St John's College, Oxford

John Barrington Wain was an English poet, novelist, and critic, associated with the literary group "The Movement". For most of his life, Wain worked... as a freelance journalist and author, writing and reviewing for newspapers and the radio. He seems to have married in 1947, since C. S. Lewis wrote a poem for his wedding in June of that year. Wain was born and grew up in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, and attended St. John's College, Oxford, gaining a B.A. in 1946 and M.A. in 1950. He was a Fereday Fellow of St John's between 1946 and 1949. He wrote his first novel Hurry on Down in 1953, a comic picaresque story about an unsettled university graduate who rejects the standards of conventional society. Other notable novels include Strike the Father Dead , a tale of a jazzman's rebellion against his conventional father, and Young shoulders , winner of the Whitbread Prize, the tale of a young boy dealing with the death of loved ones. Wain's use of lower-case letters in the titles of his novels indicate his non-conventional manner.
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Sir Kingsley William Amis, CBE was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir,... various short stories, radio and television scripts, along with works of social and literary criticism. According to his biographer, Zachary Leader, Amis was "the finest English comic novelist of the second half of the twentieth century." He was the father of English novelist Martin Amis. In 2008, The Times ranked Kingsley Amis ninth on their list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. Kingsley Amis was born in Clapham, south London, the son of William Robert Amis, a mustard manufacturer's clerk. He was educated at the City of London School, and in April 1941 was admitted to St. John's College, Oxford, where he read English. It was there that he met Philip Larkin, with whom he formed the most important friendship of his life. While at Oxford, in June 1941, Amis joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. After only a year, in July 1942, he was called up for national service.
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Sir Maurice Vincent Wilkes FRS, FREng, DFBCS was a British computer scientist credited with several important developments in computing. At the time... of his death, Wilkes was an Emeritus Professor of the University of Cambridge. He received a number of distinctions: he was a knight bachelor, Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society, a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the Royal Society. Wilkes was born in Dudley, Worcestershire, England and grew up in Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, where his father worked on the estate of the Earl of Dudley. He was educated at King Edward VI College, Stourbridge and during his school years he was introduced to amateur radio by his chemistry teacher. He went on to read Mathematics at St John's College, Cambridge from 1931-34, continuing to complete a Ph.D. in physics on the topic of radio propagation of very long radio waves in the ionosphere in 1936. He was appointed to a junior faculty position of the University of Cambridge through which he was involved in the establishment of a computing laboratory.
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