  Richard Mervyn Hare was born at Backwell Down, outside Bristol, on 21 March 1919. He was to be known professionally as R.M.  Hare, and personally as Dick Hare. His father, Charles Francis Aubone Hare, was director of a firm, John Hare &amp; Co., making paint and floor-cloth; his mother was Louise Kathleen Simonds, of a brewing and banking family. His parents died while he was still young. He was then cared for chiefly by guardians and relatives on his mother’s side, being sent to school first at Copthorne in Sussex, and then, from 1932 to 1937, as a classical scholar at Rugby. He was awarded a scholarship to Balliol College in 1937, where he read two years of Greats before the outbreak of war.