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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781784183776 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bonnier Books UK |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2015 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Brian Cox
The Unauthorised Biography of the Man Who Brought Science to the Nation
By Ben Falk
John Blake Publishing Ltd
Copyright © 2015 Ben FalkAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78418-624-1
CHAPTER 1
CHILDHOOD
Most of what you need to know about why Brian Cox turned out the way he did comes from the day he turned 10 years old. It was 1978 and most children celebrating their tenth year would have asked for a Han Solo action figure. Not the future Professor Cox, though: he requested a fuse box. 'It was a four-way fuse box,' he explained. 'And the reason is, I had a shed at my granddad's house with a friend of mine, who I'm still very good friends with, that we used to wire up. We had a railway transformer in his garage and ran 12 volts into this shed, and put switches in it and lights, and just sat there.' It's safe to say Brian Cox knew what he wanted to do from an early age. So, it seems, did his friend – he now works for the electricity board in Manchester.
Brian Edward Cox was born to David and Barbara Cox (née Holden) on 3 March 1968 at the Oldham and District General Hospital, as it was then known. Just off the Rochdale Road, it is now best known for being the birthplace of Louise Brown, the world's first 'test-tube' baby, 10 years later. Cox was taken home to Oakbank Avenue in the suburb of Chadderton, where the family lived in a semi-detached house. A quaint, quiet area outside the more brutish metropolises of Manchester and Oldham, it has a small shopping area in its heart, while the environs are filled with houses that get increasingly prettier the further away from the centre you go (as well as further up the small hills). He grew up in a space-obsessed household – his father still has a newspaper cover from the moon landing in July 1969 on the wall of his home. On Christmas Eve 1968, Cox sat on his father's knee to watch Apollo 8 go round the back of the moon. This same launch has become his own son George's favourite. 'When we watch it on YouTube, someone shouts "clear the tower!" really loudly,' he says. Now whenever George wants to see Apollo 8 on its way, he shouts the same thing.
'It was always on in the house,' said Cox of footage from various space missions. 'I don't remember watching it, but I remember growing up in a house that had pictures of the moon landings on the walls.' Indeed, his father made sure his son watched Neil Armstrong and his team walk on the moon for the first time in 1969. 'I was one year old and I watched them!' Cox recalled. Space and man's exploration into it had a profound effect on the future scientist. 'I was always fascinated by space exploration,' he has said. 'I think it was really that that triggered my interest in science and I found that I always thought of myself as a scientist. I wanted to do something. I didn't necessarily want to be an astronaut, but I wanted to be involved – so I just latched on to everything else. My interest in science grew, but I think that was the beginning.'
Later on, as a pre-pubescent schoolboy, he was entranced by one of the greatest television series ever made about science. Cox fans – and more specifically, those who love Wonders of the Solar System/Universe – would do well to seek out Carl Sagan's landmark show Cosmos (and the accompanying book) to see what was intended to be its 21st-century equivalent. Sagan approached science not just as an academic, but as a poet, too. It's not hard to see the parallels. Certainly it only added to a young Brian Cox's desire to pursue science. 'For me, television played a key role in making me a scientist and that's partly down to the quality of the science programming when I was growing up,' he revealed. 'For me, the greatest of them all was Carl Sagan's Cosmos – 13 hours of lyrically, emotionally engaging accurate and polemical broadcasting.' It wasn't only imported TV that piqued his interest, though. Patrick Moore's The Sky at Night, which debuted on the BBC in 1957, became a soundtrack to Cox's life. He has said Moore is the reason why he became a professional scientist. And despite all his success, one of his greatest achievements was joining the 88-year-old, monocled Moore for the show's 700th edition in 2011. 'He was my total hero,' said Cox. 'I took along a little book I won at school in 1978, Moore's Book of Astronomy, and got him to sign it while I was there. That meant a lot to me.'
By the time he was 6 years old, he was collecting astronomy cards and sticking them in an album. He loved a children's book called The Race Into Space (he is even seen flicking through it on-screen during one of his later TV shows), but what got him excited then is a letdown now. 'That's a disappointing book when you look at it now!' he said. 'It says we were going to be on Mars by 1983.' Unsurprisingly, by the age of 8, he had already received his first telescope. 'I was a very, very, very nerdy child,' he told the Daily Mail. He would peer up at the Oldham sky, using his star maps as a guide. 'For as long as I can remember,' he said, 'that's what I wanted to do.'
But if the astronomy thing didn't work out, there was another pursuit occupying much of his time. Bus-spotting was a serious business for Cox. Along with a friend, he kept a book filled with all the registration numbers from the vehicles of Greater Manchester Transport. Whenever he had the chance, he went to Oldham and ticked off the ones he saw. Sometimes they went into Manchester. He was a particular fan of the number 51, noting its nice bodywork and large pneumatic gears. 'I like machines,' he says. Bus-spotting parlayed into plane-spotting. On a weekend, he would head to Manchester Airport to see the departing and arriving flights in all their close-up glory. 'I didn't go out of the country until I was 17,' he later revealed, 'so it was a really romantic thing to see all these planes flying in from all over the world.'
By this time, he had a younger sister called Sandra. Despite growing up in the same house as machine-lovers and space nuts, she chose not to follow the same path as her brother and eventually became a partner at accountants KPMG in Manchester. She married a work colleague and has two children of her own. Life in the Cox household was a fairly typical story for a middle-class Northern family in the Seventies. Christmas was spent round the telly. 'I liked growing up with Christmas,' Cox told the Guardian. 'I liked watching Morecambe & Wise, I like the Queen's speech because it was on and everyone listened to it. It's a specifically Seventies Christmas that I like. I like Christmas Top of the Pops with Shakin' Stevens on it.'
Both parents worked in banks – Lloyds and Yorkshire banks in Oldham – his father as a manager and his mother a teller. Because they were away during the day, Cox spent much of his time at his grandparents' house. When he reached school age, he was there most lunch times. He remembers listening to Frank Sinatra's 'Come Fly With Me' on a large wooden radiogram with BBC Light Service embossed on the wood. 'I suppose like most people growing up, my dad and my granddad had records and this was one of the ones I remember,' he said. 'Big cover of Sinatra on the front, with this remarkable pose – it was one of the first things I latched onto, one of the first pieces I listened to.'
Both his grandparents started off by sweeping the floors of the Oldham cotton mills, but his grandfather was a remarkable man. Born in 1900, Cox senior left school in 1914 and worked his way up the corporate ladder at the company to run it. Ironically, despite no formal training, he ended his working life as a scientist of sorts. 'My granddad did write a couple of academic papers,' Cox remembered to Radio 4. 'He became a chemist and ran a dying company – he came up with a process of dying nylon black.' Though Grandpa Cox hadn't completed his schooling, he was keen to make sure his son didn't suffer the same fate. 'My dad was the first person to do A-levels and he went to a grammar school,' said Cox. 'My granddad and grandma both worked in cotton mills. I was the first person in my family to go to university.' He described it as an inspirational 20th-century story – each successive generation getting more and more opportunities. 'I think it's a progression that I fear and I hear is less possible now,' he remarked. 'Which would be a disaster.'
Cox's first school was Chadderton Hall, a good primary and literally adjacent to his house. The family home was next door to the playing fields for the school and though he wasn't supposed to, he used to climb over the fence to get there in the mornings and after lunch. Cox always enjoyed his schooling, even then academia appealed. However, he did have something he wanted to raise with those who had created the curriculum. 'One thing I wasn't happy about at junior school was that I wanted to have physics lessons but you didn't get specific science lessons until you were senior school,' he explained. 'My interest in physics and astronomy came from outside school.' Nevertheless, he indulged his geeky interests in other ways. 'Believe it or not, the head at my junior school was called Mr Perfect,' he told The Times. 'He was brilliant. He ran after-school classes in maths and English, and let kids stay on to play board games. When we played Risk, we would discuss each move and only make one or two moves a week, so one game would go on all term.'
Cox looks back with fondness on what he got up to as a child, inevitably turning to a scientific reference, albeit a science fiction one, to illustrate his point. 'As a geek, I like Star Trek,' he told Discovery.com. 'There's a very famous Star Trek episode where Captain Picard goes back in time and he gets the opportunity to tell himself as a teenager how he should behave, don't make these mistakes that you made, don't get in this car and crash it, and then he goes back to real life and he's not a captain anymore, he's just some useless guy who cleans the bathroom on the Enterprise. And that's a really vital lesson, I think: you are what you are and if you like where you've got to, then you don't know which little bits of behaviour when you were a kid got you there. So I wouldn't change anything, because I'm quite happy with where I've got to. Even though I did some silly things, maybe they're the things that allowed me not to do them in the future.'
CHAPTER 2SCHOOL
At the age of 11, it was time to go to senior school. Just three miles or so away from Chadderton, just off Chamber Road, south of Oldham was Oldham Hulme Grammar School – a private school, which was divided in two for boys and girls. A giant wooden door ostensibly separated the two sexes. Though both of Cox's parents had good jobs, it was still something of a struggle to pay the fees. 'They couldn't afford it, really – I think my grandparents chipped in,' he told the Guardian. 'I don't know how expensive it was relative to wages, but it was a huge thing for them to do that. But it was a great source of pride, I think, that my dad had passed the 11+ and gone to grammar school and got A-levels. And I think he wanted me to go to grammar school, basically – if it had been free. It's a classic 20th-century story, but when you read, now, that that kind of route has been closed off for people, that we're less socially mobile than we ever were, it's tragic.'
Though the fabric of the school has been around since 1611, the Oldham Hulme Grammar School opened on its current site in 1895. Hidden down College Lane, it is set in a suburban area, austere but welcoming. The buildings sit atop a hill, looking out over a factory chimney, which extends from the valley below. A long driveway weaves its way through to the main reception, a small football pitch in front, the library block outside. Varnished brown panelling lines the walls and a poster of Oldham the dog – given to Robert Scott for his last, doomed expedition to the South Pole in 1910 – is nailed proudly to a pillar in the main hall. It feels academically stimulating, buzzy – the kind of place where ex-pupils return as teachers. Television actress Sarah Lancashire attended the girls' school (and actually overlapped with Cox by a couple of years); journalist and presenter John Stapleton graduated from there in the early 1960s. Described by Cox as 'a traditional boys' school', alumni speak with enthusiasm of English masters who wore their university gowns and were nicknamed 'Batman' and terrifying chemistry teachers. 'It was a very good school, but quite old-fashioned,' says Tim Haughton, an old school friend of Cox. 'There were some very unusual characters, teacher-wise – very out of the mould of those old films, the strange professor. People who wouldn't have fitted into a private school setting, but wouldn't have fitted in at a comprehensive either.'
The boy's uniform was typical: a black blazer with school badge, white shirt, dark trousers, grey socks and black shoes (the tie depended on the house you were in). Echoing public school, boys were divided into different 'houses' as a means of encouraging competition and for ease of classroom streaming. It was just one of the ways that the former grammar school showed off its private school status. 'The kids were generally middle-class,' Haughton adds, 'although there were people on assisted places but generally a well-to-do background.' While in 1979 not everyone went on to the sixth form and university, Oldham Hulme had a good scholastic reputation and fostered curricular and extra-curricular development. Nowadays, the music rooms are inundated with synthesisers, but this wasn't the case in the early 1980s. The physics labs – where Cox spent much of his time – were crowded with scientific experiments, Bunsen burners and oscilloscopes; the desks arranged in a horseshoe shape in front of where the teacher stood.
When Cox arrived at the school he was already focused on pursuing science – he hadn't had the opportunity at Chadderton Hall and was itching to go once he hit senior school. 'Initially, you were split in classes by your house,' remembers Haughton. 'It was only when you got to 13, 14, that the classes got much more integrated – you could opt into certain lesion and opt out of them.' Determined to concentrate on the scientific disciplines, Cox quickly saw no need for French and dropped the subject, something he now regrets. 'I refused to speak French because I said it wasn't science,' he says. 'And then I ended up working in Geneva [at CERN], where they speak French, so ...' He joked that if he had continued with the foreign language then he would have been able to order meals at his workplace.
By all accounts, he kept himself to himself during the first couple of years at Oldham Hulme, concentrating on plane spotting. Because of his grandparents' and parents' sacrifice, he didn't like getting detentions and was careful not to disappoint. 'Certainly my impression of him over the first couple of years when our paths did cross was that he was just very quiet, quite studious, just very involved in cracking on with school work,' says Haughton. However, things began to change seriously around the age of 15. Cox had always been interested in music, especially the technological side, as we have since seen. His mother asked him to chaperone his sister Sandra to see Duran Duran play a concert in Leeds. 'It was the Seven and the Ragged Tiger tour,' he recalled. 'I thought, that looks brilliant, so I learned to play the keyboards.'
In fact, Duran Duran ended up being the first band he got into in a big way. Years later after he became famous, he met band member Nick Rhodes socially a number of times to talk about CERN and quantum theory, and they ended up as friends. It took him several meetings before he felt able to reveal the level of his fandom, though. Rhodes just laughed. 'Although I'd seen concerts before, this was the first Beatlemania-type thing – that atmosphere of screaming girls,' he explained. 'So I was just blown away by this spectacle and that's the moment I thought I want to be a pop star. So, the first thing to deflect me from the geeky pursuits of physics.'
The keyboards appealed to Cox's scientific nature. It was the early 1980s and electronic sounds were beginning to dominate the records in the charts. But he never took lessons (although the school did offer piano tuition) and instead taught himself. 'I was good at programming the keyboards,' he told Shortlist, 'but I never saw myself as a musician.' Around this time, he began listening to Billy Joel's 'New York State Of Mind'. 'When I started really wanting to play the piano, Billy Joel and Elton John were two big influences because I used to sit there and play along to these songs,' he told Kirsty Young on Radio 4's Desert Island Discs. 'If I sit down at a piano and I can't think of anything to do, then I play "New York State Of Mind."'
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Brian Cox by Ben Falk. Copyright © 2015 Ben Falk. Excerpted by permission of John Blake Publishing Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction xi
Chapter 1 Childhood 1
Chapter 2 School 8
Chapter 3 Dare to Win 23
Chapter 4 University is a D:Ream 45
Chapter 5 Academia, Love and TV 58
Chapter 6 CERN… and more 87
Chapter 7 Going to Hollywood 102
Chapter 8 The BBC Comes Knocking 123
Chapter 9 Megastardom 160
Chapter 10 The Future 208
Chapter 11 Cox's Laws 226
Chapter 12 Particles Accelerate - and So Does Brian Cox 249