Stephen Hawking (8 page)

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.