Stephen Hawking

by John Gribbin

  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.

  First there was the War Game, based on the Second World War. Then came the Feudal Game, devised around the social, military, and political intricacies of medieval England, with the whole infrastructure meticulously developed. However, it soon became apparent that there was a major flaw in their games—Stephen’s rules were of such labyrinthine complexity that the enactment and consequences of a single move turned out to be so convoluted that sometimes a whole afternoon would be spent sorting them out. Often the games moved to 14 Hillside Road, and the boys would traipse up the stairs to Stephen’s cluttered bedroom near the top of the house.

  By all accounts the Hawkings’ home was an eccentric place, clean but cluttered with books, paintings, old furniture, and strange objects gathered from various parts of the world. Neither Isobel nor Frank Hawking seemed to care too much about the state of the house. Carpets and furniture remained in use until they began to fall apart; wallpaper was allowed to dangle where it had peeled through old age; and there were many places along the hallway and behind doors where plaster had fallen away, leaving gaping holes in the wall.

  Stephen’s room was apparently little different. It was the magician’s lair, the mad professor’s laboratory, and the messy teenager’s study all rolled into one. Among the general detritus and debris, half-finished homework, mugs of un-drunk tea, schoolbooks, and bits of model aircraft and bizarre gadgets lay in untended heaps. On the sideboard stood electrical devices, the uses of which could only be guessed at, and next to those a rack of test tubes, their contents neglected and discolored among the general confusion of odd pieces of wire, paper, glue, and metal from half-finished and forgotten
projects.

  The Hawking family was definitely an eccentric lot. In many ways they were a typically bookish family, but with a streak of originality and social awareness that made them ahead of their time. One contemporary of Hawking’s has described them as “bluestocking.” There were a lot of them; one photograph from the family album includes eighty-eight Hawkings. Stephen’s parents did some pretty oddball things. For many years the family car was a London taxi which Frank and Isobel had purchased for £50, but this was later replaced with a brand-new green Ford Consul—the archetypal late-fifties car. There was a good reason for buying it: they had decided to embark on a year-long overland expedition to India, and their old London taxi would never have made it. With the exception of Stephen, who could not interrupt his education, the whole family made the trip to India and back in the green Ford Consul, an astonishingly unusual thing to do in the late 1950s. Needless to say, the vehicle was not in its original pristine condition upon its return.

  The Hawkings’ journeys outside St. Albans were not always so adventurous. Like many families, they kept a house trailer on the south coast of England; theirs was near Eastbourne in Sussex. Unlike other families, however, they owned not a modern version but a brightly colored gypsy caravan. Most summers the family spent two or three weeks walking the cliff tops and swimming in the bay. Often Stephen’s closest friend, John McClenahan, would join them, and the two boys would spend their time flying kites, eating ice cream, and thinking up new ways to tease Stephen’s two younger sisters, Mary and Philippa, while generally ignoring his adopted brother, Edward, who was only a toddler at the time.

  Frank Hawking was significant in Stephen’s childhood and adolescence by his absence. He seems to have been a somewhat remote figure who would regularly disappear for several months each year to further his medical research in Africa, sometimes missing the family holidays in Ringstead Bay and leaving the children with Isobel. This routine was so well embedded in the structure of their lives that it was not until her late teens that Stephen’s eldest sister, Mary, realized that their family life was at all unusual—she had thought all fathers were like birds that migrated to sunnier climes each year. Whether at home or abroad, Frank Hawking kept meticulous accounts of everything he did in a collection of diaries maintained until the day he died. He also wrote fiction, completing several unpublished novels. One of his literary efforts was written from a woman’s viewpoint. Although Isobel respected his efforts when she read it, she believed that it was unsuccessful.

  Isobel had an indisputable influence on her eldest son’s political ideas. She, like many other English intellectuals of the period, had politically left-of-center ideas that in her case led to active membership in the St. Albans Liberal Association in the 1950s. By then the Liberal Party was only a minor parliamentary force with just a handful of MPs, but at the grassroots level it remained a lively forum for political discussion, often taking the lead, during the 1950s and 1960s, on many issues of the time, including nuclear disarmament and opposition to apartheid. Stephen has never been extreme in his political views, but his interest in politics and his left-wing sympathies have never left him.

  Stephen and his friends quickly tired of board games and moved on to other hobbies. They built model aircraft and electronic gadgets. The planes rarely flew properly, and Hawking was never as good with his hands as he was with his brain. His model aircraft were usually scruffy constructions of paper and balsa wood and far from aerodynamically efficient. With electronics he had similar setbacks, once receiving a 500-volt shock from an old television set he was trying to convert into an amplifier.

  In the third and fourth forms, the motley gang of friends began to turn its attention toward the mystical and the religious. Toward the end of 1954, a boy on the periphery of the group, Graham Dow, got into religion in a very big way. The evangelist Billy Graham had toured Britain that year, and the young Dow had been greatly influenced by the man. Dow went on to convert Roger Ferneyhaugh, and the enthusiasm spread. Hawking’s attitude to this craze is open to debate. Most likely, he stood back from this particular game with a certain amused detachment; this at least is the opinion of his contemporaries. They speak of experiencing a towering intellect, looking on at the reaction of the participants more with fascination than with any feelings of conviction or budding faith.

  Michael Church describes how he felt an indefinable intellectual presence when it came to discussing matters vaguely mystical or metaphysical with Stephen. Remembering one encounter, he says:

  I wasn’t a scientist and didn’t take him remotely seriously until one day when we were messing around in his cluttered, joke-inventor’s den. Our talk turned to the meaning of life—a topic I felt pretty hot on at the time—when suddenly I was arrested by an awful realization: he was encouraging me to make a fool of myself, and watching me as though from a great height. It was a profoundly unnerving moment.2

  Their interest in Christianity lasted for most of the year. The group of friends met at each other’s houses as they had done to play board games. They still drank orange squash and even played games occasionally, but for most of the time they would hold intense discussions on matters of faith, God, and their own feelings. It was a time of inner growth, a struggle to find meaning in the tumble of events and stimuli surrounding them, but it was also an important group activity. One member of the group has since intimated that there was an undoubted tinge of schoolboy homosexuality about the whole thing.

  This was a difficult time for Stephen. He wanted to be involved, to be part of the group, but the rationalist in him would not, even then, allow his emotions to compromise his intellect. Yet he managed to keep his friends, remain detached, and learn a number of social skills that would hold him in good stead for the future. The irony is that at the end of the third year, at the height of the craze, Stephen won the school divinity prize.

  After Christianity came the occult. The group began to turn its attention to extrasensory perception (ESP), which at the time was beginning to capture the public imagination. Together and in the privacy of their own dens, they started to conduct experiments during which they would attempt to influence the throw of a die by the power of their minds. Stephen was far more interested in this—it was quantifiable, real experimental work, and there was a chance that the idea could be proved or disproved. It was not simply a matter of faith and hope.

  The craze did not last long. With the others, Stephen attended a lecture by a scientist who had made a study of a set of ESP experiments conducted at Duke University in North Carolina in the late fifties. The lecturer demonstrated that when the experimenters obtained good results the experiments could be shown to be faulty, and whenever the experimental technique was followed correctly, no results were obtained. Hawking’s interest turned to contempt. He came to the conclusion that it is only people who have not developed their analytical faculties beyond those of a teenager who believe in such things as ESP.3

  Meanwhile, at school things carried on pretty much as before. Stephen was poor at all sports with the possible exception of cross-country running, for which his wraith-like physique was perfectly suited. He endured cricket and rugby, but special loathing was reserved for the Combined Cadet Force, the CCF. Like most private boys’ schools in Britain, St. Albans School maintains a schoolboy army, the original aim of which was to prepare young men for national service. Each Friday the entire school, with six exceptions, wore military uniform. The exceptions were those whose parents were conscientious objectors. Despite Isobel Hawking’s political leanings, Stephen’s parents did not object and he took part in the same war games, drills, and parades as the others.

  For those with little interest in things military, the memories of the CCF are sour—cold winter Fridays in driving rain, clothes drenched through, biting January sleet numbing face and fingers, and the enthusiastic boy-officers yelling orders. Stephen had the rank of lance corporal in the Signals, the section into which those with a scientific bent were traditionally
placed. By all accounts he hated every minute of it, but it was endured. In some respects the alternative was worse. Those who did not wish to play their part in defending Queen and Country had to run the gauntlet of persuasive tactics. First, the objector was taken to Colonel Pryke, commander of the CCF. If he did not manage to persuade the dissenter to join, the next line of attack was the sub-dean, Canon Feaver, a formidable gentleman who would subject the boy to a lecture on his moral duty to serve God and the Queen, to play his role in the greater scheme of things. If that were endured, the final test would be to face the headmaster, William Thomas Marsh.

  Marsh was one of St. Albans’s most severe but successful headmasters. He has been described by more than one of Hawking’s contemporaries as “absolutely terrifying”; to cross him was an act of extreme foolishness. If the headmaster failed to convert a conscientious objector, then he must possess tremendous conviction and determination. However, that was only the beginning of the ordeal. Those who did not take part in the CCF were made to dress in fatigues along with everyone else and, instead of playing at soldiers, were forced to dig a Greek theater in the school grounds. Marsh was a dedicated Classicist, and he viewed this treatment as fitting ritualistic humiliation. The construction of the Greek theater continued, rain or shine, for as long as it took. As the work progressed, Marsh stalked its perimeter in fair weather or surveyed the site from the comfort of a warm room when it was raining or snowing.

  Life at school was not always bleak. The whole class often went on school trips to places of academic interest. It was usually the CCF commander, Colonel Pryke, who was given the responsibility of taking what he referred to as “a scruffy band of young men” to such places as chemical plants, power stations, and museums. He remembers with fondness the occasion when he took Hawking’s class to the ICI chemical plant at Billingham in the north of England. Everything seemed to be going well until just after lunch, when one of the scientists who had been showing them around cornered Pryke and asked angrily, “Who the hell have you got here? They’re asking me all sorts of bloody awkward questions I can’t answer!”