Frank Adams was born in Woolwich on 5 November 1930. His home was in New Eltham, about ten miles east of the centre of London. Both his parents were graduates of King’s College London, which was where they had met. They had one other child - Frank’s younger brother Michael - who rose to the rank of Air Vice-Marshal in the Royal Air Force. In his creative gifts and practical sense, Frank took after his father, a civil engineer, who worked for the government on road building in peace-time and airfield construction in war-time. In his exceptional capacity for hard work, Frank took after his mother, who was a biologist active in the educational field. In 1939, at the outbreak of World War II, the Adams family was evacuated first to Devon, for a year, and then to Bedford, where Frank became a day pupil at Bedford School; one of a group of independent schools in that city. Those who recall him at school describe him as socially somewhat
gauche
and quite a daredevil; indeed there were traces of this even when he was much older. In 1946, at the end of the war, the rest of the family returned to London while Frank stayed on at school to take the usual examinations, including the Cambridge Entrance Scholarship examination at which he won an Open Scholarship to Trinity College. The Head of Mathematics at Bedford, L.H. Clarke, was a schoolmaster whose pupils won countless open awards, especially at Trinity.
Harold Garnet Callan. 5 March 1917 — 3 November 1993 Elected FRS 1963
