William Henry Bragg, 1862-1942

Abstract

In the late ’fifties Robert John Bragg, a young man of twenty-five, retired from the sea, where he had been serving as an officer in the merchant navy, and purchased with some monies that had been left to him the farm called Stoneraise Place at Westward, near Wigton, in Cumberland. Plere he settled down to a farmer’s life. In 1861 he married Mary Wood, the daughter of the Vicar of the parish of Westward, and the next year, on 2 July 1862, William Henry Bragg, later to be President of the Royal Society, was born. Fortunately there are available certain notes dealing with his early life which Bragg himself prepared some time before his death.1 These contain many vivid little pictures which, besides giving us intimate glimpses of those early days, will, by their manner of telling, recall the man to those who knew him, and give to those who did not something of his direct and unaffected charm of style. Thus, of his mother he says, T do not remember my mother very well, as she died when I was barely seven. Just a few scenes remain. I think she must have been a sweet and kind woman. I remember how one day I was sitting on the kitchen table, and she was rolling pastry, and how I suddenly found I could whistle: and how we stared at one another for a quiet moment amazed and proud of the new accomplishment. . . .’ Of the school at Market Harborough, in Leicestershire, to which he went at the age of seven, he writes, ‘Uncle William had in 1869 succeeded in re-establishing the old grammar school in Market Harborough. It is a quaint structure raised on wooden pillars. The butter market used to be held underneath it. The newly appointed master, Wood by name, was an able man, I believe: and the school grew. I was one of the six boys with which it opened after a long interval. Perhaps it was because of my uncle’s connexion with the school that at the end of the first year I was given a scholarship of £8 a year exempting me from fees.