Person:George Buckton (3)

Died aged 87 yrs "Weycombe"

George Bowdler Buckton FRS (1818 - 1905)

Buckton was crippled for life by an accident at the age of five. Nevertheless he managed to pursue careers in no fewer than three branches of science. The first of these began in 1848 when he became a student, and then research assistant, to A. W. Hoffman at the Royal College of Chemistry. His major work, on the isolation and identification of methyl mercuric compounds, was published in a series of important papers.

Buckton abandoned chemistry in 1865, married Mary Ann Odling and moved to Haslemere. There he bought the estate of Weycombe on the slopes of Hindhead, and built a house of his own design (Weycombe House), with an adjoining astronomical observatory. His astronomical career ended in 1882, when he fell while trying to close the roof shutter in the observatory, and broke his leg.

Meanwhile he had embarked on what was probably the most important of his scientific careers, this time in entomology. This resulted in monographs on British Aphids (4 vols. 1876-83), and on British Cicadae or Tettigiidae (2 vols. 1890-1) and the Natural History of Eristalis tenax, or the Drone Fly (1895)

Buckton also took an interest in electricity, leading him to construct a Wimshurst machine. He was also the first Chairman of the Haslemere Gas Company. William Allingham encountered him at Aldworth (Alfred Lord Tennysons’ home) in November 1885, doing his best to answer Tennyson, who wanted to know: “How can Evolution account for the Ant?” Buckton replied cautiously that “the theory presents many difficulties.”

The Buckton's daughter Alice Mary (1867 - 1944) also merits notice, as poet, playwright and educationalist.

As a small child, Alice was a favourite of Tennyson, and once spent a whole day with him, holding a candle for him to read by, walking with him through the fields and sitting on his knee while he chanted his poems “I have never heard such a wonderful voice” He told her of his belief in the immortality of the soul and his puzzlement about matter: “Spirit is everywhere; it is Matter that bothers me” She related this anecdote, together with other reminiscences of Tennyson, when the Gaekwar of Baroda - the then owner - invited the Poetry Society to a large gathering at Aldworth in 1925.

From The Hilltop Writers by W.R.Trotter