Dr. Melville Hocken

Abstract

DR. MELVILLE HOCKEN told me, at his hospitable dinner-table IN 1946, that he was born at Cardiff on January 10,1888, when his parents were cruising off the Weleh coast—not in Cornwall, as has been ststed elsewhere. He lived with his father, a Thames pilot ,at Gravesend from the age of four to sixteen, during which years he discovered mole crickets in Kent and evinced an innate bent for biology, fostered by Moseley's 1892 Challenger voyage, received as a school prize in 1903. His first medical appointment was at the East Suffolk and Ipswich Hospital. In 1914 he joined the R.A.M.C. as senior medical officer at the Martlesham Experimental Station near Ipswich, and later served at Filby on the Norfolk Broads. In 1920, after a short time in Ipswich (like Thomas Muffet in 1585), he moved to the little Suffolk town of Halesworth, where he later bought Adams's commodious brewery house, with its excellent Charles I staircase of appliqué work. Practice so thrived that in 1938 he took two partners ; and always another and very true one was his wife, Miss Winifred Triniman, a Cornish farmer's daughter.