Stephen Hawking Read Free

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 minorprivate 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) Levelexams 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