Somewhat reluctantly, Stephen agreed to apply to his father’s college, University College, Oxford. Stephen wanted to read mathematics but his father, tropical medicine specialist Dr Frank Hawking, was adamant that there would be no jobs for mathematicians and Stephen should read medicine. They compromised on Natural Sciences and Stephen went up to Oxford at the young age of 17 in 1959. Despite claiming to do very little work, Stephen performed well enough in his written examinations to be called for a ‘viva’ (an interview) to determine which class of degree he should receive. Stephen told the examiners that if they awarded him a first-class degree he would leave Oxford and go to Cambridge but if he got a second, he would stay in Oxford. They duly gave him a first, as of course, he hoped they would. Stephen went to Trinity Hall, Cambridge in 1962. However, while still an undergraduate, Stephen had begun to realise all was not well. He had become increasingly clumsy, was struggling with small tasks such as doing up his shoelaces and his movements were erratic and ungainly. After an accident at a skating lake in St Albans, his mother took him to Guy’s Hospital in London for tests. Soon after Stephen’s 21st birthday, these tests showed he had a progressive and incurable illness. These tests were exhaustive although primitive by today’s standards. Even after these were completed, oddly Stephen was not told his diagnosis. Eventually, he discovered he had motor neurone disease which slowly and inexorably erodes muscle control but leaves the brain intact. He was given only two years to live. Stephen later recalled that he became desperately demoralised at this time but he did find two sources of inspiration and solace: the intense music of Wagner (a subsequent lifelong passion) and falling in love with Jane Wilde, the woman who would become his wife. The young couple vowed to fight Stephen’s illness together. Stephen now had someone to live for, and in the manner typical of his stubbornness, he threw himself into his research – “To my surprise I found I liked it”, he said later.
Despite his renewed enthusiasm, Stephen’s early career progressed erratically. In Cambridge, he had hoped to study under the most famous astronomer of the time, Fred Hoyle, but Professor Hoyle had too many students already and sent him to physicist and cosmologist Dennis Sciama instead. Later, Stephen recognised this as a piece of luck which laid the foundation of his later career and said that he would have been unlikely to flourish under Hoyle’s supervision. In fact, the two clashed in public in 1964 when Stephen interrupted Fred Hoyle, during a lecture, to tell the famous scientist he had got something wrong. When Hoyle asked how he knew this, Stephen said, ‘Because I have worked it out’. Sciama also introduced Stephen to Roger Penrose in 1965 when Penrose gave a talk on singularity theorems in Cambridge. In that same year, Stephen received his Ph.D for his thesis entitled ‘Properties of Expanding Universes.’ This thesis was released in 2017 on the University of Cambridge’s website, causing the site to crash almost immediately due to the extraordinarily high demand.
In 1965, Stephen applied for a research fellowship at Gonville & Caius College in Cambridge and was accepted. He was to remain a fellow there for the rest of his life. Marriage to Jane and children followed; Robert (1967), Lucy (1970) and Timothy (1979). Supported and cared for by his wife, his loyal PhD students, friends, family, colleagues and his children, Stephen settled into day to day academic life, and continued working right up until his death in March 2018.
