Free Stephen Hawking by John Gribbin

university. It acts, at least for some students, as a perfect counterpoint to the stresses and demands of study. In Hawking’s case it was the perfect remedy for a calcifying boredom with everything else Oxford had to offer.
    Rowing is one of the most physically demanding sports around, and an oarsman simply has to be powerfully built to help move a boat through the water; but there is one otheressential ingredient in every rowing team—the coxswain, or “cox.”
    Hawking was perfectly suited to coxing. He was light, so he did not burden the boat, and he had a loud voice with which he enjoyed barking instructions the length of the boat and enough discipline to attend all the training sessions. His rowing trainer was Norman Dix, who had been with the university college rowing club for decades. He recalls that Hawking was a competent enough cox, but never interested in advancing beyond the second crew. He suspects that the first crew held little appeal because it meant taking it all too seriously, and at that level the fun would have gone out of the whole thing.
    Dix remembers Hawking as a boisterous young fellow who from the beginning cultivated a daredevil image when it came to navigating his crew on the river. Many was the time he would return the eight to shore with bits of the boat knocked off and oar blades damaged because he had tried to guide his crew through an impossibly narrow gap and had come to grief. Dix never did believe Hawking’s claims that “something had gotten in the way.”
    â€œHalf the time,” says Dix, “I got the distinct impression that he was sitting in the stern of the boat with his head in the stars, working out his mathematical formulae.”
    The crews worked hard on the river. They would be out in the boats nearly every day during term time, preparing for the big races, the Torpids, which take place in February, and the Summer Eights in the summer term. The term Torpids originally came from the adjective “torpid” because this would be the first competitive race in which freshmen could compete, and therefore the standard of many crews was pretty low.Having joined the Rowing Club in October, the novice rowers would have trained hard all winter in preparation for showing off their newfound skills by the fifth week of the winter term.
    Torpids are all college “bumping” races, taking place over several days. The thirteen boats competing start off one hundred and forty feet apart. Each is tied to the bank by a forty-foot line, the other end of which is held by the cox. When the starting gun goes off, the cox releases the line and the boats chase each other along a stretch of the river with the aim of bumping the boat in front without getting bumped themselves. The main task of the cox is to guide the crew so that they avoid being bumped by the boat behind but manage to bump the boat in front. The object of the exercise is to move up through the positions of the thirteen boats by managing to bump without being bumped; after each heat the “bumpers” and the “bumped” change places. If a crew does very well and moves up several places during the series of races, each crewmember is entitled to purchase an oar on which can be written the triumphant tally of bumps, the names of the crew, and the date. Such oars adorn the walls of victors’ studies. Hawking’s crews were pretty average, notching up only a modest number of bumps during their Torpids races, but the whole idea was to have fun and to relieve academic pressures.
    After the races came the celebrations and commiserations, both of which would be accompanied by a surfeit of ale, followed by a rowing club dinner in the college accompanied by speeches and toasts. And here was the real reason Hawking was involved at all. He had been something of a misfit during his first year, lonely and needing to alleviate the boredom of work that presented no challenge to him.The rowing