Early Life
The son of a railway worker, Parkinson was educated at Lancaster Royal Grammar School, a state-run day and boarding school for boys, from where he won a scholarship to Cambridge University, where he read English at Emmanuel College, later switching to read Law. While at university, he was a Labour supporter and for a time was a member of the Labour Party. He did National Service as an NCO in the Royal Air Force. He married Ann Mary Jarvis in 1957. They have three daughters: Mary, Emma and Joanna.
After leaving university, Parkinson worked as a manager for the MetalBox Company, later becoming a consultant. He trained and qualified as a Chartered Accountant and in 1961, founded Parkinson-Hart securities.
Read more about this topic: Cecil Parkinson
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child’s life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“Clever people seem not to feel the natural pleasure of bewilderment, and are always answering questions when the chief relish of a life is to go on asking them.”
—Frank Moore Colby (1865–1925)