Early Life
Thomson was born in Oxford, where his father, William Thomson (who would later become Archbishop of York), was provost of The Queen's College. Thomson was educated at Worsley's School in Hendon and Eton College, and then attended New College, Oxford where a fellow Undergraduate was Montague John Druitt, the man named as the prime suspect in the Jack the Ripper case by Chief Constable Melville Macnaghten in a Scotland Yard document dated 1894. (Thomson replaced Macnaghten as Head of CID at Scotland Yard in 1913.) Thomson ended his university studies after two terms, after suffering bouts of depression, and spent some time from 1881 to 1882 in the United States, working as a farmer in Iowa.
Read more about this topic: Basil Thomson
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)
“Children became an obsessive theme in Victorian culture at the same time that they were being exploited as never before. As the horrors of life multiplied for some children, the image of childhood was increasingly exalted. Children became the last symbols of purity in a world which was seen as increasingly ugly.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)