Rosalind Franklin

Franklin was born on 25 July 1920 in 50 Chepstow Villas, Notting Hill, London, into an affluent and influential British Jewish family. Her father was Ellis Arthur Franklin (1894–1964), a politically liberal London merchant banker who taught at the city’s Working Men’s College, and her mother was Muriel Frances Waley (1894–1976). Rosalind was the elder daughter and the second child in the family of five children. David (born 1919) was the eldest brother; Colin (1923-2020), Roland (born 1926), and Jenifer (born 1929) were her younger siblings. Her father’s uncle was Herbert Samuel (later Viscount Samuel), who was the Home Secretary in 1916 and the first practising Jew to serve in the British Cabinet. Her aunt, Helen Caroline Franklin, known in the family as Mamie, was married to Norman de Mattos Bentwich, who was the Attorney General in the British Mandate of Palestine. Helen Caroline Franklin was active in trade union organisation and the women’s suffrage movement, and was later a member of the London County Council. Her uncle, Hugh Franklin, was another prominent figure in the suffrage movement, although his actions therein embarrassed the Franklin family. Rosalind’s middle name, “Elsie”, was in memory of Hugh’s first wife, who died in the 1918 flu pandemic. Her family was actively involved with the Working Men’s College, where her father taught the subjects of electricity, magnetism, and the history of the Great War in the evenings, later becoming the vice-principal.

Franklin’s parents helped settle Jewish refugees from Europe who had escaped the Nazis, particularly those from the Kindertransport. They took in two Jewish children to their home, and one of them, a nine-year-old Austrian, Evi Eisenstädter, shared Jenifer’s room. (Evi’s father Hans Mathias Eisenstädter had been imprisoned in Buchenwald, and after liberation, the family adopted the surname “Ellis”.)

From early childhood, Franklin showed exceptional scholastic abilities. At the age of six, she joined her brother Roland at Norland Place School, a private day school in West London. At that time, her aunt Mamie (Helen Bentwich), described her to her husband: “Rosalind is alarmingly clever – she spends all her time doing arithmetic for pleasure, and invariably gets her sums right.” She also developed an early interest in cricket and hockey. At the age of nine, she entered a boarding-school, Lindores School for Young Ladies in Sussex. The school was near the seaside, and the family wanted a good environment for her delicate health.

She was 11 when she went to St Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith, west London, one of the few girls’ schools in London that taught physics and chemistry. At St Paul’s she excelled in science, Latin, and sports. She also learned German, and became fluent in French, a language she would later find useful. She topped her classes, and won annual awards. Her only educational weakness was in music, for which the school music director, the composer Gustav Holst, once called upon her mother to inquire whether she might have suffered from hearing problem or tonsillitis. With six distinctions, she passed her matriculation in 1938, winning a scholarship for university, the School Leaving Exhibition of £30 a year for three years, and £5 from her grandfather. Her father asked her to give the scholarship to a deserving refugee student.