Frederick Gowland Hopkins 1861-1947

Abstract

Parentage and Ancestry Frederick Gowland Hopkins was born in 1861 at Eastbourne, whither hisparents had moved on their marriage. His paternal great-grandfather was a Captain Hopkins, R.N., who, according to family tradition, commanded a ship at Trafalgar. The Captain is said to have had a large family, and some of the sons, including our subject’s grandfather, went into business in London. Two other members of this family deserve special mention. One of them, Manley Hopkins, became Consul-General for the Hawaiian Islands to Great Britain, and his eldest son was Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Jesuit poet. According to the biographer of the latter, G. F. Lahey, S.J., the father was also a man of high intellectual endowment and something of a poet. Hopkins could remember that, as a boy, he was taken by his mother to visit the family of Manley Hopkins, uncle of his late father, and that the son Gerard, the poet, was present, though he did not recall him very clearly from that memory of childhood. The other member of the Captain’s family to be mentioned, as having through her descendants made contact with our subject’s life and career, is Louisa, who married Johann Leopold Abel, a German by birth. Among the offspring of this marriage was Frederick Augustus Abel (later Sir Frederick Abel, Bt.), who became eminent as a chemist and, in particular, an authority on the chemistry of explosives. He did important work for the British Government in that field, was elected F.R.S. in 1860 and was a close friend of his cousin, our Hopkins’s father. A younger brother of Frederick Abel became, through a daughter, the grandfather of Carl Frederick Abel Pantin, F.R.S., who was to be a colleague of Hopkins, as a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. To return to the direct line of ancestry, Hopkins’s paternal grandfather settled in Bishopsgate Street* in the City of London, as a bookseller and an occasional publisher, and there his son, Hopkins’s father, was born and educated, entered business and continued to live until he married.