BRILLIANT BOFFINS! -the extraordinary, brainy, and often oddball men and women of Malvern
One well-known scientist was an ordinary family bloke during the week but dressed very bizarrely at weekends and used to walk through the town with a shopping basket on his head and his children tethered by rope behind him.
As you’d probably expect with so many quirky, clever people corralled into one place, eccentric often became the norm..
`Radar Families' 
His son, Thomas Nichols was in my class at North Malvern Primary School. The Nichols’ lived on the Worcester Road, near where North Malvern Road joins the A449. We could always tell which house was theirs because it had an old ambulance parked in the front garden. My father joined the Royal Radar Establishment (RRE) as we knew it in 1953. He was from a working class family from just outside Glasgow and had graduated that year with an MA in Maths and Physics. We lived at 4 Davenham Close, just opposite the Diamonds. Being from similar Scottish backgrounds our parents were quite friendly. In later years my parents told me that Anne and I used to play together as toddlers! My father remained at RRE until 1973 when he moved to GCHQ in Cheltenham. I also spent nearly 20 years at the establishment form the early 1990s. It had just become the Defence Evaluation Research Agency (DERA) when I joined.
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