| AdminHistory | Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911) was a surgeon, botanist and explorer.
Hooker was born on 30 June 1817 in Halesworth, Suffolk. He was the 2nd son of the botanist, Sir William Jackson Hooker, and Maria Sarah Turner, eldest daughter of the banker, Dawson Turner. The family relocated to Glasgow in 1820 when Hooker's father, William, was appointed Regius Professor of Botany at Glasgow University. Hooker developed an early interest in natural history and started to attend his father's lectures from as young as seven years old. He was educated at Glasgow High School before studying medicine at Glasgow University, graduating in 1839. In the same year, a meeting with Captain James Ross at his father's house led Hooker to join Ross' Antarctic Expedition to the South Magnetic Pole on HMS Erebus as Assistant Surgeon. This was the first of many expeditions he took including a voyage to the Himalayas and India (1847-1851); a voyage to Palestine (1860) with Daniel Hanbury; a voyage to Morocco (1871) in the company of John Ball, Goerge Maw and a gardener from Kew called Crump; a voyage to Western United States (1877) with his friend, Asa Gray, an American botanist.
In 1855 Hooker was appointed Assistant Director at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and in 1865 he succeeded his father as Director (which his father had held since 1841). Whilst at Kew, Hooker clashed with Richard Owen (1804-1892). Superintendant of the natural history departments of the British Museum. Hooker also faced problems in his position as Director from a member of Parliament, Acton Smee Ayrton (1816-1886), who was appointed as First Commissioner of Works by the Prime Minister, William Gladstone (1809-1898). Hooker had a lifelong friendship with Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and Hooker classified the plants that Darwin had collected in South America and on the Galapagos Islands. Hooker was instrumental in the joint paper on transmutation of Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace (1823-1913) being presented at the Linnean Society in 1858. Hooker also publicly defended Darwin's theory, along with Thomas Henry Huxley, at the historic debate at the Oxford University Museum in 1860. Hooker received many honours including Companion of the Order of the Bath (1869), Knight Commander of the Order of the Star of India (1877), Founder's Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society (1883), Knight Grand Commander of the Order of the Star of India (1897), Order of Merit (1907). He was also a Fellow of the Royal Society, and its Presidet from 1873-1877, a Foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the Linnean Society from 1842. He also wrote numerous publications including 'Flora Antarctica' (1844), 'Himalayan Journals...' (1854), and 'Handbook of the British Flora' (1858).
In 1851 Hooker married Frances Harriet Henslow (1825-1874), the daughter of John Stevens Henslow, Darwin's mentor. They had 4 sons and 3 daughters. After Frances' death in 1874, Hooker married Lady Hyacinth Jardine (1842-1921) in 1876, the daughter of William Samuel Symonds and the widow of Sir William Jardine. They had 2 sons together. Hooker died on 10 December 1911 and is buried, alongside his father, in the churchyard of St. Anne's Church, Kew. |
Thomas Henry Farrer, first Baron Farrer (1819-1899), civil servant and statistician, was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford. Farrer was the son of Thomas Farrer, a solicitor in Lincoln's Inn Fields. He was called to the bar of Lincoln's Inn in 1844 but retired from practice a few years later. He became a civil servant in 1850 when he took the post of secretary to the naval department of the Board of Trade. In 1865 he was promoted and became one of the joint secretaries of the Board of Trade, and in 1867 he became permanent secretary. Farrer was President of the Royal Statistical Society from 1894 to 1896.
He married Frances Erskine (1825-1870) in 1854 and they had four children: Emma Cecilia "Ida" Farrer (1854-1946), Thomas Cecil Farrer (1859-1940), Claude Erskine Farrer (1862-1890), and Hon. Noel Maitland Farrer (1867-1929). Ida Farrer went on to marry Horace Darwin, son of Charles Darwin (1851-1928).
Farrer's first wife, Frances, died on 15 May 1870. Farrer remarried in 1873 to Frances' half-cousin, Katherine Euphemia Wedgwood (1839-1931). Farrer died on 11 October 1899 at Abinger Hall, Dorking. |