Warm memories of Jim Bennett, whose work on Christopher Wren inspired many | Letters
Jim Bennett (Obituary, 19 December) made a deep and enduring contribution to the study of Sir Christopher Wren. Wren was an astronomer of international repute before he became the architect of St Paul’s Cathedral, and it was Bennett who first demonstrated the essential unity of these things.
In his PhD thesis, and then in his subsequent book The Mathematical Science of Christopher Wren (1982), he showed how the beauty and consistency that Wren found in the natural world was then translated into the design and construction of the churches that he rebuilt after the Great Fire of London. Bennett’s writings inspired a new generation of Wren scholars (including me), to whom he was unfailingly kind and generous.
Prof Anthony Geraghty
University of York
In the late 1970s, I worked in the department of history and philosophy of science at the University of Cambridge. One of my abiding memories of Jim Bennett, then the curator of the Whipple Museum, is of a time when the museum’s alarm system was distressingly unstable. He told us one morning how he had arrived in Free School Lane in the middle of the night, in response to the alarm.
He was wearing his usual donkey jacket, with his shock of grey curls, when he was accosted by the police. In his unmistakable Belfast accent, he assured them that he was the curator. He was never a man to pull rank, but his possession of the keys to the building and his ability to reset the alarm finally convinced them.
It is a measure of his humanity that this anecdote, as much as his work, remains with me.
Jenny Woodhouse
Bath
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