Edward Hindle

Edward Hindle was born in Sheffield on 21 March 1886 the son of Edward James Hindle and his wife, Sarah Elizabeth Dewar.[1]

He was educated at home. From Bradford Technical College (now the University of Bradford) he obtained a scholarship in biology at the Royal College of Science in 1903.[2] He was further educated at King's College London,[3] and after research at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, he gained a Ph.D at Berkeley University of California in 1910. Returning to England, he entered Magdalene College, Cambridge, eventually becoming Sc.D in 1926.

Already a member of the Territorials, in 1914 he became a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Engineers, seeing service in France and Palestine until demobilised in Egypt in 1919.

In 1922 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers were James Hartley Ashworth, John Stephenson, Francis A H Marshall and George Leslie Purser. He served as the Society's Vice President from 1943 to 1946.[4]

Appointed Professor of Biology at Cairo University School of Medicine, in 1924 he returned to research in England at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. From there in 1925 he joined and became leader of the expedition mounted by the Royal Society to China, returning in 1928 to research at the Wellcome Bureau of Scientific Research and then at the National Institute for Medical Research.

Hindle was Regius Professor of Zoology in succession to John Graham Kerr. He was Curator of the Hunterian Museum at the University of Glasgow from 1935 to 1943, being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1942. During his time at Glasgow, he encouraged research in genetics and freshwater biology. Among the talented scientists he invited to work in his department was Guido Pontecorvo, who returned to the university from internment as an enemy alien in 1942. In 1938 Hindle had joined the Officers' Training Corps of Glasgow University, becoming a lieutenant-colonel and its commanding officer. He also commanded a battalion of the Glasgow Home Guard. He was a founder of the Zoological Society of Glasgow, which opened Calderpark Zoo after he had left the city.[5]

In 1943 he was appointed the first Scientific Director of the Zoological Society of London, a new post mainly concerned in organizing all the more scientific branches of the Society’s work as well as scientific problems concerning the collections of animals at Regent’s Park Zoo and Whipsnade Zoo.[6]

Hindle retired from Regent's Park in 1951, when he also gave up his post as General Secretary of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Among many interests, he continued his work for the Royal Geographical Society, being Honorary Secretary from 1951 to 1961 and Honorary Vice-President in 1962.

His three major achievements in his career were his work on leishmaniasis, on yellow fever and on spirochaetoses, all three arthropod-borne. A minor achievement was that every golden hamster in Europe and elsewhere descends from two pairs found in Syria that he was given in 1931.

In 1919 he married Irene Margaret Twist D.1933), first cousin of Sir John Graham Kerr FRS. In 1936 he married the former Ellen Mary Theodora Schroeder, from whom he separated in 1951. There were no children by either marriage.

Hindle died in a taxi in London on 22 January 1973.

• P. C. C. Garnham, Edward Hindle 1886-1973, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, Vol. 20 (Dec., 1974), pp. 217–234 https://www.jstor.org/stable/769639?
• http://www.175heroes.org.uk/edward_hindle.html