In 1936, José Domingo Quílez was declared an “element dangerous to the national cause”. He was suspended from his post as professor of the UGR and as a meteorologist at the Spanish Meteorological Service, and “disqualified from holding management posts or other such positions of trust in any cultural or teaching institutions”
Now, a group of academics from the University Granada (UGR) have returned to the early decades of the twentieth century to trace the story of José Domingo Quílez (Calatayud, 1903–Toulouse, 1939), who was Professor of Theoretical and Experimental Physics at the UGR. The research team comprises Roque Hidalgo, Carmen Valdivia and Inmaculada Domínguez of the UGR, together with Carmen Morente of the Present History Studies research group of the University of Cádiz, Olalla Olea of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and Joaquim Sales of the University of Barcelona.
Their research offers an exciting journey through the very earliest days of Spain’s scientific research and its protagonists, in a study that has been published recently in the journal Revista de la Sociedad Española de Historia de las Ciencias y de las Técnicas.
In the early 1900s, a national scientific research and education council was created in Spain, known as the Junta de Ampliación de Estudios e Investigaciones Científicas (JAE). Chaired by Nobel laureate Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the council awarded about 2,000 scholarships for scientists to visit foreign institutions, and created a number of chairs to enable science to be decentralised beyond Madrid and encourage mobility among teachers of science.
José Domingo Quílez passed the necessary competitive exams to join the Spanish Meteorological Service in 1921, aged just 18 and recently out of high school in Zaragoza. He first served at the Madrid Observatory, then transferred to the observatory at the Armilla Aerodrome in Granada, and later to the Ebro Observatory. In parallel, he completed his university studies: the first two years (1921–23) at the UGR and the remaining years the University of Zaragoza. There, in 1926, he obtained his Bachelor of Science Degree (specialising in Physics), with his outstanding grades recognised in a special excellence prize.
In March 1932, he defended his thesis entitled “Atmospheric turbulence and the evaporation of large bodies of water” at the University of Madrid (the only university in Spain where doctoral theses could be defended at that time). In April 1933, he successfully applied for the Chair of Theoretical and Experimental Physics of the University of Seville, and the following month he joined the University of Granada.
A commitment to modernising the UGR
From the moment he arrived at the UGR, at just 30 years old, José Domingo Quílez demonstrated a profoundly active commitment to the modernisation of the institution, and of society in general. No sooner had he started in the new post than he was appointed Secretary to the Faculty of Science; and the following year he was made Secretary to the Board of Trustees. He was also behind the creation of a research laboratory in the Faculty of Sciences.
He published eleven articles on meteorology, five of them in the Annals of the Spanish Meteorological Society, five in the newsletter of the Confederación Sindical Hidrográfica del Ebro and others in the Annals of the Spanish Society of Physics and Chemistry. In this latter journal, he published a paper on the phenomenon of redshift in spiral galaxies. And, fascinated by advances in sub-nuclear physics, he wrote a paper entitled ‘Latest Discoveries in Physics’, this time for the UGR Bulletin. He delivered the welcome speech for the academic year 1934–1935, entitled ‘Structure, Expansion and Evolution of the Universe’, and later published a book of the same name that was aimed at the general public. At the local meetings of the Society of Physics and Chemistry, he also disseminated the primary results emerging from research in Cosmology and Physics, both theoretical and experimental. He applied, unsuccessfully, to the JAE for three scholarships to conduct research stays, including with renowned nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi. He called for the ‘new physics’—the physics of the smallest and greatest dimensions—to be taught in classrooms and included in textbooks. His library was famous for the huge number of volumes it contained in several languages (German, Castilian, French and English). Some of these now appear to be kept in the Faculty of Science Library, where the UGR researchers found two books featuring his handwritten annotations.
His commitment to social causes led him to take an active role in Spain’s Republican Left, being elected spokesperson for its leadership team (Granada Section) in March 1935, when Jesús Yoldi Bereau (also Professor of the Faculty of Sciences) was elected Chair. In July 1936, Professor Yoldi was shot by supporters of the coup d’état while Domingo Quílez was out of Granada—a fact that probably saved his life. José Domingo Quílez was declared an “element dangerous to the national cause”. He was suspended from his post as professor of the UGR and as a meteorologist at the Spanish Meteorological Service, and “disqualified from holding management posts or other such positions of trust in any cultural or teaching institutions”. All his assets were duly confiscated.
In 1937, remaining faithful to his commitment to the II Republic, he joined the University of Barcelona as an associate professor. There, he taught at the University Plaza building and lived close by at Les Cortes n. 566, with his wife Raquel Lion Miranda, who was then 27 years old, and his two daughters Raquel, aged 3, and Cristina, 1. His third daughter, Sara, was born in Barcelona. On February 20, 1938, the Gaceta de la República published a list of readmissions to professional practice of many professors who had been stripped of their livelihoods under the coup—among them, José Domingo Quílez.
He remained in Barcelona until the fall of the city, and signed, together with several other academics, an article published by La Vanguardia on 10 January 1939, requesting international support after repeated aerial bombardments of the university:
“… We hereby denounce the latest crime committed against culture in our country by airplanes from countries that have expelled culture and men of science from their very hearts.
We ask you to make your moral authority felt in the world, to ensure that such crimes never happen again. We, faithful to our duty, will continue in this struggle. We have been entrusted with the task of keeping alive the cultural embers of our country under the scourge of war, and to ensure it continues to glow for our youth who fight today and for the Spain of tomorrow. We will never give up in this cause …”
José Domingo Quílez died of diabetes in Toulouse in 1939, and was buried there on 24 April of that year. On 7 March 1941, his widow, Raquel Lion, answered before the Court of Political Responsibilities of Granada:
“… and that, at this new and pressing hearing, she can neither answer nor refute charges of which she is unaware, leaving her only to solemnly state that her late husband Don José Domingo Quílez was a man of great honour, an enlightened professor of the University of Granada, and that his death left his widow and three young daughters entirely vulnerable, with no assets or resources of any kind to their name.
I hope that all these circumstances may move this high court to show some mercy, given the distressing situation in which this poor family finds itself.”
The professors of the UGR’s Faculty of Sciences, Juan Tercedor Díaz, Victoriano Martín Vivaldi and Gonzalo Gallas Novás (dean) testified in his favour, and the Court decided to impose a fine on his widow.
In studying the UGR archives, two letters were found, dated 28 March 1977, in which professor Lluis Solé i Sabarís of the University of Barcelona intervenes to enable Raquel Lion, who was in desperate economic circumstances, to collect what was owed to her of her widow’s pension.
The authors of this work conclude: “The best researchers and academics died or were forced into exile [in the Civil War], while their jobs were taken by supporters of the dictatorship. It is difficult to imagine what our universities would be like today if they had been built on the legacy of professors of the stature of José Domingo Quílez”.
Bibliography:
Inmaculada Domínguez, Carmen Valdivia, Carmen Morente, Olalla Olea, Joaquim Sales, Roque Hidalgo Álvarez, ‘El meteorólogo José Domingo Quílez (1903–1939): Un caso de investigador en la periferia’, Llull: Revista de la Sociedad Española de Historia de las Ciencias y de las Técnicas, ISSN 0210-8615, 42(86), 2019,241–260.
https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7153458
Image captions:
Images of the book written by José Domingo Quílez, of which two copies are held in the library of the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Granada
Report from the Court of Political Responsibilities
José Domingo Quílez, Professor of Theoretical and Experimental Physics of the UGR, in an image taken from his personal record at the University of Barcelona in 1937
Media enquiries:
Inmaculada Dominguez Aguilera, Department of Theoretical Physics and Cosmology, University of Granada
Email: inma@ugr.es
Tel.: +34 958 249062
Roque Hidalgo Alvarez, Department of Applied Physics, University of Granada
Email: rhidalgo@ugr.es
Tel.: +34 958 243213
Carmen Valdivia Campos, Department of French Philology, University of Granada
Email: cvaldivi@ugr.es
Tel.: +34 958 240521
