Family, friends bid farewell to Hawking

A wider audience will attend a thanksgiving service at Westminster Abbey in London on June 15

Friends, family and colleagues of British scientist Stephen Hawking gathered yesterday to pay their respects at his private funeral in Cambridge, where he spent most of his extraordinary life.

Hawking, who died on March 14 at the age of 76, was famously an atheist but his children Lucy, Robert and Tim have chosen the town’s university church, St Mary the Great, to say their farewell.

“Our father’s life and work meant many things to many people, both religious and non-religious. So, the service will be both inclusive and traditional, reflecting the breadth and diversity of his life,” they have said.

Tributes poured in from around the world upon Hawking’s death, from Queen Elizabeth to Nasa, reflecting his huge impact as a physicist and an inspiration, in his refusal to give up in the face of physical disability.

But the service at St Mary church — a short distance from Gonville and Caius College where Hawking worked for more than 50 years — will only be open to those who knew him, followed by a private reception at Trinity College.

New photographs

A wider audience will attend a thanksgiving service at Westminster Abbey in London on June 15, where Hawking’s remains will be buried near the grave of another legendary scientist, Isaac Newton. Ahead of the funeral, Gonville and Caius College released new black and white photographs of Hawking taken in 1961 at a summer school for young astrophysicists at a castle in Sussex, southern England, when he was 19.