John Gribbin: "It was inevitable that we would have become friends"
Mike Kenward and John Gribbin have been friends since university. They both went from science to science writing. They are ABSW Life members.
Mike Kenward and I were exact contemporaries at the University of Sussex, joining in the second full year of its activity, in 1963, when the undergraduate numbers doubled from some 300 to about 600. With such a small cohort, and as we came from similar working-class, left-wing backgrounds with a shared interest in Buddy Holly, it was inevitable that we would have become friends even if we had not been doing the same course.
Mike’s attitude to the course itself was that it was necessary to do enough work to get by, but there was no need to do more, and there was more to life than work. This "more" included an interest in still photography and film, and I particularly recall trying to help him run a showing of Psycho for the film club using a recalcitrant projector. The suspense of wondering when the film would next break was suitably Hitchcockian.
The attitude to work is best summed up by Mike’s approach to finals. The exams clashed with Bob Dylan’s 1966 performance at the Albert Hall, so Mike went to the gig, stayed in London overnight, and turned up an hour late for one of the papers. He got a 2:2, which might well otherwise have been a 2:1. The attitude to life is indicated by his role as photographer at my wedding, where he was also Best Man. He took many pictures, and in due course sent us a set of postcard-sized proofs from which to choose the best for enlargement. I am still waiting for the enlargements, as I used to remind him every 17 September.
Our paths diverged after that, but only minimally. Mike followed the technical route into writing, via the Culham research labs, while I followed an academic route, which also led me into writing, on the science side rather than technology. Mike ended up at New Scientist; I initially landed at Nature, but a sideways shift left me as one of Mike’s underlings at New Scientist in what turned out to be (no particular credit to me) the glory days of the magazine. I still blame Bob Dylan for setting Mike on that path instead of the respectable route I followed.
John Gribbin is a science writer who has dedicated his life to writing popular science books. He was honoured with the ABSW Lifetime Achievement Award.
