Alfred Daniel Hall, 1864-1942

Few men of our time have done more for the scientific development of country life than A. D. Hall. The task required an unusual combination of personality, ability and outlook and these he possessed: he had further the advantage of being ready for the work just when it was ready to be done. He was born on 22 June 1864 at Moss Terrace, Milnrow Road, Rochdale, the son of Edwin Hall, a flannel manufacturer who, however, had come from Bury where the grandfather had also been in the flannel trade, but the older generations had for long been small farmers on the edge of the moors. He was the eldest of five children and his early home life was very happy. The parents were in comfortable circumstances and encouraged the children to take an interest in intellectual and outdoor pursuits, to read widely, to realize the beauty in books, music and pictures; at the week-ends the father took them for long walks. On Sunday evenings after Sunday School and Church they would sit round the fire, listen to the reading of the Bible and then join in singing hymns standing round their mother at the piano. It was the kind of up-bringing that has produced many famous men. His family was not unique in its intellectual interests: there were others like-minded in Rochdale. In one of his rare autobiographical fragments 1 he describes a little society of working men naturalists that as a boy he used to frequent—for he had a gift of making friends with older men. One member, a cotton spinner, had added several mosses to the British flora; another had made a detailed study of the calcareous shale brought up from a coal pit and prepared numerous sections of the fossil vegetation which he passed on to Professor Williamson for use in his paleobotanical investigations; yet another, a brass fitter, made the bodies of microscopes and telescopes and fitted them with lenses purchased from optical firms; from him Hall, by dint of hard saving, acquired his first microscope: ‘a clumsy tool’, he says, ‘but it served my purposes.’