Part 2 (Obituaries) - King's College - University of Cambridge

inherited in 1973, was still the place where he felt most at home and where
he also spent long periods of time.
George’s ongoing researches and experiments led him into many fields of
human, and extra-human, knowledge. He tried to uncover the true origin of
the manna that the Israelites consumed in the desert, a project which led to
the publication of The Manna-Machine and The Kabbalah Decoded in 1978. Some
years later he published The Radio Hacker’s Codebook and then devoted his energies
to the study of extra-terrestrial activity. He was also interested in terrestrial
affairs and proposed a novel solution to the Gibraltar problem that involved
offering the Spanish an enclave of their own on the English south coast, where
they could stage bullfights and express other parts of their culture. No stranger
to technology, he took early to programming computers. He spoke a number
of languages and flew a Tiger Moth.
George’s personal life was no less dynamic and unorthodox than his more
professional one. He was affable and handsome, and married three more times
after divorcing his first wife, with whom he had a daughter, in 1961.The two
children from his third marriage to Susan Christian-Howard died tragically in
a car crash in 1996, and George faced this devastating loss with courage: that
same year he had also been diagnosed with cancer. However the previous year
he had married Alison, who was to be his last wife. She cared for him with
devotion, though having to put up with worries such as which part of the
house was radioactive when George apparently acquired a small amount of
heavy water for an experiment.
George did in the end reach some kind of catharsis when it came to his
relationship with his famous father. He hired Max Egremont to write a
biography and offered him all the unpublished material that he had kept out
of the reach of other researchers. The cards were put on the table, and
Egremont’s Siegfried Sassoon: A Life, published in 2005, became a shockingly
honest but also critically acclaimed account of the poet’s life and work.
George died at the age of 69 on 8 March 2006 from cancer. His family and
friends mourn the loss of a remarkable man who with energy, open-
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OBITUARIES