The Strangest Man Read online

  46 Government report on inspection on 10–12 February 1914, reported in the log book

  of Bishop Road School, stored in BRISTRO: ‘Bishop Road School Log Book’

  (21131/SC/BIR/L/2/1).

  47 Westfall (1993: 13).

  48 Betty refers to her skating at the Coliseum rink in her letter to Dirac, 29 January

  1937 (DDOCS).

  49 ‘Paul’, a poem by his mother, Dirac Papers, 1/2/12 (FSU). The relevant lines are: ‘At

  eight years old in quiet nook / Alone, he stays, conning a book / On table high, voice

  strong and sweet / Poems of length he would repeat.’

  50 Interview with Flo Dirac in Svenska Dagbladet, 10 December 1933.

  51 ‘Recollections of the Merchant Venturers’, 5 November 1980, Dirac Papers 2/16/4 (FSU).

  52 Salaman and Salaman (1986: 69).

  53 Dirac’s scholarship covered his expenses at his next school, rising from £8 in the first

  year (1914–15) to £15 in the final year (1917–18). BRISTRO, records of the Bishop

  Road School, 21131/EC/Mgt/Sch/1/1.

  54 Winstone (1972) contains dozens of photographs of Bristol during the period

  1900–14.

  55 Interview with Mary Dirac, 14 February 2004.

  56 Dirac Papers, 1/10/6 (FSU). The lectures were held at the Merchant Venturers’

  Technical College, where Dirac would later study.

  57 Testimony of H. C. Pratt, who attended Bishop Road School from 1907 to 1912, to

  Richard Dalitz in the mid-1980s.

  Two

  In the world of commerce,

  In the crafts and arts,

  Sons of her are honour’d

  Nobly bear their parts;

  While in sports and pastimes

  They have made a name,

  Train’d to wield the willow,

  Learn’d to ‘play the game’.

  Verse of the Merchant Venturers’ School song1

  On 4 August 1914, when Dirac was preparing to start at senior school, he heard that Britain was at war – the first conflict to involve every industrialised country in Europe. ‘The European War’, which would claim more British lives than any other, was to be the backdrop to the whole of his secondary education at the Merchant Venturers’ School.

  Like most other British cities in the UK, Bristol quickly prepared for the war, the urgency of the preparations heightened by the statement by the Boer War hero Lord Kitchener that the conflict would be decided by Britain’s last million men. On the last day of August, in his capacity as Secretary of State for War, Kitchener sent a telegram to the Bristol Citizens’ Recruiting Committee asking them to form a battalion of ‘better class young men’, and within a fortnight some 500 professional men had volunteered for the ‘Twelfth Gloucesters’, part of ‘Kitchener’s Army’.2 Within a few weeks, the focus of the city’s industries had changed from making money to supplying the military with everything from boots and clothes to cars and aircraft. Even the Coliseum ice-rink was commandeered as a site to assemble warplanes.

  The first casualty lists were published barely a month after the declaration of war. The Bristol newspapers reported that the Allies had contained the initial German onslaught and that the battle lines had hardened to form a series of linked fortifications that stretched from the Franco-Belgian border on the coast right through to the Franco-Swiss border, close to where Charles Dirac had been brought up. After Parliament passed the Aliens Registration Act, Bristol was one of the UK cities to be declared a ‘prohibited area’. Charles had to register with the authorities as a foreigner, although he was hardly a threat to British security. By the time his elder son arrived at the all-boys Merchant Venturers’ Secondary School, Charles had spent almost a third of his forty-eight years as its Head of French, doing more than any other teacher to extend the school’s reputation for excellence beyond its established forte of technical subjects to modern languages.

  It took Charles about fifteen minutes to cycle from his home to the school in Unity Street, in the heart of the city. The building was round the corner from the Hippodrome, Bristol’s newest and swankiest music hall, where the young Cary Grant secured his first job, as a trainee electrician helping to operate the lighting rigs – soon after Paul started at the school. The school’s Edwardian-Gothic building had been opened in April 1909, after the previous school on the site had burnt down. Everyone in the vicinity of the new school heard the clatter and rumblings from the basement workshops. The vibrations were so violent that the school’s near-neighbour, Harvey’s wine merchants, complained of the incessant disturbance to their cellars.3

  The behaviour of Charles Dirac, whose pupils nicknamed him ‘Dedder’, emerges clearly in the testimonies of several of his fellow teachers and his students obtained by the Oxford University physicist Dick Dalitz in the mid-1980s. One of Dirac’s fellow students, Leslie Phillips, gave a sense of the reputation of Monsieur Dirac:

  He was the disciplinarian in the school, precise, unwinking, with a meticulous, unyielding system of correction and punishments. His registers, in which he recorded all that went on in the class were neat and cabalastic; no scholar could possibly understand their significance. Later, as a senior, I began to realize the humanity and kindness of the man, the twinkle in the eyes. But to us in the junior school, he was a scourge and a terror.4

  Dedder was well known for his old-fashioned, strictly methodical approach to teaching and for springing random tests on his students, so that they always had to be prepared. If he caught them cheating in these tests or in their homework, he punished them with four half-hour periods of detention on Saturday afternoons. ‘You never wrote this. Saturday at four for cribbing,’ he told Cyril Hebblethwaite, later Lord Mayor of Bristol. Most teachers routinely meted out corporal punishment by whacking errant boys across their backsides with a slipper or cane with an enthusiasm that bordered on the sadistic. But there is no record that Charles was fond of this form of chastisement, either at school or at home.

  It is easy to imagine Monsieur Dirac’s terrified pupils looking at Paul and Felix and wondering, probably out loud, ‘What’s he like at home?’ Their father’s strict classroom regime did, however, bring the benefit of a supply of comics that he had confiscated and brought home for his children.5 The young Dirac read these cheap ‘penny dreadfuls’, black-and-white comics full of slapstick cartoons, juvenile jokes, detective stories, sensational tales of soldierly adventure and even the occasional topical reference to the build-up of the German military.6 This one concession to popular culture in the Dirac home gave the young Paul an enduring taste for comics and cartoons.

  The boys’ mother also inflicted her share of pain on them by keeping their hair in tight curls and making them wear knickerbockers long after they were fashionable. They wore short breeches and garters so tight that, when they were removed, they each left an angry red line around the boys’ legs. Dirac long remembered the taunts of his fellow pupils for being what nowadays would be damned as ‘uncool’.7 Such was his induction into that most characteristic of English anxieties, embarrassment.

  Like all parents at that time, Charles and Flo worried that their children would catch tuberculosis, then responsible for one in every eight deaths in the UK.8 It was particularly brutal in culling adult males: it accounted for more than one death in three among men aged fifteen to forty-four. The Dirac children were all born during the first decade of a government-funded anti-tuberculosis campaign that urged all citizens to get out into the open air, to take plenty of outdoor exercise and thus to get plenty of fresh air into their lungs. This philosophy may have encouraged Charles to decline to pay for his sons’ tram fares to and from school and therefore to force them to walk there and back twice a day (they had lunch at home). Paul later resented what he believed was his father’s meanness, though it probably led him to acquire a taste for taking long walks, soon to become one of his obsessions.9

  *

  It took only
weeks for Dirac to establish himself as a stellar pupil at the Merchant Venturers’ School. Except for history and German, he shone at every academic subject and so was usually ranked as the top student of his class.10 The curriculum was wholly practical, with no room for music nor – to Dirac’s relief – Latin and Greek. Instead, the school focused on subjects that would equip its boys to take up a trade, including English, mathematics, science (though not biology), some geography and history. What made the education at this school special was the high quality of the teaching of technical skills such as bricklaying, plasterwork, shoemaking, metalwork and technical drawing. For the previous fifty years, government inspectors had praised the school for giving one of the best technical educations available to any child in the country.11

  In the school’s laboratories, Dirac learned how to fashion pieces of metal into simple products, how to operate a lathe, how to cut and saw, how to turn a screw thread. Away from the clatter of machinery, the puddles of oil and the coils of swarf, he learned more of the art of technical drawing. These lessons built on the introductory classes at Bishop Road and showed Dirac how to produce plans for more complicated objects, developing his ability to visualise them from different angles. In his ‘geometric drawing’ classes, Dirac considered cylinders and cones, and he learned how to see in his mind’s eye what happens when they are sliced at different angles and then viewed from various perspectives. He was also taught to think geometrically about objects that are not static but moving, and he learned how to draw the path of, for example, a point on the outside of a perfect circle as it rolls along a straight line, like a speck of dust on the outside of a wheel rolling along a road. To students who first encounter these shapes – curved, symmetrical and often intricate – they are a source of delight. If, as is likely, Dirac wondered how to describe these curves mathematically, his technical-drawing teachers would probably have been unable to enlighten him as they were usually former craftsmen with little or no mathematical expertise.

  Although Dirac focused intensely on his college work, he was well aware of the scale of the war. All day long, convoys of trucks passed through Bristol with their supplies for the soldiers at the front, and huge guns were towed through the streets, shaking nearby buildings. At night, the streetlamps were extinguished to make the city a difficult target for the expected convoys of German airships, although they never arrived. The city’s rapidly expanding aviation industry was on a war footing, so the threat of aerial bombing was clear to Dirac, who passed a busy aircraft factory every time he walked to and from school.12

  Unreliable news of the conflict trickled back from the battlefronts through newspapers and by word of mouth. The Government’s censorship policy prevented journalists from reporting on the full extent of the carnage, but readers could form a broad picture of the conflict and its ramifications. In February 1916, the Germans began their campaign to try to wear down the French Army at Verdun, and in July the British Army attacked on the Somme. Casualty figures soared, although the battle lines changed only slowly. In April 1917, the Germans introduced unrestricted U-boat warfare, aiming to cut supplies of food and other resources to the UK and thereby to force the enemy to the conference table. This brought the United States into the war, and Bristol celebrated by giving its schoolchildren a half-day holiday on 4 July, Independence Day.13 Meanwhile, Russia was in turmoil, with the fall of the monarchy in February followed nine months later by Lenin’s Bolshevik revolution.

  Every day, the Dirac family read about these events in the local and national newspapers. The inside pages of the Bristol Evening News showed head shots of uniformed teenage soldiers, with a few lines that listed their regiment, when they fell and whom they left behind. Despite the depressing regularity of these reports, the recruitment campaigners maintained a constant flow of army volunteers, many of them younger than the minimum legal age of eighteen. Some of the boys shipped out to the killing fields were only a year older than Dirac. The nearest he came to military service was a brief stint in the Cadet Corps in 1917, but around him there was plenty of evidence of the experiences of less fortunate young men. He would certainly have seen legions of wounded and maimed soldiers hobbling around the city, having returned from France for treatment.14

  But the war was a boon for Dirac’s education.15 The exodus of the school’s older boys depleted the higher classes and enabled Dirac and other bright children to fill the gaps and therefore make quick progress. He excelled at science, including chemistry, which he studied in a silence that he broke on one occasion, a fellow student later remembered, when the teacher made an error, which Dirac gently corrected.16 In the foul-smelling laboratories, Dirac learned how to investigate systematically how chemicals behave and learned that all matter is made of atoms. The famous Cambridge scientist Sir Ernest Rutherford gave an idea of the smallness of atoms by pointing out that if everyone in the world spent twelve hours a day placing individual atoms into a thimble, a century would elapse before it was filled.17 Although no one knew what atoms were made of or how they were built, chemists treated them as if they were as palpable as stones. Dirac learned how to interpret the reactions he saw in the laboratory test tubes simply as rearrangements of the chemicals’ constituent atoms – his first glimpse of the idea that the way matter behaves can be understood by studying its most basic constituents.18

  In his physics lessons, he saw how the material world could be studied by concentrating, for example, on heat, light and sound.19 But the mind of young Dirac was now venturing far beyond the school curriculum. He was beginning to realise that underneath all the messy phenomena he was studying were fundamental questions that needed to be addressed. While the other boys in his class were struggling to get their homework done on time, Dirac was sitting at home, reflecting for hours on the nature of space and time.20 It occurred to him that ‘perhaps there was some connection between space and time, and that we ought to consider them from a general four-dimensional point of view’.21 He appears to have shared much the same opinion as the Time Traveller in the 1895 novel The Time Machine by H. G. Wells, whose science-fiction novels he read: ‘There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.’22 Such an opinion had wide currency at the end of the nineteenth century, and Dirac may have read the Traveller’s words when he was a child.23 In any case, the young Dirac was mulling over the nature of space and time before he had even heard of Einstein’s theory of relativity.

  Dirac’s teacher, Arthur Pickering, gave up on teaching him with the rest of the boys and sent him to the school library with a book list. Pickering once set the prodigy a set of tough calculations to keep him busy at home that evening, only to hear from Dirac on his way home that afternoon that he had already done them.24 And Pickering opened up another new vista to Dirac when he suggested that he look beyond simple geometry to the theories of the German mathematician Bernhard Riemann, who had proposed that the angles of a triangle do not always add up to exactly 180 degrees.25 Just a few years later, Dirac would hear how Riemann’s geometric ideas – superficially without relevance to science – could shed new light on gravity.

  Charles Dirac understood as well as anyone that his younger son had an exceptionally fine mind coupled with formidable powers of concentration. By imposing a rigorous educational regime at home, Charles had produced a workaholic son in his own image, as he presumably intended. What Charles did not apparently appreciate as acutely as other people was Paul’s odd behaviour. The young Dirac’s fellow students certainly regarded him as strange. In testimonies given sixty years later, several of them described him as a very quiet boy; two accounts speak of ‘a slim, tall, un-English-looking boy in knickerbockers with curly hair’, and ‘a serious-minded, somewhat lonely boy [who] haunted the library’.26 Even at that time, he had a monomaniacal focus on science and mathematics. Games did not appeal to him and, when he was obliged to play, his participation seems to have been superfluous: one of his fellow schoolboy
s later remembered that Dirac’s style of holding a cricket bat was ‘peculiarly inept’. As an old man, Dirac attributed his dislike of team games to his having to play soccer and cricket with the older and bigger boys on the Merchant Venturers’ playing fields.27

  His appreciation of literature was also extremely limited. He never understood the appeal of poetry, though he did read novels written to appeal to young boys, including adventure stories and tales of great battles, scrutinising each text with the care of a literary critic.28 As a nine-year-old, Bishop Road School had awarded him a prize of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, a novel that always strikes a chord with those who are happy to be away from the crowd – almost, but not quite, alone.29

  It was the mathematics and science lessons that did most to shape Dirac’s way of thinking. Decades later, when his history teacher Edith Williams renewed contact with him, she told him that, when he was a student in her class, she ‘always felt you were thinking in another medium of form and figures’.30 By every account of Dirac’s behaviour in his mid-teens, he had the same personality characteristics as today’s pasty-faced technophiles who prefer using the latest software and gadgets to mixing with other people and who are happiest sitting alone at their computer screens. From a modern perspective, the young Dirac was an Edwardian geek.

  At the Merchant Venturers’ School, the class sizes shrunk and the range of lessons narrowed. When Dirac began at the school in September 1914, there were thirty-seven boys in his class; by the time he left in July 1918, four months before the end of the war, there were eleven. At the Speech Day, July 1918, he received a prize – as he had done every year – and heard the Headmaster announce that ninety-six boys had been killed and fifty-six wounded in the year 1916–17.31 For the rest of his life, he would remember these litanies of death.