Obituary notices of fellows deceased

Although the Tilden family was long connected with the county of Kent, the subject of this notice was born in London on the 15th of August, 1842, as the elder son of Augustus Tilden, clerk in the Bank of England, and later the manager of a provincial bank. Young Tilden attended school successively in Kidderminster, Bedford and East Dereham, and it was from a visiting master’s occasional lectures at the last-mentioned place that the boy picked up some notions of chemistry and developed the desire to become an experimenter. Chemistry in the wider sense was probably a branch of knowledge unrecognised by Tilden’s parents, and it seems that they thought to meet his aspirations by apprenticing him, while yet barely fifteen years of age, to a pharmaceutical chemist at Barnsbury. He was fortunate in his employer, Mr. Alfred Allchin, who, having acted as assistant in the Pharmaceutical Society’s laboratory and worked for a short time in Pelouze’s laboratory in Paris, had an outlook beyond the limits of the pharmacy. The young apprentice was encouraged to attend lectures at the Pharmaceutical Society, and those of Hofmann at the Royal College of Chemistry, and to make as many chemical preparations as his duties permitted. In 1861, Tilden was awarded the first Bell Scholarship at the Pharmaceutical Society, and at the end of his apprenticeship he became a junior assistant in Dr. John Stenhouse’s private laboratory, returning a year later to the Pharmaceutical Society as Demonstrator under Attfield, then Professor of Practical Chemistry.