EZRA SOMEKH
 

From Roy Marsh 1962
I just stumbled across the site, and feel moved by the contributions of Mick Yates, and the one below on Somekh, to add something.
Inspired by Ezra's teaching, I wanted in 1968 to go further in physics but couldn't handle the maths.  As Ezra used to say of some of us when the (poorish) results of our exams emerged, "Boys, it pains me to say it, but some of you are drugging your feet already".  I'm jealous of anybody with a book written by Ezra.  Had no idea such a thing existed.  So I did materials science instead, enjoyed it and became a patent attorney (1979 qualified).  Best profession in all the world.  And a grounding in metal physics allows one to cope with the many technologies that clients work with.  My "speciality" for some years has been medical devices like "keyhole" surgical instruments, and stents for keeping bodily lumens open.  A special privilege is to see how these inventions really do keep people alive, healthy and active and sooner out of hospital. 

On Being a Teacher

At a distance of over 30 years, it might be seen as strangely irrelevant and inconsequential to spend time discussing a teacher, now dead for 25 years, met in a grammar school in middle England, and now at a time when both person and institution are disappearing from collective memory. But that would be to treat all as equal time passing. This note unashamedly seeks to praise and commend what is good to others who did not have the fortune of knowing Ezra Somekh. 

He taught physics. That was important. Important, I believe, for him. He talked of its beauty, of how it lived, both through its ability to bring us into an intimate contact with a full-of-wonder Nature, as well as through the lives of the people who had over the centuries struggled to give it shape. And further, its mathematics was not simply its language, but the very thinking process of the Creator. Had we known Blake then, we would surely have considered him bereft of imagination, of the insight into this Nature which we enjoyed. To engage – as a sociologist would say - with the World through science has been a privilege. It has also been a deep comfort to know I am an intimate and integral part of the Universe, that, a number of first second elements apart, my atoms, like yours, were forged in the centre of stars. And that the human I and the lowly mouse are latter-day, genetically well conserved bedfellows. This love of science and the belief that we stand and think a little more human through science, I trace, in large part, to Ezra’s vision of what is beautiful in thought, and in the working of the human mind.

But Ezra saw this breathing and thinking life, as a shared experience. We engage not only with a physical world, but also with the minds and works of other men. And this is profoundly more important. In a way, we can live without science, but not without each other. For Ezra, for himself or another not to understand was a deep and personal sadness. I believe it hurt him if we did not understand;  that he felt that it somehow diminished the human race for a person not to comprehend, and that he shared in the sadness, if not the responsibility. From this, or with this, I believe, came an unmistakable respect for each and every human being, each one of us.

 He spoke five possibly six languages. His sandwiches were consumed in the Senior Physics Lab at lunchtime over a copy of the Financial Times. His small house was crammed with books; the front room panelled with books, and a bed to rest and read, at the time, William Manchester. He addressed us as “My Lords”. He hunted through Army and Navy surplus for galvanometers, oscilloscopes, rheostats, and various vacuum tubes at knock down prices. He constructed apparatus and undertook experiments. He laughed at vectors and fought with tensors. He ran the photographic society, and showed photos which showed into his soul. He went to Florence in 1966 or ‘67 and came back and cried at the destruction. The first time I went to Florence, I looked at the Arno and walked along outside the Uffizi and thought of him. One summer evening, deep in conversation with one of his sons, he walked past our house, and I was jealous. Through weakness, I once lied to him, and have remained, to this day, deeply ashamed.

Some saw him as a Renaissance man, others, for certain, mistakenly, as more with the Encyclopaedists. I ventured, because of his lightness of touch, more Erasmus and a humanist. But this too should be discarded. These days should make us remember he was an alien, an asylum seeker from somewhere, possibly along the Tigres or Euphrates. His forefathers and mothers had possibly been those who gave us our time, or helped pass on from India our numbers, or then ran the world’s largest and most advanced hospital system, in that most learned and cosmopolitan of cities - Baghdad. We should compare him to names such as Al-Razi, or Ibn Sina, but, unlike him, so few of us have that breath which comes from crossing cultures.

 And the moral, -  being a teacher is an important and responsible job. Well done, its finger points to the stars.  (Tom Casey, 2001)

(Photo: Ezra on the Photographic Society to Liverpool, 1961, - from Bob Street)

Burton on Trent, Burton Grammar School, Burton upon Trent Grammar School Old Boys, Association