Department of Mathematics and Statistics

A Necessary Balance: Alec and Harry Aitken 1920-1935
P.C. Fenton


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19.   Harry; MSc; goitre and cancer research; London and Edinburgh

Harry left home in 1928 to flat in town. Reflecting on his earlier excoriation of home life, he wrote to Pearl:

I have long reached the stage in my prodigality (in the sense of the Prodigal Son) where I have ceased to have any particular feelings towards the home that I have left. Experience of the world has shown me that I have no material cause to bear any grudge and has given me a right attitude towards my former vulgar sensitiveness. Leaving home was the best thing I ever did; but I hope to be able to help Dad soon. It is the ambition of my life, though I have no cause to be sanguine as to its realization.143

Adding, as if to validate his decision and, perversely, the ‘vulgar sensitiveness’ he repudiated, ‘Since I left home, I have forgotten what it is like to be ill.’

Harry completed a BSc in 1926, an MSc in1927144 and throughout 1928, as a Smeaton Scholar, worked in the Chemistry department of the University on the extraction of essential oil from totara and white pine.145 In 1929, still in Chemistry, he was analysing sulphur compounds in grass, funded by a National Research Scholarship from the newly-instituted Department of Scientific and Industrial Research.146 He wrote to Pearl,

My own diversions are reading, bridge, movies, dancing and fencing. I take Miss Mabel McIndoe, who taught me how to dance, to the movies and the dances. The fencing I do with my worldly room-mate, Lionel Stevens. My work is research on sulphur compounds in grass with which I’m fairly well satisfied.147

He took up a position in the Otago Medical School, the University’s flagship, in 1931, as a chemist in C.E. Hercus’s goitre research laboratory.

I have been having dinner and playing bridge with my chief the well-known or notorious Dr Hercus. An unusual transport into domesticity. While we played, the family ears were cocked all the time for any cry from the children sleeping up stairs. Any sundry bump – had M. fallen out of his cot? Any little cry. Would that be J? You go and see. Finally the inevitable result; the youngest brought down to dance on daddy’s knee, pull daddy’s hair etc. etc. I managed to keep up a semblance of being delighted and entertained. I have been working pretty furiously in my laboratory these days and nights and I might just manage to get the programme I had mapped out completed in time.148

In 1932 he moved into cancer research under A.M. Begg, formerly of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, London; a Dunedin branch of the British Empire Cancer Campaign had been established in 1930.149

The work interested Harry but in other ways he may have felt left behind. Mabel McIndoe, having concluded that Harry was ‘too introspective, too theoretical, too emotionally infantile to be a companion or support to any other human being’, was in London amusing herself before taking a job teaching. Kenneth Grinling was also in England, in repertory theatre. Lionel Stevens, the worldly room-mate from whom Harry had been inseparable, was working as a mining engineer, and Ken McIndoe, Mabel’s brother and the third, with Harry and Lionel, in a close-knit trio, had long-since departed for post-graduate study in the US, and was now in Liberia.

In what may have been, given an apparent absence of planning, a spur of the moment decision, Harry threw in his job and his fiancée,150 and in late 1932 sailed for Britain. He was accompanied by a school friend, Norman McKinlay, the son of a Dunedin shoe manufacturer.

Perhaps he was egged on by Norman, who was in a rebellious phase and keen to distance himself from the shoe factory.151 Possibly flight was a way to end his engagement; his wariness of emotional commitment may simply have got the better of him. His pay from the Medical School was soft money (and a meagre £350/annum) and from his earliest years he knew the destructive effects of straitened circumstances. ‘One thing is certain,’ he had written to Pearl, ‘I shall never get married unless I have plenty of money.’152

Of his arrival in London, Harry wrote:

We swung up the Thames at 17 knots, being late with the butter, and the skipper was soon mumbling regrets for delay to the owners, all his kingliness having fallen from him like unto a garment.
I spent six weeks in London before coming to Edinburgh. I cannot describe London adequately. It is full of pubs, parks and churches. Everything exists in great variety as compared to N.Z. and the art of living requires discrimination.153

His high spirits soon drained away. He had no job, a sketchy reference from Begg (nothing from Hercus) and £70 in cash. England was economically depressed and hunger marchers demonstrated in Hyde Park. ‘McKinlay had nine job interviews but without success, and finally gave up the unequal struggle to get a job. So far I have not done much better. The Govt. economies were causing even the elect to lose their positions in the Cancer Research at Mill Hill where I had hoped to get a start so naturally I had no success there.’154

They headed for Scotland in early November, Norman to work for a few months at a pub in Montrose before throwing in the towel and returning to New Zealand, Harry to shelter at Sycamore Terrace with Alec and Winifred.

Alec knew nothing of Harry’s intention to leave New Zealand until by chance he read an item in the New Zealand News155 that Harry and Norman had called at the office of the High Commission. A few weeks later Harry got in touch for the first time. Alec’s reply ‘must have been peppery,’ he confessed later to Mabel McIndoe, condemning ‘not him, but Hercus and Begg, for downright carelessness in sending him over like this [...] No doubt the cap fitted, and the letter wounded him.’ Immediately repentant, he wrote again, insisting Harry come at once, and stay until he found a job. Alec and Winifred had agreed that if there was no work and study for a PhD was an acceptable alternative, Harry could remain with them for two years.

Thus chastened and welcomed, Harry arrived at Sycamore Terrace on 7 November.

[Harry] said I had not changed much, except for having less hair; – but I was genuinely shocked by the change in him. […] His will-power seemed impaired […] and he stayed at home mornings and afternoons, reading the Biochemical Journal by the fire. I watched him sometimes, and was amazed at the extreme slowness of his assimilation. It was the same with novels – the slowest reader I have ever seen, and did not remember what he had read any the better afterwards.

Harry applied for academic jobs but nothing came of it.

[He] fell into despondency, read no more biochemistry, but a lot of Blake’s poems […] that morbid introspection which is his chief enemy.

In late January, with Alec’s help, he secured a position in George Barger’s156 laboratory – unpaid, but it was work and he was no longer housebound. The clouds lifted. If the ‘G.B.’ who wrote Harry’s obituary in the Biochemical Journal (which concludes ‘Aitken was of a shy and retiring disposition and hardly became known to British biochemists, as he deserved to be’) was Barger, Harry made a good impression.

In February Margaret and George contracted whooping cough and Winfred succumbed soon after. Sycamore Terrace was a small house of three bedrooms. With Harry in one and Alec and Winfred up and down to the children at night, sleeping arrangements fell into chaos. Tensions that till then had simmered reached boiling point.

From the outset he conceived hostility to my wife. He was on occasion abominably rude, and time after time I had to ignore, or to divert into other channels, difficult situations. He was also jealous of me, always supposing that I was asserting intellectual superiority over him, the last thing I would assert over anyone. […O]ur most harmless statements, our attempts at kindness, at tact and so on, were all misinterpreted, construed as insults, or analysed into senseless components.157

After a final conflagration – Alec’s term – Harry announced his intention to leave. He wound up his work at the University, and two uncomfortable weeks later, on 8 April, boarded the steamer that took him to London. So, Aitken wrote, ‘those uneasy five months were tipped down the chute of time.’

A depressing outcome, but could it have been otherwise? Harry and Alec had diverged in fundamental ways. Communication between them lacked the intimacy they once shared, and might have carried them through. Perhaps nettled that his disappointments were so visible to his established older brother, Harry had ‘jeered to Winnie about my hopelessly unpractical nature […] (to say nothing of my narrowness, conservatism and lack of a philosophical outlook).’ Unconsciously confirming part of Harry’s judgment, Alec continued

To sum up, it never did Harry any good in Dunedin to cast in his lot with Grinling’s and that crowd. They are a loose-thinking, loose-living lot whose “advanced” ideas on literature, philosophy and social behaviour will be rendered out of date, left rotting above high tide, by the wash of a milder new Victorianism which, if the signs are of any guide, is due to set up in the middle third of this century.158

And all this in a small space in the depths of winter.

In London Harry camped at Kenneth Grinling’s before finding digs of his own, and began study for a Fellowship of the Institute of Chemistry. Aitken got back to mathematics (‘I have at least six papers ready to finish – I could not do them while Harry was a worry – and plans for another book, on statistical mathematics, maturing’) and Winifred returned the household to its old routines. The children blotted Harry out.

I have only one memory of him, in the sitting room, and I remember vividly what he looked like and the impression that he was irritable. And George has one memory of him, he remembers Harry coming out of the back door or something. He stayed for a whole five months and yet each of us has only one memory.159


143  22 Sept 1928.
144  With second class honours. The University of Otago Library has a copy of the thesis, A comparison of methods of introducing the methylene group in a carbon chain and in dihydric phenyls (27pp), and a manuscript addendum (3pp) which repeats a section of the thesis but with different weights and measures in an experiment. Whereas in the thesis the common section ends ‘Unfortunately there was not sufficient material left for combustion [...]’, the addendum has ‘On combustion the following results were obtained.’
145  A handwritten report (18pp) on this work is held at the University of Otago Library.
146  Obituary Notices, Biochemical Journal 29 (1935), 1; Journal and Proceedings of the Institute of Chemistry of Great Britain and Ireland, part IV (1934), 296.
147  8 July 1929.
148  Harry to Pearl, 10 October 1931.
149  Dorothy Page, Anatomy of a Medical School (Otago University Press, 2008), 86. Begg resigned from the ICRF in 1929. Joan Austoker, A History of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund 1902-1986 (Oxford University Press, 1988), 131.
150  Ngaio Garland, a professional violinist and viola player (ACA to Pearl, 13 July 1933). Harry claimed not to recall her name when he next met Mabel McIndoe in London (Elizabeth Mason, personal communication).
151  Phone conversation with Bill McKinlay, 15 December 2011.
152  Harry to Pearl, 22 Sept 1928.
153  Harry to Win, 3 Jan. 1933 (from Sycamore Tce).
154  Harry to Pearl, 15 Feb. 1933 (from Sycamore Tce)
155  A publication of the New Zealand High Commission.
156  FRS, Professor of Biochemistry at Edinburgh.
157  ACA to Mabel McIndoe, 17 Oct 1933.
158  ACA to Pearl, 11 April 1933.
159  MM speaking to me, Edinbugh 1996.
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