Dennis Potter - Early Life

Early Life

Dennis Potter was born in Berry Hill, Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire. His father, Walter Edward Potter (1906 – November 1975), was a coal miner in this rural mining area between Gloucester and Wales; his mother was Margaret Constance, née Wale (born 1910). Potter has a sister named June.

Brought up a Protestant, he attended the local Salem chapel, and went to Christchurch Junior School where, in 1946, he passed the eleven-plus entrance examination to Bell's Grammar School at Coleford. He then went to St. Clement Danes School in London, while the family lived for a time with his maternal grandfather in Hammersmith. During this time the ten year old Potter was sexually abused by his uncle, an experience he would later allude to many times in his writing. Between 1953 and 1955, Potter did his National Service and learnt Russian at the Joint Services School for Linguists, serving with the Intelligence Corps and subsequently at the War Office.

After national service, in 1956, he won a scholarship and went to New College, Oxford to study Politics, Philosophy and Economics, editing the student magazine Isis. He graduated in 1958, after obtaining a second-class degree. A tall, lean young man with red hair, he was described by his economics tutor as a "cross between Jimmy Porter and Keir Hardie".

On 10 January 1959 he married at the Christchurch parish church Margaret Amy Morgan (1933–1994), a local girl he met at a dance. They lived a "surprisingly quiet private life" at Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire, and had a son, Robert and two daughters, Jane and Sarah, who was to achieve prominence in the 1980s as an international cricketer.