A Multifarious Life

Abstract

Charles Percy Snow was born on 15 October 1905 at 40 Richmond Road in Aylestone Park, which at that time was a new suburb of the East Midlands city of Leicester. He was the second of four sons; William Harold Snow had been born on 10 October 1898, Edward Eric Snow would arrive on 13 March 1910 and Philip Albert Snow on 7 August 1915. All the sons except Philip were known by their second forenames (‘Percy Snow’ only became ‘Charles’ in 1950 when he married Pamela Hansford Johnson, who instigated the change). Their father, William Edward Snow, worked as a clerk in a boot and shoe factory and, for a time, like Lewis Eliot’s father in Time of Hope, ran a small business, which went bankrupt in 1914; but his real interest was in music. He was an Associate, then a Fellow, of the Royal College of Organists, who worked as an organist and choir master at local churches, and gave piano lessons in the evenings. His wife, born Ada Sophia Robinson, had come from Stamford in Lincolnshire to work as a seamstress in Leicester; she was 25 and he was 28 when they married.