Huxley Family

The Huxley family is a British family; several of its members have excelled in science, medicine, arts and literature. The family also includes members who occupied senior positions in the public service of the United Kingdom.

The patriarch of the family was the zoologist and comparative anatomist Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895). His grandsons include Aldous Huxley (author of ''Brave New World'' and ''The Doors of Perception'') and his brother Julian Huxley (an evolutionary biologist and the first director of UNESCO) and the Nobel laureate physiologist Andrew Huxley.

Family tree

Thomas Henry Huxley

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) was an English biologist. Known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his defence of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Mostly a self-educated man, he had an extraordinary influence on the British educated public. He was instrumental in developing scientific education in Britain, and opposed those Christian leaders who tried to stifle scientific debate. He was a member of eight Royal Commissions and two other commissions. A noted unbeliever, he used the term "agnostic" to describe his attitude to theism.

Though Huxley was a great comparative anatomist and invertebrate zoologist, perhaps his most notable scientific achievement was his work on human evolution. Starting in 1858, Huxley gave lectures and published papers which analysed the zoological position of man. The best were collected in a landmark work: ''Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature'' (1863). This contained two themes: first, humans are related to the great apes, and second, the species has evolved in a similar manner to all other forms of life. These were ideas which the careful and cautious Darwin had only hinted at in ''The Origin of Species'', but with which Huxley was in full agreement.

In 1855, he married Henrietta Anne Heathorn (1825–1915), an English émigrée whom he had met in Sydney. They had five daughters and three sons:

*Noel Huxley (1856–1860), died aged 4.
*Jessie Oriana Huxley (1858–1927), married architect Fred Waller in 1877.
*Marian Huxley (1859–1887) married artist John Collier in 1879.
* Leonard Huxley (1860–1933), married Julia Arnold.
*Rachel Huxley (1862–1934) married civil engineer Alfred Eckersley in 1884.

*Henrietta (Nettie) Huxley (1863–1940), married Harold Roller, travelled Europe as a singer.
*Henry Huxley (1865–1946), became a fashionable general practitioner in London.
*Ethel Huxley (1866–1941) married artist John Collier (widower of sister) in 1889.

John Collier (son-in-law)

John Collier was not a Huxley by birth, but by marriage twice over: both his wives were daughters of Thomas Henry Huxley. The Honourable John Maler Collier OBE RP ROI (27 January 1850 – 11 April 1934) was a writer and painter in the Pre-Raphaelite style. He was one of the leading portrait painters of his generation. The National Portrait Gallery's collection of his portraiture is weak, but in 2007 it bought his first wife's portrait of him painting her.

Collier's views on religion and ethics are interesting for their comparison with the views of Thomas Henry Huxley and Julian Huxley, both of whom gave Romanes lectures on that subject. In ''The religion of an artist'' (1926) Collier explains "It he bookis mostly concerned with ethics apart from religion... I am looking forward to a time when ethics will have taken the place of religion... My religion is really negative. he benefits of religioncan be attained by other means which are less conducive to strife and which put less strain on upon the reasoning faculties". On secular morality: "My standard is frankly utilitarian. As far as morality is intuitive, I think it may be reduced to an inherent impulse of kindliness towards our fellow citizens". On the idea of God: "People may claim without much exaggeration that the belief in God is universal. They omit to add that superstition, often of the most degraded kind, is just as universal". And "An omnipotent Deity who sentences even the vilest of his creatures to eternal torture is infinitely more cruel than the cruellest man". And on the Church: "To me, as to most Englishmen, the triumph of Roman Catholicism would mean an unspeakable disaster to the cause of civilization". His views, then, were very close to the agnosticism of Thomas Henry Huxley and the humanism of Julian Huxley.

Collier and his first wife Marian (Mady) had one child, Joyce, a portrait miniaturist. She married twice, first to Leslie Crawshay-Williams, whose family were South Wales ironmasters. They had two children, Rupert Crawshay-Williams and Gillian. Joyce next married Drysdale Kilburn; they had a son, Nicholas Kilburn.

By his second wife Ethel he had a daughter and a son, Sir Laurence Collier , (1890–1976), British Ambassador to Norway 1939–1950. In later life Ethel became known as ''The Dragon'', and then ''The Grand-Dragon'' to her grandchildren. She vetted all the family marriages; inspecting Elizabeth Powell for prospective marriage to Rupert Crawshay-Williams (her stepdaughter's son) she said "You are marrying into one of the great atheist families; I know you are an atheist now, but will you be able to keep it up until you die?". The bridegroom started working for Gramophone Records, but became a philosopher and writer. He was the author of ''The Comforts of Unreason'' (1947); ''Methods and Criteria of Reasoning'' (1957) and ''Russell Remembered'' (1970); a homage to Bertrand Russell.

Ethel's daughter Joan married Captain (later General) Frank Anstie Buzzard. They had three children: John Huxley Buzzard, Richard Buzzard, and Pamela.

Collier's portraits of the family and others

Collier painted numerous portraits of members of the family. He painted both his wives, Marian (Mady) and Ethel; his children; both Thomas Henry Huxley and his wife; and many of the next two generations. A biographer reports a total of ''thirty-two'' Huxley family portraits during the half-century after his marriage to Mady. His favourite sitter was his eldest daughter Joyce, of whom six portraits are recorded. Second wife Ethel sat for four portraits; their children, Joan and Laurence, the Buzzard children, Laurence's wife Eleanor, and several of their children were also portrayed. Many of Huxley's children and some of his grandchildren were portrayed: Leonard Huxley, Julian and Juliette Huxley, Aldous Huxley; Henry (Harry) Huxley and his wife, and son Gervas; Henrietta (Nettie) Huxley; and there are others.

Many scientific friends and supporters of Huxley sat for Collier. Darwin and Huxley themselves, twice each – and there were a number of replica portraits of Darwin and Huxley made by Collier. George John Romanes, William Kingdom Clifford, Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, William Spottiswoode, Sir John Lubbock, E. Ray Lankester and Sir Michael Foster were all important friends. Francis Balfour and John Tyndall were portrayed after their tragic deaths.

Margaret Huxley (niece)

Margaret Huxley (1854–1940) was the niece of Thomas Henry Huxley, daughter of his brother William Thomas Huxley. She became a senior nurse in Dublin and is considered to be the pioneer of scientific nursing training in Ireland, after establishing nursing education in her own hospital and a few years later in a central school. She campaigned for the professionalisation of nursing and a formal system of nurse registration.

Sir Leonard George Holden Huxley (distant cousin)

Sir Leonard George Holden Huxley KBE (1902–1988) was second cousin once removed of Thomas Henry Huxley. Much of his life was spent in Australia, though he was at Oxford from 1923 to 1930. He obtained his D.Phil from Oxford University in 1928. The final period of his life was spent in Australia, University of Adelaide (1949–60); Australian National University (1960–67), latterly as Vice-Chancellor. A key figure in the establishment of the Anglo-Australian Telescope.

Leonard Huxley and issue

Leonard Huxley (1860–1933), the most prominent of T. H. Huxley's children, had six children, several of whom left their mark on the twentieth century. He was a teacher (assistant master) at Charterhouse, then assistant editor and later editor of the ''Cornhill Magazine''. Huxley's major biographies were the three volumes of ''Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley'' and the two volumes of ''Life and Letters of Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker OM GCSI''.

His first wife was Julia Arnold (1862–1908), founder in 1902 of Prior's Field School a still existing girls' school in Godalming, Surrey. Through her Leonard was connected to the intellectual family of the Arnolds: his wife's father was Tom Arnold (1823–1900), who married Julia Sorell, granddaughter of a former governor of Tasmania. Julia Arnold's sister was the best-selling novelist Mary (who wrote as Mrs Humphry Ward), her uncle the poet Matthew Arnold, and her grandfather the influential Rugby School headmaster Thomas Arnold. In her youth she and her sister Ethel had inspired Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) to invent doublet (now called word ladder


Leonard and Julia had four children, including the biologist Julian Huxley, Sir Julian Sorell Huxley and the writer Aldous Leonard Huxley. Their middle son, Noel Trevenen (born in 1889) committed suicide in 1914. Their daughter, Margaret Arnold Huxley, was born in 1899 and died on 11 October 1981.

After the death of his first wife, Leonard married Rosalind Bruce (1890–1994), and had two further sons. The elder of these was David Bruce Huxley (1915-1992), whose daughter Angela Huxley married George Pember Darwin, son of the physicist Sir Charles Galton Darwin (and thus a great-grandson of Charles Darwin married a great-granddaughter of Thomas Huxley). The younger son (1917-2012) was the Nobel Prize winner, physiologist Andrew Fielding Huxley.

A Plaque was erected in 1995 at the house in Bracknell Gardens, Hampstead to commemorate Leonard, Julian and Aldous 'Men of Science and Letters, lived here.'

Sir Julian Huxley

Julian Huxley (1887–1975) was the first Director-General of UNESCO. He was Secretary of Zoological Society, co-founder of the World Wildlife Fund, and president of the British Eugenics Society. He won the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society, the Darwin–Wallace Medal of the Linnaean Society, the Kalinga Prize and the Lasker Award. He presided over the founding conference for the International Humanist and Ethical Union. He wrote fifty books, including "The Science of Life", co-authored with H. G. Wells