Early Life and Family
Oliphant was born the eldest of five sons in Kent Town, a suburb of Adelaide, South Australia. His father, Harold George "Baron" Oliphant Dip. Ec. (1876–1963) was a civil servant with the South Australian Engineering and Water Supply Department and part-time lecturer in Economics with the Workers' Educational Association. His mother Fanny Beatrice "Edith" Oliphant, née Tucker, (27 March 1869 – 29 October 1951), was an artist. His father was for some 15 years a devoted Theosophist, and as such opposed to eating meat. Marcus became a lifelong vegetarian while a boy, after witnessing the killing of pigs on a farm. He was also found to be completely deaf in one ear and he needed glasses for severe astigmatism and short-sightedness. He was first educated at primary schools in Goodwood and Mylor, then Unley High School in Adelaide.
He had four brothers, one of whom (H. Roland Oliphant) became a laboratory technician at the University of Adelaide before founding (with brother Nigel B. Oliphant) a manufacturing business Oliphant Brothers Ltd. of 163 Gouger Street, which built scientific equipment such as Geiger-Muller tubes and eventually specialised in UV sterilizing equipment.
Oliphant was at first interested in a career in either medicine or dentistry, and he began studying at the University of Adelaide in 1919. However, his physics lecturer, Dr. Roy Burdon, influenced him to become a physicist by showing him "the extraordinary exhilaration there was in even minor discoveries in the field of physics".
After graduation he got a job cleaning floors for a jewelry manufacturer. He married Rosa Wilbraham, who was also from Adelaide, in 1925, and they had one daughter. Geoffrey Bruce Oliphant, an infant son, born Oct. 6, 1930 died of meningitis on Sep. 5, 1933 and was interred in an unmarked grave in the Parish of the Ascension Burial Ground in Cambridge alongside Timothy Cockcroft (1927-1929), the infant son of Sir John Cockcroft and Lady Elizabeth Cockcroft, who were also later interred in the same plot.
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