Michael Briggs was a well-known scientist - and a fantasist. When his daughter Joanne began digging into his past for a memoir, new lies kept emerging ...
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rowing up in the 1960s, Joanne Briggs knew her father, Michael, wasn’t like other dads. Once a Nasa scientist, now a big pharma research director, he would regale her and her brother with the extraordinary highlights of his working life.
If he was to be believed, he had advised Stanley Kubrick on the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, smuggled a gun and a microfiche over the Berlin Wall and, most amazingly, conducted an experiment on Mars that led to the discovery of an alien life form. This was in addition to earning a PhD from Cornell University in the US and a prestigious doctor of science award from the University of New Zealand. Quite a leap for the son of a typewriter repair man who grew up in Chadderton, a mill town on the road from Manchester to Oldham, before getting his first degree from the University of Liverpool.
But when Joanne was seven, her father abruptly walked out on the family. He’d been married to her dressmaker mother Marion for 13 years when he decided to leave Britain and his job at the pharmaceutical company Schering and start a new life in Africa with a colleague. “From that point on, I told myself my father wasn’t really gone – he was just somewhere else. He was incredibly important and well known, a powerful thinker who had to be elsewhere to do that,” says Joanne from her home in Sussex. She is now 61, but with her mop of auburn curls and impish grin, it’s easy to imagine her as a child, dazzled by this larger-than-life character.
