On February 10th we welcomed Mary Stopes-Roe, the Birmingham historian and one of Barnes Wallis's daughters. Barnes Wallis, the engineer, designer and inventor of considerable note was the subject of our February talk. He is best known as the inventor of the bouncing bomb that breached the dams of the Ruhr valley in the famous Dambuster Raid during the Second World War. It was fascinating to meet Mary, a slight figure but very sprightly and alert who recounted the very human story of Barnes Wallis's courtship of Molly Bloxam, whom he married in 1925. Most men pursue their sweethearts with chocolates and roses, rather than with calculus and trigonometry but not Sir Barnes Wallis!
Mary gave us a fascinating insight into the personal lives and courtship of Barnes and Molly. Their correspondence by letter throughout the period was a reminder, in today's society of emails, of the enormous value, interest and attraction of letters. Showing us photographs of the courtship letters that had been found in a dress box in 1978, Mary took us through the humorous and slightly eccentric approaches of Barnes. For example, we saw how he went into painstaking detail to support Molly through her university education, adding his own cartoons and mathematical formulae to enlighten her. He covered a range of topics to help her understand what were, for Molly, the puzzling mysteries of subjects like physics, calculus and trigonometry.
Barnes and Molly were step-cousins. They met at a family tea party in 1922, he was 35, she was just 17. Although marriages between older men and younger girls were customary as they offered financial security, Molly's father, Arthur Bloxam, objected because Molly was closest to him and he wanted her to complete her education. He carefully stipulated his requirements for the terms of the courtship for his daughter. Barnes could only write to his favourite child to teach her maths, a subject she was finding difficult on her pre-medicine course at University College, London. Despite leading a sheltered life, Mary described her mother as someone who was neither shy nor submissive. Her family were most important to her. Barnes himself was not submissive in professional life, but was apparently painfully shy with women. The loosening morals of the post-war era had not affected the Bloxam or Wallis
families. The story of Molly and Barnes shows that the values of the 19th century still pervaded. Mary pointed out that stories of love don't normally mix with mathematics, but that this very personal story did.
We followed the background to the story of Barnes Wallis, as we were taken through his early childhood to his final years, when he continued to design and invent. In fact, he carried on until he was forced to retire, at the age of 83, receiving a knighthood for his work and service to his country in 1968. In spite of discouragement from his family and teachers he left school in 1904 at the age of 16, Barnes with his interest in mechanics and machines was determined to become an engineer. He apprenticed himself to a shipbuilding firm on the Isle of Wight, working his way up from the shop floor to the drawing board. In 1913 he was appointed one of the chief designers at Vickers on the airship development programme, where in due course he became chief designer. He passed his London external BSc in 1922 after only 5 months of study, and took a teaching post of mathematics in Switzerland. Having failed to say goodbye to Molly, he wrote letters to keep himself in her mind at a time when she was getting out and about and he was far away.
In their correspondence, Barnes feared puzzling Molly and diminishing her confidence. He reassures her by writing that 'calculus is like chocolate meringues and trigonometry is like stale bread and margarine'. He blames her teachers for her loss of confidence and her feeling 'unbrainy'. It was also interesting that he never actually asked about her syllabus. He wrote in praise of the discipline of mathematics, stating that mathematics enables you to tackle much bigger problems in life, much wider than the school application of the subject.
Once back in London, Barnes continued to court Molly and it was clear that the mathematics had not been necessary to keep the relationship alive. Molly's goal became marriage and a family, and they duly married and had four children, enjoying 50 years of happy marriage. Barnes died in 1972 at the age of 92.
Denise Preston