Martin Bax obituary
As the title of his 2018 memoir, Two Lives to Lead, indicated, Martin Bax’s working life was divided into two equally demanding roles: that of a developmental pediatrician who published extensively on childhood disabilities, and founder of the long-running literary and art magazine Ambit. Bax, who has died aged 90, also wrote fiction while continuing his work within the NHS.
Those medical and literary interests merged with his 1976 novel The Hospital Ship, a dystopian vision in which the crew of the ironically named Hopeful cared for the victims of a global mass psychosis. Text from the book was later developed, with trumpeter Henry Lowther, into The Vietnam Symphony, performed at the ICA and on BBC Radio 3. He also published a collection of short stories, Memoirs of a Gone World (2010), and a children’s book. , Edmond Went Far Away (1988), illustrated by artist and Ambit collaborator Michael Foreman.
Founded in 1959 from Bax’s home in Highgate, North London, and from which it operated until his retirement in 2013, Ambit was characterized from its inception by a countercultural impulse, keen to place itself on the raw margins of mainstream society. wanted to place literary movements. fashion.
Bax spoke of the influence of John Middleton Murry’s Rhythm, the early 20th century magazine that featured DH Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield. His formative vision was to provide a place where visual art could speak and be in harmony with new writing, without undue attention being paid to it. A typical song may consist of pop art, sketches, short stories and poetry. Prominent (or soon to be) names such as poets George MacBeth, Stevie Smith, Peter Porter and Edwin Brock were published early in its pages. Other established figures such as JG Ballard and Carol Ann Duffy were regular contributors and later worked with Bax as editors of fiction and poetry respectively.
Ambit also had an impressive roster of artists, with figures such as David Hockney and Eduardo Paolozzi contributing to the covers and pages in the 1960s. Hockney’s unfinished female nude for Ambit 14 (1962-63) was indicative of the magazine’s penchant for creating something that was at once playful and visually charged.
As editor, Bax strove for a kind of radical independence – all the more radical because he did not subscribe to some of the more political or polemical angles than those of his contemporaries, such as Michael Horovitz, whose more Beat-inflected New Departures was founded the same year. Bax said: “What was my program? … Well, I don’t really have a program; I just put good things together.”
In the mid-1960s, the limits of explicitness and provocation were tested more intensively than in the magazine’s first ten years. In response to a Ballard story, You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe, published in Ambit 27 (1966), a note from a Conservative MP to the then Minister for Education and Science refers, in the manner of Mary Whitehouse, to the ways in which in which the magazine had developed: “(Ambit) is disgusting if it is possible to understand the words used. Some of it seems to be the product of a warped mind. If it ends up in the hands of teenagers, which it easily could, it would be an extremely dangerous publication.”
Undeterred, in 1967 the magazine organized a competition “for the best creative work, both prose and poetry, written under the influence of drugs.” Despite the inevitable furor, the winner – experimental novelist Ann Quin – wasn’t exactly a cautionary tale for the country’s youth, as he was “under my usual combination of nicotine, (caffeine) and of course the birth pill I take – Orthonovin 2” .
Born in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, Bax was the son of Cyril, a civil servant, and Eleanor (née Bayne), a former home science teacher. Public service – and social care – ran through the paternal line, with Bax’s grandfather, Ernest Belfort Bax, a founder of the Fabian Society and associate of William Morris.
He attended school at Dauntsey, Wiltshire, and then studied medicine at New College, Oxford, and Guy’s Hospital, where, after graduating in 1961, he became a lecturer at the medical school.
It was at Oxford that Bax met Judy Osborn, and they married in 1956. She went on to work as headteacher at Parliament Hill School in north London and won a seat on Haringey council after her retirement.
Bax worked throughout his career as a pediatrician in the NHS, specializing in child development and disability. He was a particularly influential figure in the treatment of cerebral palsy in children. From 1982 to 1985 he was Director of the Community Pediatric Research Unit at St Mary’s Hospital Medical School, then at Westminster Hospital Medical School (now part of the Imperial College School of Medicine), where he was also Senior Lecturer and, after his retirement in 2001, reader emeritus.
He was editor of the journal Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology from 1978 after the death of Ronnie MacKeith, his long-time colleague who had founded the journal and with whom Bax had helped establish the book series Clinics in Developmental Medicine. From 2000 to 2008 he was president of the European Academy of Child Disability, and was life president of the Society for the Study of Behavioral Phenotypes.
Bax published a final novel, Love on the Borders, in 2005. The breadth of his achievements in both the medical and literary worlds is a testament to his ability to adapt and innovate, to push boundaries with his thirst for finding what was new and unexpected. .
Ambit’s origins as a homemade, do-it-yourself magazine placed by hand on a variotyper were somewhat unpromising for the longevity it would eventually achieve. It continued publishing until 2023, becoming one of the UK’s longest running magazines.
Judy passed away in 2015. Bax is survived by his three sons, Ben, Alex and Tim, seven grandchildren and one great-grandchild.