It is with very great regret that we have heard of the death at the age of 33 of our member in Canada. When Hugh Thompson came to McGill University in 1952 he had already had considerable Arctic experience with the Oxford University Exploration Club in Spitsbergen in 1949. He was therefore a natural choice for geomorphologist on the Arctic Institute’s 1953 Baffin Island expedition. From this he drew the material for his thesis which led to the degree of Ph.D. in 1954 and shortly after he was appointed to the staff of the Department of Geography at McMaster University, Hamilton. Since then his health had never been very good and in December 1956 he was ordered to abstain from field work and forced to switch his interests to more static occupations. Yet the next month saw him organizing a symposium on “Northern Canada Today” which was the most successful divisional meeting of the Association of Canadian Geographers ever held. When I saw him at Toronto in the following September he seemed to have recovered the good spirits which had been so evident during the summer months when we were together in 1953. Hugh Thompson was always serious about his own subject, but on any other he could be relaxed and charming and a delightful companion. He was a confirmed wanderer, having been born in New Zealand from which country he moved via the North-west Frontier of India to Britain and then to Canada. One of his pieces of research led him to investigate small lochs in western Sutherland, another a square mile of ice in Nordaustlandet. During the last year of his life he had begun work on a quantitative analysis of slope and relief in Southern Ontario. Those of us who knew him will miss him sorely and our sympathy goes out to his young wife.
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