2018 Concert Series Gallipoli to the Somme | Page 20

Alexander Aitken – a short biography by Peter Fenton
Alexander Craig Aitken was born on 1 April 1895, in Dunedin. During school
holidays he stayed at his grandparents’ farm at Seal Point, and from his wan-
derings over the Peninsula grew his profound love of the natural world, one
of the romantic elements that, merged with other, classical tendencies – math-
ematics, athletics and music, classical art and literature – produced the vibrancy
of his maturity. Music was central to his life. Eric Fenby, Delius’s amanuensis,
described Aitken as the most accomplished amateur musician he had known.
Aitken entered the University of Otago in 1913, and enrolled in mathemat-
ics, French and Latin. With war in Europe, he volunteered on his twenti-
eth birthday and participated in the latter stages of the Gallipoli debacle.
He was commissioned in northern France and wounded in what became
known as the Battle of the Somme. Invalided home in 1917, he passed a
year of recuperative inactivity during which he wrote a draft of the mem-
oir published later as Gallipoli to the Somme (1963). For this work he was
elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (1964).
Aitken resumed his studies in 1918 and in 1919 was elected President of the
Students’ Association. He graduated with first class honours in languages but
a second in mathematics. Bitterly disappointed, he abandoned thought of a
career in mathematics and took a job teaching at Otago Boys High School.
In 1920 Aitken married Winifred Betts, a brilliant student of botany who
became the first female lecturer at the University of Otago. Contact with
R.J.T. Bell, the professor of mathematics at the University, rekindled his am-
bitions and in 1923 he was awarded a scholarship to study mathematics
at the University of Edinburgh. After hurried preparations he and Winifred
left New Zealand, never to return.
Aitken’s thesis was completed in 1925, under pressure and at great personal
cost. He suffered a breakdown in 1927 that permanently altered his outlook.
Referring to it later he wrote: ‘Since that time, there is not a tree, not a turn in
the road, not a hill-top, not even a swaying reed, but speaks of the beauty, the
terrible beauty and mystery of the world.’ Breakdowns beset him throughout
the rest of his life, invariably associated with his experiences at the Somme.
Aitken was appointed to the staff at Edinburgh in 1925, promoted to Read-
er following his FRS in 1936 and took up the chair of Pure Mathematics in
1948. To an unusual extent he incorporated his extraordinary abilities into
a view of humanity that gave primacy to pure being. Despite recurrent ill-
ness his natural grace was refined by age. He died on 3 November 1967.
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