We went along to the interview with the head of the chemistry department at the Sydney Technical College, Ultimo. I remember him vividly. He was a large white-haired man. He grunted a bit and listened to the story. He said that he would not have anything to do with schoolgirls and that the College was intended for male apprentices. He patted me on the back and said "you are better off with your domestic sciences, go away and forget about chemistry."
I was devastated. My mother, furious but not beaten, said let's go around and see if we can interview the head of the physics department. We found a little room, and on the door it said, 'Department of Physics - G.H. Godfrey'. In we went. There was this much younger man, with quite a different manner. It was a wonderful interview he gave us. He was really touched by the fact this small, diminutive school girl thought she wanted to do physics. He questioned me closely, and I expounded what I had learnt out of my encyclopedia. With a twinkle in his eye, he said if you are prepared to face a class of males, considerably older than yourself, if you are prepared to work in a practical class on your own, he would consider taking me on. "The authorirties will not approve of this", he said, "and it is not a good area in Sydney for a young school girl to be wandering around alone in the evening." He made my mother promise to bring me, wait for two hours while I did my lectures and practical classes, and take me home again. When she agreed, he said "I will take you on. I will see you next week."
After I sat through my first lecture I realised that this was the stuff for me! I really lapped it up. It was tremendous. A man called Mr. Price ran the practicai classes and he was very helpful to me. He made up for the fact that I did not have anybody to work with. With his guidance, I made good progress there. But it was a chancy business, and one day Mr. Price said to me, at the beginning of a practical class, "there is an inspector coming around today. We think that it would be best if he did not happen to see you". He hid me behind a tall bench. An hour later he came back. "The coast is clear", he said. I survived two years of that. It was enough to get me up to the Leaving Certificate standard. In fact, I came top of the class. Godfrey told me, when I was leaving, that the authorities had finally caught up with what was going on end the edict came around, "NO MORE SCHOOLGIRLS IN YOUR CLASSES." So, the door was opened uniquely for me, and it was closed again after me. It is only looking back now that I realise how fortunate I was.
Once I entered Sydney University I was challenged by some forms of what we now call sexual discrimination. There was a strange attitude towards women in physics. However, after the Technical College, I did not mind blazing my own trail. In second year I had to decide whether I would choose chemistry or physics to do my honours in. This was before the war, and everyone said that physics was no good for a girl and that girls would not get jobs afterwards. I consulted a woman who graduated before I did, Phyllis Nichol, who said she had a great struggle. She had a temporary job as a demonstrator in the physics department but she could not get a permanent job, she got no opportunity for research, and she became tutor at the Women's College. She explained that I would be much better off with chemisty.
However, about that period a Professor of physics from England, B.A. Bailey, arrived back. He was an eccentric, but enthusiastic, physicist. He had been doing experimentai work on an ionospheric effect on radio transmissions, known as The Luxembourg Effect. He had a theory about how this was affected by the earth's magnetic field at the ionospheric level. He went to Europe and succeeded in verifying his theory. After doing so he came back to his second year students bubbling over with delight, and I felt that research was really quite exciting. I went to him and said that I would go on with physics.
I got my honours degree in 1939, and lo and behold came World War 2. I seem to have lucky breaks all the way along. Work was suddenly abundant for anyone who had had physics training, whether they be male or female. I was able to go into the radar research lab after I graduated from Sydney UnNersity.
I was lucky enough to be awarded a CSIR (as it was then called) scholarship to go over to Cambridge and do a Ph.D. in England. When I finally arrived at the Cavendish, at the end of 1946, I thought that this is the place where Ruthertord did all his nuclear physics, Cockcroft and Watton splitt the atom first, this was the most wonderful place in the world. I believed that I would meet paragons of virtue, geniuses in science, wonderful students who knew everythig. was expecting wonders of this place. I got quite a rude shock. It really was a tremendous anti-climax. I had a non-existent supervisor appointed to me and I had no experiments to do. I fell in with two Canadians and two South Africans; we were considered the Colonials there. We were very disillusioned. I struggled hard to get into nuclear physics there. I finally did succeed.
More than anything the experience brought home to me that the individual scientists I had known in Sydney were every bit as good as the people that I came acmss in Cambridge. It was just that in Britain there were more of them, and they could interact more. Australia was isolated but the feeling that they were not as good was quite erroneous. I think this feeling of isolation and possible inferiority has gone, to a large extent. I think that the pioneering spirit that people in Sydney had in those days was very important. People had to struggle for themselves. It seemed that the students who came over from Australia did show, and maintain, their pioneering spirit. I feel that this is something to keep alive.
At the end of that period I had a big choice to make. I felt an obligation to the CSIR, and I feft that I should go back. However there was practically no nuolear physics in Australia then. I was also tempted to go to Harwell. I had also just met a student at Cambridge, one John Jelly, who was captivating my interest (and who in fact I married not long afterwards). What should I do? I made my decision. Instead of coming back home, I went to Harwell. The rest of my career was carved out in Britain. I have always enjoyed coming home, and I feel a great sense of loyalty of my home country and I admire the work that is done in Australia, and in Sydney particularly.
I think my determination and sense of dedication to my subject was an important factor in being successful. I persevered. Although I was the only woman most of the time, I did not have any sense of real discrimination. I was accepted, just as I had been at the Radiophysics lab, as one of the boys. I was able to get along without feeling that I was too different from the men. Again, I was lucky in the particular people that I happened to know and work with.
I managed to get an intemational reputation for the work I did in neutron physics; while initially the work I did was related to reactor design, I worked out a way that this same material was relevant to basic nuclear physics and the study of excited states. I managed to get myself to America and gave papers there, and I got into the international community of nuclear physicists which was great fun.
It was an advantage to working in physics. After a year I came back to Harwell, around about 1960, and I became group leader of a new accelerator at Harwell. I worked on a study associated with beta-decay which related to fundamental theories of beta decay weak interaction, nuclear forces and electromagnetic force. In conjunction with a theoretical physicfst from the University of Sussex, I developed what I learnt at Harwell and showed how the work related elementary particle physics to these fundamental theories. As a result of this we were jointly awarded the Rutherford Medal in 1976. This was an unexpected, but very pieasurable, award to receive.
I feel that it was because I was a thorough, persistent, and dedicated scientist that I achieved this honour. That attitude can bring its rewards. One does not need to be a genius to be able to be successful.
A female can do it just as well as a man can.
I would just like to conclude by making the point that women should be given opportunities at an early age, and be encouraged to follow their natural leanings, if they have a scientific interest. It is a very rewarding subject to follow. It is exciting in its fundamental aspects, and it is inspiring. To be able to understand things that are happening in astrophysics, or at the subnuclear level, it is a fulfilling )ob to do. At the same time it is also very important to consider the practical applications of physics and science. From environmental issues, to the medical field, indeed all aspects of present technological life, physics has a part to play and women should have the opportunity to have an informed interest and a judgment in these fields. A woman's voice should be heard. Many of these issues are also politically biased so it's very important that basic science should play its part in the future of our planet. I encourage all people to take this sort of attitude towards the sciences.
I thank you for listening and encouraging me to come. Lastly I must pay a tribute to Gordon Godfrey, the person who got me started.