On Bene’t Street, a few steps from King’s Parade, there is a pub that has been pouring drinks since 1667, when it opened as the Eagle and Child. It was a coaching inn, with a galleried courtyard where travellers once climbed down from the London coach. The building still belongs to Corpus Christi College, whose rooms look down on it.
Look up in the back room and you will see the first of its stories. During the Second World War, British and American airmen from the airfields around Cambridge spent their evenings here. Using candles, lighters and even lipstick, they wrote their names and squadron numbers across the ceiling. Many of them never came back. The marks were carefully preserved in the 1990s, and people still call it the RAF Bar.
“The secret of life”
In the early 1950s the University’s Cavendish Laboratory stood just round the corner on Free School Lane, and The Eagle was its local. Two of its regulars were Francis Crick and James Watson. On 28 February 1953, so the story goes, Crick walked in at lunchtime and told everyone that they had discovered the secret of life: the double-helix structure of DNA.
It was a wonderful moment, but it was not theirs alone. In London, at King’s College, Rosalind Franklin had been taking extraordinarily precise X-ray images of DNA. One of them, now known as Photograph 51, was shown to Watson by her colleague Maurice Wilkins without her knowledge, and it helped point the way to the helix.
A discovery with a wider cast than the plaque once told.
Watson, Crick and Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize in 1962. Franklin had died four years earlier, aged just 37, and Nobel Prizes are not awarded after death. For years, passers-by scribbled her name on the pub’s blue plaque. In 2023 it was finally replaced with a new one that honours Franklin and Wilkins too. The original now lives in the Whipple Museum of the History of Science, back on Free School Lane.
So when you sit in The Eagle with a pint, you are sitting among layers of Cambridge: travellers and coaching horses, young airmen far from home, and a scientific breakthrough made by more hands than history first remembered.
[Fact-check before publishing: dates and historical details.]