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One of Lenham’s famous sons
Tucked away behind shrubbery in the Old Ashford Road is the Old Vicarage, now converted into three houses. It has an impressive driveway and a block of stables, now used as garages. The New Vicarage, a little further along the road towards the village, was built on what once was the vegetable garden of the Old Vicarage. It was an extensive property and the house itself would have accommodated a succession of vicars with their families, with a groom, a gardener and quite probably a live-in housekeeper or maid.

One such vicar was the Revd Hugh L Longuet-Higgins who lived there with his wife and three children from 1921 – 1929. Too long ago for but only a very small number of people to remember them, if any at all. Betty Clark has told us that her late husband, Michael Clark, was baptised by the Revd Longuet-Higgins and of course there may be Certificates of Weddings and Baptisms he had conducted still lying in deed boxes within the village.

There were three children in the family, only two of which have we been able to identify – Hugh Christopher and Michael.

Recently Christopher’s obituary was published in the Guardian – he died on April 11th this year at the age of 80. Following his entrance to Winchester College, where his talents in mathematics and music flourished, in 1941 he won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. By the age of 29, he was professor of theoretical physics at King’s College London, and in 1954 became professor of theoretical chemistry at Cambridge, and a fellow of Corpus Christi College. It is thought he was unfortunate not to receive the Nobel Prize for his work in theoretical chemistry and cognitive science, but was made a fellow of both the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Arts and a foreign associate of the US National Academy of Sciences.

He is survived by his brother, Michael, a distinguished professor of fluid mechanics.

If you are interested, there are many web sites about the life and work of Hugh Christopher Longuet-Higgins born in Lenham in 1923.