The year 1959 started with a bang: January 2 saw the thirty-two-year-old Fidel Castro sweeping to power in Cuba; a month later, Buddy Holly died in a plane crash and Indira Gandhi became the leader of India’s ruling Congress Party. By the spring, the world’s first hovercraft was under construction on the Isle of Wight, two rhesus monkeys had become the first primates in space, and the writer Raymond Chandler had died at age seventy. Meanwhile, in a small city in Hertfordshire a seventeen-year-old schoolboy named Stephen Hawking was getting ready for the Oxford entrance examination in a large, cluttered bedroom in his parents’ rambling Edwardian house. Obtaining a place at Oxford University was no easy task. A potential candidate had two alternatives—an entrance examination taken in the upper sixth, before A Levels, or the same examination taken in the seventh term, provided very high A Level grades had been obtained. The former route meant that a successful candidate could go straight to Oxford after the summer vacation; the latter necessitated waiting until the following October.
Stephen and his father settled on the first alternative, and he was entered for the examination toward the end of his final year at St. Albans School. The intention from the start was that he was going for a scholarship, the highest award offered by the university. The award provided a number of titular privileges, and, more important, a percentage of the cost of putting a student through Oxford was paid by the university. A student failing to obtain a scholarship could be awarded an exhibition, which was less prestigious and brought with it a smaller contribution to the costs of education. Last, a candidate could be offered a place at the university but with no financial assistance at all and the student was then known as a “commoner.”
Over the previous year, father and son had engaged in endless arguments over the choice of university course. Stephen insisted that he wanted to study mathematics and physics, a course then known as natural science. His father was unconvinced; he believed there were no jobs in mathematics apart from teaching. Stephen knew what he wanted to do and won the argument; medicine had little appeal for him. As he says himself:
My father would have liked me to do medicine. However, I felt that biology was too descriptive, and not sufficiently fundamental. Maybe I would have felt differently if I had been aware of molecular biology, but that was not generally known about at the time.1
Frank Hawking lost the argument over Stephen’s choice of degree course, but he was determined to see his son obtain a place at his old college, University College, Oxford. However, it is clear that Dr. Hawking was not, even at this stage, fully convinced of Stephen’s ability and believed that he had to pull strings to get him in. He evidently decided to take the initiative. Just before the scheduled entrance examination during the Easter vacation, he arranged to take Stephen to meet his prospective tutor at University College, Dr. Robert Berman. As Berman himself recalls, the sort of pressure Hawking senior was applying would usually have put him off the candidate immediately. However, Stephen sat for the exam and did so extraordinarily well that Berman and University College soon warmed to him.
The entrance examination was pretty tough. It was spread over two days and consisted of five papers in all, each of which was two and a half hours long. These included two physics and two mathematics papers, followed by a paper that tested candidates on their general knowledge and awareness of current affairs and world issues. A typical question would have been something like “Discuss the possible short-term global consequences of Fidel Castro’s takeover of Cuba.” It was doubted at the time whether a seventeen-year-old should be expected to have very strong opinions on such matters at all, and some at the university even doubted the desirability of such opinions. Dr. Berman, for one, would have been more impressed, he has said, by Hawking’s knowledge of the England cricket team than his views on contemporary politics.
After twelve and a half hours of theory examinations and a physics practical paper came the interviews. First there was a general interview at which the candidates were grilled by the master, dean, senior tutor, and fellows of the subject. These took place in the Senior Common Room. The prospective students were led in individually to face stern appraisal by the panel and were expected to give intelligent answers to a series of obtuse questions. The purpose of this, like that of a job interview, was to find out a little more about the character of the candidate. Following the general interview, a specialist interview was held in Dr. Berman’s office, during which Hawking was questioned on his knowledge of physics.
The interviews and examinations over, the candidates returned to their various schools around the country to await the results and get on with their A Levels. Meanwhile, the tutors marked the papers and conferred on the matter. If University College wanted Hawking, they had first choice of offering him a scholarship because he had placed them at the top of his list in his application. If they decided they did not want to award him a scholarship or an exhibition, then other Oxford colleges on his list could take up the option. If no one wanted to give him an award, the choice went back to University College to take him as a commoner if they wished.
Ten days passed before he heard anything from them. Then came the invitation to return for another interview. This was a promising step forward. It meant that they were taking his application seriously and that he had a very good chance of obtaining a place. Little did he know that he had scored around ninety-five percent in both his physics papers, with only slightly lower percentages in the others. A few days after the second interview, the all-important letter fell onto the Hawkings’ doormat. University College was offering him a scholarship. He was invited to enroll at Oxford University the following October, the only condition being that he obtain two A Level passes in the summer.
It has often been said that there is a certain light in Oxford, a wonderful interplay between sunlight and sandstone, which, like the comparably beautiful cities of Italy and Germany, has inspired the work of poets and painters down the centuries. The city center is totally dominated by the presence of the university—a ubiquitous thing, without nerve center or organized structure. The colleges are to be found in a random scattering with the rest of the town weaving around it. The architecture displays as little organization as the geography, dating from medieval times to the late twentieth century. On summer days, with the sunlight strong against the stonework and the river dotted with punts, their navigators sweeping a pole into the sparkling water, and those on the grassy banks lifting a glass of champagne to their lips, it can, if you let it, seem like an earthly paradise in freeze frame.
In the late fifties and early sixties, Oxford, as a microcosm of British society, was on the brink of great change. When Hawking arrived at the High on his first October Thursday as an undergraduate, the university had in many respects changed little since his father’s time or, indeed, for the past few hundred years. University discipline had relaxed somewhat since the end of the war. Before then, students had been forbidden to enter the city’s pubs and could, if caught, be expelled from them by the university police, known as the Bulldogs. Women were not allowed in male students’ rooms without written permission from the dean, who would specify strict time limitations and conditions in a letter sent to the head porter, who would then rigorously uphold the dean’s instructions. All this changed when servicemen returning from the war entered the university either as freshmen or to restart courses interrupted by the fighting. Naturally, they were unwilling to accept such draconian restrictions and gradually the rules were relaxed.
Students vied for rooms in college, but Hawking was lucky in that, being a scholar, he took priority and managed to keep in residence in college rooms throughout his three years at Oxford.
Most Oxford colleges are built in the form of a number of quads, each with a lawn at the center and paths around and across the grass. From the quads, staircases lead off into the buildings, and the students’ rooms are on a number of levels up to the top of each staircase. Students in college had their rooms cleaned for them and their general domestic duties handled by college servants, or “scouts.” Scouts were also responsible for making sure that hungover young men and the occasional young woman made it to breakfast between the regulation times of 8:00 and 8:15, so as to avoid facing a locked dining-hall door. Scouts addressed the students as “Sir” or as “Mister Such-and-Such” if attempting to inject a note of disdain into their voices. They in turn were addressed by their surnames, in true master-servant fashion.
The intake at Oxford was still largely male and from the country’s private schools, and the majority of those were from the top ten, including Eton, Harrow, Rugby, and Westminster.
The number of students from middle-class and working-class backgrounds was beginning to increase, but in many respects the class system took on a greater refinement and a sharper profile at Oxford University. There were definite lines of demarcation. The friendships and relationships capable of crossing those invisible boundaries were still amazingly few. The twain very rarely met.
In one camp were the elite, the children of the aristocracy and heirs to “old money,” the Sebastian Flytes of this world; they made up a substantial proportion of students at Christchurch and, to a lesser extent, Balliol. The privileged spent their often considerable allowances largely on entertaining their chums from school who had gone up with them or friends who had chosen to go to the “other place,” Cambridge. They looked upon those from minor private schools such as St. Albans as a lesser breed, lumping them in with the lowest of the low—ex–grammar school boys. Despite literature’s tendency toward exaggeration, it was still all very Brideshead Revisited. On the other side of the divide, the “Northern chemists” and the “grammar school oiks” made do on their scholarships and grants, forfeiting quails’ eggs and champagne for pork pies and beer.
The two groups looked surprisingly similar in many respects. In the late fifties, baggy trousers and tweed jackets were in fashion for academic young men whatever their background. The difference was that for a privileged few the jackets came from Savile Row and the baggy turn-ups from Harrods. At the college balls held each summer, the female companion of an Old Harrovian or Etonian would, in all probability, be the daughter of a baron or a duke, wrapped in the best silk. Meanwhile, at the same functions, the middle classes gathered together with others of their own kind, sipping at rarely sampled champagne.
A simple point of reference illustrates the changes about to hit Oxford soon after Hawking went up, encapsulated by one of his contemporaries. “When we arrived in Oxford,” he said, “anybody who was anybody rowed and never wore jeans. When we left, anybody who was anybody never rowed and did wear jeans.”
Changes were afoot everywhere. Beat poetry from San Francisco was beginning to have an influence. The Labor Party was growing in popularity. The old values, the class system in particular, were beginning to look anachronistic, at least among the intelligentsia. There was no desire to “storm the citadel” (that would come a decade later and in a different city), but the Zeitgeist was definitely on the move. When it came down to it, Hawking’s type of person found the whole infrastructure of Oxford as a microcosm faintly amusing, an ethos which would, in peculiarly British fashion, lead to Beyond the Fringe and Monty Python rather than blood in Parisian gutters.
Despite its many charms, Hawking’s first year at Oxford was, by all accounts, a pretty miserable time for him. Very few of his school contemporaries and none of his close friends from St. Albans had gone up the same year. In 1960 Michael Church arrived, and John McClenahan went to Cambridge. Many students in Hawking’s year had completed national service before going up and were consequently a couple of years older than he. (He had avoided the draft himself by only a few months when it was scrapped by Harold Macmillan’s government.)
Work was a bore. He had very little difficulty solving any of the physics or mathematics questions his tutors gave him, and he went into a downward spiral of bothering very little and finding meager satisfaction in easy victories. The system at Oxford made it easy for someone like Hawking to slide into apathy. Students were expected to attend a number of lectures each week and a weekly tutorial in which problems given during the previous tutorial were gone through. Apart from these commitments, students were left largely to their own devices.
On top of this freedom, the examination structure was loose and eminently open to exploitation if you were of Hawking’s caliber. The only crucial examinations were set by the university, as opposed to the college, and took place at the end of the first year and again in the final year. The degree was awarded solely based on the student’s performance in finals. There were also college exams at the beginning of each new term to test the students on both the previous term’s work and their personal studies during the vacation. These were called collections and were marked by the students’ own tutors. As Hawking relates:
The prevailing attitude at Oxford at that time was very anti-work. You were supposed either to be brilliant without effort or to accept your limitations and get a fourth-class degree. To work hard to get a better class of degree was regarded as the mark of a gray man, the worst epithet in the Oxford vocabulary.2
Hawking knew that he was in the former category and determined to live up to the image. During his first year he attended only mathematics lectures and tutorials and completed college exams solely in mathematics. As his tutor now freely admits, the physics course at the time was little more than a repetition of A Level work and of limited use to the Hawkings of this world.
There has arisen a veritable folk tradition of anecdotes about his intuitive understanding of the subject at university, stories reminiscent of the early prowess of the boy-Mozart. One of his contemporaries who shared tutorials with Hawking recalls an incident that left a lasting impression on him. They had been given some problems by the tutor to bring to the next tutorial. No one in the group could do them except Stephen. The tutor asked to see his work and was immensely impressed with his proof of a particularly difficult theorem and, complimenting him on the achievement, handed back the paper. Without the slightest hint of arrogance Hawking took back his work, wadded it into a ball, and lobbed it into the waste-paper bin in the far corner of the room. Another member of the tutorial group said later, “If I had been able to prove that in a year, I would have kept it!”
Another story tells of the time the four members of his tutorial group were set a collection of problems for the following week. On the morning the questions were due in, the other three came across Hawking in the common room slouched in an armchair reading a science fiction novel.
“How have you got on with the problems, Steve?” one of them asked.
“Oh, I haven’t tried them,” Hawking replied.
“Well, you’d better get on with it,” said his friend. “The three of us have been working on them together for the past week and we’ve only managed to get one of them done.”
Later that day the three of them encountered Hawking walking to the tutorial and inquired how he had done with the problems. “Oh,” he said, “I only had time to do nine of them.”
Hawking kept very few notes and possessed only a handful of textbooks. In fact, he was so far ahead of the field that he had become distrustful of many standard textbooks. A further anecdote describes the time one of his tutors, a junior research fellow named Patrick Sandars, gave the class some problems from a book. Hawking turned up to the following tutorial having failed to complete any of the questions. When asked why, he spent the next twenty minutes pointing out all the errors in the textbook.
Despite his lackadaisical attitude to things academic, he still managed to maintain a healthy relationship with his tutor, Dr. Berman. He would occasionally go for tea at the Bermans’ home on Banbury Road. In the summer they would hold parties on the back lawn, at which they would eat strawberries and play croquet. Dr. Berman’s wife, Maureen, took a particular liking to the rather eccentric young student whom her husband rated so highly as a physicist. Hawking would often arrive early for tea to ask her advice on what good books he should buy, and she guided him through a highbrow literary diet to supplement the physics texts he would occasionally read.
His lack of effort hardly seemed to hold back his progress in physics. As an award student, he had to enter for the university physics prize at the end of the second year, for which all the other physicists in his year entered. With the minimum of effort he won the top award and received a Blackwell’s book token for £50.
Maintaining his academic position in college and staying on the right side of Dr. Berman were one thing, but coping with the increasing boredom of it all was quite another, and at this time he might have nosedived into depression. Fortunately, in the second year he discovered an interest that would help him find some sort of stability: he took up rowing. Rowing has a long tradition at both Oxford and Cambridge, dating back centuries. Each year, the boat race between the two universities highlights the skills of the best oarsmen, who spend the rest of the year in intercollegiate races and training.
Rowing is a very physical activity and is taken terribly seriously by those involved. Rowers go out on the water whatever the weather, rain or snow, breaking the ice on freezing winter mornings and sweating in the early summer heat. Rowing requires dedication and commitment, and that is the real reason for its popularity at university. It acts, at least for some students, as a perfect counterpoint to the stresses and demands of study. In Hawking’s case it was the perfect remedy for a calcifying boredom with everything else Oxford had to offer.
Rowing is one of the most physically demanding sports around, and an oarsman simply has to be powerfully built to help move a boat through the water; but there is one other essential ingredient in every rowing team—the coxswain, or “cox.”
Hawking was perfectly suited to coxing. He was light, so he did not burden the boat, and he had a loud voice with which he enjoyed barking instructions the length of the boat and enough discipline to attend all the training sessions. His rowing trainer was Norman Dix, who had been with the university college rowing club for decades. He recalls that Hawking was a competent enough cox, but never interested in advancing beyond the second crew. He suspects that the first crew held little appeal because it meant taking it all too seriously, and at that level the fun would have gone out of the whole thing.
Dix remembers Hawking as a boisterous young fellow who from the beginning cultivated a daredevil image when it came to navigating his crew on the river. Many was the time he would return the eight to shore with bits of the boat knocked off and oar blades damaged because he had tried to guide his crew through an impossibly narrow gap and had come to grief. Dix never did believe Hawking’s claims that “something had gotten in the way.”
“Half the time,” says Dix, “I got the distinct impression that he was sitting in the stern of the boat with his head in the stars, working out his mathematical formulae.”
The crews worked hard on the river. They would be out in the boats nearly every day during term time, preparing for the big races, the Torpids, which take place in February, and the Summer Eights in the summer term. The term Torpids originally came from the adjective “torpid” because this would be the first competitive race in which freshmen could compete, and therefore the standard of many crews was pretty low. Having joined the Rowing Club in October, the novice rowers would have trained hard all winter in preparation for showing off their newfound skills by the fifth week of the winter term.
Torpids are all college “bumping” races, taking place over several days. The thirteen boats competing start off one hundred and forty feet apart. Each is tied to the bank by a forty-foot line, the other end of which is held by the cox. When the starting gun goes off, the cox releases the line and the boats chase each other along a stretch of the river with the aim of bumping the boat in front without getting bumped themselves. The main task of the cox is to guide the crew so that they avoid being bumped by the boat behind but manage to bump the boat in front. The object of the exercise is to move up through the positions of the thirteen boats by managing to bump without being bumped; after each heat the “bumpers” and the “bumped” change places. If a crew does very well and moves up several places during the series of races, each crewmember is entitled to purchase an oar on which can be written the triumphant tally of bumps, the names of the crew, and the date. Such oars adorn the walls of victors’ studies. Hawking’s crews were pretty average, notching up only a modest number of bumps during their Torpids races, but the whole idea was to have fun and to relieve academic pressures.
After the races came the celebrations and commiserations, both of which would be accompanied by a surfeit of ale, followed by a rowing club dinner in the college accompanied by speeches and toasts. And here was the real reason Hawking was involved at all. He had been something of a misfit during his first year, lonely and needing to alleviate the boredom of work that presented no challenge to him. The rowing club brought the nineteen-year-old out of himself and gave him an opportunity to become part of the university “in crowd.”
When old school friends encountered Hawking during his second year, they could hardly believe the change in him. Variously described as “one of the lads” and “definitely raffish,” the slender, tousle-haired youth in his pink rowing club scarf seemed a far cry from the gawky schoolboy who had left St. Albans School less than two years earlier. He was no longer a social also-ran but a fully paid-up member of the “right” social set. It was very much an all-male domain; women rarely entered this world. It was, in a way, a continuation of the gang at St. Albans School, without the intellectual intensity but with a lot more alcohol. The idea was to drink copious amounts of ale, recount vaguely lurid stories, and have as much harmless fun as possible. However, his newfound taste for adventure almost got him into trouble.
One night he decided to create a splash. After a few beers with a friend, the two of them headed off to one of the footbridges spanning the river. After leaving the pub, they picked up a can of paint and some brushes they had left at the college and hidden them inside a bag. When they arrived at the bridge, they set up a couple of wooden planks parallel to the span and suspended them over the water by a carefully arranged rope a few feet below the parapet. Clambering over the side, they positioned themselves on the planks with the can of paint and brushes and began to write. A few minutes later, just visible in the dark, were the words VOTE LIBERAL in foot-high letters along the side of the bridge and clear to anyone on the river when daylight broke.
Then disaster struck. Just as Hawking was finishing off the last letter, the beam of a flashlight shone down on them from the bridge and an angry voice called out, “And what do you think you’re up to, then?” It was a local policeman. The two panicked, and Hawking’s friend scurried off the planks and onto the riverbank, hightailing it back to town and leaving Hawking with paintbrush in hand to face the music. The story goes that he simply got a ticking off from the local constabulary, and the incident was eventually forgotten. But it must have had the desired effect of scaring the life out of him, because he never clashed with the law again.
Less than three years after arriving at Oxford University, Hawking again had to face the music when finals approached, and he suddenly found that he could have been better prepared. Dr. Berman knew that Hawking, for all his innate ability, would find the examinations harder than he anticipated. Berman realized that there were two types of student who did well at Oxford: those who were bright and worked very hard, and those who had great natural talent and worked very little. It was always the former who achieved greater things in written papers. That was the way of exams: winning end-of-year prizes was one thing, but finals were in a different league. They were all or nothing, the focal point of the whole three years of study. Hawking once calculated that during the entire three years of his course at Oxford he had done something like 1,000 hours’ work, an average of one hour per day—hardly a foundation for the arduous finals. One friend remembers with amusement, “Towards the end he was working as much as three hours a day!”
However, Hawking had devised a plan. Because candidates had a wide choice of questions from each paper, he would, he decided, attempt only theoretical-physics problems and ignore those requiring detailed factual knowledge. He knew that he could do any theoretical question by using his proven natural talent and intuitive understanding of the subject. But there was an additional problem to complicate things: he had applied to Cambridge to begin Ph.D. studies in cosmology under the most distinguished British astronomer of the day, Fred Hoyle. The catch was that to be accepted for Cambridge, he had to achieve a first-class honors degree, the highest possible qualification at Oxford.
The night before finals, Hawking panicked. He tossed and turned all night and got very little sleep. When morning came, he dressed up in subfusc (the regulation black gown, white shirt, and bow-tie worn by all examinees), left his rooms bleary-eyed and anxious, and headed for the examination halls a few yards along the High. Out on the street, hundreds of other identically dressed students streamed along the pavements, some clutching books under their arms, others puffing maniacally on their last cigarette before entering the examination hall—a feast for the tourist’s camera but abject misery for those having to sit through days of examinations.
The examination halls themselves do their best to intimidate: high ceilings, great chandeliers hanging down from the void, row upon row of stark wooden desks and hard chairs. Invigilators pace up and down the rows, keeping an eagle eye on the candidates in their multitude of poses—staring at the ceiling or the middle distance, pen protruding between clenched teeth, or terminally absorbed, hunched over a manuscript in a free-flow trance. Hawking woke up a little as the paper was placed on the desk before him and duly followed through his plan of attempting only the theoretical problems.
Exams over, he went off to celebrate the end of finals with the others of his year, guzzling champagne from the bottle and joining the throng of students ritualistically stopping the traffic on the High and spraying bubbly into the summer sky. After a short pause and a period of nail-biting anticipation, the results were announced. Hawking was on the borderline between a first and a second. To decide his fate, he would have to face a viva, a personal interview with the examiners.
He was fully aware of his image at the university. He had the impression, rightly or wrongly, that he was considered a difficult student in that he was scruffy and seemingly lazy, more interested in drinking and having fun than working seriously. However, he underestimated how highly thought of were his abilities. Not only that, but as Berman is fond of saying, Hawking was in his element at a viva, because if the examiners had any intelligence they would soon see that he was cleverer than they were. At the interview he made a pronouncement that perfectly encapsulates the man’s matter-of-fact attitude and at the same time may have just saved his career. The chief examiner asked him to tell the board of his plans for the future.
“If you award me a first,” he said, “I will go to Cambridge. If I receive a second, I shall stay in Oxford, so I expect you will give me a first.”
They did.