Kapitza was soon admitted to Trinity College, where he became a very popular Research Fellow, and in 1929 he was elected to Fellowship of the Royal Society. His researches flourished, first through his invention of a new technique for generating briefly very large magnetic fields, and then for his elegant experiments on the behaviour of helium at very low temperatures. But unfortunately, at the end of one of his regular visits to the Soviet Union in 1934, he was firmly refused permission to return to Cambridge, and was obliged to remain for the rest of his life in Moscow conducting his researches at a new Institute for Physical Problems to which the instruments that he had designed were transferred. In 1966 he was permitted to return to England after a lapse of 32 years to receive the Rutherford Medal of the Institute of Physics, and I was happy to have an opportunity of talking to him at Churchill College, where his old friend John Cockcroft had become Master, and where he was elected in 1974 to an Honorary Fellowship. In 1978 he was belatedly awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on low temperature physics, and in 1984 he died in Moscow at the age of 87.
In 1924 Abram Samoilovitch Besicovitch left Russia, and after working for a year in Denmark came to England, where with the support of the eminent mathematician G. H. Hardy he made his way to Cambridge, and in 1927 became a University Lecturer, succeeding to the prestigious Rouse Ball Professorship in Mathematics in 1950. Three years after his arrival in Cambridge he was elected to a Fellowship at Trinity College, where he remained as a much-loved figure for the next 40 years. One characteristic that he retained to the end of his days was a firm refusal to admit to the existence of the definite article in the English language, and it is said that during one of his lectures an undergraduate tittered at its persistent absence. “Gentlemen”, said Besicovitch, “there are fifty million Englishmen speak English you speak; but there are five hundred million Russians speak English I speak”. The tittering quickly stopped. Well do I remember the passionate speech that I heard him make in 1949 defending an aged avenue of lime trees at a meeting of the Fellows in Trinity, when he considered that his juniors were overhasty in wanting them to be replaced. He always felt strongly about the state of the College gardens, and during the 1939–1945 war when gardeners were in short supply he was regularly to be seen helping to cut the grass in the courts with a small hand mower. It was typical of his thoughtfulness that on his death in 1970 he made bequests to all of the bed makers who had looked after him when he lived in Trinity.
It was in 1938 when we were both undergraduates at Trinity that I first met Dimitri Dimitrievich Obolensky. He had been educated partly in France and partly in England, and differed in one respect from the other Russians on my list in speaking an elegant English that could not be faulted. He became a leading authority on the mediaeval history of Eastern Europe, and particularly on religious and cultural problems. After graduating brilliantly, he was briefly a lecturer in Russian in Cambridge, but in 1950 he was attracted to Oxford by a Readership. There he remained for the rest of his life as a Student (Fellow) of Christchurch, in due course with a personal Professorship in the University. But it was a pleasure to see him occasionally in Trinity, which made him an Honorary Fellow in 1991.
The academic distinction that all these Russians brought to Cambridge in such varied fields goes without saying, but what in my experience united them all was their outstanding friendliness and charm. We greatly look forward to seeing more of them in the future».
Professor Richard Keynes,
Churchill College.
«Насколько я помню, в Кембридже всегда присутствовали русские, которые придавали университету особую атмосферу. Благодаря счастливому случаю, я встречался с некоторыми из тех русских, которых и до сих пор с хорошим чувством вспоминают в Кембридже.
Прежде всего, это русская балерина Лидия Лопокова, на которой мой дядя, экономист Джон Мейнард Кейнс, женился в 1925 году. Я до сих пор помню его несколько курьезное письмо к ней: “Сегодня в полдень я видел атом. Меня привели в лабораторию Кавендиша, в которой физики проводят удивительные опыты, и двое из них сопровождали меня и рассказывали об этих опытах. Было очень интересно. Один из этих двух – молодой русский по имени Петр Капица. У него замечательное оборудование, и мне показалось, что он очень умный”.
Я не уверен в том, что Мейнард Кейнс был близко знаком с Капицей, но Лидия имела в Кембридже широкий круг близких друзей, которые всегда получали удовольствие от ее откровенных и остроумных замечаний, касающихся не только театральных и художественных предметов, но многих других сюжетов. Хотя все это она выражала на специфическом английском языке, в котором было много ошибок, ее комментарии всегда обладали очарованием. Через несколько лет после смерти мужа, последовавшей в 1946 году, она переехала из Кембриджа в Сассекс. Мы постоянно навещали ее там до самой ее смерти в 1981 году.
В июле 1921 года молодой русский физик Петр Леонидович Капица приехал в Кембридж с научным визитом и встретился в лаборатории Кавендиша с Эрнстом Резерфордом. Капица был сердечно принят, но когда он спросил, не может ли он поработать несколько месяцев в лаборатории, Резерфорд ответил отрицательно, так как в лаборатории не было достаточно места. Неожиданно Капица задал Резерфорду вопрос: “Скажите, какова степень допустимых погрешностей в ваших исследованиях?”. Тот ответил, что около 3 %. На что Капица заметил, что поскольку в лаборатории насчитывается 30 исследователей, его присутствие никто не заметит, так как в процентном отношении он будет в пределах допустимых