85-year-old ‘genius’ Robert Reid in search of a lost piece of his past

Published: 2nd June, 2011
by TOM FOOT

HE achieved one of the highest IQ scores in the country and spent his lifetime locked in the pursuit of the mathematically unknown, cracking puzzles in minutes and astounding everyone with his mind-boggling inventions.

But now, after almost 50 years in Peru running a cinema, Robert Reid is back in West Hampstead and searching for his childhood pals.

The 85-year-old “genius”, who suffers from acute Parkinson’s disease and lives in sheltered housing in West End Lane, is looking for members of the “Cabourn” family he played with behind his home at 57 Greencroft Gardens.

He said: “I remember I would shout out: ‘Betty, Betty – over the wall, over the wall.’ And she would come and pick me up and over it.

“Betty was the eldest and Audrey was the youngest. Then there was Mickey, Pat and Joan.”

When he lived in West Hampstead, Mr Reid achieved a National Institute of Industrial Psychology-accredited IQ score of 142, officially marking him out as a “genius”.

He was sent to a special college in Canada, and then went on to Peru, until returning a few years ago to the area where he grew up.

“I have a very strong brain,” he said. “But people aren’t above or below one another. They are just different.”

Parkinson’s causes Mr Reid to fall – he has been taken to University College Hospital nine times in 11 months – and means he struggles to complete the puzzles he holds so dear.

But despite the lifelong disease, he became known as a master “recreational mathematician” and shape dissectionist. 

His council home is an Aladdin’s cave filled with his cubic shapes, designs and academic journals. He can split cubic shapes into equal parts with ease and has designed puzzles that have won him praise.

His Squirmfest – where a complex shape is made to fit together with identical ones in unison, continuing into infinity – was “mathematically un­known” until he created it. A large mural of the design hangs on his wall of his home.

“I can’t tell you how I see it,” he said. “There is only one other person in the world that knows that.

“I always had an interest in shapes. I wasn’t any good at geometry because my hand was always shaky. But I was very good at jigsaw puzzles. There was a jigsaw puzzle club and the owner would send away for the most difficult puzzles and feed them to me.”

Mr Reid believes that, with the right marketing, his Cubic Trisection creation could be the next Rubik’s Cube, the famous colour-coded twisting puzzle. His brother – a lieutenant in the Lifeguards – had a photographic memory, his sister is an eminent historian and his accountant grandad was said to have almost supernatural powers when it came to adding figures.

“It must be genetic,” said Mr Reid, who is a brain donor. “I know I have a peculiar mind and that some people don't understand me.”

He regularly attends “puzzle parties” at Camden Lock’s West Yard in Camden Town. The Wednesday night event brings some of the capital’s top puzzle breakers to the Lockside Lounge once a month.

Mr Reid attended Arnold House School in Belsize but went on to live in Canada and then Peru, where he imported film equipment and later ran his own cinema showing “good films and bad films”.

Anyone with information about the “Cabourn” family can contact the New Journal.