Читать книгу The Wonder Of Brian Cox - The Unauthorised Biography Of The Man Who Brought Science To The Nation - Ben Falk - Страница 7
ОглавлениеMost 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.’
