Synopsis

Dr Joe McCall, a retired geologist, aged 91, published in 2011 a biography of his great-great-grandfather, George Pilkington, 'The Pilkington Gene'. The central figures here are his maternal grandfather, Dr Joseph Kidd and himself. He recounts Dr Kidd's life, from birth as the seventeenth and last surviving child of a family of 20, in Limerick in the early 19th C. Joseph tended the Irish Potato Famine and then became a consultant physician in London, with Disraeli among his patients: he married twice and had 15 children. Joe's father's work at the Ballantyne Press (and Vale Press) is mentioned. He covers his happy early life at the tail of a family of seven, in Suffolk and Sussex, his school years under gathering war clouds in the 1930's, and his abortive start at Imperial College, before being called up to army service in 1940. As in his previous book, we get the flavour of worlds now gone. Particularly interesting are the large families of the 19th C, when the males considered it their Christian duty to continue putting their wives in the family way, even wearing them out to death. His great grandmother, Rebecca, has a child every year for eleven years! Yet Joe would not be here, if she had not had 17 children! He leaves us on his departure for Aldershot in 1940.

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