Rudolph Cecil HOPKINSON

30 August 1918

Major B. Hopkinson Killed

Major Bertram Hopkinson, C.M.G., F.R.S., was killed on August 26th in a flying accident near London. He had been Professor of Mechanism and Applied Mechanics at Cambridge since 1903, and was a Professorial Fellow of King’s. He was the eldest and last surviving son of the late Dr. J. Hopkinson, F.R.S., the engineer and physicist, who was a nephew of the late Mr. J.B. Dewhurst, and cousin of Mr. Algernon Dewhurst J.P., of Aireville, Skipton. A brother of Major Bertram Hopkinson (Lieut. Cecil Hopkinson) died of wounds recently.

The death of Major Hopkinson recalls the tragic Alpine accident of twenty years ago, when. on August 27th, 1898, Dr. John Hopkinson, father of the deceased officer, with another son, Jack, and two daughters, Alice and Lina, were killed, and the new wing of the Engineering School at Cambridge University was erected to their memory. There is now only one daughter left of the family, namely Lady Ewing, wife of Prof. Ewing.

Major Bertram Hopkinson was born in January, 1874. He was educated at St. Paul’s School and Trinity, Cambridge, where, owing to illness, he was forced to take an acgrotat degree in the Mathematical Tripos, Part I., 1895; but in 1896 he was placed in the first class, Division I., of the Second Part. He was called to the Bar in 1897. On his father’s death, however, in the following year, in the Alpine accident already referred to, Major Hopkinson started in business as a consulting engineer in partnership with Mr. Charles Hopkinson and Mr. Ernest Talbot, and jointly with them he was responsible for the design of the electric tramways at Leeds and Newcastle-on-Tyne and many other public works. He was a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1910, and was created a C.M.G. in 1917. He edited Original Papers by his father, with a memoir, and was the author of several scientific and technical papers read before the Royal Society, the Institution of Civil Engineers, and other scientific bodies. He carried out a good deal of experimental work on the phenomena of explosion, measuring, for example, the duration of the pressures produced by the detonation of gun-cotton, and investigating the precise course of events which happen when a mixture of gas and air is burnt in conditions such as obtain in the cylinder of a gas-engine. In 1903 he married the eldest daughter of Mr. Alexander Siemens. The funeral will be a military one, and will take place at Cambridge today (Friday).