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The world-famous author Brian Wilson Aldiss was born in Dereham, Norfolk on 18 August 1925.

He served in the Royal Signals in the Far East during the Second World War, and first came to Oxford in 1947 at the age of 22 to work as a bookshop assistant at Sanders at 104 High Street.

In 1948 he married his first wife Olive Mary Fortescue, secretary to the owner of Sanders, and his father bought them a Taylor Woodrow house in Kidlington as a wedding present. Brian continued to work at Sanders until 1955. He disliked his Kidlington house, and in the late 1950s the family moved to 69 Victoria Road in Summertown, where he wrote his first science-fiction novel Non Stop.

He and Olive had two children – Clive Aldiss (1955) and Caroline Wendy Aldiss (1959) – but his first marriage ended shortly after the birth of Wendy, as his daughter was known.

From 1958 to 1969 Brian was the literary editor of the Oxford Mail, and in the 1960s he lived alone in the Jericho area. In 1965 he married his second wife Margaret Ethel Christie Manson, secretary to the editor of the Oxford Mail, and they also had two children: Timothy Nicholas Aldiss (1967) and Charlotte May Aldiss (1969). They lived outside Oxford in the 1970s, but had to sell their house in 1981 to pay a large sum of back tax. Following the publication of Helliconia in the 1980s, they were able to buy a house on Boars Hill.

In 1995 Brian & Margaret Aldiss bought 39 St Andrew's Road in Old Headington. On 8 December 2002 this house featured in the Living section of The Sunday Times under the heading “Sci-fi space that altered over time”. It records that having sold their Boars Hill home to the mathematician Sir Roger Penrose, they bought their Headington home for £250,000:

They immediately engaged builders, who ripped out all the old wiring and plumbing and began to add a fifth bedroom, a hall, study, staircase and library to the east side.... Aldiss says, “All the floorboards were up and everthing was a mess....

They took the old front door from the other side of the house, with its two windows either side, and moved it to be the new front door, which I thought was very clever. The old staircase is now a sort of western wing. They matched the extension with the existing exterior in every detail.” In the end the total cost of the house extension came to £80,000, and they spent a further £8,000 landscaping the garden....

The home is a charming melange, loved by his grandchildren for its secret staircase and surprising corners, and Aldiss estimates its value to be about £750,000.

The garden is more than 100ft. long and has an extremely old concrete swimming pool at the end, which he has turned into a pond, home to numerous goldfish and frogs.

Brian Aldiss's Headington house at 39 St Andrew's Road, originally named Hambledon, was built in 1914 on the site of dilapidated cottages by Dr Massie of the Rookery, and is shown below shortly after it was built.

The architect of this house was Nathaniel William Harrison and the builder William Matthew Gray. It house was described in the Oxford Chronicle of 9 October 1914 as a gardener's cottage in roughcast and stone, and the first occupant was Dr Massie's gardener, Louis Dawes, who can be seen listed here in the 1921 census with his wife Emma and son Frederick.

Brian had this house renovated, adding a courtyard and a large study with book room over.

His second wife Margaret died of cancer in 1997, and he continued to live here for another twenty years until his own death in 2017.

Despite being an atheist, Brian Aldiss was good friends with Father Michael Brewin, the Vicar of St Andrew's Church. In an interview for the Guardian he said:

One of the things I disliked when I came to Headington was that it was a very Christian community. But the vicar is all right. When Margaret was dying, he was round here often. He was a good man with red wine.

Brian Aldiss died at his Headington home on 19 August 2017, the day after his 92nd birthday, and wanted his funeral to be held at St Andrew's Church in Headington.

 

Right: Memorial to Brian Aldiss in St Andrew's churchyard

There is a full entry on Brian Wilson Aldiss in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
The ODNB online is available free to many public library users, including those in Oxfordshire:
just put your library ticket number in the “Library Card Login” box.

He also has a Wikipedia entry.

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Brian Aldiss and Headington

Headington Poetry Competition 2001

Brian was always a good sport, and was persuaded to enter the Headington Poetry Competition in 2001 with this entry:

Headington at Home

Someone sits drinking in the Café Noir –
Known to punters as the Latin Quarter
Of Headington. Thinking of how he lives
He naturally prefers strong wine to water.

Daily he treads the treeless London Road,
Sensing almost tangibly meanwhile
The people’s discontents; Estate agents
Show how we seek a better “domicile”.

Nowhere a decent restaurant! Only
Cheap food joints and pubs that serve dear hooch.
People dropping litter in the street,
Into the many charity shops they mooch.

Who wants an iron bed, a funeral
By Co-op? Friends, life is just a kind of code!
Be philosophical. Concrete must yield
To mind – and Oxford’s only down the road.

The entries were judged anonymously by Professor Paul Muldoon (President of the Poetry Society and Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford), and the contest excited local press interest when mechanic Reg Burnley of Barton knocked Brian into second place. Undeterred, Brian entered the Headington Poetry Competition again in 2002.

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The Queen's Golden Jubilee, 2002

Brian threw himself into preparations for the celebration of the Queen's Golden Jubilee at a street party in St Andrew's Road, Old Headington on 3 June 2002, and attended many meetings at the church.

His hopes for a “Miss Headington” competition were, however, dashed.

He presented the prizes (right) at the street party, and his daughter Wendy Aldiss, who is a professional photographer, took some excellent pictures (but not this one).