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Conflict in the Cosmos: Fred Hoyle’s Life in Science
CHAPTER 1
An End—and a Beginning
On August 19, 1972, Fred Hoyle sat in his office at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge for the last time. His summer had been busy. A record number of academic visitors had come to the institute to benefit from summer conferences, collaborations, lectures, and discussions. He had fretted to make sure the institute would be financed securely for the next 5 years. Just 3 weeks earlier, the Institute of Astronomy had been born through a merger of two astronomy departments, after the university had decided to join the historic Observatories established in 1823 with the pioneering Institute of Theoretical Astronomy founded by Hoyle in 1965. Hoyle had been the head of Theoretical Astronomy for 7 years, but now he had a new boss, because the university had not chosen him as the director of the combined institute.
On a sultry afternoon with a threat of thunder in the air, staff members who were in the old Observatories, including myself, made the short walk along the path through the parklike grounds to the building that had been the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy—IoTA for short—to take their afternoon tea in the library. This wonderful Cambridge tradition gave the researchers and their students an opportunity to exchange ideas, and maybe wish a departing visitor a safe trip
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back to California or India. But this afternoon, Hoyle would not be joining his colleagues for tea. He had spent the past two weeks clearing his vast office of personal documents, books, and drafts of scientific papers, the result of 36 years of scientific work, much of it carried out in Cambridge.
Affairs of state had eaten into a lot of his time for the past year, and we had seldom seen him in the institute. He juggled the duties of being both vice president of the Royal Society and president of the Royal Astronomical Society. At the February meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society he had presented the Gold Medals. One of them went to Fritz Zwicky, of the California Institute of Technology, where Hoyle himself had made astounding breakthroughs some 20 years earlier. After the presentations of the medals, Hoyle had given a lengthy lecture setting out his ideas on the origin of Earth and evolution of life on it. This was not a mere summary of accepted theory, but his own views on what might have happened. On the research front he had worked on new theories of gravity and had published two demanding technical papers. He was still as productive as ever, working up novel ideas into papers, one after another.
Whereas most mature scientists would be content with two or three papers a year, Hoyle was still writing books at a furious pace. There had been two this year. One reviewed the scientific case for interpreting Stonehenge as an astronomical observatory and eclipse predictor, ideas that had brought him into sharp disagreement with archaeologists.1 The following year, 1973, would be the 500th anniversary of the birth of Nicolaus Copernicus, who had taken the decisive step of abandoning the Earth-centered universe of ancient Greek philosophy. Copernicus had published a new, but flawed, theory of the universe with the Sun rather than Earth at the center of the solar system. Hoyle was hard at work for his London publisher on a book celebrating the achievements of Copernicus as one of the founders of modern science.2
His year started in turmoil and conflict about how the government’s funding for scientific research should be handled. Two national committees of scientific gurus had reported to the government that a greater proportion of the money should go to projects of direct interest
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to the taxpayer and that the cash should be channeled through ministries other than the Department of Education. Hoyle smelled a rat. If the proposals were accepted, then future funding would be in the hands of politicized decision makers rather than the scientists and professionals in education. Hoyle set about vigorously lobbying the scientific community to resist “the setting up of more bureaucratic machines.”3
The following month, February, Fred had flown to Australia to discuss plans for the new Anglo-Australian Telescope. He traveled with a colleague who was on the inside track of political machinations at Cambridge. This colleague had dropped a bombshell into the conversation: The university appeared to be considering the appointment of someone other than Fred as the director of the combined Institute of Astronomy. The news was a heavy blow—so heavy that, during a stopover in Los Angeles, Hoyle dashed off a letter of resignation to the vice chancellor. Hoyle was already feeling completely through with Cambridge by this time because of its dithering and (as he saw it) inept approach to making senior appointments.
Now, on his last day, he felt deeply that his beloved institute had been stripped of its international character. In 1961, he had developed the idea of an institute devoted solely to the theoretical side of astronomy. In only a few days’ time, his world-class theory team would be united with astronomers who built instruments and looked through telescopes. He supported both communities but could not come to terms with the university’s decision to disregard him when it came to appointing a director. He was certain he had made the correct decision.
For decades, Hoyle had been the best-known astrophysicist in Britain. His output of technical papers was prodigious, but he never confined himself to the ivory towers of academia. A gifted popularizer, he could make the most profound intellectual puzzles into entertaining radio talks and lucid television programs. Fred Hoyle’s broadcasts and books influenced many of us who were drawn into astronomy. Most years, he wrote a book, sometimes two. The sweep of his accomplishments as a writer covered a spectrum from popular books to technical monographs. Imaginative ideas that were too speculative for journal papers and serious books were cleverly developed to be aired in the guise of science fiction.
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Despite his fame and standing, matters in Cambridge had somehow unraveled in the past year so that, as Hoyle put it, “Now I really did want to be done with it.”4
Even when the tea drinkers had drifted back to their offices, Hoyle still felt unable to make a break for it, not wishing to endure the embarrassment of further handshakes, eye contact, or best wishes. By early evening the institute building was finally empty. The time to depart had come. He would head straight for the main door and be done with the institute forever. He took a last look round the office and, as an afterthought, picked up the inky blotter on the desk as a memento. He seldom used ballpoint pens, always choosing to write confidently with a fountain pen and rarely revising manuscript drafts. Just as he left the office, which was at the end of a long corridor and some distance from the front door, he changed his mind about bolting for the exit. Instead, he took a nostalgic tour of the building, his pride and joy. Though founded by him, funded by his pleas for cash, and populated by his handpicked team of research astronomers, it welcomed his presence no longer.
Ray Lyttleton’s office was nearby. Ray was Hoyle’s earliest collaborator and together they had done important work on the origin of the solar system. In a long career, Lyttleton had made the strategic error of continuing to work in the same area, defending his early papers from attack. This approach was very different from Hoyle’s, which was to keep moving into new areas before someone else came up with a better idea. I remember Lyttleton in those days as a sad figure, still the holder of a prestigious professorship, but not a scientist anyone listened to or read anymore. Taking his last look, Hoyle glimpsed Lyttleton’s work on a spoof paper, trying to prove mathematically that it should be impossible to ride a bicycle.
Cyril Hazard’s office was next. Cyril was making a huge effort to identify very distant objects now known as quasars. Most astronomers believed quasars were at immense distances from our galaxy, but Hoyle thought they could have been ejected from nearby galaxies. Hazard’s objective was to get accurate distance measurements (a part of the project on which I myself collaborated with Hazard) and to nail the problem one way or the other. Hoyle looked at Cyril’s office. It was a
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wasteland of scientific papers, piled so high and loosely against the window as to form a miniature landslide that extended halfway to the door. His desk was submerged under a mountain of photographs of candidate galaxies and quasars that Hazard worked on with collaborators in the United States. The blackboard was a mass of random prompts: names, ideas, galaxies to investigate. Here was a great friend and collaborator who, as a result of Hoyle’s resignation, now faced an uncertain future without a job.
Further along the corridor lay the study of Sverre Aarseth, who had joined Hoyle years earlier as a graduate student and had then been appointed to the research staff in the foundation year. He and Fred had a strong interest in chess and were intently following the Spassky-Fischer world championship in Reykavik. On the last day of the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy, Aarseth had organized a boat trip up the river Cam to the cathedral city of Ely. At the end of the trip, when IoTA was no more, Aarseth presented the former director with the official visitors book, which had been kept since 1965. Such a volume normally would have been regarded as part of the university archives, but Aarseth knew it would give Fred great pleasure to have this personal reminder of all the visitors he had attracted.
Hoyle walked past the open-plan library, always the first place in Cambridge to receive from the United States the world’s premier research publication for astrophysics, the Astrophysical Journal. Only the institute had an airmail subscription. On one table lay a large electronic calculator, purchased at colossal expense in 1968, with a display that used extremely complex neon lights to show each number. The airmailed journal and the huge calculator kept Hoyle’s theorists a step ahead of the other astronomers in Cambridge.
In the lecture room, there was a wide expanse of blackboards, made from state-of-the-art ground glass and amply supplied with no-dust chalk. During the construction of the institute, Hoyle had squeezed the budget to afford blackboards of the highest quality because advances in theory require countless hours of argument at the blackboard. Now he looked at the jumble of words, mathematical symbols, and general squiggles. These were the remnants from the last seminar to take place under his leadership. He could make out some patterns of
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thought, but others he did not recognize: Even his towering intellect could not comprehend all the advances of modern astronomy.
Now he turned and swung the big heavy door to the outside world. It shut slowly behind him as he set off on the short walk home. To his right was a pasture where three horses grazed contentedly, oblivious to any cosmology more complex than a flat field of grass. To his left was a building housing the IBM 360/44 computer that Hoyle had purchased as bait to lure summer visitors from the United States, who used it to model the evolution of stars. Ahead, he could see the new buildings of the department of physics, which had recently moved out of central Cambridge. A turn to the left and he was walking past the entrance road to the Observatories.
I have made this walk countless times. Today the William (Bill) H. Gates Building for Computer Science blocks the view to the department of physics, but the horsefield is still there. Hoyle was retracing the footsteps of great astronomers who had worked at the Observatories. One of them was Arthur Eddington, an astronomer Hoyle had always particularly admired. Eddington had been one of Hoyle’s predecessors as the Plumian Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge. Back in 1919, he had confirmed an important prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity: the bending of the path of starlight by the gravity of the Sun. In the 1920s, Eddington’s research on the structure of stars was groundbreaking and was an important launchpad for Hoyle’s earliest researches.
By now, Hoyle was almost home, walking past the cornfield on Clarkson Road, to his home in Clarkson Close. Here, he could reflect on 35 years of achievements in Cambridge. He had produced more than 400 scientific papers, a couple of dozen monographs and textbooks, and several best-selling science fiction novels. He was the first professional astronomer to use radio, and later television, to bring modern astronomy to a vast public. Early in his career he had worked on the structure of stars and had investigated how a star’s appearance evolves over its lifetime. The greatest of his early achievements was showing how stars make carbon, the element essential for life in the universe. Professional astronomers regarded his work on the origin of certain of the chemical elements as a soaring achievement, standing
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above everything else he had done. He had spent a quarter of a century arguing with his colleagues about the nature of the universe, always rejecting the popular notion that a universe produced itself out of nothingness in a “big bang.” These clashes had made him very famous in the public eye.
Two days later, Fred Hoyle and his wife Barbara hitched their caravan to their car and set out on a long journey to a remote beach in Cornwall. They stopped to drink coffee from a flask on the Downs south of Swindon. As Fred sipped the hot liquid, the penny finally dropped: He was suddenly emotionally overwhelmed by the magnitude of the break he had just made.
Within 3 months, Fred and Barbara sold the house and left Cambridge for good.
Fred Hoyle was born on June 24, 1915, at the home of his parents, Ben and Mabel, in the countryside of west Yorkshire made famous by the Brontë sisters and elegantly described in the novel Wuthering Heights. His paternal grandfather, George Hoyle, came from the neighboring county of Lancashire and settled in Gilstead, a village founded in Saxon times. George’s son Ben originally emigrated to the United States but returned to Gilstead to help his widowed mother.5 He started working in the wool trade and married his first cousin, Mabel Pickard, who had considerable musical talent.
Today, that part of northeastern England is a popular tourist destination, which it certainly was not during the First World War. Fred’s birthplace, Gilstead, is a village 1 mile from the town of Bingley and 6 miles from the city of Bradford. The latter was a great manufacturing center for the textile trade, with hundreds of chimneys belching forth sulfurous smoke, as they had done for a century. The urban industrial landscape of northern England is beautifully captured for us in the early works of the artist L. S. Lowry, although he painted the factory environments of Lancashire rather than Yorkshire. William Blake’s poem Jerusalem immortalizes the “dark satanic mills” of the Industrial Revolution:
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And did the Countenance Divine
Shine down upon those clouded hills;
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among those dark Satanic mills?
—William Blake (1804)6
Gilstead is in one of the valleys invaded by the textile industry. The local building material is sandstone, which takes up soot readily, and the smoke from factory chimneys has blackened all the stone within an area of thousands of square miles. The surrounding fields were, and still are, small and divided by drystone walls rather than hedges, walls that march in serried ranks up the steep sides of the valley to the bare moorland towering above Gilstead. The village today is scarcely larger than it was 90 years ago, when a simple house number (34 Gilstead) sufficed for a postal address,7 and it is still surrounded on three sides by open farmland.
The village of Haworth, 5 miles away, to which the Brontës moved in 1820, was almost visible from the Hoyles’ house. Also near to Fred’s first home is a humpbacked bridge over the Leeds–Liverpool Canal. Its famous system of five locks at Bingley is now a major tourist attraction. Fred and his playmates had plenty of childhood distractions: the edge of the moor with its heather, a nearby stream that by turns could be a trickle or a raging torrent, a wood with numerous possibilities for bird nesting, deep snow in winter, the open fields, and the village high street. Fred never cared for the typical activity of little boys, robbing birds’ nests: In later life he recalled his childhood excitement at finding a partridge nest with 15 eggs, which of course he left undisturbed. He and his mates had impromptu football matches, games of cricket, as well as fights and scraps.
Parents of that era permitted their children great freedom just to get on with playing, particularly during the long school holiday in summer. It is inconceivable today that a child of 21/2 would be allowed to wander freely around the roads and other parts of the village, but in those halcyon days, cars were a fantastic rarity. Road-building machinery, such as steam-powered rollers, arrived in the village in late 1918, causing small children to gawp all day at the noisy and smelly contraptions.
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Ben did fairly well as a businessman engaged in the Bradford trade of woolens and worsteds, and his wife had been a schoolteacher before her marriage in 1911. In those days, when a woman working in the public service married, her job immediately came to an end. This all changed of course with the outbreak of the First World War. With Lord Kitchener of Khartoum signing up a volunteer army of tens of thousands of men a week, married women were able to return to careers such as teaching. But Fred’s mother decided not to do so, partly because young Fred was considered to be of “frail disposition.” In the days before a National Health Service was established in Britain, families took care to keep the doctor’s bills down, and Mabel Hoyle felt she could not leave Fred with a minder during the day.
Kitchener raised his fighting force with an astounding propaganda campaign, launched on August 7, 1914. Recruitment was to be local, into Pals Battalions, the members of which came from the same town. At first, this was highly successful, with up to 30,000 being sworn in each day. Within a month, Kitchener had half a million volunteers to supplement the quarter of a million in the regular army. Ben Hoyle was too old to respond to this call to arms, so he did not sign on with the First Bradford Pals. Initially, the recruitment sergeants followed strict guidelines on minimum height, chest size, and age. By May 1915, however, many of the restrictions were relaxed as the carnage on the Western Front relentlessly destroyed the young volunteers. The maximum age was raised to 40 and Ben Hoyle could now join the war. However, he chose not to go into a Pals Brigade because of his dislike of “bull” (following pointless orders). Instead, he enlisted with the new Machine Gun Corps, a decision that would astound young Fred in the 1920s when he learned all about machine-gun warfare from his father.
At the outbreak of war in August 1914, the tactical use of machine guns was unappreciated by the British military. Consequently, the Army went to war with its infantry battalions and cavalry regiments each having a machine-gun section of only two guns each. These were supplemented in November by the formation of the Motor Machine Gun Service, administered by the Royal Artillery, consisting of motorcycle-mounted machine-gun batteries.
A year of warfare on the Western Front proved that, to be fully effective, machine guns must be used in larger units and crewed by
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specially trained men. To fulfil this need, the formation of the Machine Gun Corps was authorized in October 1915. By this time, the menfolk of entire villages were being wiped out in the Pals Brigades on the Somme. Voluntary recruitment was going sufficiently badly that the government had already passed a compulsory registration act as a prelude to enforced service from January 1916. Ben Hoyle, realizing that he could be conscripted into a unit he did not care to join, immediately enlisted with the Machine Gun Corps while he still had a choice in the matter. The Corps operated at the national level, and care was taken to train the men well. Between 1915 and 1918, the Corps drew 170,500 officers and men, of whom 12,500 were killed and 50,000 seriously wounded. The men were organized into teams of eight for each gun.
So how would Fred and his mother fare? As a mother married to a serving soldier, Mabel received a government allowance of 1 shilling a day for both of them to live on. On this pittance, it was absolutely impossible to maintain their lifestyle. Fortunately, Mabel had studied music at the Royal Academy, first as a singer, but later transferring to the piano. For the rest of her life, she played the piano for 2 or 3 hours each day. From 1916, she worked in the evenings at a cinema in Bingley as the piano accompanist for silent films. All her training was in the classical tradition, and it did not suit the local cinema management that she would embellish cops-and-robbers movies with the music of Beethoven. She was fired early in 1917, and the cinema attendance promptly plummeted. Within a week, she was back because, when the manager enquired around the town, he was told, “We didn’t come to see your films but to hear Mrs. Hoyle play.”8
Fred’s appreciation of classical music began at an early age from listening to his mother performing at the piano. To the end of his life he enjoyed the works of Beethoven, which she played frequently.9 He ascribed his own failure to learn any instrument to the fact that he knew so much music by heart before he went to school and subsequently could not bring himself to play what he regarded as boring and trite pieces for beginners.
Fred appears to have become adept at counting and numbers from an early age. By day, his mother had plenty of time on her hands, and she had taught him the numbers before he was 3 years old. He rapidly
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developed a plodding system for memorization that went something like this: “One and six make seven, two and six make eight, so three and six make nine, so four and six make ten, so five and six make eleven, so six and six make twelve.” He would recite these ditties in his head after being put to bed at night. By setting little problems for himself, he found he could remember earlier results, and so, step by step, he constructed multiplication tables for himself.
As the war on the Western Front dragged on, Fred’s mother lived in daily dread of receiving a post office telegram expressing the grief of the British government in informing her that her husband had been killed in action. Through censorship of the press, the government was able to keep from public gaze the scale of the catastrophes being ordered by the generals in London. Nevertheless, word spread that the life expectancy of a soldier on the front line of trenches was only a few months, maybe as little as 3 for fighting troops in the Machine Gun Corps. In a year of nonstop combat, only 1 among 20 would survive, apparently by luck.
Of course, there were lulls in the campaigns while forces regrouped or the weather intervened, but being in the front line with the Machine Gun Corps was exceedingly hazardous. In part, this was due to the design of the Vickers portable machine gun, which was water cooled and fed with belts holding 250 rounds. The gun had to be fired in short bursts, rat-a-tat-tat fashion. The gunner would put his finger on the trigger, shoot while saying “mam and dad” to himself, and then stop so the water could cool and the belt feeders straighten the webbing. Continuous firing in broad sweeps would have boiled the water, or the webbing would have jammed, or the gunners would have run out of ammunition too soon. The section leader was under instruction to fire random bursts across the battlefield every 10 minutes or so, a tactic that gave the enemy time to pinpoint the location and eliminate it with heavy artillery. Ben Hoyle’s survival method was to remain hidden as long as possible and fire only at critical moments. This tactic directly contradicted the commands from London.
On March 21, 1918, it was misty in the Somme Valley. The Germans brought in reinforcements from the defunct Eastern Front. At 4:40 a.m., they launched the second Battle of the Somme. Excep-
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England). Astoundingly, the government also announced that the exchange rate would revert to that pertaining before the war, despite the fact that Britain had suffered higher inflation than its trading partners. To sustain an exchange rate that was too high, the government followed a severe deflationary policy, with high interest rates. Exports completely collapsed, and the textile trades suffered twice over because competitors in America and the British Empire had built their own industries up while Britain was at war. A great slump was underway, and the first businesses to be destroyed would be those of middle-men like Ben Hoyle.
Compounding his business difficulties, Ben had to cope not only with the birth of a second child, Joan, in 1921 but also with the serious illness of his wife, possibly severe postnatal depression. The family decided to spend the summer as paying guests at a house in Essex, in southeastern England. At the same time, they rented out their Gilstead house to tenants.
After a summer of playing in the fields and lanes of Essex, the time came for Fred to enroll in the local village school. This was across common land with grazing horses and gorse bushes. Almost immediately, Fred worked out a truancy system with another boy and neither of them spent very much time at the school. Ben Hoyle’s intention had been to sit it out in Essex (where the climate is better than in Yorkshire), until the business situation improved. He had no idea, of course, that the British economy would not significantly recover for a further 12 years.
In November 1921, a letter from Fred’s maternal grandmother brought them all back to Gilstead in short order. The tenants had done a “moonlight flit”! In those days, this was not uncommon: A fraudster had rented a house and opened accounts with various businesses in the town in the name of the landlord, with no intention of paying any of the bills. The impressive address, 4 Milnerfield Villas, no doubt helped in setting up the scam. When the creditors started pressing for their money, the scheming tenant vanished into the night.
So, the returning Hoyles had a huge commotion to sort out. The tenant had paid them no rent. But it was worse than simply a lack of income. He had run up an enormous bill at the grocery, hired a Rolls
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Royce and chauffeur, cleaned out the best dress shop in Bradford for his daughter, and enrolled the younger children at the fee-paying Bradford Grammar School. While the Hoyles were dealing with this unwelcome mess, Fred did not go back to school. He finally returned in January 1922, by which time he had escaped about 18 months of the education he should have had.
After only a few weeks he had an argument with the dame. Fred was proud that he could multiply, and the class was working on Roman numerals. So what about these Roman numerals, Fred wondered? “How did the Romans do multiplication?” This question brought an evasive reply from the teacher: You simply learned Roman numerals, and you did not need to multiply them.
With that unsatisfactory response, Fred was soon playing truant again. He persuaded his parents that he really was at school and got a message to his school friends that he was ill at home. The dame was not too concerned, except perhaps at the loss of fees, and did not make any enquiry of Mr. and Mrs. Hoyle. The subterfuge worked for about 4 weeks. During this time, and future spells of truancy, Fred obviously could not play in the woods and fields of Gilstead. Instead, he purposefully walked most days to Bingley, where there were very few motor cars or motor vans. Horse-drawn carts were used for shipping the finished goods, and the roads were plentifully supplied with piles of steaming dung. Fred wandered the streets, poking his head into the mills and factories. These were filled with thundering and clacking looms driven by steam engines. Perhaps the operatives mistook the small boy for the observant son of a manager.
Some days he watched the barges on the Leeds–Liverpool Canal, the longest canal in Britain, which has 92 locks to take the route up and over the Pennines, and he spent time at the Five-Rise Locks, opened in 1774, where river traffic is raised through 320 feet. It was still a busy waterway in Fred’s school days. In later life, Fred Hoyle attributed an early interest in mechanics and hydraulics to the observations he made during his periods of truancy.
His 1922 truancy scheme unraveled in late April, when Fred’s parents ran into a schoolmate who expressed concern at Fred’s serious illness! The fact that Fred was not observing the requirement to go to
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school was worrying for Ben and Mabel. As they explained to their son, the “law” required him to go the school, and the “authorities” could punish the family with fines. They even threatened Fred with the specter of them all ending up in the workhouse as a result of serial fines. In later life, Fred claimed to have been deeply puzzled by all of this.
How was it, I wondered, that the law could pursue so relentlessly a harmless boy like me while permitting the tenants to do a flit with all those debts unpaid? After worrying at this problem like a dog with a bone I concluded unhappily I’d been born into a world dominated by a rampaging monster called “law,” that was both all-powerful and all-stupid, a view which has resurfaced from time to time ever since.
A family council of war decided that Fred could choose his next school and delay starting until September 1922, by which time he would have missed two years of education. He elected for an elementary school in Bingley, Mornington Street School, which then had a tough reputation. The school is still there, greatly changed no doubt, and renamed Priestthorpe First School.
For the first year all was well, but in 1923 he moved up one standard into a class run by a tyrannical woman. By Fred’s account, she beat the living daylights out of the 8-year-olds, relentlessly thrashing them with the cane. Fred avoided attending for much of the autumn of 1923 by feigning illnesses. He also managed two months off when his tonsils were removed. In spring 1924, the boys and girls were all given the task of bringing in wildflowers for the nature table. A list of about 20 flowers was specified, and Fred had no difficulty finding them all since he spent so much time roaming the upland countryside.
The teacher asked how many petals a certain flower had. Fred looked at his bunch: “Six, miss.” The teacher said five. Now here was a dilemma. The flower in his hand definitely had six petals. Fred puzzled about the numbers. Maybe this wretched woman couldn’t count?
“Pay attention Hoyle!” shouted the teacher, simultaneously smashing her flat hand over his unprotected left ear. Fred had not seen it coming and had no time to duck. The pressure on the eardrum and middle ear must have been enormous. In his adult life, Hoyle became deaf in his left ear and attributed it to having his ears boxed.
The little boy, sobbing piteously, made a dash for the door, plead-
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ing the need to “go out” (use the lavatory), which was never refused. He never went back to the school, despite the head’s offer of an apology. It was back to kingfisher nests in the sandy banks of the streams, the mills of Bingley, and the Five-Rise locks by way of education. However, after 3 weeks or so of nonappearance, the local authority again came down heavy-handedly on Fred’s parents, insisting that he should attend school. His mother must have been at her wits’ end.
Then she remembered a tiny school in the nearby village of Eldwick, run by a teacher for whom she had worked before Fred’s birth. The school took children ages 5 to 14, who were taught in three sets. Fred was accepted into the oldest set, where one teacher took all 5 years (ages 9 to 14) simultaneously. A record, dated July 9, 1924, survives of a visit to Eldwick school by His Majesty’s Inspector of Schools:
The teaching conditions indicated in the last report still exist. It is impossible to expect that the children can be properly taught. The main room is awkward in several aspects, and indeed is suitable only for a single class.
For the teachers there is no separate room, cloakroom or lavatory. The playground is encroached by ladders, broken iron pipes, and coke and coal dumps. Many of the desks are too small for the children to use them.13
Plainly, under these conditions it would be difficult to win a scholarship to the grammar school. But things immediately took a turn for the better.
The young woman teaching Fred drummed it into him that he must try for a scholarship. In this she had the support of his parents. Ben Hoyle had won such a scholarship to the grammar school but, because of his father’s death, had been forced at the age of 11 to work in order to support his mother and younger brother. The school record shows that in January 1925, Fred was promoted to the senior standards and, month by month, moved up the class to be nearer the front, where the bright pupils were always placed, to catch the eye of the inspector. Fred now started to do the arithmetic problems for the girls, which made him popular. The school gave homework, which Fred would do by staying on at the school, often not leaving until 8:00 p.m.
The walk home along unlit roads took about half an hour. Sometimes his mother and sister Joan met him halfway.14 The stars made an
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impression on Fred in a way that is impossible today. In the 1920s, the clear night sky in the Yorkshire countryside, free from the effects of outdoor lighting, would have been breathtaking, particularly on nights when the wind blew the billowing city smoke away from Eldwick and Gilstead. About a thousand stars would have been visible at any one time on moonless nights. As Fred recounted in Encounter with the Future, he had no idea at age 10 what these points of light in the sky were, but, after one frosty night, he wanted to find out more about them.15 So Ben Hoyle took his son to see a man living some distance away who had a modest astronomical telescope. And then on Christmas Day, 1925, Fred tore the wrapping paper off a present from his parents to reveal a brass telescope purchased from Clarkson’s Optical Stores in High Holborn, London.16 This was one of many ways in which Fred’s parents gave him every encouragement in scientific pursuits. Later, they visited another man who had a microscope, so Fred could see what small objects looked like under magnification.17
About this time, Fred Hoyle began the interest in chemistry that would stay with him throughout his life. There was a chemistry textbook at home belonging to his father, and he began to set up experiments in the small kitchen. So started a train of events that would bring him to the grammar school and ultimately to Cambridge. His father had collected some of the standard equipment for a school chemistry laboratory, such as a bunsen burner and retort stands, as well as a few jars of chemicals. His box of chemical weights and his chemical balance are now in St. John’s College, Cambridge.18 He made gunpowder and staged explosions as well as setting up standard experiments described in the textbook. He recalls how, still only 10 years old, he saved his pocket money and went to a wholesale chemist in Bradford for concentrated sulfuric acid and complex glassware.
His greatest triumph was the preparation of phosphine (also known as hydrogen phosphide). This colorless gas has an odor similar to garlic, rotting fish, or stale urine, so his experiments stank up the kitchen for a week at a time. Phosphine gas is potentially very dangerous: It catches fire spontaneously in moist air, which is why Fred needed special glassware so he could exclude air from the apparatus. It is also a toxic gas that can cause thermal burns, and modern chemistry texts
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classify it as an extremely hazardous material. Joan Hoyle still remembers the scary explosions he set off.19
Fred failed his first attempt at the grammar school scholarship. He had taken the examination organized by the local education authorities, consisting of two arithmetic papers, one English paper, and an essay to write. He showed the papers (which he kept for the rest of his life) to his father, who could see that Fred had gotten the right answers to the arithmetic papers. However, 2 months later he got the failure letter. Then there was a twist to the story: The results for the entire county showed that massive cheating had taken place in some areas. It was decided that the Bingley candidates would be reassessed on appeal, and Fred was told to attend an interview with the head of Bingley Grammar School, Alan Smailes. At the interview he spoke of his chemistry experiments and described articles on astronomy that he had read in an old encyclopedia.20 The chemistry master was astonished at the phosphine experiment, saying “Well, you’ll not be doing that here.” A letter announcing the award of a scholarship duly came, and Fred Hoyle started at Bingley Grammar School in September 1926.
From then on he walked 8 miles (13 kilometers) a day, in two round-trips, because he had to return home for his midday lunch. The distance was actually a fraction under 2 miles, which meant the local authority did not have to provide the scholarship holder with money for the bus fares; 5 years into the slump, Fred’s parents could not afford the bus fares for their son. Fred’s route took him past the railway, where once a week he saw the boat train headed for Liverpool to connect with the transatlantic liners. He sometimes wondered if he would ever go the United States himself.
He approached the grammar school with a completely different attitude. From the outset he respected both the chemistry teacher and the head, who was a Cambridge mathematics graduate. By the end of his first year he had progressed from a middling performance to being top of the class. He also started to read a lot more widely, borrowing books from the public library, including Arthur Eddington’s Stars and Atoms in 1927. Eddington was at that time one of the two most famous astronomers in Britain; the other was James Jeans.
Stars and Atoms was one of Eddington’s several popular books,
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which immediately captivated an informed readership. In this book, Hoyle read about many of the problems of stellar astrophysics at that time. One of these was the source of the Sun’s energy. In the nineteenth century, astronomers had assumed that the Sun was contracting little by little and getting its energy from gas falling in toward the center. This theory worked provided that the Sun was only a few million years old. However, by the end of the century, geologists were fairly sure that the Earth, and therefore the Sun, was hundreds of millions if not billions of years old. Eddington had plunged into the new science of what is now called nuclear physics, proposing that instead of gravity as the source of heat, the Sun must be extracting energy from atomic nuclei. He had suggested in 1920 that four hydrogen nuclei might somehow merge to form one helium nucleus. Should this be the case, a vast amount of energy would be released, because one helium nucleus is slightly less massive than four separate hydrogen nuclei. The difference can be accounted for as matter that has been transmuted into pure energy, just as Einstein had predicted it would be. Eddington was also feted as the astronomer who had proved that Einstein’s general theory of relativity is correct. On rereading Stars and Atoms today, I am impressed at Fred Hoyle’s level of understanding in his early teens: The book is technically more demanding than most of the popular science being published today. It introduced him to some of the greatest contemporary problems in astrophysics.
By now financial concerns at home were desperate. Ben Hoyle could hang on no longer as the slump continued. He decided to quit the cloth trade while he still had some money in the bank, but of course there were no jobs to be had because Bradford and Bingley had been totally dependent on the now-defunct woolen industry. The family would have to depend on government handouts for the unemployed. To make ends meet the family would have to cultivate the garden and grow fruits and vegetables for the table. Fred earned a few pennies by singing in the local church choir, but this source dried up when his voice broke. The complete absence of jobs meant that Fred might just as well stay on at the grammar school because there was no prospect of his being the breadwinner. When he was awarded a book prize worth £5 in a national essay-writing competition, he immediately sold the books in order to get cash in hand.
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Back at school, Fred worked diligently at chemistry, coming in top of the class term after term, but in physics he was less successful initially, perhaps because the experiments were quite rigidly defined. However, he was putting on real spurts in the grades to such an extent that, at the end of the third year, he and three or four classmates skipped over the fourth year and were catapulted directly to the fifth year. He had thereby entered the class that worked for the matriculation certificate 1 year early. After just one term in the fifth, he was placed first in physics and chemistry and second in all other subjects. What now motivated him was the rate at which he could up his game, tackling progressively more difficult work with increasing ease. Some nights he used his telescope to observe the stars, which held a growing attraction.
The matriculation examination, taken at age 15 or 16, was a watershed for all pupils in grammar schools. Achieving the coveted award of matriculation would open the door to university admission at 18; about one in six boys made this top grade. Below matriculation was the School Leaving Certificate, which the majority of candidates could expect, and that opened the door to a job market with no jobs and millions of unemployed. A few candidates got nothing for their efforts. Fred matriculated and, at age 15, he returned to the school in September 1915 to a completely different regime.
Now he was in the class being groomed for university entrance two years hence, and known as the sixth form. Bingley Grammar had eight teachers for the 200 pupils in all years, so there was no possibility of intensive coaching in the special subjects Fred was studying. Laboratory space was given over to the younger pupils. Despite carrying a high administrative burden, Alan Smailes taught Fred advanced mathematics. In these circumstances the teaching amounted to a succession of research projects. Formal lessons were few, and instead the pupils were given tasks: chapters to read, problems to solve, and experiments to set up. The education authority made a grant of £15 a year to matriculated scholars who stayed on at school. Fred’s parents allowed him to keep the full amount on condition that he bought his own clothes and shoes. For the first time in his life he had cash to spare, and so he started going to orchestral concerts in Bradford, given by the Hallé Orchestra and conducted by Tommy (later Sir Thomas) Beecham.
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He also joined the local chess club, winning silver trophies in 1932 and 1933.21
In the sixth form, Fred developed his reading interests. In addition to Eddington, he tackled several astronomy and physics books by Jeans and also books on relativity and the new field of quantum mechanics. At that stage, I doubt that he fully understood the content of the books, but he began to grasp that cutting-edge physical science often concludes with a mass of equations. In the hands of physicists, mathematics was a tool to be used to crack nature’s secrets. He started to realize that science cannot be done just with words, experiments, and hand-waving arguments. Again he was fortunate: The chemistry teacher was buying university-level textbooks, out of his own pocket, for the sixth form, and this introduced Fred to the fascinating world of university research.
Alan Smailes gave Fred and the other university candidates extra tuition in mathematics by teaching them at his home in the evening. This was marvellous for Fred; he was now studying in a tutorial group, just the way mathematics was taught at Cambridge. Fred had his sights on getting into Leeds University to read chemistry, for which he would need a local authority scholarship. However, Fred failed to win a scholarship to Leeds in 1932, and so Smailes, who had graduated from Emmanuel College, Cambridge, formulated a different plan: He wanted Fred and one other pupil to have a shot at the Emmanuel College entrance examination.
In December 1932, Fred went to Emmanuel for interviews and the examination papers. Smailes had given him only 3 months of private tuition—definitely too little. Fred was now in competition with boys from the best grammar schools and private schools in the country; the latter competed fiercely for scholarship places at Oxford and Cambridge. As he ate his dinner in hall on the first evening, he hoped the mathematics paper would have two or three problems he could tackle with some ease, but he feared most of them would be incomprehensible.
What Fred did not know that evening was the contents of a letter Alan Smailes wrote on December 3, 1932, addressed to the Master of Emmanuel: “The boy Hoyle has insight, energy, and originality. He is young, and his appearance is diffident and awkward. But,” Smailes
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continued, “you’ll see he has real ability in science.” Smailes raised the question of how to pay for a Cambridge education. He explained that Hoyle came from a good home, with thrifty and intelligent parents. “His father has suffered very much in the slump and is now without situation. The boy will have to win scholarships and I am confident he will do so.” On outside interests, and the potential to add to college life, Smailes notes that Fred has little interest in outdoor games but is good at chess.22 But as to future potential, something college tutors always look for, he added, “I believe he will turn out to be a swan, no matter what sort of duckling or gosling he now appears.”
In any event, when he took the papers in the great hall at St. John’s College, the chemistry paper went well. Because Fred had learned chemistry from a first-year university text, he found the questions comfortable. Physics seemed quite good as well, and the mathematics paper was tolerable. The practical examinations were in the Cavendish Laboratory, an imposing Victorian-gothic building in the center of Cambridge. The examination was very different from experimentation at Bingley Grammar, and he had not received any training in laboratory practice, the keeping of notebooks, and so on. He struggled pitifully.
The Master wrote to Fred on December 20, charmingly starting the letter, “My dear Hoyle.”23 Fred had come within sight of exhibition class (worth £40 a year): His marks were chemistry 60% (good), physics 51% (just below standard), practical 44% (weak), and maths 28% (very weak). Smailes got a letter a week later, saying the college had “no emolument for Hoyle,” but he should try again the following year. Smailes read this letter with dismay: If Fred could get a local authority scholarship, then he would be fully funded for board, lodging, books, and tuition. But the West Yorkshire authority would only make the full grant to those who reached Exhibition standard. At this point, Fred felt truly beaten. He was on the point of giving up.
Alan Smailes continued to have faith in Fred. In March 1933, he put him in for the examinations at Pembroke College. In the oral examination, Fred became flustered when the don, Philip Dee, tied him in knots, saying disdainfully: “Is there any physics you do know?”24 The results from Pembroke disclosed that this time Fred had reached Exhibition standard, but Pembroke could not offer him a place because
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there were more candidates who met the standard than places available. But this achievement gave Smailes an important idea.
Fred’s champion wasn’t willing to give up the fight too soon. Fred stayed on at school and sailed through the Higher Certificate examinations in summer 1933, meeting the requirement for a scholarship by a fair margin. The costs of an education at Cambridge (or Oxford) were significantly higher than at the other universities. Smailes pleaded with the West Riding County education authority to top up Fred’s grant should he be accepted at Cambridge. They added £100 to the potential award.
Smailes now implemented his important idea, to go back to Emmanuel, citing Fred’s success in the March exams. On May 20, 1933, he wrote by hand to the Master of Emmanuel, saying, “I am anxious to secure a place for my pupil Hoyle,” who had now satisfied the requirements for academic standards and finance. Dr. Giles replied that the application was very late, but the tutors would admit him if he could get the scholarships. On June 17, Giles formally wrote to offer a place to read natural science, subject to finance. By August 23, Smailes could confirm that the West Riding scholarship was in the bag, and so Fred was finally on the way to Cambridge.25 He had been fortunate indeed to catch the eye of Alan Smailes, about whom he later wrote, “Without the encouragement and determination of Alan Smailes, I would never have reached Cambridge.”26
Representative terms from entire chapter:
grammar school