I enjoyed my visit to Westminster Abbey. I did not realize how many famous people were memorialized or buried there, such as Stephen Hawking, Charles Darwin, and William Shakespeare.
Stephen Hawking was a famous English theoretical physicist and author. Despite being confined to a wheelchair after the age of 21, he made many discoveries in the areas of space and time. Stephen was married twice. His first wife was Jane Beryl Wilde Hawking Jones. His second wife’s name was Elaine Mason. Stephen had three children with his first wife: Lucy Hawking, Timothy Hawking, and Robert Hawking. He had a disease called Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) which slowly caused him to become paralyzed. He grew up in Highgate, London and St Albans, Hertfordshire and worked as a professor at Cambridge. While he is most known for discovering black holes emit radiation, he has discovered a number of other things and has contributed to countless other scientific breakthroughs and has written many scientific books. Stephen Hawking has received a great number of awards, medals, and other prizes for his work. He was born in 1942 and passed away in 2018 at the age of 76. We lost a great mind but heaven gained a great man.
Charles Darwin was an English biologist and naturalist recognized for his contributions to evolutionary biology. He married his first cousin, Emma Darwin, and they had ten children together but only seven lived to adulthood. He lived with his wife and children just south of London in the Kent countryside. Charles Darwin was a naturalist, philosopher, geologist, plant biologist, explorer, and travel writer. Charles spent over forty years suffering from multiple medical issues including vomiting, skin problems, and headaches. He was diagnosed to have a type of panic disorder as well as psychosomatic skin disorder. Despite his medical troubles he still made major findings that most of the world today consider a fact. Charles introduced the theory of evolution by natural selection, commonly known as ‘Survival of the Fittest’. He first had the idea, during a trip to the Galapagos Islands, when he studied different types of finches and how they lived. He continued his work by creating artificial evolution with pigeons using selective breeding. He lived from 1809 to 1882. At the age of 73, he sadly died due to a heart attack.
William Shakespeare was a famous English playwright in the 16th and 17th centuries. Shakespeare married his wife Anne Hathaway when he was only 18. This caused a bit of a scandal due to Anne’s age of 26. They had three kids together: Susanna, and twins Judith and Hamnet. Shakespeare was an actor, a poet, and a playwright, but is most widely known for writing plays, his most famous two being Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet. He lived in between Stratford upon Avon and London. In total Shakespeare wrote thirty-eight plays. Shakespeare’s cause of death is unknown. He is not buried at Westminster Abbey but instead lies in the Holy Trinity Church at Stratford upon Avon in Warwickshire. Shakespeare lived from 1564 to 1616 and passed far too early at the age of 52.
Theatre in London U of A 