Howard Walter Florey, Baron Florey of Adelaide and Marston, 1898-1968

Abstract

Howard Walter Florey, who died suddenly in Oxford on 21 February 1968 was the fiftieth President of the Royal Society and the tenth representative of medicine in this office. At a dinner given for him in Oxford in 1966 he remarked that he had never expected to be President. He took up the position with diffidence. But his Presidency turned out to be an eventful one in which things were done that had scarcely seemed possible before. Early life in Australia Florey was born in Adelaide on 24 September 1898. His father, Joseph Florey had gone to Australia from England in the 1880s with a tuberculous wife and two small daughters and had become a prosperous boot and shoe manufacturer. After his wife’s death Joseph Florey married Bertha Mary Wadham, a second generation Australian, and they had two daughters and a son. Howard Walter was the youngest member of the family and was brought up in pleasant surroundings with his two sisters, one of whom afterwards did medicine, and two half-sisters. Looking back many years later he could recollect no serious worries or frustrations as a young boy and nothing in his environment appears to have clouded his early life. From 1908 to 1910 he was at Kyre College. In 1911 he was sent to St Peter s Collegiate School, Adelaide, which he remembered as a good school where the curriculum was not specialized or hampering and which undoubtedly had a formative influence on his character. There he became known as Floss In 1913, or thereabouts, his father suffered financial misfortune and the knowledge that he would need to rely more on his own resources may well have coloured his attitude to life.