Stephen Hawking (2 page)

To casual visitors, the city of Oxford in January 1942 would have appeared little changed since the outbreak of the Second World War two and a half years earlier. Only upon closer inspection would they perhaps have noticed the gun emplacements dotted around the city, the fresh camouflage paint in subdued khaki and gray, the high towers protruding from the car plants at Cowley, east of the dreaming spires, and the military trucks and personnel carriers periodically trundling over Magdalen Bridge and along the High, where frost lingered on the stone gargoyles.

Out in the wider world, the war was reaching a crucial stage. The previous month, on December 7, the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor and the United States had joined the war. To the east, the Soviet army was fighting back Hitler's troops in the Crimea, bringing about the first moves that would eventually precipitate the total defeat of both Germany and Japan.

In Britain every radio was tuned to J. B. Priestley presenting
Post-Scripts to the News
; there were Dr. Joad and Julian Huxley arguing over trivia and homely science on the “Brains Trust”; and the “Forces' sweetheart,” Vera Lynn, was wowing the
troops at home and abroad with “We'll Meet Again.” Winston Churchill had just returned from his Christmas visit to America, where he had addressed both houses of Congress, rousing them with quotes from Lincoln and Washington and waving the V sign. Television was little more than a laboratory curiosity.

It is perhaps one of those oddities of serendipity that January 8, 1942, was both the three-hundredth anniversary of the death of one of history's greatest intellectual figures, the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei, and the day Stephen William Hawking was born into a world torn apart by war and global strife. But as Hawking himself points out, around two hundred thousand other babies were born that day, so maybe it is after all not such an amazing coincidence.

Stephen's mother, Isobel, had arrived in Oxford only a short time before the baby was due. She lived with her husband Frank in Highgate, a northern suburb of London, but they had decided that she should move to Oxford to give birth. The reason was simple. Highgate, along with the rest of London and much of southern England, was being pounded by the German
Luftwaffe
night after night. However, the warring governments, in a rare display of equanimity, had agreed that if Germany refrained from bombing Oxford or Cambridge, the Royal Air Force would guarantee peaceful skies over Heidelberg and Göttingen. In fact, it has been said that Hitler had earmarked Oxford as the prospective capital of world government when his imagined global conquest had been accomplished and that he wanted to preserve its architectural splendor.

Both Frank and Isobel Hawking had been to Oxford before—as students. They both came from middle-class families. Frank
Hawking's grandfather had been quite a successful Yorkshire farmer but had seen his prosperity disappear in the great agricultural depression that immediately followed the First World War. Isobel, the second eldest of seven, was the daughter of a doctor in Glasgow. Neither family could afford university fees without making sacrifices, and in an age where far fewer women went on to higher education than we are now accustomed to, it demonstrated considerable liberalism on Isobel's parents' part that a university education was considered at all.

Their paths never crossed at Oxford, as Frank Hawking went up before his future wife. He studied medicine and became a specialist in tropical diseases. The outbreak of hostilities in 1939 found him in East Africa studying endemic medical problems. When he heard about the war, he decided to set off back to Europe, traveling overland across the African continent and then by ship to England, with the intention of volunteering for military service. However, upon arriving home he was informed that his skills would be far more usefully employed in medical research.

After leaving Oxford, Isobel had stumbled into a succession of loathed jobs, including a spell as an inspector of taxes. Leaving after only a few months, she decided to take a job for which she was ridiculously overqualified—as a secretary at a medical-research institute. It was there that the vivacious and friendly Isobel, mildly amused at the position she had found herself in but with sights set on a more meaningful future, first met the tall, shy young researcher fresh back from exciting adventures in exotic climes.

When he was two weeks old, Isobel Hawking took Stephen back to London and the raids. They almost lost their lives
when he was two, when a V-2 rocket hit a neighbor's house. Although their home was damaged, the Hawkings were out at the time.

After the war, Frank Hawking was appointed head of the Division of Parasitology at the National Institute of Medical Research. The family stayed on in the house in Highgate until 1950, when they moved twenty miles north to a large rambling house at 14 Hillside Road in the city of St. Albans in Hertfordshire.

St. Albans is a small city dominated by its cathedral, which can trace its foundation back to the year
A.D.
303, when St. Alban was martyred and a church was built on the site. However, long before that, the Romans had realized the strategically useful position of the area. There they built the city of Verulamium, and the first Christian church was probably constructed from the Roman ruins left behind when the empire began to crumble and the soldiers returned home. In the 1950s, St. Albans was an archetypal, prosperous, middle-class English town. In the words of one of Hawking's school friends, “It was a terribly smug place, upwardly mobile, but so awfully suffocating.”

Hawking was eight when the family arrived there. Frank Hawking had a strong desire to send Stephen to a private school. He had always believed that a private-school education was an essential ingredient for a successful career. There was plenty of evidence to support this view: in the 1950s, the vast majority of members of Parliament had enjoyed a privileged education, and most senior figures in institutions such as the BBC, the armed forces, and the country's universities had been to private schools. Dr. Hawking himself had attended a minor
private school, and he felt that even with this semi-elite background he had still experienced the prejudice of the establishment. He was convinced that, coupled with his own parents' lack of money, this had held him back from achieving greater things in his own career and that others with less ability but more refined social mores had been promoted ahead of him. He did not want this to happen to his eldest son. Stephen, he decided, would be sent to Westminster, one of the best schools in the country.

When he was ten, the boy was entered for the Westminster School scholarship examination. Although his father was doing well in medical research, a scientist's salary could never hope to cover the school fees at Westminster—such things were reserved for the likes of admirals, politicians, and captains of industry. Stephen had to be accepted into the school on his own academic merit; he would then have his fees paid, at least in part, by the scholarship. The day of the examination arrived and Stephen fell ill. He never sat for the entrance paper and consequently never obtained a place at one of England's best schools.

Disappointed, Dr. Hawking enrolled his son at the local private school, St. Albans School, a well-known and academically excellent abbey school which had close ties with the cathedral extending back, according to some accounts, to the year
A.D.
948. Situated in the heart of the city and close to the cathedral, St. Albans School had 600 boys when Stephen arrived there in September 1952. Each year was streamed as A, B, or C according to academic ability. Each boy spent five years in senior school, progressing from the first form to the fifth, at the end of which period he would sit for Ordinary (O) Level
exams in a broad spectrum of subjects, the brighter boys taking eight or nine examinations. Those who were successful at O Level would usually stay on to sit for Advanced (A) Levels in preparation for university two years later.

In 1952 there were on average three applicants for every place at St. Albans School and, as with Westminster, each prospective candidate had to take an entrance examination. Stephen was well prepared. He passed easily and, along with exactly ninety other boys, was accepted into the school on September 23, 1952. The fees were fifty-one guineas (£53.55) a term.

The image of Stephen at this time is that of the schoolboy nerd in his gray school uniform and cap as caricatured in the “Billy Bunter” stories and
Tom Brown's Schooldays
. He was eccentric and awkward, skinny and puny. His school uniform always looked a mess and, according to friends, he jabbered rather than talking clearly, having inherited a slight lisp from his father. His friends dubbed his speech “Hawkingese.” All this had nothing to do with any early signs of illness; he was just that sort of kid—a figure of classroom fun, teased and occasionally bullied, secretly respected by some, avoided by most. It appears that at school his talents were open to some debate: when he was twelve, one of his friends bet another a bag of sweets that Stephen would never come to anything. As Hawking himself now says modestly, “I don't know if this bet was ever settled and, if so, which way it was decided.”
¹

By the third year Stephen had come to be regarded by his teachers as a bright student, but only a little above average in the top class in his year. He was part of a small group that hung around together and shared the same intense interest in their
work and pursuits. There was the tall, handsome figure of Basil King, who seems to have been the cleverest of the group, reading Guy de Maupassant at the age of ten and enjoying opera while still in short trousers. Then there was John McClenahan, short, with dark brown hair and a round face, who was perhaps Stephen's best friend at the time. Fair-haired Bill Cleghorn was another of the group, completed by the energetic and artistic Roger Ferneyhaugh, and a newcomer in the third form, Michael Church. Together they formed the nucleus of the brightest of the bright students in class 3A.

The little group was definitely the smart kids of their year. They all listened to the BBC's Third Programme on the radio, now known as Radio 3, which played only classical music. Instead of listening under the sheets to early rock 'n' roll or the latest cool jazz from the States, Mozart, Mahler, and Beethoven would trickle from their radios to accompany last-minute physics revision for a test the next day or the geography homework due the next morning. They read Kingsley Amis and Aldous Huxley, John Wyndham, C. S. Lewis, and William Golding—the “smart” books. Pop music was on the other side of the “great divide,” infra dig, slightly vulgar. They all went to concerts at the Albert Hall. A few of them played instruments, but Stephen was not very dexterous with his hands and never mastered a musical instrument. The interest was there, but he could never progress beyond the rudiments, a source of great regret throughout his life. Their shared hero was Bertrand Russell, at once intellectual giant and liberal activist.

St. Albans School proudly boasted a very high intellectual standard, a fact recognized and appreciated by the Hawkings
very soon after Stephen started there. Before long, any nagging regrets that he had been unable to enter Westminster were forgotten. St. Albans School was the perfect environment for cultivating natural talent.

Much remembered and highly thought of was a master fresh out of university named Finlay who, way ahead of his time, taped radio programs and used them as launch points for discussion classes with 3A. The subject matter ranged from nuclear disarmament to birth control and everything in between. By all accounts, he had a profound effect on the intellectual development of the thirteen-year-olds in his charge, and his lessons are still fondly remembered by the journalists, writers, doctors, and scientists they have become today.

They were forever bogged down with masses of homework, usually three hours each night, and plenty more on weekends, after Saturday-morning lessons and compulsory games on Saturday afternoons. Despite the pressures, they still managed to find a little time to see each other out of school. Theirs was pretty much a monastic lifestyle. English schoolboys attending the private schools of the 1950s had little time for girls in their busy program, and parties were single-sex affairs until the age of fifteen or sixteen. It was only then that they would have the inclination and parental permission to hold sherry parties at their houses and practice the dance steps they had learned after school games on Saturdays at a dance studio in St. Albans city center.

Until they had graduated to such pleasures, the boys often went on long bicycle rides in the Hertfordshire countryside around St. Albans, sometimes going as far afield as Whipsnade, some fifteen miles away. Another favorite hobby was
inventing and playing board games. The key characters in all this were Stephen and Roger Ferneyhaugh. Hawking, the embryonic scientist and logician already emerging, would devise the rules and laws of the games, while Ferneyhaugh designed the boards and pieces. The group would gather at parents' houses during school holidays and on weekends, and set up the latest game on the bedroom floor or with glasses of orange squash on the sitting-room carpet.