Cyril Dean Darlington, 19 December 1903 - 26 March 1981

Abstract

Cyril Dean Darlington’s paternal great-grandfather was Henry Robertson, a merchant of Liverpool, Buenos Aires and Montevideo, and a cousin of W. E. Gladstone, the nineteenth century Liberal Prim e Minister of Great Britain. Henry fathered a son illegitimately by his Welsh nursemaid, Mary Davies of Wrexham , at Salford in 1873; this son was given the name Henry Robertson Darlington, the name Darlington coming from Mary Davies’s later husband, William Darlington, a black smith and iron-founder. Henry Darlington married Alice Dean who gave birth to Cyril’s father, William Henry Robertson Darlington (1866-1943), a schoolm aster and secretary. Cyril has described this change of his paternal name with his characteristic light-hearted and irreverent style— ‘The business end of my Y chromosome therefore comes from Fife and not Durham ’— the county containing the town Darlington. Cyril’s maternal grandfather was a Frankland, son of a Unitarian minister of Whitby, married to a Cowling, an old family of solicitors of York. His mother, Ellen Darlington née Frankland (1874-1949) had two sons, Alfred Frankland Dean and Cyril Dean.