Personal Life
Spilsbury was born on 16 May 1877 at 35 Bath Street, Leamington Spa, Warwickshire. He was the eldest of the four children of James Spilsbury, a manufacturing chemist, and his wife, Marion Elizabeth Joy.
On 3 September 1908, Spilsbury married Edith Caroline Horton. They had four children together: one daughter, Evelyn, and three sons, Alan, Peter, and Richard. Peter, a junior doctor at St Thomas's Hospital in Lambeth, was killed in the Blitz in 1940, while Alan died of tuberculosis in 1945, shortly after the Second World War.
The deaths (of Peter, in particular) were a blow from which Spilsbury never truly recovered. Depression over both his finances and his declining health are believed to have been a key factor in his decision to commit suicide by gas in his laboratory at University College, London in 1947.
In later years, Spilbury's dogmatic manner and his unbending belief in his own infallibility gave rise to criticism. Judges began to express concern about his invincibility in court and recent researches have indicated that his inflexible dogmatism led to miscarriages of justice.
Read more about this topic: Bernard Spilsbury
Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or life:
“The lover never sees personal resemblances in his mistress to her kindred or to others. His friends find in her a likeness to her mother, or her sisters, or to persons not of her blood. The lover sees no resemblance except to summer evenings and diamond mornings, to rainbows and the song of birds.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Thou art a toilsome mole, or less,
A moving mist;
But life is what none can express,
A quickness which my God hath kissed.”
—Thomas Stanley (1625–1678)