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CHAPTER 1
A Yorkshire lad
Yorkshire is an idea, not a place.
Roy Hattersley
Yorkshire is the largest county in the United Kingdom, so large that it is divided up into three areas known as Ridings, each with its own identity and larger in its own right than many other counties. It is also the most populous, even though there are large stretches of untouched countryside such as the Yorkshire Dales. The people of Yorkshire take special pride in their local culture and it is often said they identify more strongly with their county than they do with their country. They like to refer to Yorkshire as 'God's own county'.
John Bolton was a Yorkshireman and true to his origins all his life. Even though he left Yorkshire to go to university at 18, he remained a Yorkshireman at heart. Over the years his accent softened, but no one would ever mistake him for someone born in Australia. He returned to visit family and friends whenever he could and quickly adjusted to his life as it might have been had he never left. One-time deputy of the Labour party Roy Hattersley has noted how Yorkshire people have a strong 'belief in the importance of self-improvement and the propriety of self-confidence', as well as 'a compulsive desire to compete and an obsessive need to win' – traits that to a fair degree ring true of John Bolton.
John Gatenby Bolton was born in Sheffield, Yorkshire, in 1922. He shared the same name as both his father and grandfather. John's father and mother both came from Yorkshire families with humble beginnings. The Bolton family can be traced back to John's great-grand-parents. In 1850 Thomas Bolton, a farm labourer, married Elizabeth Gatenby, a dressmaker, in a small town on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales. They are believed to have had three sons and two daughters. The second son was born in 1852 and christened John Gatenby Bolton, in keeping with a Yorkshire custom of adopting the mother's maiden name as the child's middle name. Thomas and Elizabeth seem to have done reasonably well for themselves. The Yorkshire census from 1871 records them as having a combined grocery and drapers shop.
In 1875 John's grandfather, the first John Gatenby Bolton, married Annie Andrew and they settled in the mining town of Skelton-in-Cleveland. They had five children, though they lost their fourth child, a two-year-old girl, when a typhoid epidemic swept through the district in the early 1880s. Their fifth child, a boy and very much an afterthought, arrived ten years later and was named after his father. Grandfather Bolton spent his entire career working for South Skelton Mines as a cashier, making up the pay packets of the miners. He was on call night and day to organise rescue missions whenever there had been an accident at the mine – not an infrequent occurrence in those times. He was also the founder of the Skelton branch of the Yorkshire Penny Bank, a non-profit community bank staffed by volunteers that introduced the practice of banking to the working class.
Similar to his father, John's mother was also an afterthought in her family. Ethel Kettlewell was born 15 years after her sister and almost 20 years after her brother. Although Kettlewell was the name of a small Yorkshire village, the Kettlewell family were farmers from Lincolnshire, the county to the south of Yorkshire. Ethel's parents made the break from rural life when they moved to Goole in East Yorkshire. Ethel's father had ambitions to be a railway engine driver, but an accident left him partially disabled and he had to settle for a career as a railway guard.
The success story of the Kettlewell family was Ethel's brother Thomas. Situated on the Ouse river that flows into the mighty Humber, Goole was an important shipping port, far enough inland to give it a natural advantage as a place to ship freight to and from the large industrial cities in the north of England. In 1919 Thomas founded the Kettlewell Shipping Company and began ferrying freight from the railheads in Goole to various ports in northern Europe. The company expanded during the 1920s and at one stage operated a dozen freighters. Although its growth slowed during the Depression years, the company prospered in the late 1930s, when Thomas shrewdly decided to specialise in steel and scrap at a time when Britain was undergoing a massive rearmament of its military forces.
Both John's parents were schoolteachers and, most unusual for the time, both had university degrees. His mother Ethel graduated from Leeds University with an Arts degree and taught in Leeds for a short while before returning home to teach botany at the Goole Grammar School, a public co-educational school. John's father was educated at the grammar school in Guisborough and then went to Exeter College on the south coast of England, part of the University of London. In 1915 he was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree, with a major in mathematics, together with a Bachelor of Education. He tried to enlist but was spared the carnage of World War I when he failed the medical, thought to be the result of a hernia. Bolton senior took up teaching instead and in 1916 was appointed the mathematics master at Goole Grammar. A history of Goole noted that their grammar school 'was fortunate in having the services of a brilliant mathematician, J. G. Bolton, who also played the piano for morning assembly and later married Miss Kettlewell, the botany mistress'.
The budding romance that developed between John senior and Ethel was put on hold in 1919 when John was appointed to a position in Liverpool, but they kept in touch through the occasional visit by Ethel (chaperoned, of course, by her older sister). They married in July 1921 at the Methodist Chapel in Goole and spent their honeymoon in Exeter. Upon returning to Goole they began preparing to set up a home in Liverpool when a letter arrived which led to a sudden change of plans. John had been offered the position of senior mathematics teacher at one of Sheffield's leading schools, an offer he accepted immediately. John and Ethel moved to Sheffield in late 1921 and rented a small terrace house in a rundown area near the centre of the city. On 5 June 1922, less than a year after their marriage, Ethel gave birth to a boy. They named him John Gatenby Bolton, the same as his father and his grandfather before him. Two and half years later a daughter, Joanne, arrived.
When John was five the family moved to a new and more spacious house in Abbeydale, a rural area on the southern outskirts of Sheffield. Two attempts were made to start John in primary school and both failed. He seemed unable to accept the authority of his teacher or understand the need for discipline within the classroom. Fortunately, at this time there was a law in Yorkshire that, if either parent was a teacher, then it was not compulsory to send the child to primary school. After these two early failures John's parents decided to tutor him at home. His mother, who stopped teaching after her marriage, took care of his introduction to the three Rs. John spent much of his time roaming around the surrounding farms. Later in life, he attributed his keen interest in gardening to these early experiences. Although he made friends in the neighbourhood, John's primary school years were lonely, at a time when most children are being thoroughly socialised at school.
Despite the outdoor life, John was a sickly child who suffered from hay fever in summer and asthma in winter. He also suffered from migraines. In John's case they were particularly severe and sometimes would last up to three days. He would become extremely sensitive to light and sound and needed to withdraw to a darkened bedroom in complete silence. No doubt this condition contributed to his failed attempts to start school. Although the migraines eased as he got older, bouts of illness were a regular occurrence for the rest of his life.
John's father taught at Central High School and the house they rented when they first moved to Sheffield was within walking distance. When the family moved out to Abbeydale it was easy enough for him to catch the bus to work. When John was 11 his parents decided to move back closer to the centre of Sheffield. However, in 1933 the school decided to relocate from the inner city to a new campus built on the school's playing fields, southwest of the city, an area known as High Storrs, near the foothills of the Pennines. It was renamed High Storrs Grammar School. John's father would spend the rest of his career at the new school. The family moved to Ecclesall, a town near the new campus and soon to become a suburb of an expanding Sheffield.
Another reason his parents decided to move is that John would need to spend at least six months at a primary school to be able to sit the entrance examination for secondary school. Towards the end of their stay at Abbeydale, John had overcome his aversion to the classroom and attended a small private school. In Ecclesall both John and his sister Jo were enrolled at nearby Greystones Primary School. As a foretaste of an outstanding academic career ahead, John passed the entrance examination to secondary school and won a scholarship as well.
The house the Boltons rented in Ecclesall – they never bought one of their own – was quite well-to-do by Sheffield standards. The double-fronted, semi-detached house featured a ground floor with a dining room and a lounge room, furnished with a wireless set and a piano where John's father played and sang the popular songs of the day. A hallway led to a kitchen large enough to unfold a table tennis table. Upstairs there were three bedrooms, one each for parents, John and Jo. A further flight of steps led to an attic bedroom occupied by John's cousin, Janet Robinson. Janet came to live with the Boltons after her father's grocery business went bankrupt. Six years older than John, Janet was more like an elder sister than a cousin.
John's parents were a rather austere couple. They had a circle of friends, mainly teachers and academics, but did not make friends easily. They joined a tennis club and had a passion for bridge, but they rarely entertained at home. If John wanted to have a friend over for a visit he was required to prearrange an appointment, rather than have his friend casually drop in, as most people do. They were not religious, even though Ethel's father had been a lay Methodist preacher in Goole. They went to social events at the local church, but did not attend church services nor send John and Jo to Sunday school. Politics and the momentous events of the 1930s were rarely discussed at home and, in this respect, John took after his parents later in life. He had little interest in religion or politics and it was uncommon for him to discuss either.
John's parents granted him a fair degree of independence. During his first year at high school they gave him a weekly allowance of four shillings on condition that he buy his own shoes and pay for his bus fare to school. John persuaded his father to lend him six pounds so that he could buy a Raleigh touring bike. It opened up a new world of adventure. Every school holiday John and one or two mates would board a train with their bikes and set off touring the countryside. His favourite destination in summer was the Lake District and at Easter it was hiking through the Welsh mountains. John would stay in budget youth hostels along the way and often be away from home for three weeks at a time. He was building an independence and self-reliance that would prove of great value early in his career.
King Ted's
Fac recte, nil time – Do right, fear naught.
School motto
Sheffield is the most inland city in Britain or, put another way, the city where the distance to the sea is greater than for any other city. The city takes its name from the river Sheaf, one of five rivers that flow through the city and divide it into distinctive suburbs and generous stretches of parkland. Sheffield is surrounded by a ring of rolling hills and most of its buildings have views towards the city or out into the countryside.
The history of Sheffield is a history of steel. Every schoolchild was taught that the crucible process for producing quality steel was developed in Sheffield in the 1740s, and that the process for producing stainless steel was invented there in 1912. These innovations, together with an abundance of Yorkshire coal to fuel the steel furnaces, spurred Sheffield's growth to become one of England's major industrial cities. Sheffield was a place to live and work, but not to visit. It had fewer hotels and guest houses than cities half its size. The grime and pollution from its factories and the crowding and drabness of its buildings were probably not much worse than other cities in England's north, but as George Orwell caustically noted in 1937: 'Sheffield, I suppose, could justly claim to be called the ugliest town in the Old World.'
There were two main secondary schools in Sheffield in the 1930s. One was High Storrs Grammar, where John's father taught, and which was co-educational to the extent that the boys' school and the girls' school were located on the same campus. John's father decided that daughter Jo would go to High Storrs, while John would attend its major rival, the boys-only King Edward VII School. Known popularly as King Ted's, the school was formed in 1905 by the merger of two smaller schools and named after the reigning monarch, who had succeeded Queen Victoria in 1901.
King Ted's was partly funded by school fees and partly by the taxpayer. Similar to most secondary schools in England, it aspired to be like the leading public schools such as Eton and Harrow. A public school education was universally regarded as the finest and most balanced that a school could achieve. The headmaster and most of his staff were products of public schools and they did their best to recre-ate at King Ted's the features of a modern public school that are now taken for granted – speech days, houses, boarders, prefects, compulsory sport, school magazines and a variety of clubs and societies. Even corporal punishment was modelled on the public schools, with masters permitted to dish out four strokes of the cane. The headmaster of King Ted's wrote in 1937: 'The offences for which corporal punishment seems to me most suitable are those which involve some degree of "uppishness", or culpable negligence or an occasional outburst of animal spirit that has unfortunately to be suppressed.'
The school underwent a growth spurt in the 1920s when it became the school of first choice among Sheffield's growing middle class. Its reputation meant it could attract the most talented teachers. When John started in September 1933 over three-quarters of the staff were graduates from Oxford or Cambridge. Although technically King Ted's could not count itself among the elite public schools, it certainly thought itself the equal of one.
One significant difference between King Ted's and the public schools was that the Sheffield education authorities insisted that a certain number of places be reserved for students from poorer families, who could be supported on scholarships offered by the school. John had been awarded one of these scholarships after sitting the entrance exam at Greystones Primary, but the catch was that it was means tested. Because his father's salary was over the threshold, John was classed an 'honorary' scholarship holder and his father was required to pay the full school fees. The scholarship meant that John was placed in the highest of the four classes in each age group, which were taught by the best teachers. The scholarship boys had a special status within the school. They were among the most gifted students and a high proportion of them rose to senior positions such as prefects, house captains and team captains.
In his first year Bolton studied English, geography, history, mathematics, Latin, French and science. Latin was compulsory for the first three years and each student was required to take a heavy load of six periods a week in the subject. John found Latin, with its systematic structure, easy to learn and he also found that he had inherited some of his father's talent for mathematics. He did, however, struggle with English and suffered from a bad case of writer's block. A change came when he attended English classes and was introduced to the works of Oliver Goldsmith, an 18th-century Anglo-Irish writer. Goldsmith was a natural storyteller and one of the first to write, with brevity and wit, what now would be described as bestsellers for a mass audience. John no longer had difficulty writing an essay or, in the future, a scientific paper.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Radio Astronomer"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Peter Robertson.
Excerpted by permission of University of New South Wales Press Ltd.
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