At about this time the family moved to Manor House at Farrington Gurney, Somerset where his tutors were the village schoolmaster and a local clergyman.

He then worked in a research laboratory under H W B Skinner and W Sucksmith on magnetism and the soft X-ray spectra of solids.

[1] In World War II Eshelby began working for the Admiralty on the degaussing of ships, but on 4 May 1940 he joined the Technical Branch of the Royal Air Force.

His work from February 1941 to June 1942 was for the Coastal Command Development Unit conducting performance trials of air-to-surface-vessel radar and other operational devices in all types of aircraft.

[1] After the war Eshelby returned to Bristol University to study for a PhD and taught himself the theory of elasticity for his thesis on "Stationary and moving dislocations".

[1][2] In 1964 he moved to the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University at the behest of Neville Mott, and was a Fellow of Churchill College from 1965 to 1966.

[3] Eshelby work helped shape the fields of defect mechanics and micromechanics of inhomogeneous solids for fifty years, including the controlling mechanisms of plastic deformation and fracture.The scientific phenomenon called Eshelby's inclusion is named after this scientist, and points at an ellipsoidal subdomain in an infinite homogeneous body, subjected to a uniform transformation strain.