George Hoole Mitchell, 31 December 1902 - 11 March 1976

Abstract

G eorge H oole M itchell, who died in hospital at Greenock on 11 March 1976, was the Assistant Director in charge of the Geological Survey of Great Britain's work in Scotland from 1959 to 1967. Some time before this appoint ment, he had become distinguished for his geological work in the Lake District, Yorkshire and the English Midlands. Mitchell was born in Liverpool on 31 December 1902, the elder of two children of George Richard and Emma Mitchell. Both his parents were natives of Birmingham and they belonged to families thought to have migrated there to benefit from that city's nineteenth-century industrial prosperity. Mitchell's mother, Emma France (1877-1953), was the thirteenth and youngest child of the marriage of Hoole and Mary France; her father's name, Hoole, was one of those given to G. H. Mitchell and to his sister, Joyce M. H. Mitchell. Though G. H. was addressed at home as Hoole, his school friends and later his geological friends and even his wife, sister, sons and grandchildren called him 'Mick' or 'Mickie'. Hoole was certainly a forename of several of G. H.'s mother's ancestors and members of that family believed themselves to be related to Charles Hoole, the author of A new discovery of the old art of teaching schoole'; in four small treatises (1660). The four treatises were entitled respec tively: The petty schoole, The usher's duty, The master's method, and Scholastick discipline, and the whole book was reissued in 1913, edited by E. T. Campagnac and published by the Liverpool University Press. Reviews appeared in the Times Educational Supplement and in the Manchester ; in the latter newspaper, the reviewer (J. Dover Wilson) described the book as 'one of England's educational classics' and Hoole was categorized as a schoolmaster who tried 'to make the dry bones of grammar toothsome to those of tender years'. Mitchell's father, George Richard Mitchell (1874-1965), was the eldest of four children; his father was a pewterer of Irish extraction and his mother, a member of a family of twenty-two children, came from Ayrshire. So one appreciates Mickie's claim to having a quarter of Scottish ancestry and 'about' a quarter of Irish. George Richard Mitchell won a scholarship to King Edward's School, Birmingham, where he gained distinction in classics and was a good all-round cricketer and footballer. Subsequently he went to a school in Bridgenorth as a pupil teacher and later to Heversham School, Westmorland. There,