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The New Jacob Bronowski Archive Erica Wagner The New Jacob Bronowski Archive Erica Wagner The polymath’s archive has found a new home at Jesus College, Cambridge. His daughter Lisa Jardine pays a visit for the first time and remembers her remarkable father Professor Lisa Jardine, Jacob Bronowski’s daughter, explores the Bronowski archive for the first time ©Thom Atkinson One of Bronowski’s letters to his wife Rita sent from postwar Japan. In the November of 1945, Jacob Bronowski went to Hiroshima and Nagasaki as part of the British team which, in the immediate aftermath of the second world war, travelled to Japan to document the effects of the atom bombs that had been dropped on those cities. He was just 37 years old and had left behind a young family: his wife, Rita, an artist, and their two daughters, Lisa, who was a little over a year old, and her infant sister, Judith. “I hope you are having a happy time, and that Lisa & Judith are not being exasperatingly naughty to you,” he wrote to his wife from Hiroshima. “I dreamt of you the other night, & Lisa was certainly splashing in her bath more than very good girls do.” “Lisa” is not splashing in her bath just now but standing beside me in the new Jacob Bronowski Archive at Jesus College, Cambridge. She grew up to be Professor Lisa Jardine, as brilliant a polymath as her father. The first woman fellow of Jesus College – appointed in 1976 – she is now professor of Renaissance Studies at University College London and director of the UCL Centre for Humanities Interdisciplinary Research Projects and the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters. She is also a director of The National Archives, and a former trustee of the V&A and chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. She is, like her father, a wonderful broadcaster. And she is, I ought to say, my friend – a friendship cemented in 2002 when she chaired the Man Booker Prize. I was a judge for the first time and Yann Martel won with Life of Pi. It is thrilling to be with her as she sees what’s in the Jacob Bronowski Archive for the first time. We are in the beautiful, cloistered grounds of Jesus College, being guided through the collection by Stephen Heath, keeper of the Old Library, and Madelin Evans, the archivist who has spent the past year carefully cataloguing the archive’s contents. An intimate event held at the college on November 20 marked the fact that it is finally ready to be opened. ©Thom Atkinson Jacob Bronowski in 1964 (photographer unknown) The letter from Hiroshima – in distinctive, legible handwriting with “y”s that look, somehow, like mathematical symbols, not perhaps surprising for someone who was such a gifted mathematician – goes on to describe what he saw in that devastated city. He had already been to Nagasaki, where “fantastic tangles of steel and concrete . stood savagely against the sky”, the strangeness of the atmosphere heightened by the popular music blaring from the loudspeakers of the ship on which he and his fellow observers slept. Hiroshima, he wrote, had once been a city with good roads, bridges and European-type buildings, “the Bristol of Japan”. But now, “It has been utterly gutted, so that it looks quite unlike Nagasaki & much more like Tokyo: some seven miles of native houses burnt flat, with many of the European buildings standing up – and standing up very well. There is of course other than fire damage, and some of it (including a temple in ruins) is very spectacular.” Hiroshima he found less shocking than Nagasaki – “even allowing for the general deadening of the nerves which is bound to overtake me as I surely ‘sup full of horrors’”. But he wrote that the work was going well, and there is even a note of humour when he remarks that, unsurprisingly, the town doesn’t offer much to see “except geisha houses, at which however the queues discourage me”. That humour may strike an odd note now but Bronowski knew full well – and understood better than most – the cost of conflict. The opening of his archive in Cambridge comes at a point where he might be said to be in danger of slipping out of public memory. Yet, both in terms of range and depth, 21st-century public scholarship owes much to Bronowski’s influence. “The first episode of Brian Cox’s Human Universe is damn close to the kind of thing my father was doing,” Jardine says. She’s talking, of course, about The Ascent of Man, the documentary series first aired in 1973, which transformed popular science on television. Just a few years ago the BBC reissued the accompanying book with a new forward by Richard Dawkins. “‘Last renaissance man’ has become a cliché,” Dawkins wrote, “but we forgive a cliché on the rare occasion when it is true. Certainly, it is hard to think of a better candidate for the accolade than Jacob Bronowski.” ©Thom Atkinson Jesus College, Cambridge: the archive’s new home The book and the series remain compelling and instructive, for all that they stop short before obvious key developments in molecular biology and computer science and technology. Yet Bronowski’s experiences in Japan, and the story of his own life, meant that the series wasn’t just about the wonders of science but about its perils too: one of the most striking sequences shows him at Auschwitz, lifting handfuls of human ash and quoting Oliver Cromwell to address our unwillingness to believe what took place there only a few decades before: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.” In the bowels of Christ: but Bronowski was, of course, Jewish. Born in 1908 in Łódź, Poland, then part of the Russian empire, his family of haberdashers moved to Germany during the first world war. Interviewed by Michael Parkinson near the end of his life – Bronowski died of a heart attack in 1974, at just 66 – he described himself as a “very patriotic little German”, although his family, seen as Russian, were disliked by the Germans. “Of course it was traumatic,” he told Parkinson – who described Bronowski as one of his favourite interviewees – “but it didn’t strike me so at the time”; being always a stranger in his childhood “made me at home in the world”. The family came to Britain soon after the first world war and settled in London; he learnt English by borrowing books like Frederick Marryat’s Mr Midshipman Easy from the Whitechapel library. In a sense, his rise as a public intellectual was accidental. He won a scholarship to Jesus and arrived there in 1927, the same year as another poor boy who would go up in the world of broadcasting, Alistair Cooke. The two of them can be seen in a group photo of the editorial team of Granta magazine, an early indication of his literary leanings; indeed, his first books were about poetry, not science. His book on William Blake, A Man Without a Mask (1943), is a wonderful study of the poet who was, like Bronowski, just as interested in the natural world as the literary one. It was his mathematical work, however, that caught the eye of the War Office, which used his calculations to maximise the destructive force of aerial bombardment. As his daughter has said, “He used mathematics to work out how best to kill people, then devoted the rest of his life to promoting the - wonders of science.” Yet that clip from Auschwitz shows that, especially as a Jewish scientist, Bronowski knew very well what was at stake and that moral equations are never quite so simple. ©Thom Atkinson Jacob and Rita Bronowski in Italy in 1951 He never achieved the academic eminence that he had hoped for. He became a lecturer in mathematics at Hull university, having failed to secure a post at Cambridge. Later, as director of research at the National Coal Board, he developed “Bronowski’s briquettes”, a form of smokeless fuel made from coal dust, but they were never mass produced. He ended his career in California as associate director of the Salk Institute, founded by Jonas Salk, who had developed the polio vaccine. There was more for him in America; just how his career in Britain was stalled was made plain in 2011, when his MI5 file was released by the National Archives, showing that there were those who believed him to be “an agitator of the communist type”. He was never a communist, his daughter says; his sisters had belonged to the party and their lives had been ruined by it. “He was a passionate supporter of his adoptive country after he came to Britain at 12.” And yet mud sticks, as does what Jardine plainly calls the “straight anti-Semitism” in many of the critiques of her father. It was partly the release of this file which made Jardine determined to discover more about her father’s past. After his death the archive had been bought by the University of Toronto, where it had languished; it was when Jesus College commissioned a bust of her father in 2011 that she thought the college might give a home to his papers. “My mother wanted the archive to go to Cambridge,” Jardine explains. “After he died she offered it to Churchill, then the only college with a real archive. They refused it, saying he wasn’t distinguished enough, and my mother was furious. All his career he had been dogged by this claim that he was lightweight because of his broadcasting career.” Now, she adds wryly, “it would be seen as ‘impact’”.
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