The Strangest Man Read online

  Nor was there any respite at home from the gloom. In Dirac’s eyes, when his father returned home from school, his persona changed from the school’s fair-minded and respected disciplinarian to bullying tyrant. He still imposed his linguistic regime at the dinner table, where wartime shortages and rationing had made Flo’s meals simpler and less abundant. By the beginning of 1918, there were long, morale-sapping queues for bread, margarine, fruit and meat. The price of a chicken rose to a guinea, a week’s wages for a manual labourer.32 The shortages encouraged many families, including the Diracs, to cultivate fruit and vegetables, and it was mainly for this reason that Paul Dirac took up gardening, though the hobby would also have given him another reason to escape the atmosphere inside the house.33

  Another source of unhappiness in the Dirac family was that Charles and Flo each had a favourite child: Paul was his mother’s, Betty her father’s, with Felix left out in the cold.34 As a student, Felix had done almost as well as his younger brother at Bishop Road, but the gap between their abilities at senior school became so wide that it began to cause serious friction between them. The two brothers no longer walked around together but were continually bickering. In his later life, Dirac was uncharacteristically forthright about the reason for the rift: ‘having a younger brother who was brighter than he was must have depressed him quite a lot’.35 This is a telling remark. Dirac was never socially sensitive and, as an old man, was exceptionally modest and given to understatement, so he was probably making light of how painful Felix found the experience of being academically outclassed by his younger brother.

  As he came to the end of his studies at the school, Felix had set his heart on becoming a medical doctor. His father, however, had other ideas: he wanted Felix to study engineering. This subject was popular among young people, just as Bernard Shaw had foreseen in his novel The Irrational Knot: a new class of engineer-inventors would go ‘like a steam roller’ through the effete boobies of the aristocracy.36 The future appeared to be in the hands of H. G. Wells’s ‘scientific samurai’. It certainly seemed sensible for Felix to use his practical skills to take a course that would virtually guarantee him employment. As Charles probably realised, for Felix to train to be a doctor would entail six expensive years of training, with little prospect of the costs being offset by Felix winning one of the scarce scholarships to medical school. Felix tried to stand firm, but Charles forced him to climb down, doing more harm to their relationship than he probably realised.37

  The cheapest and most convenient place for Felix to study was at the university’s Faculty of Engineering, housed in the Merchant Venturers’ Technical College, which shared the same premises and facilities as the Merchant Venturers’ School.38 Probably with a good deal of resentment, Felix began his course in mechanical engineering there in September 1916, his studies funded by a City of Bristol University Scholarship.39

  Paul never considered studying anything other than a technical subject.40He could have taken his pick from dozens of science courses, and seriously considered taking a degree in mathematics, but decided against it after he learned that the likely outcome would be a career in teaching, a prospect that held no appeal for him.41 In the end, in the absence of a strong preference of his own, he decided to follow his brother – and, apparently, their father’s advice – by studying engineering at the Merchant Venturers’ College, supported by a generous scholarship.42

  In September 1918, Felix was preparing to begin the final year of his engineering course, which he had been finding hard going – throughout, he had languished near the bottom of his class. At the same time, Paul, aged only sixteen, was about to join the ranks of the engineering students – two years younger than the other students in his class. Felix must have known that others were comparing his talent with his brother’s and that he would not emerge well from the comparison.

  Notes - Chapter two

  1 Words by H. D. Hamilton (School Captain, 1911–13). This is the second verse of the song.

  2 Lyes (n.d.: 5).

  3 Pratten (1991: 13).

  4 The following recollections were given to Richard Dalitz. Leslie Phillips attended the Merchant Venturer’s School from 1915 to 1919. Some of Charles’s codes are extant in Dirac Papers, 1/1/5 (FSU). In 1980, Dirac described his father’s reputation in Dirac Papers, 2/16/4 (FSU).

  5 Interview with Mary Dirac, 7 February 2003.

  6 These comics, named after the ‘penny stinker’ (a cheap and nasty cigar), first became popular in the 1860s and were still popular in Dirac’s youth. They were widely frowned upon for their lack of seriousness.

  7 Interview with Mary Dirac, 21 February 2003.

  8 Bryder (1988: 1 and 23). See also Bryder (1992: 73).

  9 Interview with Mary Dirac, 26 February 2004.

  10 Dirac’s reports when he was at the Merchant Venturers’ School are in Dirac Papers, 1/10/7 (FSU).

  11 See, for example, the reports of the Government’s Department of Science and Art, from 1854, London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.

  12 Stone and Wells (1920: 335–6).

  13 Stone and Wells (1920: 357).

  14 Stone and Wells (1920: 151).

  15 Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 6 May 1963, p. 1.

  16 Testimony to Richard Dalitz of J. L. Griffin, one of Dirac’s fellow students in the chemistry class.

  17 Daily Herald, 17 February 1933, p. 1.

  18 Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 6 May 1963, p. 2.

  19 Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 6 May 1963, p. 2.

  20 Dirac remarked that he ‘was very interested in the fundamental problems of nature. I would spend much time just thinking about them’. See Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 1 April 1962, p. 2.

  21 Dirac (1977: 11); interview with Dirac, AHQP, 1 April 1962, pp. 2–3.

  22 Wells (1895: 4).

  23 See, for example, Monica Dirac, ‘My Father’, in Baer and Belyaev (2003).

  24Pratten (1991: 24).

  25 Dirac (1977: 112).

  26 Testimony of Leslie Roy Phillips (fellow pupil with Dirac at Merchant Venturers’ School, 1915–19) given to Richard Dalitz in the 1980s.

  27 Dirac Papers, 2/16/4 (FSU).

  28 Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 6 May 1963, p. 2.

  29 Later, Dirac received more books as prizes at the Merchant Venturers’ School, including Decisive Battles of the World and Jules Verne’s Michael Strogoff, an adventure story set in tsarist Russia. Some of the books Dirac won for school prizes at the Merchant Venturers’ School are stored in the Dirac Library at Florida State University. Other information about Dirac’s reading choices is from his niece Christine Teszler.

  30 Letter from Edith Williams to Dirac, 15 November 1952, Dirac Papers, 2/4/8 (FSU).

  31 From Merchant Venturers’ School yearbooks 1919, BRISTRO 40659, 1.

  32 Stone and Wells (1920: 360).

  33 In the spring of 1921, Dirac planned the planting of vegetables on what looks like a geometric drawing of the garden in 6 Julius Road, with some annotations by his father. The plan, dated 24 April 1921, is in Dirac Papers, 1/8/24 (FSU).

  34 The Bishopston local Norman Jones told Richard Dalitz in the mid-1980s that his most vivid memory of Charles was ‘seeing him always carrying an umbrella, struggling up the hill, often with his daughter, of whom he was very fond’, interviews with Richard Dalitz, private communication.

  35 Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 1 April 1962. Felix’s reports when he was at the Merchant Venturers’ School are in Dirac Papers, 1/6/4 (FSU).

  36 Quoted in Holroyd (1988: 81–3).

  37 Interview with Monica Dirac, 7 February 2003; interview with Leopold Halpern, 18 February 2003.

  38 The Merchant Venturers’ School used the facilities during the day, and the college

  used them during the evening.

  39 See Felix’s university papers in Dirac Papers, 1/6/8 (FSU); the scholarships are recorded in BRISTRO 21131/EC/Mgt/sch/1/1.

  40 Dirac took the qualifying examinations for the University of Bri
stol in 1917, three years earlier than most other applicants. He then spent a year studying advanced mathematics and finally qualified in ‘physics, chemistry, mechanics, geometrical and mechanical drawing and additional mathematics’, enabling him to take a degree in any technical subject. See Dirac Papers, 1/10/13 (FSU); details of Dirac’s matriculation

  are also in a letter to him from his friend Herbert Wiltshire, 10 February 1952, Dirac Papers, 2/4/7 (FSU).

  41 Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 6 May 1963, p. 7.

  42 Interview with Flo Dirac, Svenska Dagbladet, 10 December 1933.

  Three

  A report by the Bristol Advisory Committee, working in conjunction with the Employment Exchange, issued early in 1916, threw light on the effect of the war on the labour of young people in the preceding year. It stated that boys were almost generally fired by the ambition to become engineers […]

  GEORGE STONE and CHARLES WELLS (eds), Bristol and the Great War, 1920

  On the overcast morning of Monday, 11 November 1918, Dirac set off from his home as usual to walk to the Merchant Venturers’ College. It was the beginning of his seventh week at the college, and appeared to be like any other day. But when he arrived, he found that all lectures had been cancelled. He soon heard the reason: suddenly and unexpectedly, the war had ended.

  By midday, the centre of Bristol had become the site of a vast, anarchic carnival. During a day of noisy jubilation not seen before in living memory, English reserve was abandoned. Church bells rang out, businesses shut down, everyone felt licensed to drape themselves in the national flag, to march the streets, to bash empty biscuit tins and dustbin lids and anything that would make a lot of noise.1 All over the city, Union Jacks hung from windows, lamp posts and from the hundreds of trams and motor vehicles that had been commandeered for the day without demur from the police. Among the groups of marchers repeatedly singing ‘Rule Britannia’ was a group of American soldiers on the way to war, each of them holding a corner of the Union Jack. Nearby, a group of grammar-school students carried an effigy of the Kaiser, once a resident of Bristol.2 Dirac’s fellow Merchant Venturers’ students caroused around the city, singing the song they had composed for the occasion. Dirac long remembered the chorus they sang at the top of their voices: ‘We are the boys who make no noise,’ followed even more loudly by ‘Oo-ah, oo-ah-ah.’3

  The Prime Minister David Lloyd George spoke that day in the House of Commons of the curious mixture of regret and optimism in the country after ‘the cruellest and most terrible War that has ever scourged mankind. I hope we may say that thus, this fateful morning, came an end to all wars.’ Fate, however, had yet more cruelty in store: the Spanish Flu pandemic that broke out towards the end of the conflict cost even more lives than the war. To try to slow the spread of the virus, Bristol’s schools had been closed, leaving thousands of children wanting to spend the afternoons laughing at new film comedians such as Fatty Arbuckle, but they were thwarted by the closing of the cinemas during school hours by the local Council’s Malvolios.4

  The novelist and poet Robert Graves remarked perceptively that before August 1914, the country was divided into the governing and governed; afterwards, although there were still two classes, they had changed into ‘the Fighting Forces […] and the Rest, including the Government’.5 The new divisions were clear at the Merchant Venturers’ College after the war: Dirac saw young men returning from the battlefront suddenly outnumber the original intake of students, whose closest brush with the enemy had been through reading newspaper reports. The soldiers had returned to a brief welcome, but they had to settle down quickly to normal life, encumbered by disfigurement and by shell shock and other psychological damage. These men, most of them still in uniform, brought a new grittiness and pragmatism to the lecture rooms. Dirac later observed: ‘the new students had a more mature outlook on life, and in the Engineering Faculty they were especially eager to learn results of practical importance and [they] did not have much patience with theory.’6

  The returning soldiers were among the thousands who flocked to that year’s Christmas treat in Bristol: the opportunity to see and take a tour around the inside of a captured German submarine U86. It was moored in the docks, the Union Jack flag fluttering on one of its masts above the German naval ensign. Everyone knew the significance of the display: the tank, the machine gun, the aircraft, radio and poison gas had all played their part in the war, but none had seemed more menacing than the submarine. Now this most feared weapon was impotently on show, like a dead shark.

  Engineering was evidently not the subject best suited to the talents of the young Dirac. The course at the Merchant Venturers’ College was more practical than theoretical and therefore exposed his limited manual skills while not making the most of his mathematical gifts.7 True to form, Dirac strode ahead in mathematics and was ‘a student who got all the answers exactly right, but who had not the faintest idea of how to deal with apparatus’.8 Not only was he maladroit, his mind was on other things: he spent much of his time in the physics library, reflecting on the fundamentals of science.9 With no money and nothing else to do during the day, Dirac would walk down from his home in Julius Road to the college and work in the libraries six days a week.10 He did, however, make his first friend among the other thirty-one students in the class: Charlie Wiltshire, another solitary young man with a mathematical bent.

  They were taught mathematics by Edmund Boulton, nicknamed ‘Bandy’, as his gait gave the impression that he had just dismounted a mare. Not a strong academic, Bandy showed his class how to tackle textbook mathematical problems in orthodox ways, only for Dirac repeatedly to proffer simpler and more elegant solutions. Soon Dirac and Wiltshire were segregated so that they could work at a pace that would not shame everyone else. Poor Wiltshire may have felt better if he had stayed behind, as he found the task of keeping up with his friend’s mathematical progress ‘utterly hopeless’. Within a year, they had completed the mathematical content of their degree, but Wiltshire was permanently scarred. Over thirty years later, he wrote that the experience of trying to stay abreast of Dirac had left him with a ‘pronounced inferiority complex’.11

  Mathematics was only a small part of Dirac’s curriculum: he spent most of the time fumbling in the laboratories with Wiltshire or trying to stay alert during lectures. Unlike most students, he did not like to be spoon-fed and preferred to learn in private, ideally alone in the library, where he would flit back and forth between passages in books and journals, making his own links and associations. One course of lectures that did keep Dirac on his toes was given by the hard-driving head of the electrical-engineering department, David Robertson, a theoretically minded engineer who had been confined to a wheelchair after contracting polio.12 Dirac admired Robertson for arranging his life methodically and for the way he used clever labour-saving initiatives to help overcome his disability. It was difficult for Robertson to deliver standard chalk-and-blackboard presentations, so he used a precursor of digital presentation software: a continuous series of lantern slides lit – none too reliably – by a flickering carbon arc lamp.13 Robertson rushed through his commentary, giving no quarter to the intellectual limitations of his audience or to their need to write legible notes. Dirac’s favourable opinion of him was not shared by the great majority of his students, who were left trailing in frustration and despair.14

  Robertson ensured that the electrical-engineering course was built on solid theoretical foundations. Dirac and his colleagues specialised in electrical engineering only in their final year, after they had been given a grounding in physics, chemistry, technical drawing and other types of engineering – civil, mechanical and automotive. No one could reasonably accuse the course of being out of touch with business: Dirac was taught the elements of management, contract law, patents, bookkeeping and accountancy. He even learnt about income tax.15

  The course was based in the engineering laboratories. Dirac spent many hours every week there, working with Wiltshire, learning about the mechanical
structures and machinery that underpinned industry, including bridges, pulleys, pumps, internal combustion engines, hydraulic cranes and steam turbines. He measured the strength of materials by stretching them until they snapped and by observing how much they bent under stress. The course on electrical engineering was extremely thorough, and Dirac learned about the subject from its roots – simple experiments in electricity and magnetism – through to the minutiae of the design and operation of the latest hardware of the electricity-supply industry. H. G. Wells could not have asked for a more thorough training for a future leader in his technocratic utopia.

  The university Engineering Society organised trips to local factories, partly to give the students a sense of the noise and grime in which most of them would soon be working. A posed photograph taken on one of these trips in March 1919 shows the physical appearance of Dirac and his fellow students, all of them male. Each of them is wearing a tie, a hat and an overcoat, several of them have a stick, and a few are still in military uniform. The sixteen-year-old Dirac is standing at the front, hands in his pockets, looking blankly at the camera with a hint of adolescent rebelliousness. It is the first of many photographs of him as a young man to show confidence and resolve shining out of his eyes.16

  *

  Six Julius Road was a cold and unloving refuge to Dirac, but for many local people he seemed to be part of an admirable home. The reputation of Charles Dirac was still on the rise: he had become one of the ‘Big Four’ housemasters at the Merchant Venturers’ School, and his private language classes were thriving at home. A few minutes after the beginning of each tutorial, in the small study overlooking the front garden, Flo knocked on the door to bring Charles and his student a pot of tea and a plate of biscuits – part of the attentive service students took for granted at that address. She spent most of her time running the house but liked to while away afternoons reading romantic novels and the poetry of Robert Browning, Robert Burns and Rudyard Kipling. In an exercise book, she wrote out some of her favourite verse and a collection of aphorisms that indicated her penchant for the Victorian virtues: ‘Control, give, sympathise: these things must be learnt and practised: self-control, charity and sympathy.’17