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Famous Hunters

John Hunter Scientist and Surgeon (1728-1793)

John Hunter was born in 1728 on a Scottish farm on the outskirts of Glasgow; the youngest of 10 children.  He received little in the way of a formal education and dropped out of school at the age of 13 years.  Despite this background he was to become one of the of the most influential British surgeons of the 18th century. 

In 1748, he wrote to his brother William, an anatomist and obstetrician, enquiring as to whether he could join him in London.  Later that year he began preparing anatomical dissections and within a year he was helping his brother teach anatomy.  John Hunter became an assistant to William Cheselden at the Chelsea Hospital  and in 1751 he was appointed apprentice to Sir Percival Pott at St. Bartholomew's Hospital.  Between 1754 and 1756 he worked as a house surgeon at St. George's Hospital.

In 1761, he developed pulmonary tuberculosis, a disease which was to affect him for much of his working life.  In order to improve his health he was commissioned as an army surgeon and was sent to France and Portugal for two years.  During this time he became familiar with the management of war wounds and their complications. In 1764, he returned to London where he set up his own anatomy school and started in private surgical practice.  His surgical career was slow to be established.   However, in 1767 he was elected as Fellow of the Royal Society and in 1768 he was appointed as surgeon to St. George's Hospital.  He became a member of the Company of Surgeons but he was never to hold high office within the organisation.  

The written work produced by Hunter had a significant impact on medical practice of the time.  His first book, Natural History of Human Teeth, was published in 1771.  In it he clearly described dental anatomy and coined the terms bicuspids, cuspids, incisors and molars.  His second book, A Practical Treatise on the Diseases of Teeth, described dental pathology.  In 1786 he published A Treatise on Venereal Disease in which he described chancre and lymphogranuloma venereum. In The Digestion of the Stomach after Death (1772) he described shock and intussusception and in A Treatise on Blood, Inflammation and Gun-Shot Wounds (1794) he questioned the need to surgically enlarge gun-shot wounds and disproved the belief that gunpowder was poisonous.  In 1786 he was appointed deputy surgeon to the army and in 1789 he was made Surgeon General.  He described ligation of the femoral artery in the treatment of popliteal aneurysms.

The lack of a university education failed to lessen his contributions to surgery, medicine and science.  Many of these contributions were the result of clear and concise personal observations based on innumerable hours spent preparing anatomical dissections.  His anatomical and surgical teaching was held in high regard and his famous pupils include Benjamin Bell, Astley Cooper, Everard Home and Edward Jenner. 

 

Known as the father of scientific surgery, John Hunter was one of the first people to apply a rational and scientific approach to surgery.

The Reluctant Surgeon

Although there is no single medical or surgical advance that is credited to him, John Hunter greatly extended our understanding of disease processes making real inroads into areas such as inflammation, transplanting teeth, gunshot wounds and venereal disease.

He has been described as a ‘reluctant surgeon’ in that he would only operate when really necessary. Given the absence of anaesthetics and the dangers that attended surgery in the eighteenth century this was a sensible approach. John taught his students that surgery should only be attempted if the surgeon had a clear outcome in mind and that it would do the least amount of harm to the patient. This approach, of only operating- indeed conducting any treatment, on a rational basis coupled with his extensive anatomical studies is what gave him the accolade of father of scientific surgery.

A Bribe for a Body

Although essentially a kind man, John Hunter was no saint, particularly when his curiosity drove him. He bribed a mourner to help him obtain the body of the 7 feet 7 inch Irish giant Charles Byrne for dissection (John was fascinated by the unusual). The unfortunate Irishman knew that John wanted his body and asked to be buried at sea to ensure that the grave robbers couldn’t get to him. He failed to take into account John’s determination and a mourner’s greed.

A Man with a Fierce Temper

John had a fierce temper which, he thought, might one day kill him. In a heroic experiment to determine that nature of venereal disease, John purposefully inoculated himself with infected material from a sufferer. This gave him syphilis which over the years severely damaged his heart and the rest of circulatory system. John was well aware of the dangers this combination of a badly damaged heart and an uncontrollable temper, saying that ‘My life is at the mercy of any rogue who chooses to provoke me’.

This proved prescient. During an argument with fellow surgeons John collapsed never to regain consciousness. He died on 16th October 1793.

Much of what remains of John Hunter’s collection can be seen in the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons, London. If you can't get there, the website has a virtual tour.

 
William Hunter

WILLIAM HUNTER (1718-1783), British physiologist and physician, the first great teacher of anatomy in England, was born on the 23rd of May 1718, at East Kilbride, Lanark. He was the seventh child of his parents, and an elder brother of the still more famous John Hunter. When fourteen years of age, he was sent to the university of Glasgow, where he studied for five years. He had originally been intended for the church, but, scruples concerning subscription arising in his mind, he followed the advice of his friend William Cullen, and resolved to devote himself to physic. During1737-1740he resided with Cullen at Hamilton, and then, to increase his medical knowledge before settling in partnership with his friend, he spent the winter of1740-1741at Edinburgh. Thence he went to London, where Dr James Douglas (1675-1742), an anatomist and obstetrician of some note, to whom he had been recommended, engaged his services as a tutor to his son and as a dissector, and assisted him to enter as a surgeon's pupil at St George's Hospital and to procure the instruction of the anatomist Frank Nicholls (1699-. 1778). When Dr Douglas died Hunter still continued to live with his family. In 1746 he undertook, in place of Samuel Sharp, the delivery, for a society of naval practitioners, of a series of lectures on operative surgery, so satisfactorily that he was requested to include anatomy in his course. It was not long before he attained considerable fame as a lecturer; for not only was his oratorical ability great, but he differed from his contemporaries in the fullness and thoroughness of his teaching, and in the care which he took to provide the best possible practical illustrations of his discourses. We read that the syllabi, of Edward Nourse (1701-1761), published in 1748, totam rtm anatomicam complectens, comprised only twenty-three lectures, exclusive of a short and defective "Syllabus Chirurgicus," and that at "one of the most reputable courses of anatomy in Europe," which Hunter had himself attended, the professor was obliged to demonstrate all the parts of the body, except the nerves and vessels (shown in a foetus) and the bones, on a single dead subject, and for the explanation of the operations of surgery used a dog! In 1747 Hunter became a member of the Corporation of Surgeons. In the course of a tour through Holland to Paris with his pupil, J. Douglas, in 1728, he visited Albinus at Leiden, and inspected with admiration his injected preparations. By degrees Hunter renounced surgical for obstetric practice, in which he excelled. He was appointed a surgeonaccoucheur at the Middlesex Hospital in 1748, and at the British Lying-in Hospital in the year following. The degree of M.D. was conferred upon him by the university of Glasgow on the 24th of October 1750. About the same time he left his old abode at Mrs Douglas's, and settled as a physician in Jermyn Street. He became a licentiate of the College of Physicians on the 30th of September 1756. In 1762 he was consulted by Queen Charlotte, and in 1764 was made physician-extraordinary to her Majesty.

On the departure of his brother John for the army, Hunter engaged as an assistant William Hewson (1739-1774), whom he subsequently admitted to partnership in his lectures. Hewson was succeeded in 1770 by W. C. Cruikshank (1745-1800). Hunter was elected F.R.S. in 1767; F.S.A. in 1768, and third professor of anatomy to the Royal Academy of Arts; and in 1780 and 1782 respectively an associate of the Royal Medical Society and of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Paris. During the closing ten years of his life his health failed greatly. His last lecture, at the conclusion of which he fainted, was given, contrary to the remonstrances of friends, only a few days before his death, which took place in London on the 30th of March 1783. He was buried in the rector's vault at St James's, Piccadilly.

Hunter had in 1765 requested of the prime minister, George Grenville, the grant of a plot of ground on which he might establish "a museum in London for the improvement of anatomy, surgery, and physics" (see "Papers" at end of his Two Introductory Lectures, 5784), and had offered to expend on its erection X 7000, and to endow in perpetuity a professorship of anatomy in connexion with it. His application receiving no recognition, he after many months abandoned his scheme, and built himself a house, with lecture and dissecting-rooms, in Great Windmill Street, whither he removed in 1770. In one fine apartment in this house was accommodated his collection, comprising anatomical and pathological preparations, ancient coins and medals, minerals, shells and corals. His natural history specimens were in part a purchase, for £1200, of the executors of his friend, Dr John Fothergill (1712-1780). Hunter's whole collection, together with his fine library of Greek and Latin classics, and an endowment of £8000, by his will became, after the lapse of twenty years, the property of the university of Glasgow.

Hunter was never married, and was a man of frugal habits. Like his brother John, he was an early riser, and a man of untiring industry. He is described as being in his lectures, which were of two hours' duration, "both simple and profound, minute in demonstration, and yet the reverse of dry and tedious"; and his mode of introducing anecdotal illustrations of his topic was most happy. Lecturing was to him a pleasure, and, notwithstanding his many professional distractions, he regularly continued it, because, as he said, he "conceived that a man may do infinitely more good to the public by teaching his art than by practising it" (see "Memorial" appended to Introd. Lect. p. 120) .

Hunter was the author of several contributions to the Medical Observations and Enquiries and the Philosophical Transactions. In his paper on the structure of cartilages and joints, published in the latter in 1743, he anticipated what M. F. X. Bichat sixty years afterwards wrote concerning the structure and arrangement of the synovial membranes. His Medical Commentaries (pt. i., 1762, supplemented 1764) contains, among other like matter, details of his disputes with the Monros as to who first had successfully performed the injection of the tubuli testis (in which, however, both he and they had been forestalled by A. von Haller in 1745), and as to who had discovered the true office of the lymphatics, and also a discussion on the question whether he or Percivall Pott ought to be considered the earliest to have elucidated the nature of hernia congenita, which, as a matter of fact, had been previously explained by Haller. In the Commentaries is exhibited Hunter's one weakness - an inordinate love of controversy. His impatience of contradiction he averred to be a characteristic of anatomists, in whom he once jocularly condoned it, on the plea that "the passive submission of dead bodies" rendered the crossing of their will the less bearable. His great work, The Anatomy of the Gravid Uterus, exhibited in Figures, fol., was published in 1774. His posthumous works are Two Introductory Lectures (1784), and Anatomical Description of the Human Gravid Uterus (1794), which was re-edited by Dr E. Rigby in 1843.

See Gent. Mag. liii. pt. I, p. 364 (1783); S. F. Simmons, An Account of the Life of W. Hunter (1783); Adams's and Ottley's Lives of J. Hunter; Sir B. C. Brodie, Hunterian Oration (1837); W. Munk, The Roll of the Royal College of Physicians of London, ii. 205 (1878). (F. H. B.)
 

John Hunter

   John Hunter (governor) (1737-1821), second governor of the British colony of New South Wales, Australia (1795-1800), whose attempts to reform the colony were cut short by the powerful New South Wales Corps. Born in Leith, Scotland, Hunter entered Aberdeen University, where he briefly studied to become a minister. In 1754 he left the university to join the British navy, where he served for more than three decades. In 1786 Hunter was appointed second captain of the Sirius, part of the First Fleet, which carried the first British settlers to Australia.

In 1788 Governor Arthur Phillip sent Hunter in the Sirius to the Cape of Good Hope, Africa, to collect supplies; in the course of returning to Australia, Hunter circumnavigated the world—a rare feat at the time. In 1790, with Hunter at its helm, the Sirius wrecked off Norfolk Island. Marooned with his crew for nearly a year, Hunter undertook a survey of the island. He returned to England in 1792, defended his loss of the ship, was cleared of blame, and published a journal of his years in New South Wales and Norfolk Island. In 1793 Phillip resigned as governor of New South Wales; Hunter applied for and was given the position.
Hunter did not arrive in Sydney until 1795, more than two years after Phillip’s departure. In the interval, the New South Wales Corps, which had been sent to protect the settlers and perform civil duties, had governed the colony and solidified its power. Members of the corps had a virtual monopoly on trade and, receiving the best land and a large share of convict labor, control of the colony’s agriculture. Hunter tried to return some of the corps’ power to the government, particularly the control of trade and farming, but members of the corps, led by John Macarthur, deftly countered most of his moves. Macarthur and others asked the British government for Hunter’s removal—they charged, among other things, financial wrongdoing—and in late 1800 Hunter was recalled and replaced by Philip Gidley King.
In 1802 Hunter published a treatise to vindicate himself and to suggest several reforms for the colony, many of which were later adopted. He continued his naval career after his recall from New South Wales and eventually attained the rank of vice admiral.

 

Robert Hunter


His first military appointment on record was as aide-major in Lord Cardross,s regiment of dragoons in Flanders on 19 April 1689. A year later Robert became captain in Colonel John Hill's regiment of foot and on 28 February 1694 he transferred to the Royal Scots Dragoons with the same rank. Just over a year later on 28 May, he was appointed major of brigade in Flanders and promoted brevet Lieutenant colonel on 1 January 1703.

During the early years of the 18th century, there was a refugee problem in England that is mirrored in many ways by the current difficulties with asylum seekers. The refugees at the time were from the Palatinate of the Rhine and were a source of trouble and concern to the English Government. To relieve the situation, Robert proposed in a letter dated 17 December 1709 to take 3,000 of them for settlement along the banks of the River Hudson in the New York colony. His plan was approved, Robert was appointed Governor of New York, and sailed to America with the refugees early in 1710.

He reported in November of that year that they had established themselves along the Hudson close to great pine forests. Their purpose was to burn pine to produce tar, and Robert stated that for a subsidy of £15,000 per year, the settlements could produce enough tar for the English Navy forever. Orphans were adopted by families who guaranteed to maintain and educate them and each worker had a personal account to ensure that subsistence money received would be repaid in the form of their labour in the pinewoods.

Robert was enthusiastic about the project and predicted that the colonists would increase in numbers because they were very healthy. In 1712 he reported that they were all now living in good houses near the forests and had felled over 100,000 pine trees for tar burning. It was proposed that some of the colonists should be employed in the Navy Yard in New York, with the daily pay rate at 6d for adults and 4p for children.

However, there was a downside to this progress. Robert complained that he had spent virtually all of his personal money and his credit had been stretched to the limit. The Indians in the Hudson Valley were becoming restless and threatening, and his officers were nearing starvation because their pay was so much in arrears. He had constant disputes with the New York Assembly, which repeatedly refused to approve the necessary financial appropriations for the Hudson colonists unless what they claimed was their inherent right to determine the disposal of the money was granted.

Robert seems to have retained his enthusiasm and optimism despite these problems, and always enjoyed eventually surmounting obstacles that had initially seemed impossible. A prescient observation of his was that the attitude of the Assembly and the disagreements
about who was ultimately in charge and making the final decisions would one day lead to the secession of the American colonies. Despite his wrangling with the New York legislators, Robert personally was well liked, and American writers of the day described him as a man of good temper and discernment and one of the best and most able Governors of New York. He had to compromise eventually in 1715 and concede that the Assembly could decide the application of the revenues that they voted.

Robert returned home in 1719 with the rank of brigadier general, rising to major general 10 years later when he was appointed Governor of Jamaica and captain of the independent companies garrisoning the island. He died there on 31 March 1734, one month short of his 65th birthday. Robert had married Elizabeth Orby, daughter of Sir Thomas Orby of Crowland Abbey, Lincolnshire, and widow of Brigadier General the Lord Hay of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, some time after 1706. She apparently predeceased him. His will, probated in November 1734, left considerable property at Chertsey, including the patronage of the church living, to his son, Thomas Orby Hunter, MP for Winchelsea, from whom descended the family of Orby-Hunter. Robert left £5,000 to his daughters, Henrietta and Charlotte.

And, being the tenacious Scottish soldier and gentleman that he was, ever mindful of the bawbees, Robert pointed out in his will that he was owed £21,000 by the Crown, being the sum he personally contributed to the upkeep of the colonists of the Palatinate of New York. This debt had been acknowledged by a Mr Hartley of the Treasury but was never repaid.
 
 

General Sir Archibald Hunter GCB GCVO DSO (1856 – 1936)

was a General in the British Army who distinguished himself during the Boer War. He was Governor of Omdurman, in Sudan, and later of Gibraltar.

Early life
Hunter was the son of a London businessman. However, his maternal grandfather had been a Major. Having chosen not to follow his business routes, Hunter began military education in Glasgow, and then at the Royal College, Sandhurst. In 1875, the nineteen year old Sub Lieutenant joined the King's Own 4th Lancashire Regiment.
The Mahdi Uprising
Between 1884 and 1885, Hunter joined the Gordon Relief Expedition which sought to rescue Charles George Gordon (or Chinese Gordon) from his Mahdi captives. The Expedition was, however, too late; Gordon had been killed two days before their arrival.
During the time in which the Mahdi's were being suppressed, Hunter saw much front line action. He led a brigade under the command of Major-General Grenfell in Sawakin. He was wounded on this mission.
He was appointed Governor of Dongola Province in the Sudan and Commandant of the Frontier Field Force in 1895. In 1896, he joined the Anglo-Egyptian Nile Expeditionary Force under Lord Kitchener and the Sirdar (commander of the Egyptian Army). Sudan was recaptured, and Hunter was put in charge of the Egyptian division. He was made Governor of Omdurman in Sudan in 1899.
The Second Boer War
Between 1899 and 1901, Hunter served as General Officer Commanding 10th Division in the Second Boer War.
Later life
He was GOC Scotland from 1901 to 1903. He was then GOC Western Army Corps in India from 1904 to 1907 when he became GOC Southern Army in India.
From 1910 until 1913 he was Governor of Gibraltar. In 1914 he became GOC 13th (Western) Division.
He served in World War I as Commander of the 3rd Army. He was then went to Aldershot first as GOC Aldershot Training Centre and then as GOC Aldershot Command. He retired in 1918.
He was elected at the 1918 general election as a Coalition Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) for Lancaster, but stood down at the 1922 general election.
He died in 1936.
 Legacy
His archive of over one hundred letters and documents was recently sold. A highlight of the £15,000 collection included twenty six Autograph Letters from Kitchener.
 

 MAJOR-GENERAL DAVID HUNTER, U.S.A.

General Hunter was born about the year 1802, in the District of Columbia, and was appointed from thence to West Point in 1818. He graduated in the infantry in 1822, and served eleven years with his regiment. In 1833 he was appointed Captain of Dragoons. After three years' service he resigned, and settled in Illinois, which State has ever since been his home. In 1842 he was offered, and accepted, the post of Paymaster in the army.

After the election of Mr. Lincoln to the Presidency Captain Hunter was one of the army officers appointed by the War Department to escort him to Washington. On the reorganization of the army he was appointed Colonel of the Sixth Cavalry, and on 13th August, 1861, Major-General of Volunteers, thus ranking
all the Major-Generals of Volunteers except Banks, Dix, and Butler. He had just previously taken part in the battle of Bull Run in command of his regiment, and received a severe wound in the throat, which compelled him to quit the field. On his recovery he was dispatched to the West, where
he served as second in command under Fremont in the latter's brief campaign in Missouri. General Hunter was one of the first to denounce Fremont's incapacity; and, on the removal of that officer, he succeeded him in command of the army. He had no opportunity to distinguish himself, however, as
he was himself very shortly afterward superseded by General Halleck. On his return to Washington he soon found a vacancy in the command of the troops at Port Royal, vice "Port Royal" Sherman, who was removed. While in this command he achieved no military triumphs; but he attracted
more attention than any other man in the country by issuing a short order emancipating all the slaves in the Department of the South. This order was revoked by the President, and General Hunter returned home in consequence.

After a brief holiday he was again assigned to the command of the Department of the South, and is now at Port Royal. When the attack is made upon the city of Charleston or Savannah, it is expected that General Hunter will direct the operation of the land-forces.

General Hunter, though sixty years of age, is a veteran of remarkable vigor, energy, and iron will. He tolerates no insubordination in his command, and is as much feared by his officers as by the enemy. Bred in extreme pro-slavery views, the war has converted him into a firm abolitionist. He has always been in favor of arming the negroes, and has now quite a little negro army under his command at Port Royal. "Black Dave," as the soldiers call him, will make or mar himself in the course of the next ninety days.

The Tribune correspondent states that General Hunter has organized an expedition of 5000 negro troops to penetrate one of the most thickly-populated districts of the Department of the South with a view to rouse the slaves. The invaders are to carry extra muskets, and are to be supported by an adequate force of regular troops. Though the scheme in itself seems feasible, the story is generally discredited at the North.
 

 

http://www.saugeenshores.ca/page.php?PageID=127

The Shipwreck H.M.S. General Hunter

Visitors to Saugeen Shores may notice an armour stone breakwater in place along a short section of the Southampton beach between Morpeth and Palmerston Streets.  This temporary breakwater was installed in the spring of 2006 to protect the hull remains of a British military ship which still lie buried under the sand of the beach.

The ship was discovered in April, 2001 when low lake water levels and a spring ice scour uncovered about a dozen of the ship’s frame tips, pushing up through the sand of the beach.

After a series of archaeological excavations of the wreck and years of historical research the wreck has been identified as the British naval brig General Hunter.  The ship was built in 1806, and served as a Provincial Marine transport ship on the Upper Lakes.  During the War of 1812 it took part in a number of successful actions as part of the British Navy squadron based at Amherstburg (Fort Malden), Ontario.  The General Hunter was captured by the Americans in the famous “Battle of Lake Erie” in 1813.  Following the war, in 1815, with its name shortened to Hunter, the ship was sold to a private buyer in the United States.  It was later purchased by the U.S. Army as a transport vessel and made several voyages during the spring and summer of 1816 carrying U.S. army material and men to various Upper Lakes ports. 

According to a letter written by U.S. Army General Alexander Macomb to the U.S. Secretary of War, a major Lake Huron storm pushed the Hunter ashore and wrecked it on a remote Canadian beach on August 19, 1816.  Details in the letter and an attached legal declaration by the crew – found in the U.S. Archives in Washington - clearly identify the wreck location as that of the present-day Southampton beach.  All eight crew members and the two young passengers survived, managing to crawl down the broken mainmast and on to the beach as the ship was battered by wind and waves.  The crew rowed and sailed the small ship’s boat down the lake to Detroit, arriving a week after the ship was wrecked on the beach.

The General Hunter/Hunter lay buried under the beach sand for nearly two centuries before its timbers were discovered pushing up through the sand.  The ship was fully excavated in 2004 and all artifacts were removed.  Some of those artifacts, including a unique swivel cannon found on the wreck, can be seen in an Exhibit at the Bruce County Museum & Cultural Centre in Southampton.  The rest of the artifacts are undergoing conservation treatment at the Canadian Conservation Institute in Ottawa.  In some cases it will take several years to complete conservation but all artifacts ultimately will become part of the shipwreck exhibit at the museum.

In the spring of 2006 a dramatically altered beach profile and the continuing low lake levels, once again exposed a large number of ship timbers and put them at risk of serious damage.  The temporary breakwater was installed immediately and tons of sand was put in place, to keep this important shipwreck - and the historic work barge that is buried beside it  - safe from the ravages of Lake Huron wind and waves.

A major study in 2005 set out a plan for next possible steps in the Shipwreck Project.  Consideration of this plan will began in early 2007.  Interested readers can see the plan “Southampton Beach Shipwreck Project: Recovery, Conservation and Display Preliminary Study,” at the Bruce County Libraries in Southampton and Port Elgin or at the Bruce County Museum & Cultural Centre in Southampton.  All the details of the shipwreck discovery, excavation and identification are also available at the same locations in the “Southampton Beach Shipwreck Project: 2004/2005 Project Report.”

In the meantime, visitors walking along the Southampton beach boardwalk can see the exact location of this exceptional marine archaeological site.  The temporary stone breakwater, and the mounded sand inside the breakwater, mark the present resting place, the temporary grave, of the bones of the ship built in 1806 as the British Navy brig General Hunter.

Ken Cassavoy, Marine Archaeologist and Project Director Southampton Beach Shipwrecks Project

　

Sir Robert Hunter
(1844-1913) Founder of The National Trust in 1895

Born in Addington Square, Camberwell, he was the first child of Robert Lachlan Hunter and Anne Hunter. He had one sister, Anne, 4 years younger. His mother came from a missionary family. His father had, as a child, run away to sea to join the whaling fleet and had become a master mariner by the time Robert was born. His sea-going career had been profitable enough to allow him to establish his own mercantile business in London, and he then lived at home.

Social unrest at this time posed a threat to security, and Robert senior enrolled as a special constable to assist Peel’s Metropolitan Police force in dealing with the riots. Chartist gangs roamed the streets and the residents of Addington Sq. hid their jewel1ery in the water butts. On one occasion in 1848, young Robert and his pregnant mother only just reached the relative safety of their home before a violent mob invaded Camberwell Road.

In 1847 Robert, then nearly three, was seriously ill. He slowly recovered but remained subdued and went on to suffer severe forms of every childish illness. In 1850 he attended a day school for little boys run by a Miss Cribb. He had personal memories of the 1851 Great Exhibition and of the Duke of Wellington’s funeral. In 1853, the family moved to Denmark Hill. Living in a tall, north- facing house overlooking fields, the view on a clear day was superb, right across London as far as Highgate. At the weekends he and his sister were taken to concerts, museums and book clubs, and on one memorable day to the Crystal Palace to see Blondin wheeling a barrow along the high wire

In 1861, Robert senior was sent on medical advice to Dorking, and thus young Robert became acquainted with the Surrey commons and hills which he held in great affection in later life. In the same year, he was awarded a place at University College, London, where he studied Logic and Moral Philosophy.

Here he also developed a love of walking and climbing. Encouraged by his father, he enrolled as an articled clerk with a firm of solicitors in Holbom, but he found the work totally uninteresting. To relieve the boredom he read for a Master’s degree in his own time. In 1866, Sir Henry Peek offered prizes of £400 for essays on Commons and the best means of preserving them for the public. Hunter wrote one of the six best entries, and when a vacancy came up in 1868, the Commons Preservation Society made him their Honorary Solicitor.

Here he achieved many successes in saving common land from enclosure, most notably Epping Forest, which Queen Victoria declared open as a public park in 1882 In that same year, he was recommended for the position of Legal Adviser to the Post Office, where he stayed for the rest of his working life, though he still regularly assisted the Society in its work.

In 1877, five years after his first wife had died in childbirth, he married Ellen (Nellie) Cann. They had three daughters, Dorothy, Winifred and Margaret.

In 1883, he and his family moved to Three Gates Lane in Haslemere, where he joined the growing band of rail commuters employed in London. The following year, Octavia Hill enlisted his help in trying to save Sayes Court in Deptford. The owner wanted to give the property to the nation, but no organisation existed to accept the gift. Hunter felt a new ‘Company’ should be established for such purposes, and so began his idea of a ‘National Trust.’

The idea lay dormant for nearly 10 years until 1893, when Hardwicke Rawnsley sought help to buy some land in the Lake District which was under threat from speculators. This time the seed grew, and in January 1895 the National Trust was founded, with Hunter as its first chairman.

Knighted the previous year for his services to the Post Office, he also became chairman of the first Haslemere Parish Council, formed in the same month as the Trust. This diligent, quiet man retired from the Post Office at the end of July 1913, but by early November had died of septicaemia.

Waggoners Wells, near Grayshott, was acquired by the trust in 1919 and dedicated to his memory.

 

Bob Hunter: 

Perhaps more than anyone else, Bob Hunter invented Greenpeace. His death on May 2nd 2005, of cancer, marks the passing of a true original, one of the heroes of the environmental movement.

In 1971, the word "Greenpeace" hadn't yet been coined.  Bob was a hippy journalist in Vancouver, a town which he described as having "the biggest concentration of tree-huggers, radicalized students, garbage-dump stoppers, shit-disturbing unionists, freeway fighters, pot smokers and growers, aging Trotskyites, condo killers, farmland savers, fish preservationists, animal rights activists, back-to-the-landers, vegetarians, nudists, Buddhists, and anti-spraying, anti-pollution marchers and picketers in the country, per capita, in the world."

Mind bombs

A student of Marshall McLuhan, he was bent on changing the world with what he termed "media mindbombs" -- consciousness-changing sounds and images to blast around the world in the guise of news.  He got involved with a few folks in a church basement who wanted to stop a US nuclear weapons test off Amchitka, which he called the "Don't Make a Wave Committee".

Sailing into the bomb

But their plans were going nowhere until Marie Bohlen suggested that the group simply sail a ship into the test site.  Bob thought it was a perfect "mindbomb,"  and on September 15, 1971, he and 11 other rag-tag activists would sail out to challenge the greatest military force on Earth in a rusting fishing boat they called "The Greenpeace."  In doing so, they set off a wave of public support and protest which closed the US-Canadian border for the first time since 1812, ultimately shut the testing programme down, and created a new force for environmental and peace activism which continues to this day.

Greenpeace bears his mark

Over the next decade, Bob's madcap creativity, strategic smarts, and hard-nosed journalistic sense of story would indelibly mark the Greenpeace brand of action.  From the pack ice of Newfoundland, where he dyed the whitecoats of Harp Seal pups to make them commercially worthless, to the Pacific Ocean where he stood between Russian harpoons and the whales they were hunting, he inspired a new brand of personal environmental activism.

Shaman, mystic 

"Bob was a storyteller, a shaman, a word-magician, a Machiavellian mystic, and he dared to inject a sense of humour into the often shrill and sanctimonious job of changing the world," says Greenpeace Executive Director Gerd Leipold.  "He was funny and brave and audacious, inspiring in his refusal to accept the limits of the practical or the probable.  He revelled in life's ability to deliver little miracles in the form of impossibilities achieved, and Greenpeace will forever bear the mark of his crazy, super-optimistic faith in the wisdom of tilting at windmills."

Warriors of the Rainbow

In 1978, Hunter chronicled the birth of Greenpeace in his book "Warriors of the Rainbow."  It was a masterful feat of storytelling, one which attracted a further generation of young people into the ranks of the organisation.  In its introduction he wrote:

"We fought... an unequal battle against American and French nuclear weapons makers; Russian, Japanese, and Australian whalers; Norwegian and Canadian seal hunters; multinational oil consortiums and pesticide manufactures; cynical politicians; angry workers; and, again and again, ourselves.  The people involved were men and women, young and old, not all of them brave or wise, who found themselves face-to-face with the fullest ecological horrors of the century..."

Storymaster

Among Hunter's stock stories was the tale of how he'd stumbled on to the Cree Indian myth of the "Warriors of the Rainbow" -- a legendary tribe of spirits who would rescue nature when the Earth became sick.  The story involved a gypsy dulcimer maker, an old set of fenceposts, and the gift of a book which Hunter claimed leapt into his hands -- quite literally -- when The Greenpeace dropped down a steep swell on its way to Amchitka. The story itself was magical and mythological, and over the years Hunter would embellish and polish it into a hilarious and inspirational piece of campfire folklore.

Awful child

Hunter was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1941. In his own words "I was an awful, rebellious, early attention-defficient kid who was loved by my art and English teachers, but hated by the rest. I cheated by scribbling novels when I was supposed to be doing schoolwork." He became a journalist for the Winnipeg Tribune and later wrote a column for the Vancouver Sun in which he featured environmental subjects.  He quit writing the column when he joined the first Greenpeace voyage to save the whales, becoming a reporter explicitly to ensure his somewhat less than objective "message" would reach a global audience, because "the subjective stuff written by columnists [was] never picked up by the wire services."

Journalism as opinion

He readily confessed that this made him "a traitor to my profession," but believed he had a higher calling: "If we ignore [the] laws of ecology we will continue to be guilty of crimes against the earth. We will not be judged by men for these crimes, but with a justice meeted out by the earth itself. The destruction of the earth will lead, inevitably, to the destruction of ourselves."

Hunter became president of the Greenpeace Foundation in 1973, and served in that post until 1977.

He joined Toronto's City TV as an ecology specialist in 1988, and for years hosted a highly successful morning TV spot for Breakfast TV in his bathrobe, in which he  read the day's newspaper headlines and sputtered scandalously witty commentaries in a form of rapid-fire stand-up journalism.

Advisor, speaker, comedian-in-chief

Over the years he continued to contribute to Greenpeace as an advisor and occasional speaker, and kept up good relations with the organisation's original luminaries, including many who were no longer on speaking terms with one other.  He authored several books and founded a tongue-in-cheek religion, the Whole Earth Church.

In a recent book, Rex Weyler writes about reflecting with Hunter on their experiences in the early days of Greenpeace:

"The ironies and tension of history simultaneously provided the gift of history: that we got to live, to see the flourishing Earth, the flying fish, dolphins, caribou, seal pups, the raging sea, the blue light of morning, the miracle and terror of survival all rolled into one; and that we were blessed with an opportunity to serve it."

Bob Hunter made much of his opportunity to serve the Earth, and Greenpeace will always be blessed with his spirit.

 

Neil Aylmer Hunter

Born 1926 as Cochran-Patrick. He matriculated the Arms of Hunter of Hunterston in 1970, becoming the 29th Laird, and inheriting the title of Hereditary Forester from his Aunt. He
married Sonia Isabella Jane Furlong of Gloucestershire, England, in 1952,
and they had seven children, all of whom survive him.
Neil Hunter was a noted and avid sportsman, having represented Great
Britain in sailing competition in the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki, Finland,
and again in the 1956 Games in Melbourne, Australia. He won the Silver
Medal in Melbourne.
On moving to Andorra, he returned to his love of skiing which he started to
learn when he was nine years of age! He derived much pleasure in teaching,
with enormous patience, those persons who had lost their nerve, or found
skiing difficult.
In addition to sports interests and the Clan, he was a dedicated husbandman
and amateur horticulturist, and the lands at Hunterston have been steadily
improved as a working farm. Cattle breeding and lambing are also prominent
activities. As a keen gardener, the Laird personally led the revival and
restoration of the lovely gardens at the castle.

  
Madam Pauline Hunter of Hunterston

30th Laird: (1994-  ) Born January 1953, eldest child of Neil and Sonia.

Nominated in 1992 she inherited title in 1994 as Madam Pauline Natalie Hunter of Hunterston. Married to Russell James Mullen MA (1945 - 1997) in 1980 whilst living in Wales. She trained as a Registered General Nurse and subsequently as a District Nurse. Following in the tradition of her ancestors the famous William and John Hunter, surgeons and Anatomists. Madam Pauline is the Patron of:  "The Order of the Royal Huntsman"