Professor William George Victor Balchin And The Balchin Family Society - Sir Robert Balchin

It was on a cold day in November 1991 that I first met Professor William Balchin, although we had exchanged letters often before that time and, as he said, 'had eyed each other in Who's Who'. We had both been in correspondence also with the late Mrs Pat Green, sister of Mrs Jenny Dixon who presently does wonderful family research on our Committee. Pat, a descendant of John Balchin, a brother of Dr Richard Balchin, an early 19th century mayor of Godalming, had long been investigating the history of the Balchin family, and became an extremely talented genealogical expert. She had caught this bug from her Dorking relation John Walker, who had since 1915 been researching the family, and had been responsible for the important and lengthy family tree Balchins of Surrey which he had printed and lodged in the British Library. Co-incidentally John Walker died aged nearly 90 on the day after our meeting - he would have been proud of the fact that our present family tree took his work as its basis.

So Pat, William and I met at the Royal Overseas League and decided then and there to form a one-name society, the Balchin Family Society. I knew at once that William was a Balchin when he greeted me in the foyer, as he looked very much like my great-uncle Joseph.

William was seventy-five at the time, but had the energy of someone twenty years younger, and together we decided to approach as many Balchins in the UK and the Commonwealth as we could discover. We were helped in this by a young man called Adrian Hindle-Briscall, himself with Balchin blood and an expert on the computers of those days. He soon downloaded as many British Balchin addresses as he could find and then collected CD-ROMs from Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Australia and the USA, so our letters inviting membership of the new Society began to travel all over the world.
The result was the 1994 first Family Gathering at Surrey University, where 170 of us gathered to talk about the Balchins, an ever-fascinating topic!

For the next sixteen years Professor William was our hugely esteemed President - he edited our family journal and researched and wrote extremely interesting articles for it. He assiduously attended our Committee meetings and Gatherings, travelling all the way from llkley, even when forced, to his dislike, to use a walking stick. One meeting took place in my office in Great Smith Street, Westminster, but I was called to an urgent political meeting halfway through and left the Committee in my room. Unfortunately the caretaker did not know that they were there and locked them firmly in. William, in his late seventies, decided that anyone who had mountaineered in Spitzbergen could descend down a drainpipe at the back! He was, with reluctance, dissuaded, and luckily I returned with a key soon ...

William, in his quiet and courteous way, was a great man whose enthusiasm and brilliance touched us all and led to that first November meeting; the rest was, literally, history.

The Balchin Family Newsletter- Issue 27,
January 2008



Professor William George Victor Balchin - 1916 - 2007 Professor Emeritus Alice Coleman