![]() I did well in that school and skipped one year, enabling me to leave at the age of 10. Probably one of the reasons for this was that many of the pupils were poverty stricken and I guess their parents didn’t give them much help in their schooling. I was in the A class, but I didn’t find it very stimulating, in spite of that. They had graded classes, from A to D, in descending order of brilliance. I went at the age of five, and the primary school was quite close to where I lived. ![]() When you went to primary school, you were quite young? Every day when I met my father coming back from work, I asked him whether he’d had the sack- fortunately, he never lost his job. I lived through the Great Depression, which was a terrible experience. That was during the depression, wasn’t it? I had a very happy childhood, much of it spent playing with other kids in the street, which one did in those days. He and my mother worked at the Dunlop Rubber Company, he as a clerk and she as a bookkeeper. He was also intensely shy, which unfortunately I inherited from him-and that’s been a burden for me throughout my life. My father was a very intelligent man, but regrettably he had to leave school at the age of 14. Later we moved to a corporation house, like a government house here in Australia. They lived in two rooms, rented in somebody else’s house. I was born in 1924 in a rather poor suburb of Birmingham and my parents were not very well off. So, John, can you tell us something about your family background-conditions at home and what it was like growing up? Exciting new world – San Francisco, California.A Chemistry set, Meccano, Radio and Chess.Interviewed by Professor George Dracoulis in 2010. He was made emeritus professor in 1990 and continued as a visiting fellow in the Department of Nuclear Physics until 2008. Newton was instrumental in the installation of a new accelerator at the ANU and introduced a new collaborative research ethos to the department. In 1970, Newton left England and became professor of nuclear physics and head of department at the Australian National University (ANU), Canberra. He made subsequent visits in 1965-67, 19-81. ![]() The first of Newton’s visits to the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory (LBL) in Berkeley, USA took place in 1956-58. Newton then accepted an appointment as senior lecturer (1959-67) and later, reader in physics (1967-70) at the University of Manchester. He began as a fellow before promotion to principal scientific officer in 1954. Newton joined the Atomic Energy Research Establishment (AERE) in Harwell in 1951. In 1946, he was able to return to the Cavendish laboratory at Cambridge to finish his MA (1948) and later his PhD (1953). During WWII Newton worked as a junior scientific officer at the radar facility in Malvern. He won a scholarship to St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, where he completed the first two years of his bachelors degree (BA, 1944) before joining the war effort in 1943. John Oswald Newton was born in 1924 in Birmingham, England.
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