Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath
Possibly Cambridge’s most famous lovers, though not for their happy ending, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath met at a party in Cambridge in February, 1956. Allegedly he kissed her passionately on the neck and she reciprocated by biting him on the cheek – not your usual ‘do you come here often?’ but it seemed to do the trick. Just months later they were married.
Both were poets and lived large: he was known as ‘the biggest seducer on campus’; she was a blonde, brilliant American studying English literature at Newnham who’d had ‘hundreds of boyfriends’. Indeed, Sylvia was in love with Richard Sassoon, a distant relation of the war poet, Siegfried Sassoon, when she met Ted, and would have almost certainly married him instead if he’d asked.
The Hughes lived at 55 Eltisely Avenue in Cambridge and later moved to London. She committed suicide at her home in Primrose Hill on 11 February, 1963 – just round the corner from where the Beatles were recording Abbey Road that same day.
Stephen Hawking and Jane Wilde
Living genius and local hero Stephen Hawking fell in love with his first wife, Jane Wilde, while he was studying for his PhD at Cambridge. His entry to Cambridge was the subject of their first conversation at a party in 1963, and she was his date to a May Ball later that year.
Their story of love and determination against the odds recently became the subject of a film, The Theory of Everything, based on Jane’s memoirs of her time with Stephen.
They married in 1965 and had three children, but Stephen was rapidly deteriorating having been diagnosed with a rare motor neuron disease. Their relationship lasted until 1990 when they separated amicably.
“Perhaps there was something about his very eccentricity that fascinated me in my rather conventional existence,” she writes in Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen Hawking.
Lord Byron and John Edleston
The famous poet, who kept a tame bear in his rooms at Trinity College when told he couldn’t have a dog, is known as much for his notorious personal life as his poetry.
But while he had countless, well-documented affairs with women, including his half sister, a few liaisons with men are hinted at in his poetry and letters. At Cambridge, Byron met John Edleston, a choirboy two years his junior, for whom he developed ‘a violent, though pure, love and passion’.
Take a romantic stroll and pay homage to the ‘mad, bad’ romantic at Byron’s Pool in Trumpington, so called because he took regular dips there in the summer.
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge
Kate and Wills made an eagerly awaited visit to their namesake city in November 2012, shortly before the Duchess’s first pregnancy was announced. Crowds gathered in the Market Square to catch a glimpse of the royal couple, who had lunch at a local pub (the Fort St George – perhaps with baby names in mind?) and visited homeless shelter, Jimmy’s. They have since had a punt named after them.
Though the pair met at University in St Andrews, the Duchess is patron to a local Cambridge charity, EACH, and we’re sure it won’t be long before they’re back.
