THE older I get, the greater my interest in reading and rereading
biographies. Their appeal has not only intensified but also changed in nature. I
was first introduced to the genre by my elementary and Sunday school teachers,
whose intention was, I suspect, both moralistic and pietistic. I also suspect
that they hoped the famous lines from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem
Resignation would inspire me: “Lives of great men all remind us/We can make
our lives sublime.

I fear I disappointed those early teachers. Fortunately, I went to an
excellent secondary school which insisted that we science specialists also
studied English and two foreign languages. During my last year, the English
master required us to read Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians with
its marvellously iconoclastic treatment of Thomas Arnold, Florence Nightingale
and General Gordon of Khartoum. This marked the end of my innocence concerning
important people and their biographers.

From then on, I wanted biographies to provide not just a formal parade of
events, but also information on what made the subject take the decisions
recorded. For the author to make a fair and reliable appraisal of the motives of
someone he and the readers never met is very difficult. It calls for a deep
knowledge of the subject and of their family, their major areas of work and
their significance in the society of their time, as well as of the prevalent and
relevant contemporary mores and social structures of the day. And above all, the
author must display a discerning, wise and fair judgment.

Judged by such criteria, Colin Russell’s Edward Frankland: Chemistry,
Controversy and Conspiracy in Victorian England, is a triumph. Moreover, it
commands the reader’s attention. I found it so compelling that I read and
annotated its 519 pages within three days. Part of the book’s quality stems from
the author’s devotion to his subject, which dates from the days when he was
preparing his doctoral thesis. He realised that Frankland’s contributions to
giving precision to the notion of a chemical bond and the graphical depiction of
the structure of molecules were of seminal importance to the development of
chemistry.

Frankland’s father was Edward Gorst, a son of the family where his mother,
Margaret, was in service. This liaison made him half-brother to John Gorst,
later to become Sir John, a leading Victorian public servant and MP and the last
vice-president of the Privy Council on Education. Russell thinks Gorst’s
complete acceptance by the Establishment must have rankled in his half-brother
Frankland’s mind. Indeed, his knowledge of these matters as well as of
Frankland’s eminence as a chemist at home and overseas had already encouraged
Russell to write Lancastrian Chemist, a book about Frankland’s earlier
life.

The great stroke of fortune that made this book possible occurred when
Russell and his wife came across a vast collection of material that Frankland
had left to his surviving children by his first wife.

Russell’s skilled handling of this material makes much of the book read like
a good novel, displaying deep insight into the emotions and interactions of the
characters. At the same time, by virtue of his training as a chemist and
historian, he writes with authority on Frankland’s contribution to chemistry and
his impact on the politics of chemistry in Victorian England.

Born illegitimate and attending eight schools, Frankland’s fate might well
have been a common disaster. But he was saved by the support of his mother and
generously minded stepfather, plus a succession of fortunate contacts and his
enormous capacity for work and determination to learn about the natural
world.

This drove him, despite limited resources, to do experiments at home and then
to seek his fortune in London under the guidance of famous chemist Lyon
Playfair, whose assistant he became. Thereafter, unquenchable curiosity combined
with extraordinary energy led him to rise at 4 am to study algebra and propelled
him upwards. From Hermann Kolbe, another assistant of Playfair, he learnt gas
analysis—using methods which, incidentally, were essentially the same ones
I used for my first research nearly a century later.

Frankland, after refusing a professorship at the Royal Agricultural College
at Cirencester, went off with Kolbe to Bunsen’s laboratory in the University of
Marburg. There he worked very hard and fell in love with Sophie Fick, later to
become his devoted first wife. He returned to Marburg to “hunt for radicals” and
after only ten months successfully defended his thesis “concerning the Isolation
of Ethyl” in an oral examination conducted in German. This work was to lead him
into organometallic chemistry (a term he invented) and synthetic organic
chemistry.

This depth and pace characterised Frankland’s work throughout his life. On
his return to England he stayed a short time as professor of chemistry at the
private Putney College for Civil Engineering before becoming, at the age of 26,
a lecturer in chemistry at the newly founded Owen’s College in Manchester, the
forerunner of the Victoria University. The move brought him a welcome proximity
to his parents, while an industrial consultancy allowed him the income to marry
Sophie. However, despite Frankland’s efforts, student numbers failed to rise and
he returned to London five years later to become a lecturer at Barts Medical
College and receive a Royal Medal from the Royal Society.

From then on, achievement followed achievement: his books were landmarks, he
became a professor at the Royal Institution (only to withdraw later), and
succeeded A. W. Hofmann at the Royal College of Chemistry. His membership of the
X-Club alongside the likes of Huxley symbolised his acceptance into the
Victorian elite; only the presidency of the Royal Society eluded him.

He also enjoyed a long and happy personal life—marred only by the death
of Sophie in 1873. He himself died seven months after the death of his second
wife in the last year of the 19th century, in a holiday cottage in Norway.

The book is beautifully written. Russell catches the temper of Victorian
England while giving the reader the impression of getting inside both the head
and the heart of a remarkable man, one of the greatest chemists of the 19th
century. He also left me feeling that there was something missing in Frankland’s
personality, that despite his success he was never fully content. Was it perhaps
that Frankland lacked the ability to laugh at himself? I do not know.

What I do know is that I am grateful to Professor Russell for writing this
book in a way which has compelled my attention from beginning to end as well as
enlightening my darkness. I commend it without reservation.

A real joy as a sixth-form schoolboy was doing practical work to identify
the cations, anions and other relevant chemical groupings in an unknown
solid or liquid, a secret known only to the chemistry master. All the equipment
required was a well-stocked test-tube rack, a charcoal block and blowpipe,
a platinum wire, borax, access to simple reagents such as solutions of mineral
acids and ammonium hydroxide and, of course, the Kipps apparatus for producing
hydrogen sulphide in a fume cupboard.

To me this ‘qualitative analysis’ was a game in which the principal
aim was to demonstrate that the teacher could not devise an insoluble ‘unknown’
that would defeat my and my fellow pupils’ ingenuity. More importantly,
we learnt the reality of important concepts such as pH, solubility product,
common ion effect and so on, and the importance of accurate observation.
Alongside this work was ‘quantitative analysis’, in which we acquired the
techniques to measure the amounts of each component and hence ideas of equivalence,
valence numbers and so forth, as well as the proper use of the swing balance.

At about the same time I became fascinated by the late Arthur Conan
Doyle’s novels describing the adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson.
I recall discovering with delight Holmes’s expertise as a chemist, that
he was an inveterate smoker and the author of ‘A little monograph on the
ashes of 140 different varieties of pipe, cigar and cigarette tobacco’.
A man after my own heart – except for his drug addiction and superior violin
playing.

The reminiscences were triggered the moment Weighed in the Balance fell
open at a photograph of the main laboratory of the Department of the Government
Chemist in 1935, which was immediately recognisable as being of the same
genus as my school laboratory, another temple dedicated to ‘wet’ chemical
analysis. From the first pages I found that the laboratory, then known as
the Excise Laboratory, was set up in 1842 with the prime purpose of detecting
the adulteration of tobacco, so that smokers could be protected from the
adverse effects of the volatile combustion products but of the adulterants,
and the malefactors be successfully prosecuted. Not surprisingly the image
of the great sleuth with his curved pipe reappeared.

Institutional histories are often dull. This one is not, partly because
the authors understand that a laboratory is an organism with living interactive
parts as well as a disembodied organisation, and partly because the reader
is transported from the primitive Excise Laboratory of 1842 to the sophisticated
new laboratory at Teddington which now plays possibly the leading European
role in promoting quality assurance in chemical analysis. This book also
reveals the increasing role of science in law enforcement, and how a regulatory
laboratory has had to adapt to changing departmental paymasters and most
recently, as a quasi-independent agency, to recovering all its costs by
charging all its customers.

The book is not without its characters; from George Phillips, the laboratory’s
first principal, whose public controversy with Professor Andrew Ure gives
the impression that in the early Victorian years chemistry was not so much
a subject as a vendetta, to the government chemists of the recent past.
I recall one in particular, Sir Robert Robertson; small, dapper (always
with a bow tie and stiff winged collar), confident, combative, a martinet
who could, however, listen and encourage, and one whom G. K. Chesterton
would have recognised as a ‘card’. His successor, John Fox, who shared Robertson’s
enthusiasm for research, had a most capacious memory and seemingly instant,
total recall which he used to devastating effect.

Fox was followed by a scholar-scientist, G. M. Bennett, whom I also
knew. He had a very wide interest and, incidentally, is too narrowly described
as ‘a specialist in crystallography’, a minor lapse. His firmness saw the
laboratory through two major inquiries. The first came shortly after his
appointment when one Mr J. B. Legg was asked to review the organisation,
aims and methods of work of the laboratory. Not for the first time had the
Treasury chosen an official completely unencumbered by any knowledge of
the subject at the heart of the organisation he was asked to investigate.
The predictable and impractical changes he proposed were successfully resisted.

The second came in Bennett’s penultimate year when the chancellor of
the exchequer set up a committee under Patrick Linstead to repeat Legg’s
exercise. Being a chemist (in fact Bennett’s successor as Firth Professor
at Sheffield), Linstead made sensible recommendations. But it fell to David
Lewis, a Welsh chemist of poetic inclination, as the next head to implement
them and to supervise a move to a spacious former HMSO warehouse near Waterloo.
And so to the present day through the leadership of several different heads,
including Harold Egan, a co-author of this book and an ‘analyst’s analyst’
par excellence. It has been a tale both worth the telling and well told.

Fred Dainton is a Fellow of the Royal Society.

I REMEMBER as if it were yesterday the morning, about 45 years ago,
when a spiral of cigarette smoke wafted through the open door of my office-cum-laboratory
in Cambridge and was followed by a man, slightly shorter than I, who said,
‘I am Steacie.’ That statement had no significance for me and being preoccupied
with glass blowing which could not be interrupted, I waved him to a seat.
‘Do you enjoy doing that?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘and it is a great
relief from committees; quite soothing.’ ‘I agree; it’s fun,’ he said as
his firm mouth and jaw relaxed into an infectious grin and his eyes twinkled.
So began a life-long friendship, terminated only by his untimely death in
1962.

One hot July or August evening the following year we sat sipping whisky
and talking in my room in the Staff House at Deep River, the community for
people working at the atomic energy enterprise at Chalk River in Ontario.
Among the topics we discussed was how the National Research Council of Canada
(NRC), of which he was then the vice-president, could facilitate the two-way
flow of able postdoctoral scientists between Canada and countries of Western
Europe. He wanted these postdocs to be able to gain the same inestimable
benefits that he had derived 12 years earlier from a sojourn in London and
Frankfurt.

As we talked and the light faded and the glow worms flashed intermittently,
I began to realise that here was a man who, once convinced something should
be done, would do it. Apart from his shrewd common sense, I saw that his
greatest assets were his patent honesty, integrity and unselfishness, coupled
with a total lack of pomposity.

A patriot, as befitted the son of a soldier whom he revered, he saw
that Canada was backward industrially and overshadowed in manufacture by
its great southern neighbour. Even Britain, with its own urgent economic
problems and in its greatly straitened circumstances following six years
of war, was still able to supply many of the key personnel for the Chalk
River project that Canada could not provide.

Already Steacie saw his role as one of contributing to Canada’s progress
by raising its scientific and engineering competence, through the instrument
of the NRC. As president of the council in the last 10 years of his life,
he used the NRC to energise scientific and technological research and development
in Canadian universities, government establishments and industry.

This book is his biography and is written by another chemist, Christine
King, who had become fascinated by the history and philosophy of science.
It is also her memorial, for she was killed in a car accident in Britain
when the editing of the typescript by the University of Toronto Press had
just begun. It does her memory credit for, in my judgment, she has given
her readers a true picture in most readable prose of the life and times
of a man acknowledged by his compatriots and by foreigners alike as epitomising
the dynamism of Canadian science in its heyday in the 1950s.

The story is fascinating, not least because Steacie’s childhood in that
most English of Montreal districts, Westmount, was rather lonely, was clouded
by the death of his father at Ypres when he was only 15, and received little
stimulus from a rather narrow-minded mother. A successful year at the Royal
Military College, Kingston, could not disguise the fact that he was not
content to be a soldier. He then transferred to McGill University where
he read chemical engineering and took a PhD in chemistry. There was little
in his years at McGill to foreshadow the creative period to follow when,
encouraged by Otto Maass, chairman of the chemistry department at McGill,
and C. J. Mackenzie, acting director of the NRC, he left his professorship
at McGill and moved in 1939 to the NRC at Ottawa.

As the tale unfolds we are shown an entirely lovable man, devoted to
his family, country and vocation, who inspired and helped many and brought
science into the public consciousness in Canada. Much was achieved with
the minimum of costive paper work and bureaucracy, and the maximum use of
homespun, unmalicious wit and ready smile. His motto seemed to be: ‘Find
good people, show them the problem and support them until they cease to
merit it.’

The sociologist and political scientist who seek in this volume signs
of deep philosophical principles which in their view should inform the interactions
of government with the scientific estate will look in vain in this account
of Steacie’s successful scientific leadership. Steacie the pragmatist, who
thought life and science were indivisible and fun, would probably have stigmatised
their efforts as pretentious nonsense.

Full of honour, he died in office at the age of 62. Fourteen days earlier
and aware that death was near, but unselfish as ever, he performed the last
of many acts of kindness to me and my family by writing a letter full of
concern and wise advice for me.

Perhaps it was as well that Steacie did not live to see what the future
held for the NRC. The report of the Glassco Commission on the organisation
of government, which Steacie found hurtful, was but the precursor of many
other reports which were to be critical of the NRC. The years that followed
saw the establishment of the Ministry of Science and Technology with much
verbiage but no clout because no money, and culminated in the year of the
bicentenary of the French Revolution with what was euphemistically called
reorganisation but which to the external observer appears to be a dismemberment
of the NRC laboratories.

The question arises whether Steacie, with his unique personal qualities,
could have done better than his successors and gone down in history not
only as champion but also as saviour of Canadian science. I very much doubt
it because, irrespective of their political ideologies, the attitudes of
governments to science in much of the English-speaking world have undergone
a significant change during the 1980s. Accountants and second-rate business
school jargon are in the ascendant. Costs, which rise rapidly, and are easily
ascertained and comprehensible, now weigh more heavily in the scales than
the unquantifiable and unpredictable impacts of science on cultural values
and future material progress. Perhaps science will only regain its lost
primacy as peoples and government begin to recognise that sound scientific
work is the only secure basis for the construction of policies to ensure
the survival of Mankind without irreversible damage to Planet Earth.

Lord Dainton FRS was professor of physical chemistry at the University
of Leeds from 1950-65. He is now chancellor of Sheffield University.