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| Martin Hinton from Savage 1963 |
I am puzzled by a comment in a Biographical Memoir of the Royal Society on Martin Hinton. Martin Alister Campbell Hinton (1883-1961) was a palaeontologist and mammalogist at the Natural History Museum in London where he became Keeper (i.e. head) of Zoology in 1936; he retired in 1945.
Hinton became better known in more recent years after suggestions were made that he could have been responsible the Piltdown Man hoax. He had a very different start in life to that of most zoologists. Born in Kensington, London, he was 10 when his father died, leaving the family in dire financial straits. At the age of 12 be found employment thanks to a family friend as clerk in a barristers’ chambers. He worked his way up and then became clerk to a lawyer who became a judge. Legal terms were short and he found plenty of time to expand his already great interest and self-education in the natural world. Hinton’s biographer, the mammalian palaeontologist, Robert Joseph Gay Savage (1927-1998) wrote:
Between 1897 and 1905 the legal vacations (3½ months in the year) and all spare time were spent in Jermyn Street Museum, the Royal College of Surgeons and collecting trips in Norfolk, Essex and Kent. At the age of 16 he read his first scientific paper on the Pleistocene deposits of Ilford and Wanstead to the Geologists’ Association. Work on Pleistocene stratigraphy and mammalian faunas continued to be his absorbing interest for the next 25 years. In 1905 he began regular visits to the Natural History Museum and from 1910 was given the status of Voluntary Worker with the task of working in the Geology Department on the catalogue of fossil rodents commenced by Dr Forsyth-Major. In 1912 he switched to the Zoology Department in the Museum. Hinton worked with Barrett-Hamilton on collections of mammals obtained from the Hebrides and in 1914 was appointed by the Colonial Office and Trustees of the British Museum to examine and report on the papers left by the late Major Barrett-Hamilton relating to the whales of South Georgia; the work was completed in 1915 and released for publication in 1925….
…The emphasis of his research steadily shifted from geology to zoology and most of his later works are concerned with living rodents and whales, mainly problems involving systematics and economic biology. He shouldered an ever increasing load of administrative work at the Museum and took a very active part in several learned societies. He was Zoological Secretary of the Linnean Society from 1936 to 1939 and their Vice-President from 1939 to 1940. He was editor of the Mammal Section of the Zoological Record from 1914 to 1921 and a Vice-President of the Zoological Society of London from 1939 to 1942 and again from 1945 to 1949. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1934.
It would appear that after quitting the legal world in 1916 and being employed as an Assistant at the Museum in 1921 life was tough. He had a wife and three children.
In providing background on the family, Savage noted:
The young Hinton’s interest in nature study was early stimulated through contacts with his Shropshire relatives, the de Carle Sowerbys, and it was Arthur de Carle Sowerby, one of a line of great Victorian naturalists, who influenced young Hinton.
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| Arthur de Carle Sowerby |
I have written on Sowerby* and his life as a naturalist in China previously. What puzzles me is that Sowerby was two years younger than Hinton. Sowerby was hardly a father figure or older mentor. But perhaps it was Sowerby’s exploits in China from the early 1900s onwards that encouraged Hinton and kept him so desperate for knowledge and eventual release from his work as a barrister’s clerk. I have not found how Martin Hinton and Arthur de Carle Sowerby were related, nor have I been able to find any link to Shropshire; from the mid-1700s at the latest the Sowerby’s were Londoners.
Hinton was a ‘character’ and a Lamarckist. He retired with his second wife to Somerset. Savage recalled:
His sartorial elegance was always deliciously anachronous. He never abandoned nightshirts and heavy black boots, and his great ulster and cape were a familiar sight in Bristol on a winter’s evening when he attended a university lecture. All his clothes had voluminous pockets and their contents were a source of astonishment to adults and near magic to children. The biographer has seen them yield a half chronometer, three large pocket watches, a bulky aneroid, scissors, several huge pocket-knives, to say nothing of tobacco tins, notebooks and host of other bric-a-brac.
In spite of the number of administrative jobs he undertook, he was never an organized man. He had the innate habits of a squirrel; literally everything was kept. He boasted of smoking an ounce of tobacco every day of his life since he was 17 years old and never threw a tin away—they (or at least a few) came in useful to contain his rodents. After his death, his rooms yielded over
10 000 tobacco tins, cheque book stubs, receipts for groceries, rent, clothes, notices of meetings, catalogues, used envelopes and advertisements—over a ton of paper, leaving aside correspondence, manuscript and the like; all was completely mixed up together, and some of it going back over 60 years.
Hinton evolved from professional legal clerk and amateur palaeontologist into a professional naturalist-scientist. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society entirely without a formal education or university degree. In a similar but different way, Sowerby followed the same trajectory. He started as an explorer, hunter and naturalist but evolved into a naturalist-scientist. A major difference was that Sowerby spent most of his life in China; Hinton metamorphosed in London. Both spent a great deal of their lives short of money.
Is anything else known about the family and/or personal links between Hinton and Sowerby?
*See earlier articles on Sowerby here, here and here.
Luk CYL. 2023. The making of a naturalist in Manchuria: Arthur de Carle Sowerby, 1885–1922. Notes and Records: the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2023.0028
Savage RJG. 1963. Martin Alister Campbell Hinton. 1883-1961. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 9, 154-170.
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