In the July 1999 MRS Bulletin, Alex King wrote for a column called "Posterminaries" - a one page article titled "Lessons from J.D. Eshelby". I became a fan of Alex King and the posterminaries column on reading the article, and even before I read the column, I was a fan of Eshelby (thanks to the formative influence of Abi - He would not allow any mention to Eshelby's paper without the word "classic" preceding it).
The article by Alex King is very informative - for example, it tells
you the meaning of the word "Jock" - a name by which Eshelby was known
among his friends. There are two stories narrated in the article. One
was about the incident that led to Eshelby being a "pure
theoretician". Hunt down the article and read about it - It is well worth
the effort. The second one was is about Eshelby's election to the
Royal Society. It is such a wonderful story, I can not resist the
temptation of retelling it here:
Eshelby, it seems, was sore that he was not elevated to the rank of
Fellow of the Royal Society. So, in one lecture, he described all of
the then current theories on a particular topic and what was wrong
with each of them, and then wrote the names of the authors of each one
of them, and, finally wrote "FRS" after each of the names. Apparently,
he was elected an FRS that year and never repeated the performance.