Dorothy Hodgkin - Early Life

Early Life

Dorothy Mary Crowfoot was born on 12 May 1910 in Cairo, Egypt, to John Winter Crowfoot (1873–1959), archaeologist and classical scholar, and Grace Mary née Hood (1877–1957). For the first four years of her life she lived in the English expatriate community in Egypt, returning to England only a few months each year. She spent the period of World War I in the United Kingdom under the care of relatives and friends, but separated from her parents. After the war, her mother decided to stay home in England for one year and educate her children, a period that Hodgkin later described as the happiest in her life.

In 1921, she entered the Sir John Leman Grammar School in Beccles. Only once, when she was thirteen, did she make an extended visit to her parents, who by then had moved to Khartoum, although both parents continued to visit England each summer. Both her father and her mother had a strong influence with their ethic of selflessness and service to humanity which reverberated in her later achievements.

Read more about this topic:  Dorothy Hodgkin

Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:

    ““next to of course god america i
    love you land of the pilgrims” and so forth oh
    say can you see by the dawn’s early my
    country ‘tis of centuries come and go
    and are no more what of it we should worry
    in every language even deafanddumb
    thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
    by jing by gee by gosh by gum”
    —E.E. (Edward Estlin)

    “This life we live is a strange dream, and I don’t believe at all any account men give of it.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)