Henry Hallett Dale, 1875-1968

Abstract

Dale had no knowledge of any ancestors or relatives who had any kind of contact with science. An amusing but cranky cousin of Dale’s father, R. M. Dale, wasted much time in trying to fake an interesting genealogy for the family and told Dale that he had discovered an ancestor, named Dale, who was a botanist and had accompanied Captain Cook on one of his voyages—or perhaps had made an arrangement to do so, which failed. However, Dale could find no Dale among the supernumeraries of any of Cook’s expeditions. There was also a certain Samuel Dale who, in 1707, published a book entitled Pharmacologeia . . . Supplementum . This, so Dale was told, was the first known use of the term pharmacology. ‘I am confident that R. M. Dale would have brought this “savant” into my ancestry’, wrote Dale, ‘but I know of no reason, apart from his name, for suspecting any connexion.’ Dale’s paternal grandfather, Robert Dale, was manager of a pottery in Denby, near Ripley, Derbyshire. He is remembered by Dale ‘as a tall, gentle old man, of a simple piety and scholarly and scientific tastes at a humble level’ and as being interested ‘in hearing what lectures he could, and reading what books he could find about the “wonders of science” ’. Little is known about Dale’s paternal grandmother. She died when Dale’s father was still young; she certainly had an earlier marriage, for Dale’s father had a half-sister older than himself, he being the only child of her second marriage. About her mother, Dale’s great-grandmother Batkin, who had been more of a local celebrity, having borne nineteen children and lived to be ninety-nine, Dale writes: ‘There is no reason to credit the old lady with other claims to distinction, than those due to her fecundity and longevity; my father whose tendency to hoard and repeat stories I have, perhaps, to some extent inherited, used to tell of her that, when one of her daughters died, at the age of seventy-five, she shed a quiet tear and remarked that “she was always the weakly one” ’.