Hawking family donates archives to meet tax bill
Physicist’s relatives will hand over his papers while selling off some quirky personal possessions
STEPHEN HAWKING’S family is to donate his archive to the nation to help them pay millions in inheritance tax, it has emerged.
Hawking, who died in March, left an estate valued at around £15million.
Now his family have asked Christie’s, the auctioneers, to value his archive so that a large proportion can be donated to the nation through the Acceptance in Lieu process that allows valuable cultural works to be given instead of death duties. It is likely to be donated to public museums.
The auction house said it had submitted the archive to the Arts Council and an announcement of the items involved would be made soon. Christie’s declined to give any further information, but the archive may include groundbreaking scientific papers, personal items such as his telescope and possibly even his iconic computergenerated voice synthesizer.
Some 22 items belonging to Hawking, including his seminal work on black holes from 1974 and one of his wheelchairs, is to be sold in a public online auction at Christie’s.
Other lots include a selection of his medals and awards, a copy of his bestselling A Brief History of Time signed with a thumbprint, a bomber jacket, and the script for one of his appearances on The Simpsons.
Lucy Hawking, the astrophysicist’s daughter, said: “We hope to be able to offer our father’s archive to the nation … as we feel it is a huge part of his legacy but also of the history of science in this country. We are also giving admirers of his work the chance to acquire a memento of our father’s extraordinary life in the shape of a small selection of evocative and fascinating items. In addition, we will be auctioning one of our father’s historic wheelchairs, the proceeds of which will be donated to the Motor Neurone Disease Association and the Stephen Hawking Foundation.”
A highlight of the auction is Hawking’s thesis typescript, which is expected to sell for up to £150,000. When the PHD thesis was made available online by Cambridge University in October 2017, it proved so popular that it crashed the university’s website.
When he wrote his dissertation in October 1965, Hawking was already suffering with the early symptoms of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and it was his wife Jane, whom he had married three months earlier, who typed out its 117 pages, painstakingly adding the mathematical equations by hand.
The sale is expected to raise £200,000.
Thomas Venning, the head of Christie’s London’s books and manuscripts department, said: “The lots selected for sale highlight Professor Hawking’s remarkable achievements in science alongside his unique personality and inspirational life story.”