Godfrey Thurston Hopkins, known as Thurston Hopkins, was a well-known British Picture Post photojournalist and a centenarian.
Background
Godfrey Thurston Hopkins was born on April 16, 1913 in London. He was the son of Sybil (nee 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.
Education
Godfrey Thurston Hopkins was educated at St Joseph’s Salesian school at Burwash, near Kipling’s home in East Sussex, and at Montpelier college, Brighton. He 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.
Career
Godfrey Hopkins found employment with a publisher adding decorative frames to portraits of Edward VIII, which the King's abdication on December 10, 1936 brought to an abrupt end. With the shift to photography from illustration amongst newspaper publishers, he joined the PhotoPress Agency.
After being demobilised, Godfrey 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.
One of his first essays was his popular 'Cats of London' (24 Feb 1951), a series made whilst working on other stories during which he would find stray cats living in the many bomb sites and back alleys. His best known photograph drew on this talent with animals. Entitled La Dolce Vita, Knightsbridge, London, 1953 the picture shows a limousine owner-driver with a regal poodle sitting bolt upright in the passenger seat. Ripe for commercial exploitation, it became a best selling postcard, poster and calendar image.
With the closure of Picture Post in 1957, Godfrey Hopkins conducted business as one of London's more successful advertising photographers from his studio in Chiswick before taking up teaching at the Guildford School of Art, a major British course in photography under Ifor Thomas. In his rural retirement Hopkins returned to his interest in painting.
Godfrey Hopkins worked well into his old age and died a centenarian on October 26, 2014, survived by wife Grace, his daughter, Joanna, his son, Robert, and a granddaughter, Cressida.
Membership
Staff Picture Post, assignments worldwide 1949-1957.