William Whiteman Carlton Topley, 1886 - 1944

William Whiteman Carlton Topley, the eldest of the three sons (the other children, two, died young) of William Henry and Mary Ann Morland Topley was born in Lewisham on 19 January 1886. Topley’s father, who died suddenly in 1916 from coronary disease, at the age of sixty-three was a man of wide intellectual interests and Topley’s uncle, William Topley (1841-1894) was elected into this Society in 1888. William Topley entered the Royal School of Mines in 1858 and was appointed an assistant geologist on the Geological Survey of the United Kingdom in 1862. According to the obituary notice (Proc. Roy. Soc. 59, lxx (1896)) his early memoir ‘On the superficial deposits of the Medway, with remarks on the denudation of the Weald’, published in 1865, ‘did much towards settling a long debated point in geological speculation’.