page_title: Julian Huxley
section_title: Personal life
hierarchical_section_title: Julian Huxley / Life / Personal life
caption_attribution_description: English: Blue plaque erected in 1995 by English Heritage at 16 Bracknell Gardens, Hampstead, London NW3 7EB, London Borough of Camden
context_page_description: Sir Julian Sorell Huxley FRS was an English evolutionary biologist, eugenicist, and internationalist. He was a proponent of natural selection, and a leading figure in the mid-twentieth century modern synthesis. He was secretary of the Zoological Society of London, the first Director of UNESCO, a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund and the first President of the British Humanist Association.
  Huxley was well known for his presentation of science in books and articles, and on radio and television. He directed an Oscar-winning wildlife film. He was awarded UNESCO's Kalinga Prize for the popularisation of science in 1953, the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society in 1956, and the Darwin–Wallace Medal of the Linnaean Society in 1958. He was also knighted in that same year, 1958, a hundred years after Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace announced the theory of evolution by natural selection. In 1959 he received a Special Award of the Lasker Foundation in the category Planned Parenthood – World Population. Huxley was a prominent member of the British Eugenics Society and was its president from 1959 to 1962.
context_section_description: Huxley came from the Huxley family on his father's side and the Arnold family on his mother's. His great-grandfather was Thomas Arnold of Rugby School, his great-uncle Matthew Arnold, and his aunt Mrs Humphrey Ward. His grandfather was Thomas Henry Huxley, a friend and supporter of Charles Darwin and proponent of evolution, and his father was writer and editor Leonard Huxley. 
  Huxley's mother was Julia Arnold (1862-1908), a graduate of Somerville College,  Oxford, who had gained a First in English Literature there in 1882. Julia and Leonard married in 1885 and they had four children: Margaret (1899-1981), the novelist Aldous, Trevenen and Julian.
  Huxley was born on 22 June 1887, at the London house of his aunt. His mother died in 1908, when he was 21. In 1912, his father married Rosalind Bruce, who was the same age as Julian, and he later acquired step-brothers Andrew Huxley and David Huxley. 
  In 1911, Huxley became informally engaged to  Kathleen Fordham, whom he had met some years earlier when she was a pupil at Prior's Field, the school his mother had run. During 1913 the relationship broke down  and Huxley had a nervous breakdown which a biographer described as caused by 'conflict between desire and guilt'. In the first months of 1914 Huxley had severe depression and lived for some weeks at The Hermitage, a small private nursing home. In August of 1914 while Huxley was in Scotland, his brother Trevenen also had a nervous breakdown and stayed in the same nursing home. Trevenen was worried about how he had treated one of his women friends and committed suicide whilst there.
  In 1919 Huxley married Juliette Baillot (1896–1994) a French Swiss woman whom he had met while she was employed as a governess at Garsington Manor, the country house of Lady Ottoline Morrell. Huxley was later unfaithful to Baillot and told her that he wanted an open marriage. One of his affairs was with the poet May Sarton who in turn fell in love with Baillot and had a brief affair with her as well. Huxley described himself in print as suffering from manic depression, and his wife's autobiography suggests that Julian Huxley suffered from  a bipolar disorder. He relied on his wife to provide moral and practical support throughout his life. 
  Julian and Juliette Huxley had two sons, Anthony Huxley (1920–1992) and Francis Huxley (1923–2016), who both became scientists.
caption: English Heritage blue plaque at 16 Bracknell Gardens, Hampstead, London, commemorating Julian, his younger brother Aldous, and father Leonard
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