The Poet's Defence

JB: I wrote a book called the Identity of Man. I never saw the cover of the English edition until the book reached me in print. And yet the artist had understood exactly what was in my mind, by putting on the cover a drawing of the brain and the Mona Lisa, one on top of the other

The Poet's Defence

ON HIS RETURN to England, he took his Ph.D in geometry, on the subject of a five-dimensional figure. That same year,1933, he became a naturalized Briton.

Like for so many of his generation, the Spanish civil war (1936-39) was artistically significant, and he published a poem on the subject (see left margin), but it also had a personal significance. His mother, Celia, organised assistance for orphans of the war and it was through this that he met his future wife, Rita Coblenz.

He spent a decade at University College, Hull, then a far satellite of the University of London, and carried out research into topology. Among his colleagues there was the economist Eric Roll (see left margin).

The outbreak of World War II disturbed this academic career, but also saw the publication of his first book The Poets Defence (1939).

In 1941, on February 17th, he married Rita (see left margin). They had four daughters.

PUBLICATIONS:

Spain 1939: Four Poems
A book of poems concerning the Spanish Civil War

RECOLLECTIONS:

Eric Roll remembers a garden in Cambridgeshire.

Rita Bronowski remembers the first time she met her husband.

Jacob Bronowski himself recalls his visit to Nagasaki.

Philip Morrison, who was a US Government observer at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, here recalls his friendship with Jacob Bronowski.

In his wartime work, which began in 1942, he seems not to have been especially successful either at the Home Security Office, where he worked in the Military research unit under Sir Reginald Stradling, or in the unit run by J D Bernal. The government science adviser, Zuckerman, expressed his doubts about Bronowski's suitability and competence for the work he was doing, which was in predicting the economic effects of bombing [Ref. 5]. However, by the end of the war Bronowski was deputized to the British Chiefs of Staff Mission to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, visiting Japan in 1945 (see left-hand margin), after which he wrote a well-regarded report The Effects of Atomic Bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In what spare time he had he produced a second book, on William Blake, A Man Without a Mask (1944).

Enter Chapter 4 The Commonsense of Science

The Ascent of Jacob Bronowski

References:

5. Zuckerman, S., 1989, From Apes to Warlords (London: Hamish Hamilton), p.135.