00:00:00 Once you start to talk about that, I will sort of ask you the question to begin with,

00:00:04 but then you'll find that it's your story and your narrative.

00:00:07 I mean, actually, we don't want me on the camera very much at all.

00:00:10 This is you telling the story, so I will ask the odd question,

00:00:13 but please feel free to talk as long as you like about the subject.

00:00:18 Professor Hodgkin, you were born in Cairo in Egypt.

00:00:30 Can you tell me a little bit about your family background?

00:00:33 Yes, my father actually came from East Anglia in our country,

00:00:44 and it's thought that very likely his family, Crowfoot,

00:00:53 started there as a result of one of the Viking invasions from Denmark.

00:01:00 It's the only part of the country where the name is common.

00:01:05 At the time that he grew up,

00:01:09 the family had moved from being small farmers

00:01:14 to being professional people in Beckels, Suffolk.

00:01:19 It was usual for the elder son to be a doctor

00:01:23 and the second son to go into the church.

00:01:26 My father was the eldest son of a second son,

00:01:31 and his father became Chancellor of Lincoln Cathedral,

00:01:36 so that actually he was brought up a good deal also in Lincolnshire.

00:01:43 He followed the family tradition.

00:01:47 He went to Oxford and read classical moderations and greats

00:01:54 and got a travelling scholarship,

00:01:58 which he chose to take working with Strzegowski in Asia Minor.

00:02:07 Strzegowski was a professor of the history of art at Vienna

00:02:16 and rather well known,

00:02:18 and I suppose that my father's interest in this kind of subject

00:02:26 grew partly out of the fact that Walter Pater was his tutor at Brasenose College.

00:02:33 Anyway, he had a lovely year in Asia Minor working on Byzantine churches,

00:02:40 which set him on a line he followed all the rest of his life.

00:02:47 He couldn't easily, on return to England, get any paid job in this field,

00:02:56 so after struggling a little with lectureship in Birmingham,

00:03:04 he decided to take a job in the Egyptian Department of Education,

00:03:15 which at least took him back to the Near East.

00:03:22 This was how I came to be born in Cairo.

00:03:28 He had met my mother in Lincolnshire.

00:03:33 Her family were country squires.

00:03:37 She grew up as the squire's eldest daughter,

00:03:42 hunting and going to balls and going to a finishing school in Paris

00:03:49 where she worked very hard at music and French,

00:03:53 but she was a person of very wide interests.

00:03:58 Dame Elizabeth Wordsworth,

00:04:02 who was the first principal of Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford,

00:04:08 tried to persuade my grandmother to let Molly come to her college,

00:04:17 but my mother's mother really wanted her back at home

00:04:24 and said no, she couldn't study so much.

00:04:29 Considering what she did with her eyes, it's a rather extraordinary thing to have happened.

00:04:38 Did your mother ever regret her?

00:04:40 Oh, very much, yes.

00:04:42 My father regretted it even more for her

00:04:45 because she was a person who naturally enjoyed learning

00:04:51 and enjoyed discussing a variety of problems

00:04:57 which she picked up wherever she went with him,

00:05:03 and he felt that her main trouble was writing about them,

00:05:10 that this she would have got from an Oxford education.

00:05:18 But still, he was in Egypt and she was in Lincolnshire

00:05:29 and from time to time in San Remo, Italy,

00:05:33 where her grandmother went to winter because she had a weak heart.

00:05:42 And it took quite a long time for my father to decide that he wanted to marry her.

00:05:51 In fact, at the end, the idea was precipitated by Molly saying

00:06:00 that she thought she really must have a real job

00:06:06 and she began to think of studying medicine

00:06:11 and in fact went to some course in London through one of her medical friends.

00:06:22 But as soon as he proposed, everything changed.

00:06:26 She went and joined him in Cairo, where he then was situated.

00:06:35 And there, their first three children were born.

00:06:39 They used to come back home for the summer months

00:06:44 and so were caught back in England at the beginning of the war, 1914.

00:06:52 At that time, he had already been appointed to be Director of Education in Sudan

00:07:01 and was to go out for the next period of service there.

00:07:09 She wanted to go with him very badly,

00:07:13 so she left her three eldest children with our very good nurse

00:07:22 at Worthing, near to my Crowfoot grandmother,

00:07:32 who could keep an eye on the organisation.

00:07:36 This meant that we grew up for the next few years away from our parents' influence.

00:07:46 My mother came over once in the middle of the war to see it all as well,

00:07:53 but the journeying, of course, was difficult and dangerous.

00:07:57 She just had time to see her brothers again before two of them were killed in France.

00:08:06 But stayed in the Sudan until 1918, and the war came to an end.

00:08:21 For a few years, my father and mother weren't quite sure how to work out their life

00:08:29 between now four children, the youngest was born in the Sudan in 1918,

00:08:36 and the work that both of them were finding very fascinating in Khartoum and its surroundings.

00:08:51 One year, my mother stayed entirely with us in order to get to know us

00:08:56 and ran a small school for us at her old home, Nettleham Hall in Lincoln,

00:09:07 two small cousins being added to us four.

00:09:12 And that was a very enjoyable time.

00:09:15 She only taught us things she really knew about,

00:09:19 like natural history and history and poetry.

00:09:24 We made our own history books, one reign at a time,

00:09:30 and illustrated them and learned all about how people lived in the different periods.

00:09:36 It was a very interesting year.

00:09:43 At the end of it, they began to think of a more settled home

00:09:51 and what to do with the rest of our education.

00:09:56 My father then decided, through it best, to have a definite home

00:10:02 and found a rather beautiful old house in a village, Galston, three miles out of Beckles,

00:10:11 very near a good local education authority secondary school,

00:10:20 the Sir John Lemon School at Beckles,

00:10:24 which his family had an interest in organizing,

00:10:29 which as a day school meant that we could live at Galston,

00:10:37 and cycle into school every day,

00:10:40 at least when our mother was there to keep house for us.

00:10:46 She divided herself, actually, into two halves

00:10:52 and spent about half the year with my father in Sudan,

00:10:57 and during that half we had to lodge with parents,

00:11:02 with relations or friends in Beckles,

00:11:06 and then she would come back to us for the six months of the summer.

00:11:10 Did your children find this at all strange, or did you just think it was the way things were?

00:11:14 No, we just took it as the way things were.

00:11:19 Once we had the house, we sort of kept it going.

00:11:24 We would go out and play in it on Saturdays

00:11:29 when we were living in Beckles with a friend there.

00:11:38 But you had a very good school in Beckles, didn't you?

00:11:41 Yes, well, it was a good ordinary government school.

00:11:47 It was the school of the neighborhood

00:11:51 that was designed to train the children for the different kinds of jobs that were about,

00:11:58 and particularly for teaching in primary schools.

00:12:03 There were special children who had scholarships from all the villages around

00:12:09 who were pledged to be teachers.

00:12:13 I first came across chemistry just before I went to that school

00:12:19 in a small governess class that was organized in Beckles,

00:12:25 which we went to while our parents were looking for a house and the rest of it.

00:12:33 The course was one organized by the PNEU organization,

00:12:40 Parents National Educational Union,

00:12:45 and one started with little books, one about each science,

00:12:50 and this first one was chemistry, a book a term.

00:12:55 And I was lucky, I had chemistry, and in the first lesson,

00:12:59 almost as far as I remember it, growing crystals of copper sulfate and alum,

00:13:06 which set me on the course of what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

00:13:13 I was a little disappointed, actually, when I went to the lemon school

00:13:17 to find they didn't do chemistry in the first term,

00:13:20 but a little physics, which was much duller,

00:13:25 a little physics, which was much duller, being about levers and things like this.

00:13:31 But then, owing to some government cut, our physicist was cut,

00:13:37 and there was chemistry for the rest of the time there

00:13:42 with Miss Steely, who was a very good teacher,

00:13:48 to take us through so that I never really looked back from it.

00:13:55 There was one episode which encouraged me still further.

00:14:00 When I was 13, my father was rather near retiring age from the Sudan,

00:14:09 which was early in those days, about 50, I think,

00:14:14 and thought it would be good for us two elder children

00:14:22 to go to the Sudan for a few months just to see a foreign country.

00:14:33 And this was a very exciting journey and period altogether

00:14:39 for myself and Joan, my sister.

00:14:45 I was lucky, too, that one of his best friends was Dr. A.F. Joseph,

00:14:52 who was the government soil chemist and worked in the Wellcome Research Laboratory,

00:14:58 which itself was housed in a bit of the Gordon College, which was next door to us.

00:15:06 My mother took us over there one day to see the sort of work they were doing.

00:15:12 We were shown little pellets of gold brought back by an expedition of geologists,

00:15:23 and just to amuse us, they threw this gold into a basin full of sand and panned it out again.

00:15:32 So then we went home and panned the sand at the bottom of the little channel

00:15:39 that went through our garden, and this sand yielded a black and shiny mineral.

00:15:50 I thought I should identify this and went back to Uncle Joseph

00:15:55 to suggest that it might be manganese dioxide and might I test for it.

00:16:02 Well, he took me through the analysis, which proved in fact that it was ilmenite,

00:16:10 an ore of titanium and iron, and I was very delighted, of course.

00:16:19 It's still quite an extraordinary thing for a 13-year-old to want to do this,

00:16:25 to even identify something they find in the river, isn't it?

00:16:28 I don't know. I think they're more curious than that, judging by my grandchildren.

00:16:37 They seem to get interested in chemistry quite early.

00:16:44 I only don't stay with it. That's the only difference.

00:16:48 Your mother also gave you a book. Everything seemed to be pointing in the one direction.

00:16:53 Your mother gave you a book of some Christmas lectures which had been given at the R.I.

00:16:57 Yes. I think this was when we came back from Sudan, somewhere about 1924.

00:17:12 Those lectures were given by W.H. Bragg, and the book was called Concerning the Nature of Things.

00:17:24 There was a slightly later book called Old Trades and New Knowledge, both of which I had.

00:17:32 But the first particularly discussed the structure of crystals as found by himself and his son,

00:17:42 Lawrence W.L. Bragg, and I was very excited by these books.

00:17:52 But I had another excitement at much the same time, I think a little older,

00:17:57 and this was through some work done by a somewhat distant cousin of mine, Charles Harrington.

00:18:11 He was working on Tauroxin, and this was published in the newspapers somewhere in this middle period.

00:18:19 Again, my mother encouraged me to write to him and say,

00:18:26 if I really wanted to work in this particular field, say biochemistry, what would it be good for me to read?

00:18:37 And he suggested a book by Parsons called Fundamentals of Biochemistry,

00:18:48 which I read and found very interesting indeed.

00:18:53 I hadn't at that time done any organic chemistry at school, which made it a little complicated,

00:19:02 but found I could look up the appropriate chapter in the Encyclopedia Britannica just to get the definitions right.

00:19:12 But that was where I first met proteins and particularly insulin,

00:19:18 and I like to think that the little text above the chapter, he had quotations from Shakespeare for each chapter.

00:19:28 And the quote for the chapter on proteins was, we are such stuff as dreams are made of.

00:19:37 So before I left school, I had quite a good idea of what field I wanted ultimately to work on

00:19:51 and the means by which I hoped to investigate this field.

00:19:58 But there was a step of the way. One had to choose a university.

00:20:05 Well, I'm afraid this was easy. There had never been any question, but I would go to Oxford, which my father had been to.

00:20:15 We had to choose a college at Oxford, and there my father had made a choice accidentally by meeting Marjorie Fry,

00:20:24 the principal of Somerville, in I think a visit she paid to Egypt quite early on.

00:20:32 And so when I had completed the course in the school, which really ended at what we should now call O-levels,

00:20:48 we looked into the question of what one had to do to get to Oxford,

00:20:56 and my mother took me over to see Somerville College and the very old science tutor, Jane Willis Kirkcaldy,

00:21:06 who had come to the college as an undergraduate in the late 1880s, I think.

00:21:16 And stayed on.

00:21:19 Yes. She was the tutor for all the women's colleges at that time.

00:21:24 She was a zoologist actually, but she knew what you had to do for the different fields.

00:21:31 And it rapidly appeared that I wasn't really quite qualified.

00:21:37 I hadn't done Latin for one thing, which at that time was compulsory at Oxford University.

00:21:45 I hadn't done enough mathematics, and really I had to know a second science.

00:21:56 However, we had 18 months to fulfil these qualifications, so I set to work on Latin.

00:22:08 As the extra science chose botany because my mother knew quite a lot,

00:22:14 she found another more professional botanist in the neighbourhood who retired.