In memoriam: Dr. Clifford John Bland, Faculty of Science

Dr. Clifford John Bland, a professor emeritus with the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the Faculty of Science, died last month at the age of 88.

Dr. Bland, PhD, worked at the University of Calgary for nearly three decades.

“He was a central member of the department for many years,” says Dr. David Knudsen, PhD, department head for Physics and Astronomy.

John Bland, who was born in London, England, got his degree at the Imperial College of Science and Technology in 1963 and joined the University of Calgary as an associate professor in 1968.

During his time at UCalgary, he participated in many field and laboratory experiments and continued his research on cosmic rays. He published a highly cited paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research, which some say was instrumental in shaping his academic career, in 1976.

From 1985 to 1995, Dr. Bland was department head in the Department of Physics, renamed the Department of Physics and Astronomy in 1989.

His family describes him as a “true adventurer in both his world travels and his research.”

Henry Bland says his dad loved to travel and learned many languages during his life: Spanish, Italian, Russian, and French among them.

As a university student in London, John Bland took a summer job in Spain where he worked for the Marconi radio company testing vacuum tubes.

He later accepted an opportunity in Bolivia at a high-altitude cosmic ray observatory to operate and develop instrumentation. During his time there, he met Prince Philip during an official visit.

“He had a question he asked my father, and my dad said, ‘Let me draw you a diagram,’” recalls Henry Bland, adding his dad borrowed Prince Philip’s pen to draw the diagram and then put it in his own pocket.

It led Prince Philip to quip, “I’ll have my pen back.”

During his time in Bolivia, John Bland met his wife, Beatriz, at the British consulate where she worked as a secretary. The couple moved to Italy, where both Henry and his sister, Julie, were born.

When Dr. Bland attended a cosmic ray conference in Alberta, his son says he visited the cosmic ray station at the top of Sulfur Mountain in Banff, and fell in love with the area.

The family moved to Calgary when he got his job as a physics professor.

“He liked chemistry, but he got sidetracked by physics,” Henry Bland says with a laugh.

The elder Bland’s work evolved to incorporate chemistry with physics, developing techniques to measure low-level radiation in water and soil. He tested it after the Chernobyl disaster, an explosion at a nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine in 1986.

His dad’s biggest accomplishment, though, was the “number of students’ lives that he touched.”

Henry Bland adds that his dad inspired him to get into science.

“I ended up ‘downgrading’ from science to engineering,” he says laughingly, quickly adding, “in his mind.”

John Bland worked at the university until about 1997 when, as department head, he brought on Knudsen as one of his final hires.

"I took over his lab when he left,” recalls Knudsen, noting he found a container labelled “radioactive” and had to bring in an expert to handle it. 

He remembers Dr. Bland as a “English gentleman” who was a “walking encyclopedia.”

Dr. Alexei Kouznetsov, PhD, a physicist and astronomer in the department, says John Bland was one of his committee members when he moved from Russia to do his post-doctoral work at UCalgary.

“He was very tidy, very neat and very detail oriented,” he says.

Kouznetsov lost his own father when he was 33 and says Dr. Bland “was a man I could discuss everything with, no question.”

He says he’ll “miss the sound of his voice, his jokes and his devotion to physics.”

A memorial will be held for Dr. Bland on Saturday March 8 at 3 p.m. The flags on campus have been lowered to half-mast today in advance of his memorial.