Henry George Albert Hickling, 1883-1954

Abstract Henry George Albert Hickling, who always called himself ‘George Hickling’, was born in Nottingham on 5 April 1883. His school education in Nottingham ended at the age of sixteen, and he then lived for three years in Arbroath with a sister and brother-in-law. Here he developed an interest in geology, by observation of the structures visible on the sea shore and in the cliffs of Angus, and by walks in the Grampians. In 1902 he became a student in the University of Manchester, and worked under Professor Wm Boyd Dawkins and Bernard Hobson, gaining 1st class honours in geology in 1905. A year later he became a demonstrator in the small department. The Geology Department was housed, with those of Botany and Zoology, in a building attached to the Manchester Museum, and the close association between the staff and students of the three departments naturally led to very wide general interests in those fortunate to work in them. At that time palaeobotany had become of real interest to ‘structural botany’, and the discovery by Scott and Oliver in 1904 that Lagenostoma was the seed of a plant with fern-like leaves and a peculiar anatomy roused wide interest, especially in Manchester where there were large collections, and where Williamson had worked. Thus it is natural that Hickling published admirable accounts (1907 and 1910) of the detailed structure of two Calamitean cones; to these nothing has since been added. In 1906 he saw in the Nottingham Museum tracks of a reptile from a sandstone interbedded in the Magnesian Limestone of Mansfield, and described one form immediately. Somewhat later (1909) he discovered several more types of track from the same place, and realizing that they were the only footprints known of certain Upper Permian age, examined all other accessible footprints also regarded as ‘Permian’—from Penrith, Dumfries and ‘Elgin’. Of these he gave a summary account, with excellent outline figures of individual prints and tracks, showing that all those from these places, whilst largely similar to one another, differed entirely from all known Triassic tracks and from those of Carboniferous age. Nothing has since been added to our knowledge of Upper Permian tracks.