Early Life
Charles Fraser-Smith was the son of a solicitor who owned a wholesale grocery business; he was orphaned at age seven. He was then brought up by a Christian missionary family in Hertfordshire. He went to school at Brighton College, where he was described as "scholastically useless except for woodwork and science and making things."
On leaving school he veered from one occupation after another, working as a prep school teacher in Portsmouth, a motorcycle messenger rider, and an aircraft factory worker. Eventually, inspired by his foster family, he went to Morocco as a Christian missionary. Returning to England in 1939, he gave a Sunday sermon at the Open Brethren Evangelical Church in Leeds. In the sermon, Fraser-Smith described his practice of bricolage, and the necessity of procuring supplies from just about any source. In the congregation were two officials of Britain's Ministry of Supply, who were impressed by his adventures. As a result the Director of the Ministry of Supply offered him what he later described as "a funny job in London".
Read more about this topic: Charles Fraser-Smith
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I’ll bet your father spent the first year of your life throwing rocks at the stork.”
—Irving Brecher, U.S. screenwriter, and Edward Buzzell. J. Cheever Loophole (Groucho Marx)