HG Wells, one of the original founders of Diabetes UK, wrote more than a hundred books, fiction and non-fiction, including 'The Invisible Man', 'The War of the Worlds' and 'The Time Machine'. His futuristic, prophetic visions grappled with the profound choices faced by mankind in respect of science, technology, war and social order on a global scale.
While his novels are what he is most well-known for, Wells was also a journalist, sociologist, and historian. Such achievements are all the more admirable when set against his modest upbringing.
From humble beginnings
Born on 21 September, 1866 in Bromley, Kent, his father was a shopkeeper and a professional cricketer. His mother served from time to time as a housekeeper at the nearby estate of Uppark. His father’s business failed and Wells was apprenticed like his brothers to a draper, spending the years between 1880 and 1883 in Windsor and Southsea.
In 1883 Wells became a teacher and pupil at Midhurst Grammar School. Here he obtained a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London where he studied biology under TH Huxley. His interest in these studies diminished, though, and in 1887 he left without a degree. From there he taught in private schools for four years, not taking his biology degree until 1890. The next year he settled in London, married his cousin Isabel and continued his career as a teacher in a correspondence college.
Political commentator
He enjoyed a more than effervescent love life and it is thought this may have prevented him from standing for Parliament -he was a staunch socialist and prominent political commentator who would have felt at home in the Commons. After some years Wells left Isabel for one of his brightest students, Amy Catherine. The pair married in 1895.
Memberships
He joined the Fabian Society in 1903, worked for the League of Nations in 1917, was the president of English PEN, the association of writers promoting liturature as a means of greater understanding between cultures, from 1933 to 1936, and was a co-founder of the Diabetic Association in 1934.
Diabetes diagnosis
Wells’s diagnosis of diabetes (distinctions of Type 1 and Type 2 did not exist then) came in his early 60s, around 1930, and led to him giving up his teaching career. In July 1931 he became a private patient of the famous physician RD Lawrence.