Raven

Raven Stebbins Brown, conceived January 1, 1915, was born September 14, 1915 at the recently opened Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley.

Raven inherited his family's intelligence and curiosity, but deployed them differently. In Charlie's childhood, it was the diversity of nature that attracted his wonder and the natural order that he wanted to understand. Raven was instead fascinated by all of the languages he heard growing up — Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish — and worked to learn all of them. Cantonese proved beyond him; he could not get past the challenge of learning the nine tones — it was difficult to even hear the differences among them, let alone pronounce them and remember which word had which tone. It was much easier to learn to speak Japanese; most of the consonants and vowels are pronounced similarly to English and the syntax relatively simple. For example, the particle ga after a noun indicates it is the subject of the sentence, o indicates the object, and no indicates the possessor. So 'dog' ga 'James' no 'ball' o 'fetched' would mean 'James' dog fetched the ball.' Verbs are also relatively simple; unlike many languages, they are not conjugated for the person, number, or gender of the subject. 

The principal barrier to learning Japanese stems from the fact that it is written with three different writing systems. Two of these (hiragana and  katakana) are syllabic and reasonably easy to learn but the third involves the use of Chinese logographic characters. And each character can be read either for its meaning (kun'yomi) or for its pronunciation (on'yomi).  It is very difficult to learn a second language if you cannot read it. By process of elimination, it was Spanish that he learned. Yes, the conjugations of verbs were complex and the task of learning the gender of nouns burdensome, but at least he could read it and many people spoke it. Spanish had an additional advantage for him; many of his childhood friends were native speakers; he learned enough early enough in life to become fluent with no detectable accent. 

In sum, he learned to speak and read Spanish fluently, to speak but not read Japanese adequately, and neither speak nor read Cantonese. He also read the grammars of many different languages as though they were trash novels and learned the plot of most of them.

After Raven graduated from Berkeley High School, he studied at UC Berkeley with a double major in mathematics and linguistics,  class of '37. 

On September 1, 1939, World War II began for Poland and two days later, it was joined by Britain and France. Charlie was seized by a desire to defend the country of his birth, but at age 70, was far too old to join the British Army. But his patriotism infected his son and, given that the US showed no likelihood of breaking out of its isolationism, Raven resolved to go in his father's stead to join the fight. He arrived in Britain in February, 1940 during the so-called "phoney war." Once there, he sought out the cluster of his father's family gathered in Cambridge. His father's principal caregivers had all died: great-grandfather Charles in 1882, great-grandmother Emma in 1896, great-uncle Frank in 1925, great-aunt Bessy in 1926, and grandmother Etty in 1929. But his great-aunt by her marriage to Sir George Darwin, Lady Martha Haskins 'Maud' Darwin née Du Puy, her daughter Gwendolen, and granddaughters Elisabeth, Sophie, and Mary were there along with the daughter of his father's favorite uncle Frank, Frances.  (Another cluster of kin lived in London.) 

He asked Lady Maud where he could best aid the war effort; she suggested he join the RAF given that it was the only branch of the British armed forces in combat with the Germans at that time. Becoming a flier appealed to his romantic conception of self and so he was soon off to RAF Marham airbase in Norfolk where he joined the 38th Squadron on June 1, 1940. He served as navigator with an RAF Bomber Vickers Wellington in mainly futile night bombing raids on channel ports and factories in the Ruhr. He experienced the bombing runs as "hours  of boredom punctuated by moments of terror" as the saying goes. He was grateful to be able to leave the RAF all in one piece in December 1, 1940, one month after the end of the Battle of Britain and at the end of his six month enlistment. He returned to Cambridge to stay with his great-aunt Lady Maud in the Newnham Grange together with his cousins Gwen, Elisabeth, Sophie, and Mary.

Lady Maud took a special interest in him; she, like his father Charlie, was the child of an American father and a British mother, she, like him, had been born in the US but found herself living in Britain. She had known his father Charlie when he was a teenager living with his grandmother in Cambridge.  He shared an interest in languages with her granddaughter Mary, who was in her last year of studying German at Trinity College, Cambridge. 

Lady Maud had an extensive network in the scientific community given that her husband, father-in-law, two brothers-in-law, and a son were all FRS — Fellows of the Royal Society. Her network was especially deep among the mathematicians who had known her late husband, Sir George, who had been both an astronomer and a mathematician. She learned through them that the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park was looking for "professor types" skilled in languages and mathematics. Raven, although young, clearly fit the bill and soon joined the GC&CS staff of cryptanalysts. Mary joined at the same time, making good use of her acute intelligence and command of German. 

Cracking codes at Bletchley was intense, exhilarating, and exhausting. Raven worked in Hut 8 decrypting naval communications while Mary worked in Hut 4 translating the decrypted messages. Their sections' contributions were crucial to sinking the wolf packs of U-boats and winning the Battle of the Atlantic. 

The other cryptologists in Hut 8 were a fascinating group: young, gifted in languages, mathematics, and music. Two-thirds of them were mathematicians; the rest were a natural scientist,  a philologist, a historian, a businessman, and a magician. 

And many were chess champions who had met at tournaments and had exploited their chess network to recruit candidate cryptologists. 

Raven was too intimidated to play against the future grandmasters, but only watched play between the champions, especially the games between Harry Golombek and Hugh Alexander, sometimes joined by Stuart Milner-Barry from Hut 6. Sometimes Raven would analyze the games and learn to recognize various tactics such as Bird's opening, the Sicilian Defense, and the Latvian Gambit. But more often he would just admire the unfolding patterns as though he were contemplating waves on the sea or clouds in the sky. The developing patterns scaffolded other reveries. For example, he could consider them a field of interacting personalities each with strengths and vulnerabilities. Alternatively, he could think of the games as symphonies or complex force fields or social networks or growing organisms.

Although the director of Hut 8 was Alan Turing, Raven worked most closely with Shawn Wylie in devising plain-text attacks on the encrypted messages. This involved discovering "cribs" — pieces of text that were likely to occur in the messages before encryption. 

Mary worked in Hut 4 translating the decrypted messages guided by the German scholar Ruth Briggs. She looked for recurrent phrases in the messages that could be used as plain-text cribs and pass the best candidate cribs to Hut 8 for use in decryption. 

Raven discovered that he and Mary made a good team, often able to solve problems together impossible to solve on their own — decryption and translation informed each other. They joked that they were two halves of a single brain, much smarter together than either alone. They were comfortable with each other but too absorbed in their work for any thoughts of romance. 

Those thoughts came after May 8, 1945.

Mary and Raven were cross second cousins — Mary was the granddaughter of Raven's grandmother's brother, while Raven was the grandson of Mary's grandfather's sister. Maud, Gwen, and Charlie all approved this continuation of the Darwin-Wedgwood tradition of marrying cousins. But the Lingít would not have approved, Mary and Raven would belong to the same matrilineal moiety. 

Their courtship unfolded slowly. It had become awkward for Raven to be living under the same roof as Mary so his first cousin once removed, Frances — his great uncle Frank's daughter, took him in.

At the same time, Raven began graduate studies at Trinity College in Linguistics towards a PhD. 

Death of CDB I  May 5, 1950

Charles Darwin Brown II

December 8, 1950 - present

Named after recently deceased grandfather, following Lingit tradition

social world of Darwin-Wedgwood

Charterhouse Trinity College Cambridge (where mother's grandfather,  George Darwin FRS went)

Goes to US, as a professor teaches Ecology and Evolutionary Biology 

in the Dept of Integrative Biology

affiliated with the MVZ

reopens the Solid Rock Church of God in Nature