Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Ough I cannot move and ve to speak through a puter, in my mind I’m free
io album, The sion Bell. e loved rubbing ulders with stars h a s Mi c h a e l e, Brian May and r String fellow. ghtclub owner ngfellow, 77, erday tweeted a picture of his “all favourite celebrity” at his club, but d him “Professor Steve Harking”. awking’s mum Isobel once said of on: “He liked parties. e liked pretty girls, only pretty ones. ked adventure and he did, to some nt, like work.” orld l eaders, i ncluding Barack ma, Nelson Mandela, and the en, were thrilled to meet Hawking delighted at his mischievous sense umour. Biographer Kitty Ferguson “Prince Charles was intrigued by Haw ki n g ’s w h e e l c h a i r a n d Hawking, twirling it around to demonstrate its capabilities, carelessly ran over his toes. One of Hawking’s regrets in life was not having an opportunity to run over Margaret Thatcher’s toes.”
When he appeared at the Daily Mirror’s Pride of Britain Awards 16 months ago, Hawking had the room in hysterics with a joke about leaving the EU. He said he dealt with “complex problems” every day, before adding: “But please don’t ask me to help with Brexit.”
Hawking was born in 1942 in Oxford, the eldest of Frank and Isobel’s four children, but the family moved to St Albans, Herts, when he was eight years old.
At meal times the family often ate in silence, each of them reading a different book and at school, Stephen was dubbed “Einstein”. He won a place at University College, Oxford, where he joined the rowing club as a cox. He found the work boring and did not excel until he did a PHD at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, having warned Oxford examiners: “If you award me a First, I will go to Cambridge. If I get a Second, I shall stay in Oxford, so I expect you will give me a First.”
But there was one subject that baffled the genius – women. “They are a complete mystery,” he admitted.
It was at Cambridge that Hawking, who began studying cosmology, met the other love of his life, first wife Jane.
Ayear later, in 1963, Hawking was diagnosed with motor neurone disease. Though doctors advised him to continue his studies, he saw little point and struggled with depression as he was given years to live.
He and Jane got engaged the following year. They wed in 1965 and had children, Robert, Lucy, and Timothy. Jane has admitted she was driven to the brink of suicide caring for Hawking and their children amid fears he would die.
The couple were so keen to find someone to support Jane that they moved Jonathan Hellyer Jones, a musician she met through her church choir, into their Cambridge flat.
But as Hawking’s illness slowed, he become increasingly unhappy with Jane and Jonathan’s friendship and grew close to one of his nurses Elaine Mason, whose first husband had invented the computerised voice synthesiser he used.
In 1990, Hawking left Jane for Elaine, whom he married five years later.
In 2004, police investigated claims by nurses that Elaine was abusing Hawking. He denied the allegations, but the marriage collapsed and he grew closer to Jane and his children once again.
Hawking campaigned for the environment, warning humans would have to leave Earth to survive if they did not change their ways. He was a great supporter of the NHS, and joined a lawsuit against Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt earlier this year.
He also maintained his sense of adventure and fun, experiencing zero gravity on an Atlantic flight known as “the Vomit Comet” in 2007. In 2009, he threw a dinner party “for time travellers”, which he only advertised after the event.
In his Reith lecture on black holes at the Royal Institute in London in 2016, Hawking said: “The message of this lecture is that black holes ain’t as black as they are painted. They are not the eternal prisons they were once thought.
“Things can get out of a black hole both on the outside and possibly to another universe.
“So if you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up – there’s a way out.”