Conrad Hal Waddington, 8 November 1905 - 26 September 1975

Abstract

Conrad Hal Waddington was born in Evesham on 8 November 1905. His parents, Hal and Mary Ellen (Warner) Waddington, were of long-established Quaker families and were first cousins, as were Mary Ellen’s parents. His surname traces to the Lancashire village of Waddington. He had one sister— Mrs Doris Christie. His father was a tea planter in South India and he spent his first 2 1/2-3 years on a tea estate in the Wynaad district of the Western Ghats and then nearly two years in Coimbatore, both being in the Madras Presidency (now Tamil Nadu). In a brief autobiographical fragment he describes one of his few memories of India: ‘One morning in the road outside our house I was scuffling my feet in the thick dust; as I remember it, it must have been at least six inches deep. I looked over my shoulder and there was a herd of young domesticated buffaloes coming fast towards me. I was terrified. I fled through the gate into the wide open garden, where the only cover was a rather straggly hedge in which I hid. It was made of some thick juicy plant, whose fleshy leaves were almost indistinguishable from the stem and when I broke one off and, without thinking, put it in my mouth as I watched with relief how the buffaloes went by without noticing me, the white acrid sap stung my tongue sharply, and I felt a renewal of terror that I was now poisoned and would surely die.’ He returned to England at the age of four (though his parents did not return permanently until 1928) to live with an aunt and uncle who had a son of his own age, on a farm in Sedgeberrow in the shadow of Bredon Hill. His uncle was farm manager for a bachelor gentleman farmer, always known as ‘Squire Bowly’, and the family lived with the squire in the farmhouse. His grandmother, who brought up his sister, lived in a house on the outskirts of Evesham where he went on school holidays.