Eventually, another school was found for him; Milner attended King's College London starting in 1946, where he competed as a featherweight boxer.
He graduated in 1949 as the best mathematics student in his year, and received a master's degree in 1950 under the supervision of Richard Rado and Charles Coulson.
Partial deafness prevented him from joining the Navy, and instead, in 1951, he took a position with the Straits Trading Company in Singapore assaying tin.
[1] Milner's interest in set theory was sparked by visits of Paul Erdős to Singapore and by meeting András Hajnal while on sabbatical in Reading.
[1] He generalized Chen Chung Chang's ordinal partition theorem (expressed in the arrow notation for Ramsey theory) ωω→(ωω,3)2 to ωω→(ωω,k)2 for arbitrary finite k. He is also known for the Milner–Rado paradox.