Description
By Robert A. Hinde
As soon as he could, at the age of seventeen, Robert Hinde volunteered for the RAF. After a frustratingly long period of training, he was assigned to Coastal Command, where he became a pilot flying Catalina and then Sunderland flying boats.
Upon his release in January 1946 he went to St. John’s College, Cambridge to read Natural Sciences (Zoology). He then went to Oxford (Balliol College and the Zoology Department), where he did field work towards a D. Phil. under the guidance of David Lack and the newly arrived Niko Tinbergen. In 1950 he returned to St. John’s College and the Zoology Department in Cambridge, where he helped William Thorpe establish an Ornithological Field Station (later named the Sub-Department of Animal Behaviour) in Madingley. Robert was awarded a Royal Society Research Professorship in 1963, and he set up an MRC Unit on the Development & Integration of Behaviour in 1971. From 1989-1994 he was Master of St. John’s College, Cambridge.
After the war, Robert became heavily involved in peace movements, particularly the Movement for the Abolition of War and the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs.
