BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

ABBESS MATILDA

Gemma sui generis . . . tota virillis etat. [A jewel of her race . . . she had all the qualities of a man.]. From the eulogy on Matilda de Bailleul, Abbess of Wherwell, circa 1214.

Wherwell Priory must be one of England’s most desirable residences, a long, elegant house, whitewashed, that comes with fishing rights on the Test, Hampshire’s famous trout stream. The priory is currently inhabited by the Hon. James Hogg, who may or may not succeed to the hereditary earldom of Hailsham, a title conferred on the heirs male of the Hoggs by Queen Victoria in her Jubilee year. It has long been suspected that the priory was built with stones taken from Wherwell Abbey, a Benedictine nunnery that bit the dust after Henry VIII divorced the Church of England from Rome. But when the Dissolution of 1540 hit Wherwell (and made its stonework available for the ‘Priory’) the abbey was already in decline, a victim of scandals (some of them unprintable) and mismanagement. For the Abbey, that sad state was nothing new. Founded in Saxon times, the Abbey had been in 1144 burnt to the ground by Queen Matilda during her effort to (re)claim the English throne from King Stephen. Shortly thereafter Wherwell Abbey was taken over by another imperious Matilda, Matilda de Bailleul, who by the time of her death (December 14, 1214) had reestablished the Abbey, secured its rents, and attracted a thriving spiritual community of 40+ nuns. This Matilda may not have had “all the qualities of a man”, but she came from a family network of knights and barons who, in Flanders, had proved relatively unconcerned about gender. Some of Matilda’s kin who were women became captains (castellans) of various Flanders castles. So when her own short and childless marriage ended, she already knew how to become Abbess of Wherwell and then to put the Abbey in order. The exact details of how she managed this miracle cannot today be known. But a later inventory of the Abbey’s sacred relics suggests that as Abbess Matilda made good use of the new cult of Thomas Becket, that ‘troublesome priest’ who was sainted in 1173 for his (fatal) defiance of King Henry II. She may also have used some of her own wealth to restore the Abbey’s buildings, its vineyards, and it rents. In order to make her reforms stick, Abbess Matilda made new alliances with powerful aristocrats, not all of them local, which helped the Abbey to acquire new rents as well as secure old ones. Probably her best gift to the Abbey was to bring in her successor, her niece Euphemia, who succeeded her as Abbess. Euphemia also wrote the eulogy quoted above, and in her own long tenure (1214-1257) continued to augment the abbey’s prosperity and add to its physical plant. Modern archaeology has, since the 1990s, told us much more about how Matilda and Euphemia rebuilt the Abbey and its outbuildings. As for Wherwell Priory’s current occupants, the Hoggs, that’s another story. ©.

[Stanley]

WILKINS

Our dark lady is leaving us next week. Maurice Wilkins to Francis Crick, May 7, 1953.
The ‘dark lady’ was Rosalind Franklin, whose work (with Wilkins) on x-ray crystallography was to prove vital in discovering the structure of the DNA molecule. Primary credit for that went to Crick and his colleague James Watson, who published their (very modest) rough draft in Nature on April 25, 1953. It was a short and very modest piece in which they gave some credit to both Wilkins and Franklin. A decade later, Franklin had died (of ovarian cancer, in 1958) and in 1962 Wilkins, Crick, and Watson shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology for their discovery. Nobels are never awarded posthumously. Still, Franklin’s “exclusion” has become an issue. In the BBC docudrama on DNA’s initial discovery, “Life Story” (1987), the obvious tension between Wilkins and Franklin is played to the hilt, and Wilkins (portrayed by Alan Howard) appears as an ineffective and rather resentful misogynist. Maurice Wilkins was born in New Zealand on December 15, 1916. His parents, well-connected to Ireland’s Protestant ascendancy, soon returned to England where Maurice excelled as a young scientist and went up to Cambridge. There he flubbed his finals (in Physics), but had impressed his tutors well enough to go on to a PhD and research in nuclear physics. In California he worked on the atomic bomb project. Once he saw its results in Hiroshima and Nagasaki he switched to biophysics and in 1946 returned to King’s College, London. There, inspired by Erwin Schrödinger’s What is Life?, he developed his own approach to study of the “genetic material”, using, first, sound waves and then x-ray crystallography. Early in 1952, new post-doctoral assistant, Rosalind Franklin, produced the famed “photograph 51”, a sight of which would inspire Watson and Crick to produce their double helix model, their Nature article, and to claim major credit for the discovery. At issue still is whether, or how far, Wilkins or Franklin had grasped the significance of ‘photo 51.’ It will probably never be resolved. Unhappy at King’s (and with Wilkins), Franklin soon moved on, first to important research on the polio virus, then to her fatal cancer. She spent some of her last months with her good friends Francis and Odile Crick. Maurice Wilkins went on to propose, and prove, some vital corrections to the Crick-Watson model of DNA’s helical structures and chemical bonds. He also developed a dislike of Jim Watson and deepened his personal friendship with Francis Crick, which I think showed good judgment. As for his relationship with Dr. Franklin, it was complicated but not “dark.” It serves us best as a reminder that in the world of science, as it existed in the middle of the 20th century, women were not yet regarded as equals. Maurice Wilkins, as professor of biophysics at London (he was promoted after his 1962 Nobel), lived long enough to make some amends for that. ©

[Stanley]

This topic has had over 2000 views in eight hours..... A mystery. ((They aren't all bots!)

[PanBiker]

This topic has had over 2000 views in eight hours..... A mystery. ((They aren't all bots!)

I am somewhat more pragmatic, the majority probably are, a bot, spider or crawler hit only takes a few nano seconds in passing, they don't sleep and work 24/7/365.

[Stanley]

PILTDOWN

So long as man is interested in his long past history, in the vicissitudes which our early forerunners passed through, and the varying fare which overtook them, the name of Charles Dawson is certain of remembrance. We do well to link his name to this picturesque corner of Sussex—the scene of his discovery. I have now the honour of unveiling this monolith dedicated to his memory. Sir Arthur Keith, speaking at Piltdown, Sussex. July 1938.

In long retrospect, and read carefully, this must be seen as a classic example of damning with faint praise. Chances are that Keith, an eminent anthropologist, already suspected that Charles Dawson’s great find, “Piltdown Man,” was not the skull of a prehistoric human. Charles Dawson, a not very successful lawyer, was well known in Sussex as an amateur paleontologist, collector of artifacts—and hungry for wider recognition. In 1908, “a workman” (still unidentified) brought him a skull fragment from a quarry. Further finds followed, and on December 18, 1912, Dawson revealed Piltdown Man to the Geological Society of London. By then it consisted of a large-brained skull case and an ape-like jaw. Dawson had already won the support of eminent scientists like the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the British Museum’s Arthur Smith Woodward. Woodward and Dawson coauthored an influential paper in 1913. Teilhard de Chardin found another tooth at Piltdown, which (he said) added to the skull’s authenticity. Sir Arthur Keith joined in the chorus of praise. From America, Henry Fairfield Osborne added his weighty presence (he was President of the American Museum of Natural History). There were doubters, almost immediately, and their numbers grew; but the full extent of the hoax was only proved in 1953, when better dating techniques showed that Piltdown was a human skull (medieval) tied to a primate jaw and some cleverly altered teeth. It was an ingenious hoax, a series of discoveries that fit together seriatum. Dawson himself has become, as the police say, a person of interest. But the hoax was also over-elaborate and unbelievable. So interest has centered on why so many reputable scientists were taken in. Were they co-conspirators? Possibly. Some of the modifications of skull and teeth suggest a more than amateur exertise. A more fruitful line of inquiry is that many of the pro-Piltdowners were ‘scientific racists’ who welcomed the idea that big-brained humans might have a European (as opposed to an African or Asian) origin. Certainly Osborne and Keith were themselves leading eugenicists who believed that ‘miscegenation’ threatened the inner qualities of Anglo-Saxon ‘racial stock.’ And whoever his accomplices may have been, however many or few they were (speculation has extended that field to include Sir Arther Conan Doyle), Charles Dawson was Piltdown’s hoaxer-in-chief. Altogether, Piltdown is an instructive story, not least in a time when our American president is (also) our hoaxer-in-chief. Meanwhile, Charles Dawson’s memorial pillar still stands at Piltdown. ©.