John Frank Charles Kingman was born on 28th August 1939, a few days before the outbreak of World War II. This Festschrift is in honour of his seventieth birthday.

John Kingman was born in Beckenham, Kent, the son of the scientist Dr F. E. T. Kingman FRSC and the grandson of a coalminer. He was brought up in north London, where he attended Christ's College, Finchley. He was an undergraduate at Cambridge, where at age 19 at the end of his second year he took a First in Part II of the Mathematical Tripos, following it with a Distinction in the graduate-level Part III a year later, for his degree. He began postgraduate work as a research student under Peter Whittle, but transferred to David Kendall in Oxford when Peter left for Manchester in 1961, returning to Cambridge when Kendall became the first Professor of Mathematical Statistics there in 1962.

John's early work was on queueing theory, a subject he had worked on with Whittle, but was also an interest of Kendall's. His lifelong interest in mathematical genetics also dates back to this time (1961). His next major interest was in Markov chains, and in a related matter—what happens to Feller's theory of recurrent events in continuous time. His first work here dates from 1962, and led to his landmark 1964 paper on regenerative phenomena, where we meet (Kingman) p-functions.