Ben Lockspeiser, 9 March 1891 - 18 October 1990

Abstract

Ben Lockspeiser was born on 9 March 1891 to Jewish parents who had recently arrived from Eastern Europe. He had an orthodox Jewish upbringing in a lively immigrant community in the East End of London. Music was a familiar part of daily life and he became an extremely competent pianist, while his brother Edward became a musicologist and authority on Debussy. He was educated at the Grocers’ School, Hackney, and from there won an Open Science Scholarship to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (his school proclaimed a public holiday to celebrate this). He read the Natural Sciences Tripos Part I, gaining a first, followed by the Mechanical Sciences Tripos in 1913. After a short period of study at the Royal School of Mines he enlisted with the RAMC in 1914 and was landed at Gallipoli. He maintained he survived only because he was invalided out of the peninsula with dysentery. He then worked for a time in Egypt on a treatment for this disease.