The Clever Cox - A Memoir

Stephen Hawking coxing.

Tim Koch writes from London,

HTBS has previously written about Stephen Hawking's involvement with rowing while an undergraduate at University College, Oxford and its importance in his personal development before being diagnosed with a form of motor neuron disease. He has recently published his autobiography entitled, inevitably perhaps, My Brief History (Bantam Press, 2013). The publishers tell us:

For the first time, Stephen Hawking turns his gaze inward for a revealing look at his own life and intellectual evolution. My Brief History recounts Stephen Hawking’s improbable journey, from his post-war London boyhood to his years of international acclaim and celebrity. Illustrated with rarely seen photographs, this concise, witty and candid account introduces readers to the inquisitive schoolboy whose classmates nicknamed him ‘Einstein’; the jokester who once placed a bet with a colleague over the existence of a black hole; and the young husband and father striving to gain a foothold in the world of academia.

Hawking and the University College Oxford Boat Club.

The book's cover shows a splendid picture of the members of University College Boat Club doing the sort of things that students do when you point a camera at them. Hawking is shown at the centre of the action. His website has an extract from Chapter 3 of My Brief History entitled ‘Oxford’. It contains a short, self-deprecating account of his coxing career plus some wonderful high resolution photographs (click on the screen icon to enlarge). Page 32 has the famous picture of Hawking coxing ‘the rugby boat’ in his boater and blazer. The next page has a study entitled ‘the Boat Club at rest’ showing some serious looking young men in suits and ties on the college barge displaying a recently acquired trophy. However, it is the pictures on pages 34 and 35 taken in 1961 or 1962 entitled ‘the Boat Club at play’ that are the real joy. They show what in those more innocent times may have been called ‘gay young undergraduates’ striking various poses. Some hold that ‘the 60s’ began in 1963, ‘between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP’ and certainly most of the young oarsmen pictured look as though they could have come from the 1940s or 1950s – though there is some evidence of the influence of the ‘beat generation’ on one or two of them.

The University College Boat Club was founded in 1827 and its website has a very good history section compiled by the College Archivist, Dr Robin Darwall-Smith. It has some wonderful pictures (again click on the screen icon to enlarge) starting in with the Torpids First Eight of 1862. Despite the seemingly odd mixture of top hats, boaters and bowlers, there are none of the undergraduate affectations displayed by Hawking’s later group. The archive pictures conclude with ULBC’s most famous cox (though possibly least distinguished boat) ninety-nine years later. Time is, indeed, brief.

The Clever Cox

Regarding last Sunday’s HTBS entry, Tim Koch writes,

The ‘Cambridge’ blade at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm seems at first a curious and rather random piece on memorabilia. In theory the crew could have existed around 1937 (the year ‘cox’ Ernest Rutherford died), but the twelve people listed (including the then nine-year old James ‘DNA’ Watson) would have to fit in one eight and they would have to know that the seven of them not then honoured would win Nobel Prizes in the future. This would only be possible if, between them, they could change the time - space continuum. A conspiracy theory anyone?

Taking a random sample of great rowing universities we can see that Cambridge has produced 85 Nobel Prize winners, Columbia 72, Oxford 48, Harvard 43, Cornell 40, Princeton 32, and Yale 18. Someone with a lot of time on their hands could undoubtedly find a few rowers in this lot but it’s not going to be me. I will, however suggest a coxswain, sculler and rower who many think should have won the Nobel Physics Prize, but who, so far, has not. He is Professor Stephen Hawking. On his website he says of his Oxford days:

“I took up coxing and rowing. I was not Boat Race standard but I got by at the level of inter-College competition.”

This is from Stephen Hawking: Physicist and Educator (2004) by Bernard Ryan:

“A River Changes Stephen’s Personality.
Stephen’s undergraduate days at Oxford were taking him deep into the study of both general relativity and quantum physics, but he found himself bored and unchallenged.... after a year or so of little social activity, he discovered a centuries-old Oxford tradition: the sport of rowing... His strong voice and light weight made him an ideal coxswain....
(The college boatman), Norman Dix, thought Hawking was a skilled coxswain but noticed that he showed no interest in trying to become cox of the first boat.... Stephen also had a daredevil way of sometimes steering his boat through gaps so narrow that the shell returned to the boathouse with its blades damaged. ‘Half the time I got the distinct impression,’ Dix later recalled, ‘that he was sitting in the stern of the boat with his head in the stars, working out mathematical formulae.’
Being a crew coxswain changed both Stephen’s personality and his social life. He became a popular member of the ‘in crowd’, enjoying parties and participating in boisterous practical jokes after strenuous rowing practices....”

David Firth, who rowed at two in Hawking’s crew, later recalled:

“We were an appalling collection of individuals who didn’t train much so I knew Stephen as a very determined leader who made sure that our boat performed far better than any of us dared expect, because he wasn’t going to let us get away with a casual ride.”

Kristine Larsen, author of Stephen Hawking: A Biography (2007), notes the price the young student paid for his devotion to rowing:

“Stephen had to balance his time between his studies.... and his time on the river. Rowing demanded many hours of practice, six afternoons a week, which cut into the time he was supposed to spend doing experiments in his laboratory course. According to Gordon Berry (a fellow cox and physicist), he and Stephen cut serious corners in taking data, faking their way through parts of the experiments by using creative analysis to write their lab reports.”

Larsen also describes Hawking’s last year at Oxford when he noticed that he was becoming increasingly uncoordinated and clumsy: “He also found that he had difficulty rowing [sic] a sculling boat.”

Why has Stephen Hawking not received a Nobel Prize? Under the rules of the Prize Committee, any theory must be experimentally validated. Hawking’s ‘big’ theories have not yet been ‘proven’. By the same rule, Einstein did not get a prize for his Theory of Relativity.

In conclusion, we can speculate that, if Hawking had spend less time on the river, perhaps he would have a Nobel Prize and we would have time travel.