Lawrence Bragg spouse Alice Grace Jenny Hopkinson
The Royal Institution (1954–1971)
In 1953 the Braggs moved into the elegant flat for the Resident Professor in the Royal Institution in London, the position his father had occupied when he died. In 1934 and 1961 Lawrence had delivered the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture and since 1938 he had been Professor of Natural Philosophy in the Institution, delivering an annual lecture. His father's successors had weakened the Institution, so Bragg had to rebuild it. He bolstered finances by enlisting corporate sponsors, the traditional Friday Evening Discourses were followed by a dinner party for the speaker and carefully selected possible patrons, more than 120 of them each year. "Two of these Discourses in 1965 gave him particular pleasure. On 7 May, Lady Bragg, who had been a member of the Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce (1951–55) and was Chairman of the National Marriage Guidance Council, lectured on 'Changing patterns in marriage and divorce'; and on 15 November, Bragg listened with evident pride to the Discourse on 'Oscillations and noise in jet engines' given by his engineer-son Stephen, who was then Chief Scientist at Rolls-Royce Ltd and later became Vice-Chancellor of Brunel University." He also introduced a programme of highly regarded Schools' Lectures, enlivened by the elaborate demonstrations that were a hallmark of the Institution. He gave three of these lectures on "electricity".He continued research in the Institution by recruiting a small group to work in the Davy-Faraday Laboratory in the basement and in the adjoining house, supported by grants he obtained. A visitor to the laboratory succeeded in inserting heavy metals into the enzyme lysozyme; the structure of its crystal was solved in 1965 at the Royal Institution by D. C. Phillips and his coworkers, with the computations on the 9,040 reflections performed on the digital computer at the University of London, which greatly facilitated the work. Two of the illustrations of the positioning of amino acids in the chain were drawn by Bragg. Unlike myoglobin, in which nearly 80 per cent of the amino-acid residues are in the alpha-helix conformation, in lysozyme the alpha-helix content is only about 40 per cent of the amino-acid residues found in four main stretches. Other stretches are of the 310 helix, a conformation that they had proposed earlier. In this conformation, every third peptide is hydrogen-bonded back to the first peptide, thus forming a ring containing ten atoms. They had the complete structure of an enzyme in time for Bragg's 75th birthday. He became Professor Emeritus in 1966.
X-ray analysis of protein structure flourished in subsequent years, determining the structures of scores of proteins in laboratories around the world. Twenty eight Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work using X-ray analysis. The disadvantage of the method is that it must be done on crystals, which precludes seeing changes in shape when enzymes bind substrates and the like. This problem was solved by the development of another line Bragg had initiated, using modified electron microscopes to image single frozen molecules: cryo-electron microscopy.In his long association with the Royal Institution he was:Personal life
In 1921 he married Alice Hopkinson (1899–1989), a cousin of a friend who had been killed in the war. They had four children, the engineer Stephen Lawrence (1923–2014), David William (1926–2005), Margaret Alice (1931-2022), (who married the diplomat Mark Heath) and Patience Mary, born 1935. Alice was on the staff at Withington Girls' School until Bragg was appointed director of the National Physical Laboratory in 1937. She was active in a number of public bodies and served as Mayor of Cambridge from 1945-46.
Bragg's hobbies included drawing – family letters were illustrated with lively sketches – painting, literature and a lifelong interest in gardening. When he moved to London, he missed having a garden and so worked as a part-time gardener, unrecognised by his employer, until a guest at the house expressed surprise at seeing him there. He died at a hospital near his home at Waldringfield, Ipswich, Suffolk. He was buried in Trinity College, Cambridge; his son David is buried in the Parish of the Ascension Burial Ground in Cambridge, where Bragg's friend, who had he survived would have been his brother-in-law, Rudolph Cecil Hopkinson is also buried.
In August 2013, Bragg's relative, the broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, presented a BBC Radio 4 programme ("Bragg on the Braggs") on the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics winners.
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