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POET OF THE DAY
• 29th January,1945- born in Farnborough, Hants where Old-Etonian, entomologist father, Mark, worked for the Royal Aircraft Establishment, inventing the glue that held the wooden airframes of Mosquito aircraft together. Mark was one of three sons of Walter, squire of Weston, near Baldock in Hertfordshire, where the family fortune was founded first on carting “night-soil” out of London, then, in the 18th century, on being Quaker brewers.
• Mother, Sophie, one of two daughters of Gwen, granddaughter of Charles Darwin. Gwen was friends with Rupert Brooke, Stanley Spencer and Virginia Woolf and married the French painter Jacques Raverat in 1912. After Jacques’ death from MS in France in 1925, she went on to become the leading wood-engraving artist in Britain, designed a ballet for her cousin Ralph Vaughan Williams, and, after a stroke in the 1950’s wrote the best-selling memoir Period Piece, which has not been out of print since.
• 1945- family moved back to Cambridge where Mark resumed his life as an academic at Trinity College, rising to become Senior Tutor.
• 1956 – WMP sent to crammer in Cumberland with first cousin (Francis Pryor, who would become the TV archaeologist) to pass Common Entrance exam to get into Eton. A traumatic Dickensian experience for a 12 yr old.
• 1957-61 – Eton. Did not fit in, hated sports, WMP persuades parents to let him leave after O levels. In same house as various Macmillans and other luminaries.
• 1961-2 – Davis, Laing & Dick crammer in Lon..
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