Yahoo Finance Bernard Bloom obituary
My father, Bernard Bloom, who has died aged 95, was an analytical chemist and inspirational teacher, who spent time as a meteorologist in the early days of Israel’s civil aviation industry.
He was born in Didsbury, Greater Manchester, the youngest of five children of Jack Bloom, a tailor, and his wife, Fanny (nee Cohen), and went to North Manchester Municipal High School for Boys. The outbreak of the second world war meant Bernard had to condense his chemistry studies at Sheffield University, where he took his BSc degree. Then he spent a year from 1945 to 1946 with the Roche conglomerate partly in Paris, where he worked with a team focusing on Vitamin K, the vitamin associated with blood clotting. He also became a fluent French speaker.
Thereafter he undertook national service with the Royal Navy. He was the sailor who never went to sea; after the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, he was posted to HMS Drake in Portsmouth – now better known as the Devonport naval base – based wholly in land barracks. He taught a variety of applied sciences while there.
Once the new state of Israel was declared in 1948, he volunteered and joined what was to become the Israeli air force, working first as a pilot officer and then as a meteorologist. By the summer of 1950, he was back in Britain, working as a teacher at Hasmonean boys’ school in London. He married Pauline Lanzman in 1952.
In 1954 he took a job with FW Berk, a chemical manufacturers, in London, as a product development chemist, working principally in the metallurgic and foundry industries. At this point he was commuting to our family home in Manchester, but a near-fatal car accident in the late 1950s prompted him to switch career. He began teaching chemistry and physics in schools and colleges of further education in the Manchester area.
My father’s innovative and busy mind — and close friendships — took him to Geoffrey Berlyne, a physician at the Royal Manchester Infirmary. In a Lancet paper in 1961, Berlyne described how my father’s work with ultrasound, today widely used in medicine, had inspired him with the idea of using ultrasound for renal biopsy, a novel approach at the time.
In 1981 he and my mother divorced, and my father retired from teaching. Bernard then founded a friendship group, where he met Natalie Harris. She became his partner for the next 40 years.
In retirement, he began buying and restoring chemistry equipment, which he supplied to schools. He also gave scores of lectures to the Probus group for retired people, and continued teaching until he was 93. In at least one lecture, while demonstrating water properties, he managed to fuse all the lights in a local town hall.
His lively mind and continued curiosity about the world — he was an avid letter-writer to the Guardian — was appreciated by his huge extended family.
He is survived by Natalie, me and his sister, Freda.
