Bernard Quatermass - Character

Character

Little is revealed of Quatermass's early life during the course of the films and television series in which he appears. In The Quatermass Experiment, he at one point despairs that he should have stuck to his original career of "mapping the tropics."

In Nigel Kneale's 1996 radio serial The Quatermass Memoirs, it is revealed that the Professor was first involved in rocketry experiments in the 1930s, and that his wife died at a young age. The unmade prequel serial Quatermass in the Third Reich, an idea conceived by Kneale in the late 1990s, would have shown Quatermass travelling to Nazi Germany during the 1936 Berlin Olympics and becoming involved with Wernher von Braun and the German rocket programme, before helping a young Jewish refugee to escape from the country. According to The Quatermass Memoirs, during World War II Quatermass conducted top secret work for the British war effort, which he subsequently refused ever to discuss.

By 1953 Quatermass is the head of the British Experimental Rocket Group, which has a programme to launch a manned rocket into space from a base in Tarooma, Australia. Although Quatermass succeeds in launching a three-man crew, the rocket vastly overshoots its projected orbit and returns to Earth much later than planned, crash-landing in London. Only one of the crew, Victor Carroon, remains, and he has been taken over by an alien presence, eventually forcing Quatermass to destroy him and the other two crewmembers who have been absorbed into him in a climax set in Westminster Abbey.

Despite this trauma, Quatermass continues with his space programme, and by Quatermass II (1955) is actively planning the establishment of Moon bases. In this serial we see his daughter, Paula Quatermass, who works as an assistant at the Rocket Group, but there is no sign of a wife or other children. In the fourth episode of the serial he mentions that he never reached his twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, tying in with The Quatermass Memoirs' later assertion of his wife's early death.

At the beginning of the third serial, Quatermass and the Pit (1958–59), Quatermass's funding is being cut back and the Rocket Group is being handed over to military control, much to his disgust. Command is to be handed over to Colonel Breen and Quatermass senses that he is being forced out: however, after the events of the serial, Breen is dead, Quatermass has helped to save the world, and London is in chaos.

It is not clear what happens to the Rocket Group immediately after this: the next time Quatermass is seen on screen (Quatermass, 1979) he has long been retired, living in retreat in the Scottish Highlands. He has recently become the guardian of his teenaged granddaughter, Hettie, after her parents were killed in a road accident in Germany. After Hettie runs away from home he travels to London in search of her, and finds a dystopian world there. Quatermass and the scientist Joe Kapp establish that an alien force is causing the downturn of society and Quatermass forms a plan to induce the intruder away by the detonation of a nuclear device. He presses the button to detonate it himself, with Hettie's help, and they are killed in the blast as the planet is saved.