Family of Ronald George HATTON and Hannah Rachel RIGDEN

Husband:	Ronald George HATTON (1886-1965)
Wife:	Hannah Rachel RIGDEN (1891-1982)
Marriage	1914	West Ashford, Kent, England

Husband: Ronald George HATTON

Name:	Ronald George HATTON
Sex:	Male
Father:	Ernest HATTON (1855-1927)
Mother:	Amy PEARSON (1858-1949)
Birth	6 Jul 1886	Yorkshire, England
Census	31 Mar 1901 (age 14)	Brighton, Sussex, England¹
	18 Goldsmid Rd
Census	2 Apr 1911 (age 24)	Bath, Somerset, England²
	Mr. T. Brady, 15 Linkmead, Stratton On The Fosse
Occupation	2 Apr 1911 (age 24)	Professor; Bath, Somerset, England²
Census	19 Jun 1921 (age 34 yrs 11 mns)	West Malling, Kent, England³
	Hill Top House
Occupation	19 Jun 1921 (age 34)	Director of East Malling Fruit Research Station; West Malling, Kent, England³
	Employment: The Kent Incorporated Society for Promoting Experiments in Horticulture Place of Work: East Malling Research Station Nr Maidstone, Kent
Census	29 Sep 1939 (age 53)	Malling, Kent⁴
	Great East
Occupation	29 Sep 1939 (age 53)	Director of Horticultural Research Institution and Information Bureau; East Malling⁴
Title	1949 (age 62-63)	Sir
	He was knighted for his services to horticulture on his retirement in 1949.
Occupation		Horticulture and fruit research scientist
Death	11 Nov 1965 (age 79)	Maidstone, Kent, England
	Sleightholme Benenden
Burial	1965	East Malling, Kent

Wife: Hannah Rachel RIGDEN

Name:	Hannah Rachel RIGDEN
Sex:	Female
Father:	-
Mother:	-
Birth	8 Jan 1891	Hothfield, Kent, England
Census	19 Jun 1921 (age 30 yrs 5 mns)	West Malling, Kent, England³
	Hill Top House
Occupation	19 Jun 1921 (age 30)	Home duties; West Malling, Kent, England³
Census	29 Sep 1939 (age 48)	East Malling⁴
	Great East
Occupation	29 Sep 1939 (age 48)	unpaid domestic duties; East Malling⁴
Death	1982 (age 90-91)	Thirsk, Yorkshire, England
	Oak Lea, Dalton Road, Islebeck

Note on Husband: Ronald George HATTON (1)

RONALD GEORGE HATTON 1886-1965 Elected F.R.S. 1944 Ronald George Hatton was a distinguished pomologist, an able administrator and a man who won the affection and esteem of his friends and colleagues alike. Ronald was born on 6 July 1886, in Yorkshire, a county for which he always retained a great affection. He was the youngest child of Ernest Hatton who was a barrister of the Inner Temple. Ronald’s mother was Amy Pearson, a woman of forceful character who came from a similar environment, since she was the daughter of William Pearson, also a barrister, who had taken silk. With such legal forebears on both sides of the family it would scarcely have been surprising if their son had followed the law, but perhaps this hereditary influence manifested itself, in later life, in a marked ability for administration and the handling of finance. But, though Ronald’s ancestry was mainly non-scientific, there was one very distinguished scientist on the mother’s side, namely his uncle, Professor Karl Pearson, F.R.S., the famous statistician and author of The grammar of science. The other members of the family were two sisters. The elder of these, Margerie, followed a successful career as a nurse. She became Matron of the Cottage Hospital at Lyme Regis and, later, for a period of thirteen years till the time of her death, was Matron of the hospital at Teignmouth. The younger sister, Dorothy, studied modern languages at Exeter and was indeed the first woman to receive the Batchelor of Arts Degree from the, then newly established, College of the South-West. She next turned her attention to chemistry, though at this time and subsequently, after her marriage, outdoor pursuits always claimed her great interest. Such was the family environment that Ronald grew up in. It provided an intellectual atmosphere that was not only very diversified but embraced both arts and sciences. This broad field of family interests may perhaps explain the ease with which Ronald, whose earlier interests were centred upon history and Chaucerian literature, transferred his chief preoccupations to the scientific field, whilst relegating the arts to a smaller claim upon his time, if not upon his interest. For reasons of geographical convenience, Ronald began his school education at Brighton College and, similarly, when his parents moved from their Sussex home and went to live in Devonshire, Ronald became a pupil at Exeter School, where he studied from 1902 to 1906. Nevertheless it was Yorkshire, where he was born, and Kent, where he worked and died, that held his marked regional affections. From Exeter Hatton went up, as an Exhibitioner, to Balliol College, Oxford, where, largely owing to the persuasion of his mother, he read history and, at one time, contemplated a career in the priesthood, but his historical studies induced a change of vision for his future. During his period at Oxford, the personality of the Master of Balliol, A. L. S. Smith, who used to come and stay with the family at Hothfield, made a great impression on Ronald. Also at Oxford he came under the influence of Cardinal Newman’s ideas, and these together with his historical studies led him to adopt the Roman Catholic faith, despite the Anglican bias of his parents. Hatton had a strong historical sense but, as already indicated, it was his mother’s forceful personality that had largely guided the direction of emphasis hitherto, but the change from history to horticulture was in reality a decision to make his career in the sphere that most attracted him and claimed his greatest affections, namely, the land. The change was perhaps made the easier since the results of his history finals showed this was not his real metier, but much more was the decision dictated by Hatton’s innate love of the countryside and its life. He recorded that at the age of fourteen he had helped with a threshing and all through his Balliol days that memory remained vivid. He was at the University from 1906 to 1910 but then decided that he wanted to obtain a first-hand knowledge of the conditions of agricultural employment and the way of life of those who followed rural pursuits. In order to do this, ‘to claim a closer intimacy with my friends of the field, farm and village’ he worked side by side with them as a labourer on the farm of a friend, ‘living as they on fifteen shillings a week’. Only by this means did he feel it was possible to pass through the barriers of mutual misunderstanding created by differences of birth and education. How successfully he overcame these difficulties was evident from his book Folk of the furrow that emanated from these experiences and which was published in 1913 under the pseudonym of Christopher Holdenby. In these pages there is a graphic and sympathetic picture of the hardships that the agricultural labourer of the period endured, including a degree of mental isolation. This book was widely read and no doubt played its part in the amelioration of the countryman’s lot that the 1914-1918 war hastened. Hatton diagnosed the need of the agricultural worker for better education, better housing and more civilized conditions, aspects of the rural problem that others had stressed also, but from these pages we realize his keen appreciation of the paramount importance of the development of personal relations between the agricultural worker and the farmer. No doubt this realization was partly responsible for the happy, co-operative, atmosphere that Hatton developed when he became Director of a Research Station; a spirit of mutual respect and goodwill to which tributes have more than once been paid. One can visualize at this period Hatton’s stocky figure, the homely countenance and friendly expression, which the ‘gig-lamp’ spectacles enhanced rather than diminished, all of which helped him to establish a feeling of confidence and comradeship, so that he soon became accepted whether it were in a manual undertaking or an intellectual adventure. The two years that Hatton spent in the fields gave him a first-hand knowledge of the practical aspects of farming and engendered the desire for a deeper insight and understanding of the theoretical background. In 1912 therefore he entered the South-Eastern Agricultural College at Wye as a student, to study agriculture and horticulture. After two years he was assisting R. Wellington, who was in charge of the College’s small Fruit Experiment Station at East Malling. Hatton became acting Director whilst Wellington was on active service. At the end of the first World War, Wellington elected to retire and was replaced by Hatton. From 1917 onwards a succession of papers by Hatton, alone or in collaboration with others, demonstrated his determination to place pomology on a more scientific foundation. Hatton’s most important contributions to scientific fruit culture were concerned with the standardization of the material which was to be the subject of experimental investigation. Very early in his career he appreciated that the utilization of scions from a single source was inadequate to achieve uniformity of the material for study when the root-stocks upon which the scions were grafted varied markedly in their character and influence. He demonstrated the strikingly differing results that were produced when scions of uniform origin were grafted upon different root-stocks, which could completely invalidate the apparent effects of experimental treatments aimed to elucidate the influence of nutritional or other factors. This led Hatton to investigate the variability that obtained amongst ‘Paradise stocks’ commonly employed at that time for the grafting of apples, and amongst the quince stocks utilized for the grafting of pears. Hatton discovered that these differed widely in the vigour of their growth, the size of their leaves, the shape and colour of the buds and other botanical characteristics. They also differed in their influence on the vigour of the scions grafted upon them and the onset of their fruiting. Thus some individuals produced a small-sized fruit tree that came into bearing early, others produced a fruit tree of large dimensions that eventually yielded correspondingly larger crops but which came into full bearing much more slowly. The final outcome of these studies was the production of the well-known series of Malling stocks of which the dwarfing Malling IX and the vigorous Malling II are perhaps the most widely known. Improvements in the earthing-up technique, that enabled stool-shoots of these different types of stock to be clonally propagated upon a large scale, were an essential sequel to make these results commercially available. The practical achievement was of major importance since, for the first time, fruit growers could plant up their orchards with confidence in the character and habit of the trees that would develop, so that the foresight exercised in the spacing and lay-out of an orchard would not be falsified by an erratic growth as the trees attained maturity. However, of even greater significance for the scientific pursuit of pomology was that henceforth large-scale experiments could be carried out with material in which stock and scion were alike clonally uniform, each from one genetic source. This potential gain of precision implied the possibility of analysis of results with a statistical significance previously unattainable. One of the great handicaps to scientific investigation of ‘top-fruit’ is the length of time for which land must be devoted to a single experiment so that any reduction in avoidable variability, and thus in the area necessary for adequate replication, is an immediate contribution to the effectiveness of all scientific stations working in this field of study. By the use of specialized techniques such as that of grafting directly upon the root-system and the method of ‘double-working’ in which intermediates of different lengths were employed, Hatton was enabled to demonstrate that both constituent parts of that artificially built up organism the grafted tree, make their particular contribution to the characteristics of the fruiting maturity. Although of over ninety papers that Hatton published, most were concerned with fruit stocks of apples, pears and plums, he also made significant contributions to the culture of black-currants and to the study of pests and diseases. The value of his work was recognized by the Honorary Fellowship of Wye College, where it began, by the conferment of the C.B.E. in 1934 and by his election to the Royal Society in 1944. He was knighted for his services to horticulture on his retirement in 1949. Hatton was Director of the East Malling Research Station for a period of thirty years, from the time of the resignation of the first occupant of that office, R. Wellington, in 1919, until Hatton’s own retirement in 1949. When he took charge of the embryonic Station in 1914 it had at its disposal a very small staff, a hut and only twenty-two acres of land. It was mainly through Hatton’s initiative that Bradbourne House and estate was acquired in 1938, thus providing the means of experimental expansion, by then urgently required. With the growth of the Station the need for more specialized groups to support the work of the pomologists became apparent to Hatton, as, for example, in the field of statistics. Under his aegis other research sections developed in the fields of physiology, biochemistry, pathology, entomology and protective chemistry. He left to his successor well-equipped laboratories, a large and effective staff and an area of three hundred and sixty acres of land. In 1914 Hatton had married Hannah Rachel Rigden, daughter of Henry Rigden of Ashford, Kent. As the wife of the Director she not only dispensed a charming hospitality but earned the regard of the staff and their families as well as of the students attached to the Station. The occasion of Hatton’s retirement was marked by tributes, the world over, to the esteem in which he was held by his colleagues and all those connected with the science and practice of pomology. In retirement Hatton’s energies reverted to his gardening enthusiasms which had of necessity been somewhat in abeyance during his directorship. Almost up to the time of his death he was a very successful cultivator of roses, pelargoniums and carnations as well as choice fruit, first at Hythe and subsequently at Benenden. I can recall a visit he paid to Kew Gardens in his later years and the enthusiasm he manifested for the pelargoniums and mesembryanthemums. Hatton’s interest in the educational welfare of farm-workers was lifelong and practical. He it was who, in association with Mr Albert Mansbridge, founded the Kentish branch of the Workers’ Educational Association. Another of his successful activities was the development of the culture of Cox’s orange pippin in West Sussex, a venture which provided the early foundation of the now well known, ‘Kirdford growers’. In addition to all this Hatton was the first Director of the Commonwealth Bureau of Horticultural and Plantation Crops and subsequently Consultant Director. He also played a prominent part in the development of the Fruit Group of the Royal Horticultural Society, on the Council of which he served. Hatton died at his home at Benenden, Kent, on 11 November 1965 and was buried in East Malling Churchyard next to his great friend and life-long colleague, Jessie Amos. I would wish to record my indebtedness, in the preparation of this memoir and the accompanying bibliography, to the present Director of East Malling Research Station, Dr F. R. Tubbs, to Sir Ronald Hatton’s nephew, Dr T. W. E. Roche, and to Sir Ronald’s friend, Mr R. V. Harris. Their assistance has been invaluable especially since Hatton had not provided any ‘personal record’.

E. J. Salisbury

Downloaded from Royal Society Publishing

Note on Husband: Ronald George HATTON (2)

Decorations: CBE, FRS

Sources