Early Life and Education
Franklin was born in Notting Hill, London, into an affluent and influential British Jewish family. Her father was Ellis Arthur Franklin (1894–1964), a London merchant banker, and her mother was Muriel Frances Waley (1894–1976). Rosalind was the elder daughter, and the second child of the family of five children. 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. He was also the first High Commissioner (the effective governor) for the British Mandate of Palestine. Her aunt Helen Carolin Franklin was married to Norman de Mattos Bentwich, who was the Attorney General in the British Mandate of Palestine. She was active in trade union organisation and the women's suffrage movement, and was later a member of the London County Council.
Despite being raised in a Jewish family, Franklin later became an agnostic. From early childhood she showed exceptional scholastic abilities.
Franklin was educated at St Paul's Girls' School where she excelled in science, Latin and sports. Her family was actively involved with a Working Men's College, where Ellis Franklin, her father, taught electricity, magnetism, and the history of the Great War in the evenings and later became the vice-principal. Later Franklin's family helped settle Jewish refugees from Europe who had escaped the Nazis.
Read more about this topic: Rosalind Franklin
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“The science, the art, the jurisprudence, the chief political and social theories, of the modern world have grown out of Greece and Rome—not by favor of, but in the teeth of, the fundamental teachings of early Christianity, to which science, art, and any serious occupation with the things of this world were alike despicable.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, and moral, conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live, crime will be inevitable.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“Major [William] McKinley visited me. He is on a stumping tour.... I criticized the bloody-shirt course of the canvass. It seems to me to be bad “politics,” and of no use.... It is a stale issue. An increasing number of people are interested in good relations with the South.... Two ways are open to succeed in the South: 1. A division of the white voters. 2. Education of the ignorant. Bloody-shirt utterances prevent division.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)