John Menlove Edwards, Date of Birth, Date of Death

John Menlove Edwards

British rock climber

Date of Birth: 18-Jun-1910

Date of Death: 02-Feb-1958

Profession: poet, rock climber

Zodiac Sign: Gemini

John Menlove Edwards was born at Ainsdale, near Liverpool, England, June 18, 1910, the son of a politically radical vicar, George Zachery Edwards, and his wife Helen.
His father's cousin was Hewlett Johnson, Dean of Canterbury Cathedral.
John Menlove's sister Nowell Mary was known as Nowell Mary Hewlett Johnson, after becoming Hewlett Johnson's second wife.John Menlove attended Fettes College, trained as a doctor at Liverpool University to be near his family home and assist with the care of his ailing father, and went on to qualify as a psychiatrist, afterwards setting up in private practise on Rodney Street, Liverpool.
During the Second World War he was a conscientious objector, and worked as a child psychiatrist in London, at Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital and the Tavistock Institute.Edwards was homosexual and was for many years involved in a friendship with climber Wilfrid Noyce, whom he met in 1935.
Edwards saved Noyce's life after an accident on Scafell Crag in 1937.
He became vulnerable to periods of mental instability in the early 1940s, and increasingly to paranoid delusions during the Second World War.
He was sectioned to mental hospitals several times, and given electro-convulsive therapy and deep insulin injections at the North Wales Hospital in Denbigh.
His later life is a story of decline and he committed suicide by taking cyanide in February 2, 1958, at a house belonging to his brother-in-law, Hewlett Johnson.