His father and uncle ran a shoe and boot factory. He attended grammar school in Northampton, and was an enthusiastic experimental scientist at an early age, producing the customary number of youthful chemical explosions. As a schoolboy, he won a prize for collecting wildflowers. In his autobiography,
What Mad Pursuit, Crick describes how, along with his brother, he "was mad about tennis," but not much interested in other sports and games. At the age of fourteen, he obtained a scholarship to Mill Hill School in North London. Four years later, at eighteen, he entered University College, London. At the time of his matriculation, his parents had moved from Northampton to Mill Hill, and this allowed Crick to live at home while attending university. He obtained a second-class honours degree in physics, with additional work in mathematics, in three years. In his autobiography, Crick writes of his education in a rather light-hearted way. He feels that his background in physics and mathematics was sound, but quite classical, while he says that he learned and understood very little in the field of chemistry. Like many of the physicists who became the first molecular biologists and who began their careers around the end of World War II, Crick read and was impressed by Erwin Schrödinger 's book
What Is Life", but later recognized its limitations in its neglect of chemistry.
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