Ivor Bulmer-Thomas

Ivor Bulmer -Thomas ( born November 30, 1905 in Cwmbran, Monmouthshire; † 7 October 1993) was a British politician, journalist, author and historian of mathematics.

Life

He was originally named Thomas, the surname Bulmer he laid in 1952 by the last name of his second wife. Bulmer -Thomas was a brilliant student at Oxford, where he studied mathematics, theology and classical languages ​​and excelled in sports (Cross Country Running ). He then wrote biographies of one of the sons of Gladstone, Henry Gladstone, and Lord Birkenhead. From 1930 he was a journalist for The Times and the News Chronicle from 1937 to 1939 as Chief Leader Writer. From 1942 he was for a time for the Labour Party in the British Parliament ( for the constituency of Keighley ) and had post at the Air Ministry as Parliamentary Secretary (1945 /46) and Attlee as Undersecretary of State for the Colonies 1946/47, under the government of Clement. In 1948, he joined the Conservative Party. In the 1950 election he was defeated in his constituency and was eliminated from the parliament from - the same year he crossed the Sahara with friends. He worked again for the Times (for which he wrote obituaries ) and The Times Literary Supplement. 1953/54, he was deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph. At the same time he began to be active, where he belonged to the Anglo- Catholic wing (he was in his youth the Anglican church converts, his father was a Baptist ) and especially took care of the preservation of old churches as a lay person in the Church of England. He saw to it that the churches were inspected every five years on necessary repairs out. For this commitment to old churches, he received a CBE in 1984. This brought him into conflict with the bishops of the Church, because he advocated the preservation of every old church, and he founded a Redundant Churches Fund, whose president ( chairman ), he was from 1969 to 1976, and the Friends of Friendless Churches (1957 ) who also care about the preservation of churches in the UK. From 1958 he was secretary of the Ancient Monuments Society and its Chairman from 1975 to 1990.

He wrote, for example, more books about propaganda ( during the Second World War, he was commissioned by the British Government is propaganda against Mussolini in Italy), about his disillusionment with the Left parties in the late 1940s, the biography of the Welsh industrialist David Davies Llandinam ( 1818-1890 ) and the history the British parties. After his wife died in childbirth, he wrote to process his grief in 1938, the book Dilysia - a threnody that was influenced by his reading of Dante.

He was an honorary fellow of St. John 's College, Oxford and an honorary doctorate from the University of Warwick ( 1979). In 1970 he became a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.

1940 published his Selections Illustrating the history of greek mathematics ( Loeb Classic Library) and he wrote mathematician biographies for the Dictionary of Scientific Biography.

He was married since 1932 with Dilys Llewelly Jones, who died in 1938 and with whom he had a son, and since 1940 with Joan Bulmer, with whom he had one son and two daughters.