Early Life and Education
He was born in Middlesbrough to John William Heslop-Harrison and his wife Christian Henderson, the last of three children. Soon after his birth his father, at the time a teacher at Middlesbrough High School, accepted a position at the University of Durham as a lecturer in zoology, and the family moved to Birtley, his fathers place of birth. For seven years the family lived in a small wooden cabin formerly used to house World War I refugees until Jack's father, upon his promotion to Professor of Botany, felt rich enough to buy his own house. When he was four he attended the Elizabethville Infant School, later moving to the Elizabethville Elementary School until he was 11, when he was accepted into the Chester-le-Street Secondary School. He completed the Higher School Certificate Examinations in 1938, scoring highly in chemistry and physics but not highly enough in mathematics to win the State Scholarship he required to go to the universities of Oxford or Cambridge. He took the King's College Scholarship Examination as well, not doing well enough in chemistry to get in. After returning from a holiday in Rùm he found that one of the boys above him had dropped out, and he was now applicable for a scholarship of £60 a year to attend King's College, Newcastle, which he did in October 1938 to study chemistry, zoology and botany.
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