Nobel Laureate Fined at St. Neots

The little Victorian Court room at St. Neots is gone but the building of which is was part is now the town’s award winning museum, whose expanding web site has a gallery of local criminals to lend colour to the lives of our ancestors. The Court dealt with mainly local law breakers but occasionally an outsider found themselves in front of local J.P.’s such as Fydel Rowley of Priory Park. He was noted for his eccentricities and was ‘violently’ opposed to motor cars and expected his guests to arrive in horse-drawn vehicles or they were not invited again! His odd manner of dress and his habit of walking about the countryside with a rough stick are said to him being mistaken for a tramp on several occasions. Thus, when standing before him on a charge of dangerous driving one could expect little sympathy if you were guilty.

Undergraduate Fined. Bedfordshire Times Friday 9th May 1930

At St. Neots Petty Sessions yesterday (Thursday), before Mr G F Rowley and others as a sequel to an accident on the Cambridge Road on 29th April, Paul A. M. Dirac of St. Johns College, Cambridge, was fined £2 for driving negligently. The evidence showed that the defendant and a companion were returning from Cardington where they had been to see the German airship, and had come out from behind two other cars. In attempting to avoid Mrs G Ferguson, of Cromwell Gardens, St. Neots he swerved, and the back part of the car caught Mrs. Ferguson and her perambulator, knocking both over. Mrs. Ferguson was seriously injured, but is now making good progress.

The undergraduate was Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac who became one of the ‘most significant physicists’ of the last century and was three years later to share the Nobel prize with Erwin Schrodinger (he of ‘dead or not cat’ fame) for their work on the new field of Quantum theory. His Cambridge friends invented a new unit in celebration of his sparing use of the English language. One ‘dirac’ was a rate of one word per hour! You can find his commemorative marker in Westminster Abbey. Little can Lord of St. Neots Manor Rowley have thought that the man he fined would have later in life been awarded the Order of Merit for his contributions to British science! When you next step over the threshold into the museum building (entry free to locals) do remember that you can make mistakes in life and be fined but you can still end up with a memorial with the most famous in the land! By Peter Ibbett 4