Martin Alister Campbell Hinton, 1883-1961

Abstract

Martin Hinton was born in London on 29 June 1883, the eldest of three children. His great-grandfather Thomas Hinton was a flax farmer of Market Drayton in Shropshire. His father Martin Hinton was a legal shorthand writer and foreign correspondent. His mother Helen Campbell came of a Ross-shire family. His paternal aunts kept a school where he became a studious pupil; at the age of three and a half he had learned to read and from the age of five voraciously devoured every book he could find in his father’s library, be it on law, Latin, Spanish, natural history, travel, history or mathematics. The young Hinton’s interest in nature study was early stimulated through contacts with his Shropshire relatives, the de Carle Sowerbys, and it was Arthur de Carle Sowerby, one of a line of great Victorian naturalists, who influenced young Hinton. When Hinton was a boy of ten his father died, and two years later the family finances were so distressing that he had to find work. A legal friend of his father introduced him to the Temple where he started as a junior clerk in barristers’ chambers in Goldsmith Building. The work does not appear to have been onerous though the hours were long, and he was able to make use of legal hours to prosecute research. At week-ends he collected from gravel pits near his home and spent the evenings in the museums at Jermyn Street and Bloomsbury when they were open and in the Patent Office library when they were closed. Hinton’s peculiarities soon attracted sympathetic attention. In 1897 Mr John Cameron Graham, a patent lawyer with a degree in chemistry from University College, London, invited him to enter his service in Garden Court. Mr Graham was to have an immense influence on Hinton over the next decade; he appears to have been widely interested in both natural history and the physical sciences. He gave Hinton opportunity and encouragement, and —so important for the impressionable teenager—he became the idol for hei oworship. Hinton has written of Judge Graham ‘he gave me a great example of methodical industry, taught me to think accurately and express my thoughts clearly; his own honesty of thought, generosity and simplicity made a lasting impression’. Upon Mr Graham’s elevation to the County Court Bench in 1908 Hinton continued as Senior Clerk to his successor Mr William Neill, and on the latter’s retirement in 1916 Hinton too quit the Temple. His experience and interest in legal matters lasted throughout his life.