Charles Arthur Lovatt Evans, 1884-1968

Charles Lovatt Evans, Emeritus Professor of Physiology, University of London, and a former Vice-President of the Royal Society, died on 29 August 1968, at the age of 84, at his home at Winterslow, near Salisbury. He was the foremost pupil and a lifelong associate of E. H. Starling, Jodrell Professor of Physiology at University College London, and eventually occupied the same chair. Lovatt Evans was born in Birmingham and spent the whole of his childhood and early manhood there. His father Charles Evans taught music— piano and violin—and was a man of many interests, of which ancient history was one, and he started to learn Greek when in his sixties. Although a humorist he had somewhat rigid views on religion, life and death, and held the view that the more you do for people the less they do for themselves, so Lovatt Evans was largely left to himself to decide upon his future and surmount the difficulties of finding ways and means. His mother seemed to him to be of rather an aloof nature, spending much of her time in intellectual pursuits often at the expense of her domestic duties. The result was that in his home life he was lonely.