The Boy from Spring Grove

New Zealand Listener, Volume 24, Issue 622, 1 June 1951, Page 6

The Boy from Spring Grove

NE of Lord Rutherford’s brothers is still alive today, and he remembers his childhood in Nelson as a time of rustic poverty, when the only money their father handled was the sixpence he put in the plate on a Sunday. J. G. Rutherford, now 79, lives in New Plymouth, and listeners will hear his voice in the NZBS programme, The Boy from Spring Grove, a dramatisation of the famous scientist’s boyhood, in which those who knew him as a child and a schoolboy describe their memories of him until he went to university at 17. This programme is being broadcast in connection with the Rutherford Memorial Appeal, and will ‘be heard first from 2YA at 3.30 p.m, this Sunday, June 3. There were nine children in the Rutherford hoysehold. J. G. Rutherford was only 13 months younger than Ernest, and was closer to him than any of the others in the family. He describes their early experiences at Spring Grove and Foxhill, where their father, a Scotsman, had a small farm. They helped to keep the family going by splitting matai stumps for firewcod, milking the cows and gathering fruit and honey, which was put down in large stone jars. He describes Rutherford’s early interest in electricity, when on the night of a great storm during which trees were wrenched up and horses and cattle killed by lightning, Ernest stood on the verandah of their old homestead counting the seconds between lightning flashes

and thunder to discover how far away the flashes were. He tells of the tragic drowning of two of their brothers in the Marlborough Sounds, an event which drove Ernest deeper into his studies, and which he never forgot. At school Rutherford was helped by sympathetic masters who recognised his outstanding ability in all his subjects. They helped him to win the scholarships that took him on to Nelson College, where a portrait of him by a famous artist now hangs on a wall above a glass case in which are preserved his report cards and other mementos of his days there. Rutherford’s mother Martha was the daughter of a brilliant mathematician who died in Essex at an early age. From her tolerance of his early experiments with gunpowder and electricity, and from his father’s example of persistence and hard work he drew the impetus which made him one of the world’s greatest research scholars, president for many years of the Royal Society, winner of the Nobel Prize, and above all an inspfred leader of other scientists. His researches established not only the existence of radio-active change, but the electrical structure of matter and the nuelear nature of the atom. Rutherford at Cambridge Something» of the impact of Rutherford’s personality as a research leader when he was Cavendish professor at Cambridge University is described in a talk by Dr. G. T. P. Tarrant, of Canterbury University College, who worked

under him as a student. This, an outstanding talk, will be broadcast from 1YA, 2YA, 4YA, 2YZ, 3YZ ang 4YZ at 9.15 p.m. on Friday, June 8. The Rutherford Memorial Fund was conceived by the Royal Society, London, to provide Rutherford Scholarships for research, by... British post-graduate students in the natural sciences (preferably experimental physics). The sum of £100,000 is aimed at, and part of the money will be used to provide for a Rutherford Memorial Lecture to be delivered at intervals in British "Universities, at least one‘ in three ‘of them in- New Zealand. 4 gis