Richard Whiddington, 1885-1970

Abstract

Richard Whiddington was born in London on 25 November 1885. His father, also Richard, was a Londoner before him. His mother was born Ada Ann Fitzgerald at Swords, near Dublin. Both father and mother were schoolteachers. Miss Fitzgerald, as she then was, had come to London, in her teens, with her elder sister Eva, and had been appointed headmistress of a girls’ school in the Mornington Crescent district at the age of nineteen. Richard was the only son of the marriage; there were two daughters. At the age of six, Richard Whiddington was sent to the William Ellis School at Highgate. There he stayed until he had passed the examination for the London Intermediate B.Sc. and competed successfully in the Open Scholarship examination at St John’s College, Cambridge. He entered that college as a freshman in October 1905, significantly older than the majority of his contemporaries. Within three years, however, he had secured Firsts in both parts of the Natural Sciences Tripos and had completed his London (external) B.Sc. In his final year alone he had been awarded three undergraduate prizes by his college. His First in Part II of the Tripos had been in physics, but to begin with he had been more actively interested in biology. He had taken botany and geology along with physics and chemistry in Part I. Furthermore, he had found time for some extra-curricular research in the biological field during those years. In his second year, drawing inspiration from the work of Bateson & Punnett, he had embarked on certain Mendelian experiments with rats. In due course he had a colony of upwards of forty descendants of an albino white and a river rat established in his college rooms. The college authorities, when they became aware of the situation, very naturally regarded the outcome of this adventure of the enquiring mind as unconducive to good order and discipline, and the experiment had to be abandoned.