The Booles and the Hintons: two dynasties that helped shape the modern world

by Gerry Kennedy 



In 1983 Gerry Kennedy set off on a tour through Russia, China, Japan and the

USA to visit others involved in the global anti-war movement. Only dimly aware

of his Victorian ancestors: George Boole, forefather of the digital revolution

and James Hinton, eccentric philosopher and advocate of polygamy, he had

directly followed in the footsteps of two dynasties of radical thinkers and

doers.Their notable achievements, in which the women were particularly

prominent, involved many spheres. Boole’s wife, Mary Everest, niece of George

Everest, surveyor of the eponymous mountain, was an early advocate of hands-on

education. Of the five talented Boole daughters, Ethel Voynich, wife of the

discoverer of the enigmatic, still unexplained Voynich Manuscript, campaigned

with Russian anarchists to overthrow the Tsar. Her 1897 novel The Gadfly,

filmed later with music by Shostakovich, sold in millions behind the Iron

Curtain. She was rumoured to have had an affair with the notorious ‘Ace of

Spies’, Sidney Reilly. One of Ethel’s sisters married Charles Howard Hinton: a

leading exponent of the esoteric realm of the fourth dimension and inventor of

the gunpowder baseball-pitcher. Of their descendants, Carmelita Hinton also

pioneered progressive education in the USA at her school in Putney, Vermont.

Her children dedicated their lives to Mao’s China. Appalled by the dropping on

Japan of the atomic bomb that she had helped design, Joan Hinton defected to

China and actively engaged in the Cultural Revolution. William Hinton wrote

the influential documentary Fanshen based on his experience in 1948 of

revolutionary change in a Shanxi village. Other members of the clan became

renowned in their fields of physics, entomology and botany. Their combined

legacy of independent and constructive thinking is perhaps typified by the

invention of the Jungle Gym: the climbing-frame now used by children the world

over. In The Booles and the Hintons the author embarks on a quest to reveal

the stories behind their remarkable lives.



ISBN-13: 	9781782051855

Publisher: 	Attic Press

Publication date: 	03/20/2016

Pages: 	265