Alan Middleton
Profile
Alan Middleton was born in 1926 in Norwich, a city to which he has remained loyal – and whose accent he has never lost. From the Baptist Sunday School of his childhood he joined an evangelical group which preached outside public houses, inspired by a firm belief that the Bible was the irrefutable word of God. Thus he met Janet Wheeler, the daughter of an ardent local Baptist family. Later, searching for a faith of her own, Janet found the Unitarian Octagon Chapel, served in those days by the distinguished minister and poet, Leonard Mason. Janet and Alan began attending services at the Octagon and were married there in 1949.
On leaving school in Norwich in 1941, Alan studied at night school to qualify as an electrical engineer; but most of his working life was spent as a mechanical engineer, specialising in structural stress analysis. He moved over to work in the aircraft industry as a stressman, first on fixed-wing aircraft in Luton and then on helicopters at Westlands in Yeovil. His interest in aircraft was recreational as well as professional: he obtained a private pilot’s licence and used to fly at weekends with a club. In 1960 he moved to a job at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell in Oxfordshire (in a branch that was later to become the Rutherford Laboratory). During this time he earned the status of Chartered Electrical Engineer. He worked on large experimental apparatus, and his swan song was the structural design work for a big radio telescope.
Alan’s retirement in 1991 gave him more time to pursue his other interests and to enjoy his family. He and Janet have seven children: four girls and three boys, who have distinguished themselves in fields as diverse as mathematics, chemistry, agriculture, finance, and electronics. They have seven grandchildren, including an adopted Guatemalan child.
His early experience of tub-thumping evangelism has left Alan wary of all attempts to proselytise in the name of religion, and grateful to Janet for rescuing him from his early blinkered views. (Almost the only remnant of his Baptist youth is his strong teetotalism: he deplores the abuse of alcohol for the crime and violence to which it leads.) But in his quiet way he has served – and continues to serve – the cause of Unitarianism at many levels. Since joining the congregation in the 1960s, when Dr Lance Garrard was the Principal and Minister, and the seven Middleton children filled a whole pew in the chapel, Alan has been the chairman of our Chapel Society for two five-year periods (he was the first lay chairman, during Bruce Findlow’s ministry); his five-year stint as Treasurer ended recently, and now he serves as the Membership Secretary. He is also our historian, whose work on the development of the Chapel Society, from its foundation in 1956 to the present day, was published in 2001. He thinks that our church community is currently in good health; while regretting the absence of children, he welcomes the young people who are finding their way to us via the Internet.
At the collegiate level, Alan serves as the Secretary of the Manchester Academy Trust, which was established in 1996 (when the college became a full member of the university), with the objective of ‘advancing the Christian Religion in its simplest and most intelligible form, in particular through the promotion of the education and training of ministers and lay leaders and research into Unitarianism and dissent’. In effect, this low-profile body has the task of ensuring the continuing Unitarian identity of the college.
Nationally, Alan helped to found the Martineau Society and currently serves as its Secretary. Initially inspired by his Norwich origins to study the life and thought of James Martineau (1805–1900), he finds himself increasingly drawn to James’s sister Harriet (1802–1876), whom he admires for the diversity of her talents (as sociologist and economist, farmer, social reformer, traveller, and writer). Alan enjoys his e-mail contacts with Martineau students around the world (even in Baghdad) and has catalogued all the books by and about James and Harriet in the college library.
In his own spiritual life, Alan says he is moving on a path similar to that of Harriet, in that he has gradually moved away from formal Christian theology to something much less literal and more universal. His work in nuclear and particle physics has given him a vision of the mysteries of the universe and has led him to revere the creative force that is immanent in nature and in humanity. Lest such a belief should seem merely abstract, it should be said that it inspires him to volunteer every Wednesday for the League of Friends of the John Radcliffe Hospital, buttering sandwiches, serving coffee, and washing up in the cafeteria.
It is surprising to find that such a busy person has any spare time at all, but Alan and Janet reserve at least one day a week to do things together, usually walking in the countryside. (Janet has retired from her work as an auxiliary nurse at Michael Sobell House, the hospice attached to the Churchill Hospital.) Alan plays the piano and the organ – ‘not very well’, he says, describing himself with characteristic modesty as ‘a hybrid dabbler’. Dabbling? One wonders what he would have achieved in life if he had really seriously applied himself! Catherine Robinson September 2002