A YOUNG FH (original) (raw)

Shortly after Fred was born his father was conscripted into the British Army and opted for the Machine Gun Corps. His mother was a musician and during the war supported the family by playing the piano accompaniment to silent films at a local cinema in the town of Bingley.

Fred was given his early education by his mother and began to develop an appreciation of numbers from a very early age, learning to tell the time by the age of three and writing out his multiplication tables up to 12x12 by the age of four. However, he couldn't really read properly until he was seven. This particular skill was acquired through attending the cinema and reading the subtitles to the silent films.

"Between the ages of five and nine, I was almost perpetually at war with the educational system." Fred's mother knew, having been a teacher herself, that Fred made his best steps when left alone. Yet, she knew that without formal schooling Fred would never be able to achieve a scholarship for a place at the local grammer school or later attend university.

The elementary educational system began normally at five years of age. "As soon as I learned from my mother that there was a place called school that I must attend willy nilly - a place where you were obliged to think about matters prescribed by a 'teacher', not about matters decided by yourself - I was appalled.

"Since I made it abundantly clear that I would not accept incarceration in a mental prison house, my mother began by permitting me to ditch the first infant year."

When Fred began attending school it wasn't long before he had a very well-planned truancy technique in place. The following was the deciding factor:

"The situation as it now presented itself to my mind was that you spent the first bit of the morning, from nine to ten, getting interested in something. Then, just as you were nicely into your stride, there was a jump to something else. Once again you cooperated with the teacher by becoming interested in the new topic. But all to no avail. Like somebody with St. Vitus's dance, the teacher was off again into a new subject that bore not the slightest resemblance to anything that had gone before. The thing that eventually finished that first school for me was connected, as you might expect, with numbers. Because I found the sums I was given rather easy, I was told to learn the Roman numeral system, whereby I found to my amazement that VIII stood for simple old 8. How could anybody be so daft as to write VIII for 8, I wondered. Yet I made no instant complaint, for the task was not an onerous one. Besides, I hit a problem with some puzzlement in it - how did you multiply these strange new numbers?

When the question proved intractable, I asked the teacher, only to be told that you didn't multiply Roman numbers. When I persisted by asking what were they good for then, the answer was that Roman numbers were very old and that they were sometimes used in books.

This was more than I could reasonably stomach..." Fred managed to convince the school that he was at home near death's door with a ghastly illness whilst he convinced his parents he was at school and successfully passed away terms with only a few weeks of school attendance. His spare time was spent taking an interest in nature, astronomy and performing chemical experiments in the kitchen.

Fred managed to win himself a scholarship into Bingley Grammer School and started in the September of 1926. From then on, he learnt subjects systematically and entered into the sixth form and began his first journey to Cambridge in 1932.