Biographical
I was born in Camberwell, South London, on the 26th of March, 1938. I am told I only made it into the world on the date in question by seven minutes, thereby exhibiting at this early stage the tendency to procrastination which I fear has characterized much of my subsequent career. Not a great deal is known about my ancestry beyond a few generations, though one tidbit of information which has been passed down is that an ancestor on my father’s side served for a time as a cook on Nelson’s flagship, the Victory (it is unknown whether he was actually present at the battle of Trafalgar). As far as we can trace them, my father’s forebears were village cobblers in a small village in Hampshire, though his father broke with this tradition to become a greengrocer; my father would tell me how he used to ride with him to buy vegetables at the Covent Garden market in London. My mother’s parents were both of Irish stock; her father had emigrated to England and worked as a clerk in the naval dockyard in Chatham. My maternal grandmother, who survived into her eighties (and my twenties), was a remarkable person; sent out to domestic service at the age of twelve, she eventually married my grandfather and raised a large family, then in her late sixties emigrated to Australia to join her daughter and son-in-law, and finally returned to the UK for her last years. She was a very warm person, and I still have very fond memories both of my meetings with her (unfortunately few in her last years, because of the geography) and of the many letters she wrote me; since she had had no formal education, she simply wrote down on paper exactly what she would have said to you in person, and to read a letter from her was like having her stand in the room with you. It is interesting that that kind of spontaneity in the written word, which seemed to have been lost forever under the influence of universal secondary education, is now returning in the guise of e-mail.
My father and mother were each the first in their families to receive a university education; they met and became engaged while students at the Institute of Education at the University of London, but were unable to get married for some years because my father had to care for his own mother and siblings. He worked as a secondary-school (high-school) teacher of physics, chemistry and mathematics. My mother also taught secondary-school mathematics for a time, but had to give this up when I was born. I was eventually followed by two sisters, Clare and Judith, and two brothers, Terence and Paul (both now deceased). My parents were both Catholics (in my mother’s case ancestrally, in my father’s I believe because his own father had converted), so that we children were brought up in that faith, making us members of a small and somewhat embattled minority in the England of those days. Although I ceased to be a practicing Catholic in my early twenties, I still wonder from time to time how far the experience, in childhood and adolescence, of maintaining and defending, sometimes in public and in the face of some ridicule, beliefs and attitudes not shared by the vast majority of my compatriots may have influenced my subsequent attitude to physics and indeed to life in general (which, at least as regards the former, is I suspect sometimes regarded by my colleagues as reflecting a degree of iconoclasm verging on counter-suggestibility).
Soon after I was born, my parents bought a house in Upper Norwood, just outside the southern boundary of London proper (but well within the London conurbation). However, when I was eighteen months old, war broke out and we were “evacuated” to Englefield Green, a small village in Surrey on the edge of the great park of Windsor Palace, where we stayed for the duration of the war. The village was fortunate to escape the bombs that fell on towns all around (including Slough, perhaps in response to John Betjeman’s couplet!) and my war-related memories are relatively few: barrage balloons tethered above the Thames, lying in bed at night listening to the German “doodle-bugs” droning overhead (and praying they would not cut out immediately above our house), and the day I was “officially” informed that there was a war on (and decided that at no cost should my sister Clare, a year younger than me, find out about it). When in later life I read the memoirs of people who lived through those same years in the ravaged cities of continental Europe or Asia, or even through the Blitz in London, I realize how extraordinarily lucky we were.
Although Englefield Green is only a few miles outside the western borders of the Greater London conurbation, it is (or was!) in some sense in the countryside, and many of my memories of those years are of long walks through the fields and parks surrounding the village. However, one of my main activities, and the one which gained me most notoriety among our neighbors, was digging deep holes, I think on occasion deeper than my height at the time, in our front garden (not the easiest activity in a soil which was basically London clay). Exactly what motivated me to do this, and what deep insights it reveals into my psyche, is something I have never figured out, but it was perhaps loosely connected with my then choice of future career: after a brief flirtation with the idea of becoming a railway signalman, I decided firmly that I wanted to be an explorer (you have to remember that in those days there were still odd patches of the planet which had never been trodden by human feet, nor mapped by GPS). In the end I suppose that, like many academics, I achieved this ambition though in a more abstract way.
After the end of the war, we returned to the Upper Norwood house and lived there until 1950; my father taught at a school in north-east London (unfortunately a long commute) and my mother by that time had her hands full looking after what were eventually five of us children. I attended the local Catholic elementary (grade) school, and later, following a successful performance in the “eleven-plus” examination which I took rather earlier than most, transferred to the College of the Sacred Heart in Wimbledon (a “grammar”, i.e. state-financed academic-stream, school). This required a slightly complicated commute (bus, train, then another bus), which had the advantage that I could get a fair amount of reading done on the journey to and fro. (A few years ago, while on a brief return visit to the UK, I had for a reason I forget, to repeat exactly this journey and got completely lost – such have been the changes in the transportation system of southwest London in 50 years). Although I took part in the required physical sports at school, in particular in long-distance running, my main recreation in those years was chess, an interest I kept throughout my teens and into my Oxford years (I had a brief moment of glory when some years later, I was picked for the English team to compete against Scotland, Wales, and Ireland in the (under-16) Glorney Cup). Another practice I developed in those years was to take long hikes or cycle rides alone into the countryside surrounding southwest London; in later years I kept up this habit in much more untamed terrain, sometimes steering by compass, in thick mist, over many miles of trackless Welsh or Scottish mountainside. (Since I often did this alone and did not always leave details of my itinerary, and there are plenty of accidents in those areas even in good weather, I am perhaps lucky still to be here!)
In 1949 my father, who had become increasingly unhappy with the long commute to his job in north-east London, obtained a job teaching physics and chemistry at Beaumont College, a school run by the Jesuits near Windsor. This was a “public” school in the British sense of the word (i.e., “private” in the US sense) and we could certainly not have afforded the fees for even one of us three boys to attend it; however, my father negotiated as part of his conditions of service that all three of us could go to Beaumont free of charge, so we did. At the same time we moved to a large, rambling and somewhat broken-down house in Staines, on the far western edge of the London conurbation, which remained our family home until I was well into my thirties; this house was a delight to my father, who in another life would have been a handyman, but probably less so to my mother who had to endure the consequences of all the things he had not yet got around to fixing. One of the prime attractions, at least for us children, was the large garden and in particular the huge chestnut tree, in which we built many camps and “forts”.
Even within the somewhat esoteric world of British public schools, Beaumont was a rather unusual place. One feature which is, to my knowledge, unique to Jesuit schools, is that while the teaching staff includes both laymen, such as my father, and priests, those who are priests typically have not been school teachers for all or even most of their careers: they may have been for example parish priests, missionaries or even university teachers, and be doing the teaching job only for a few years before going back to one of those occupations. Also, in the case of “boarding” schools such as Beaumont, it is common for priests who are retired to live on the premises, whether or not they have been teachers there. As I will relate, this circumstance had totally unforeseen consequences for my career.
Not long after my transfer to Beaumont, at the age of thirteen, I had to make what under normal circumstances would have amounted to an irrevocable decision about my career in life. I imagine that to anyone reading this 50 years later, in the context of a European (even British) or North American school system, this will seem quite incredible; but in those days the degree of “channeling” even in progressive schools in Britain (and Beaumont was far from progressive!) was extreme: you had to choose at an early age (normally 15, but in my case 13) between specialization in classics, modern languages, mathematics and science. That choice then essentially determined which kinds of degree you could take at university (assuming you went), and that in turn put severe constraints on the kind of job you could reasonably apply for. At Beaumont, the unspoken tradition was that if you showed any signs of academic ability, as I apparently did, and had no strong predilection to the contrary, you were automatically channeled into the stream which was deemed most academically prestigious, namely the classics stream (Latin and Greek languages and literature). Remarkably, my father, despite his own training and employment, never exerted the least pressure on me to take the science option (which was generally regarded, for reasons which are unclear to me, but were probably a reflection of a common attitude in Britain at that time, as the least prestigious of all). So I indeed ended up, at the age of thirteen, committed to spending most of my school years on the classics, with only a small fraction available for other subjects such as English, history, or mathematics. My memories of this classics education are mixed: on the one hand, I still recall the soul-destroying discipline of the “gender rhymes”, jingles which we were required to memorize to remind us of the correct gender of Latin nouns, and fragments of which still 50 years later seem to take up kilobytes of storage space in my brain which I am sure could be put to better use (“. and common are to either sex, artifex and opifex …”). On the other hand, some of my teachers were enthusiastic and inspiring, and introduced me at an early stage to the poetry of Catullus and Horace and the historical analysis of Thucydides.
Although I by and large enjoyed the academic side of life at Beaumont and prospered at it, in most other respects I was a decided misfit: Almost all my fellow-pupils were fee-paying, which almost automatically meant that they enjoyed, at home, a lifestyle of which we had no experience; except in my last two years I was one of a small minority of “day-boys” (that is, I commuted daily from home rather than residing at the school throughout the term); and, perhaps most importantly, because of my academic precocity I was placed in classes with boys who were mostly a couple of years older than me. As a result, the five years I spent there, while not unhappy, do not stand out in retrospect as a particularly joyful period of my life.
However, at least two things happened during those years which were to have, in different ways, very happy long-term consequences. The first was that, for a reason I cannot now recall (I think it may have been to help my recovery from an illness which had kept me in bed for a month) my father decided to send me on a mountaineering course in Snowdonia. Unlike the rolling hills of Surrey and Berkshire which I had explored on my solitary hikes, the mountains around Llanberis were the real thing, craggy, mostly pathless and, in bad weather, decidedly not to be trifled with; I fell in love with them at first sight, and mountaineering in all its forms, from easy strolls to technically relatively demanding rock-climbing, has been a major passion of my life ever since.
The second serendipitous event actually occurred after I had competed for, and obtained, a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, in December 1954. I had to wait a few months before taking up the scholarship, and in those days there were no nationally organized programs to employ people in my position in voluntary service overseas, etc., so I somewhat reluctantly stayed at school. Also living at the school was a retired priest, Fr. Charles O’Hara, who had at one period of his career been a university teacher of mathematics and had in fact written a textbook on projective geometry. One day he ran into me in the corridor and said to me: “You seem to have a lot of time on your hands. Well, I have a lot of time on my hands. Why don’t you come along to my room for a couple of hours a week, and I’ll show you some interesting things in modern mathematics?” Now, at that point I had only the minimal mathematics required for the “O-level” examination (though I don’t recall clearly, I think it did not even include differential calculus, and certainly not the integral variety), and I had absolutely no reason to think that I would ever in my career need anything more sophisticated. However, I indeed had time to kill, Fr. O’Hara seemed enthusiastic, and perhaps to humor him as much as anything, I agreed to his proposal. So for the rest of those two terms he gave me, for a couple of hours a week, a sort of Cook’s tour of ideas in modern mathematics, involving concepts such as groups, rings, and fields which my O-level education had never even grazed and which I found quite fascinating. Even more importantly in retrospect, he actively encouraged me to do a few simple exercises involving those concepts, and to my initial surprise I found I could in fact do them without great difficulty. After the end of the school year I had other things on my mind and promptly forgot all the details of what he had taught me; but this was to be the first of a series of fortunate accidents that helped to shape my eventual career.
In early October of 1955 I went up to Oxford to take up my scholarship at Balliol, with the intention of reading (majoring in) the degree technically known as Literae Humaniores, and informally as Greats (on which more below). For me, coming as I did from a school background which even by the standards of those days was somewhat restrictive and conservative, entering university was like stepping through a door and finding myself in a completely new world. I still have idyllic memories of my first two weeks in Oxford, with the autumn colors in the parks at their peak and the scent in the air of infinite possibilities, both intellectual and social. Although of course that initial sense of excitement didn’t last forever, by and large my nine years at Oxford, as undergraduate and graduate, were very happy indeed; not only did I thoroughly enjoy and prosper at my academic work, but I made a variety of friends from all over the world, especially from south and east Asia, with many of whom I have kept in lifelong contact. On the sports side, I had done some sculling at school, and initially rowed bow in the Balliol third eight. However, it was not long before the coach noticed that I was two stone lighter than the then coxswain (“cox”) and interchanged us, and thereafter my destiny was fixed; I eventually rose to be cox of the first eight, and while I did not exactly steer them to victory (in fact, in the year of my coxswainship we did, formally, just about as badly as it is possible to do!), I nevertheless feel we put up a good fight. (Incidentally, I should have no such career possibility today: one consequence of the gender-integration of the Oxford colleges which took place in the 70’s is that the coxes of college eights are now, for obvious reasons, almost invariably female).
The Oxford Greats degree is one of those many British institutions which need to be understood in historical rather than logical terms. It takes four years (12 trimesters), and for the first five trimesters one studies Greek and Latin languages and literature, thus making it the obvious choice of degree for anyone who, like me, has specialized in the classics at school. For the last seven trimesters one studies in parallel “ancient”, that is Greek and Roman, literature and philosophy; the philosophy side of the degree has only a relatively small “ancient” component (Plato and Aristotle), and is (or was in my day) mostly centered in the analytic and mostly Anglo-Saxon tradition (Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Russell, Wittgenstein … and in more contemporary terms Ayer, Ryle, Austin …). I thoroughly enjoyed all the components of the course; I found particularly rewarding the individual (or sometimes two-person) tutorials characteristic of the “Oxbridge” system, in which I could discuss with my tutors, at least prima facie on equal terms, the most recent journal articles on the origins of coinage in the ancient Mediterranean or the concept of machine consciousness. (One disappointment I encountered on eventually switching to physics is that in that subject, as I suspect in most of the “hard” sciences, such cutting-edge discussions are not realistically possible at the undergraduate level).
I am often asked whether and how my Greats training has been useful to me in my subsequent career in physics. To that question I have a joking answer, namely that unlike (apparently) some of my physics colleagues I at least know the difference between the Greek letters j and y! However, there is a serious answer: I certainly do feel the philosophy component of the degree, at least, has helped to shape the way at which I look at the world and in particular at the problems of physics. This is not something which is easy to quantify or make concrete; I have never undergone a course of psycho-analysis, but I imagine that anyone who does so can never again look at the world in quite the same light, and I think that the same is true for the kind of rigorous course of analytic philosophy which I went through at Oxford. Another analogy might be with the feeling I experienced later when I learned to speak Japanese with a reasonable degree of fluency; it is as if one has learned to use a muscle that one did not know one had. At any rate I have never for a moment regretted the years I spent on this degree.
Towards the end of my third year in Oxford it gradually began to dawn on me that I could not go on being a student for ever and must start looking for gainful employment. Not being endowed with a great deal of initiative, I first looked around to see what careers previous Greats students at Balliol had chosen. With few exceptions, it seemed that they had either gone into the British civil service or become teachers, at university or high-school level, of one of the subjects they had studied (classics, ancient history or philosophy). As regarded the first option, it did not take me long to figure out that even were I to pass the examination for the civil service (something which was by no means a foregone conclusion, since it tested qualities rather different from the ones which had advantaged me in a purely academic context), a career there was likely to be both uncongenial to me and of dubious benefit to the British public. So I started contemplating a career in academia; and since the subject which I had enjoyed most, and performed best in, was philosophy, this seemed the natural choice.
But the more I thought about the prospect of doing a doctorate in philosophy and eventually obtaining a university lectureship in that subject, the more I realized that in my bones I just did not want to do it. Why not? It never occurred to me – as it no doubt would have to someone with more imagination – that maybe I was not actually cut out for an academic career at all. Rather I asked myself what exactly it was about philosophy as such which deterred me from doing it professionally for life. And I eventually came up with the answer that it was because what counted as good or bad work in philosophy – at least as it was practiced in Oxford at that time – seemed to depend so strongly on the precise nuances of one’s wording (something, incidentally, which I suspect may have subtly disadvantaged non-native English speakers in that discipline); there seemed to be no objective criterion of what was correct or not, or even what was good work or bad, and I felt in my bones that it was just such a criterion that I needed if I was going to pursue an academic career. I did indeed briefly consider the possibility of going into pure mathematics, but rejected it on the grounds that in mathematics, almost by the definition of the subject, to be wrong means you are stupid: I wanted the possibility of being wrong without being stupid – of being wrong, if you like, for interesting and nontrivial reasons. Physics seemed to fill that bill, and while I had zero formal training in that subject, the confidence which I had acquired from Fr. O’Hara in advanced mathematics led me to believe that that aspect of the subject, at least, would not give me major difficulty. So, in the early summer of 1958 I took my courage in both hands and applied to do a second Oxford undergraduate degree, in physics, following the anticipated completion in spring 1959 of my Greats degree.
For the full details, please refer to the source.
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Source:
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2003/leggett/biographical/
