George Armand Robert Kon 1892-1951

Abstract

George Kon came to British science from an unusual background. He was born in St Petersburg on 18 February 1892, the only child of his parents. His father was a cultured and talented member of an old Polish-Jewish family, an excellent mathematician and linguist and the son of a portrait painter; his mother, Marie Fleuret, was French. His father was a banker in a responsible position, and the family was comfortably off. George was a delicate child and was brought up with great care and devotion by his mother and an old nurse. In the candid and penetrating autobiographical notes which he left, he remarks ruefully, ‘It is clear that I was unnecessarily coddled and spoilt and this was to prove a handicap in later life’. He was educated privately by a succession of instructors; a French governess, two Polish tutors (one, Adolf Dygasinski, an author of some note, who gave him a love for natural history) and a German governess. When he was ten, the family moved to Tientsin in North China where his father had become manager of the Russo-Chinese Bank. He spent three happy years in China where his liking for natural history developed into a passion for butterfly collecting. He published two short notes in the Entomologische Zeitschrift between the ages of sixteen and seventeen. In Tientsin he first came into contact with the people whose nationality he was to adopt and was taught English by a ‘worthy though hideous’ lady, the daughter of a missionary. A later move was to Vladivostok, ‘magnificent country for shooting and ideal for butterfly-collecting’, and here the family made friends with Sir Robert Hodgson, then British Vice-Consul. The first turning point in Ron’s life came when Hodgson persuaded his parents to send him to Cambridge. Accordingly, in 1909, he passed the Russian equivalent of Matriculation and, after some coaching in Greek at a rectory near Wisbech, he went up to Caius to read medicine.