Department of Mathematics and Statistics

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


<<     < >     >>

21.   Makdougall Brisbane Prize; Cambridge; Harry’s collapse; West Park Mental Hospital

In March 1933, Aitken learned that he had been awarded the Makdougall Brisbane Prize of the Royal Society of Edinburgh; the prize is awarded biennially and sequentially to the Physical, Engineering and Biological Sciences.

A press photographer from the Glasgow “Bulletin” invaded my room and took a ghastly travesty of my features, rather worse than a passport photograph. Such recognition of one’s work, though I set little store on it, is pleasant enough when it comes, not prematurely.168

The family spent the summer holidays at St Abbs.

In early October Aitken visited Cambridge to see the electrical calculating machines there. He was increasingly interested in the mechanisation of mathematical procedures – ‘deeply engaged in making mathematics of a practical kind amenable to the extraordinary scope afforded by modern electrical machines’, as he described himself169 – and discriminated between rival procedures on just such grounds. He was even attracted to the machines themselves. His notebooks contain an ink-and-coloured-pencil drawing from 1937 of a ‘four-keyboard machine of Mercedes-Euclid type, the cross-multiplicator, for performing $AD – BC$ or $(AD – BC)/H$. (Useful in solving simultaneous equations, or evaluating determinants, etc.)’, the layout of the keys and switches lovingly detailed. In a day-trip to the Nautical Almanac Office at Greenwich, L.J. Comrie, a compatriot of Aitken’s and a pioneer of punched-card computing, gave a demonstration of his machines. Aitken was in Cambridge for six days.

Cambridge itself, which I then saw for the first time, impressed me far more than my mission. The still, damp mornings, when I rose to find wreaths of vapour slowly unwinding upwards from the elegant trees; the Cam, where more than once I saw kingfishers arrowing under ancient bridges; Grantchester itself; the colleges and the courts, and dinner in Christ’s as guest of S.W.P. Steen. And everywhere the Englishness, the pattern of life as formal and final as that of Pekinese mandarins, the tacit but evident conviction – I could hardly bring even myself to doubt it – that any deviation, even the slightest, from this pattern would be a decline from an achieved perfection.170

He returned to Edinburgh in time for the start of term on 9 October; Henri Gonin, a PhD student from South Africa, awaited him.

Two days later an incoherent letter arrived from Harry, written in red ink. A telegram from a Mrs Thomson followed, saying that Harry was ill and Aitken should come at once. Aitken caught the midday train to London and was at Harry’s lodgings at 39 St Charles Square, Ladbroke Grove, by 9-30pm.

In London Harry had been taken in by Elizabeth Thomson, ‘an elderly and wealthy philanthropic widow’, Aitken reported, ‘[of] almost regal presence […] well-read, witty, even humorous’,171 suppressing his aversion to Grinling sufficiently to add that ‘Harry owes something to him [Grinling], for keeping him in London, for getting him under the care of this Mrs Thomson, a genuine benefactress’.172 Her single failing in Aitken’s view was a devotion to mysticism. ‘[E]very few minutes or so the conversation inclined towards theosophy, and here she would lose her alertness and would seem to fall into a kind of trance, in which she would speak of “The One, and That which is Beyond the One”, a concept meaningless to me.’173 Yet a similar outlook on such matters may have been a main point of sympathy between her and Harry.

As we have seen, Harry’s plan was to study for a Fellowship of the Institute of Chemistry. He wrote to Alec asking for the exam fee – Alec promised to pay – and wrote again a few weeks before the exam. He seemed happy and confident.

The FIC exam occupied four days, probably Tuesday 3-Friday 6 October.174

On the final day Harry, in Aitken’s words, broke under the strain.

The experiments being completed and entered up, his sense of time – so I found – was suddenly altered; he became hallucinated. The “Lab. Boys” were transfigured before him into “celestial acolytes”, the shining weighing machines, the weights, the sun casting its beams aslant the laboratory table, all this was suddenly seen as wonderful and symbolic, sub quâdam specie aeternitatis. At first elated by the supernatural beauty diffused abroad, he soon imagined himself to have discovered some great and fundamental physico-chemical secret; he made diagrams, and drew from the tritest patterns an overwhelming significance. This was the onset of a “folie de grandeur”, but more, of an oscillation soon to exceed all proportion.175

Mrs Thomson, alarmed and unable to calm him, administered a sedative but to no effect. Alone in his room ‘Harry began to write at large, and to have his mind less and less under control’.176 On Saturday Mrs Thomson took him to Regent’s Park Zoo.

This choice, though made in all kindness of heart, was a bad one, since nothing is worse for nerves at strain (as I well knew myself from visits to the Zoo at Corstorphine) than the spectacle of creatures remotely like ourselves but seemingly degenerate, coming to the surface of the present from fathomless abysses of time, as if divine creation had gone wrong, or some devil had made the living part of the world (as held by the Manichees). And Harry must have felt as I did in 1927, for in his diary he records “the deliberating monkeys, the strange secret life of birds, of reptiles”.

Had Harry seen an octopus, Aitken wondered? For (to skip ahead a moment) on waking in Harry’s bed after a night at St Charles Square, Aitken was horrified to find that ‘Harry had gouged on the wall this rough image of his first fear, this creature that first broke the equilibrium of his mind’.

The heavy red curtains were still drawn, but a faint light passing between them began to illumine the inner wall, towards which, away from the window, my pillowed head was turned. I saw that some outline had been traced on the wall, a groove made by the back of a pen-knife or some similar instrument, and that the faint early rays, caught in this groove, were reflecting this outline, in silver against dark grey. It was something like this:
(the octopus, the frilled $\Omega$).177

On Sunday Harry wrote a disjointed letter to Mabel McIndoe. It too was in red ink, written on the back of a receipt for a typewriter. The spacing is erratic and addenda sprinkle the page but the main part reads:

Service is help.
My helpers in this Room who have stretched a point for me and whom I wish the best ought to be able to do quick business from what I have seen if they get correspondents to fill in cards in their own hand, using TACT and learn to pick illegible writers who may be the only people who want to make a rattling noise where we want a little peace from inventions.
As the writer would sooner be ignorant than stupid and prefers law to order he is not trying to teach people their business but only to express gratitude for a service.
Sgd,
Harry A.A. Aitken

Help was sought from a local GP. After a cursory examination Harry was ‘bundled by force, and four men, into a Black Maria of an ambulance’178 and taken to the Fulham Institution.179 By the time Aitken arrived at Mrs Thomson’s that evening, the house was calm, the hurlyburly done.

Aitken visited the Fulham Institution next morning. Peering through a slit in a door, he saw Harry in a padded cell.

Physically well, but wild, frightened and raging, battering the cushioned walls with volleys of fist-blows, crying out “Freedom!” “Christ!” “William Shakespeare!”, retreating baffled and then returning to the attack. I spoke, called his name aloud, but it was as useless as shouting amid shrapnel; nothing could pierce the barrage of violent thoughts and violent words.180

Aitken wrote out an account of Harry’s mental history for the medical superintendent and arranged for a transfer to the more suitable West Park Mental Hospital in Epsom. There was little more he could do. He returned to St Charles Square and left for Edinburgh by the night train.

This domestic tragedy was interrupted by farce when, days later, Aitken was assailed by newspaper reporters. Comrie had given an after-dinner speech181 in which he told how Aitken, in battle in 1916, had supplied from memory the name, rank and regimental numbers of the men in, not his platoon – as indeed he had – but his battalion. Aitken was outraged. ‘One and all have been sent away with fleas in their ear,’ he wrote. But he had only himself to blame. At Greenwich he had been showing off, having mental calculations timed against the machines. The platoon-book story was presumably thrown in for good measure, Aitken being the only source for it. Comrie simply got the details wrong.

Harry was admitted to West Park on 23 October. On the 24th Aitken reported to Mabel McIndoe from Edinburgh that Harry had passed his exams and was now FIC. ‘The acute and violent frenzy of some 10 days has now abated; he is quiet in bed, poor chap, cheerful but almost unaware of all that is passing around him’. A short time later, on 1 November Mabel McIndoe received notification from West Park that Harry was ill and should be visited.

Harry lay quietly in bed – too quietly. No one told me that he had had a stroke, that his entire left side was paralysed and that he couldn’t speak. He looked at me without interest or sign of recognition.182

Grapes she brought him he pushed into his mouth in handfuls. Thereafter she visited him every Friday, with a selflessness one might not think possible of the frivolous, pleasure-loving flapper she has been depicted to be.183 Harry partly recovered his speech but the long-term prognosis was dismal.


168  ACA to Pearl, 11 April 1933.
169  ACA to D’Arcy Thompson, 23 Dec 1938.
170  Insert to Memoir, second page.
171  Insert to Memoir, 35, 36.
172  ACA to Mabel McIndoe, 17 Oct 1933.
173  Insert to Memoir, 36.
174  In a letter to Mabel McIndoe on Saturday 14 Oct, Aitken says he received a telegram 3 days before, so on Wednesday 11 Oct. Harry went to the Zoo on the Saturday after the exam, ‘two or three days before the crisis’, the crisis presumably being Tuesday 10th. So the exam was in the week before Sat 7th. He bought the typewriter Monday 2nd, so the exams were probably Tuesday-Friday.
175  Insert to Memoir, 38. ‘Oscillation’ is a term Aitken used frequently to describe his own mental life.
176  Insert to Memoir, 38
177  Insert to Memoir, 37.
178  Insert to Memoir, 38.
179  A hospital for the chronically sick and aged. The building was originally (1849) the Fulham Workhouse. See Lost Hospitals of London, http://ezitis.myzen.co.uk/fulhamhospital.html.
180  Insert to Memoir, 38.
181  Aitken was back in Edinburgh on 12 October and wrote about the visit of the reporters in a letter to Mabel McIndoe on 17 October.
182  Cockabully Story, 30.
183  For example, in Keith Ovenden’s biography of Dan Davin, A Fighting Withdrawal (OUP, 1996).
<<     < >     >>