Thurston Hopkins

Godfrey Thurston Hopkins (16 April 1913 – 27 October 2014), known as Thurston Hopkins, was a well-known British Picture Post photojournalist and a centenarian. Education Hopkins was born on 16 April 1913 in south London, son of Sybil (née Bateley) and Robert Thurston Hopkins (1884–1958), a bank cashier and prolific author of topographical works, ghost stories, and biographies of British writers Oscar Wilde, H. G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling. The family lived in Sussex and Godfrey, who came to be known as Thurston, was educated at St Joseph's Salesian school at Burwash, near Kipling's home in East Sussex, and at Montpelier college, Brighton. Early work Hopkins studied under Morgan Rendle at Brighton College of Art in graphic art and taught himself photography, his pictures being used for some of his father's books. He found employment with a publisher adding decorative frames to portraits of Edward VIII, which the King's abdication on 10 December 1936 brought to an abrupt end. With the shift to photography from illustration amongst newspaper publishers, he joined the PhotoPress Agency. They lent him his first camera; a Goerz Anschutz which he found cumbersome. It was not until serving in the RAF Photographic Unit during the Second World War in Italy and the Middle East from 1940 that he acquired a more portable 35 mm format Leica which apart from occasional use of a Rolleiflex, he continued to prefer for the rest of his career. Picture Post After being demobilised, Hopkins hitchhiked around Europe for a while taking photographs. Back in England he worked for Camera Press, the agency founded in London in 1947 by Tom Blau. Having seen issues of Picture Post at military posts everywhere during his service he developed a keen ambition to work for this.