Department of Mathematics and Statistics

A Necessary Balance: Alec and Harry Aitken 1920-1935
P.C. Fenton


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11.   Domesticity; Dorothy McBurnie

1926 was a sedate year for the Alec and Winifred. They stayed put at Denhamgreen Place, Aitken settled into work and Winifred adapted to the routines of caring for Margaret. Actually this is not quite so. Winifred had definite views on child-rearing; she established the routines, the children followed.

Mother was very methodical and organised, and very orderly. When we were babies we were brought up on the Truby King system. Mother said we were fed on the dot of two and on the dot of six and so on. This was what she believed in. It is not thought good these days.95

Domesticity wrought changes in Winifred, broadly speaking from woman to mother.

Mother had lots of clothes when she came to Britain I believe. Ever so many smart things – in the style of the time, I can remember one or two of them – but everything got transferred to the house at some stage. Then she thought it was a bit vulgar, or self-centred or whatever, to spend a lot of time thinking about one’s clothes and one’s looks. … and I suppose her interest in clothes, which she must have had – any young girl does – would be transferred to me.96

They were changes willingly, even deliberately undergone.

Before I was born she was very keen on botany, single-minded. But when I was born, this was it. She was very maternal, interested in George and me, devoted to us and our welfare.97

The children were put to bed before Aitken came home in the evening so that he could work undisturbed. He cared for the children but, in Margaret’s phrase, in an orderly way.

Neither was demonstrative physically, though they might have been when they were young. They weren’t to each other, or to us, physically. Elizabeth Mason asked me if they’d ever kissed me – well, I can only remember this one time. I was sitting on Mother’s knee when I was little. No, I don’t remember kisses and cuddles.98

Asked whether she felt she had been deprived of love however, Margaret replied: ‘No! I certainly didn’t. I’m sure I thought my parents were wonderful, and so they were. Oh, I never felt deprivation of love at all.’99

Aitken noticed ‘a languor and melancholy new to me’, which he put down to the strains of illness and overwork the previous year. But there may have been other causes.

Before George and I were born, Mother and Father shared a mutuality of interests: literature, books, poetry, music – walking in the country they both loved – and felt in the same way, and would enjoy things together. The same feeling would come over them at a certain place in the country. I think I’ve read this in the early part of the journal – they both felt whatever they felt at some place in the Pentlands. Then with Mother being involved with George and me, and Father being able to pursue his musical interests and meet other people and so on, he advanced his interests in music, poetry, literature in general, and Mother didn’t. She was absorbed in home things. She liked the novels of Hardy, later on, the three of us discussed them, but Father, with his renaissance mind, went far in these realms, and Mother was very occupied at home. Whether, possibly if they’d never had children at all, she would have followed him to the same extent – whether she could have followed him, mentally and psychologically, emotionally, into these realms – I simply do not know. But they shared these interests, and he would give her before, when they were engaged, a book of poetry for a Christmas or birthday present, and after they were married, but not after George and I were born. She had to occupy herself with practical things.100

This ‘matronisation’ of Winifred was probably not expected by Aitken, nor welcomed. In part it can be traced to Aitken’s illness and the subtle reorientation of their relationship that followed it, but the connection may have escaped him. At the same time he was about to enter the most creative period of his life and may have felt, mixed with the languor of fatigue, a sweeter languor of latent power. He had plenty of ideas and his reputation was growing. There was a good chance that a phoenix might rise from the ashes.

During the 1926-27 academic year Aitken became involved with Dorothy McBurnie,101 a student of Aitken’s and a friend of Kate Williamson, another of Aitken’s students and the daughter of a family friend. They met secretly but the relationship was not, it seems, sexual. This episode may account for two cryptic entries in the Miscellaneous Recollections (p.53):

Obiter 1929
In many cases the central experience of a man’s life is one which convention forbids him to disclose.

1930 Morality is sometimes, perhaps most times, based on sound natural instinct; but sometimes it is merely the voice of the majority, based on expediency, prejudice or jealousy.

Winifred became aware of the relationship, but whether at the time or later, no one appears to know. Margaret is convinced, however, that it produced a confusion of loyalty in Aitken that bore on the calamity of 1927.


95  MM speaking to me, 13 June 1996.
96  Ibid.
97  Ibid.
98  Ibid.
99  Ibid.
100  MM speaking to me, 17 June 1996.
101  Later, as Dorothy Paulin, she was well-known as a poet, editor and environmentalist. Her books include Country Gold (1936), The Wan Water (1939), Solway Tide (1950) and Springtime by Loch Ken (1961?).
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