Early life and education Whittington was born at the height of
World War I in
Handsworth, now the inner part of Birmingham City. and in the
Annals and Magazine of Natural History. He received his doctorate in 1937. Wills again helped him to obtain a
Commonwealth fund fellowship to study under
Carl O. Dunbar at
Yale University in
New Haven, Connecticut, during 1938 to 1940. His important moments in America were that he befriended
G. Arthur Cooper, an Assistant Curator at Division of Stratigraphic Paleontology in
United States National Museum, who remained his lifelong friend; and Dorothy Emma Arnold, a docent in the School Service Department of the
Peabody Museum in Yale, who became his lifelong wife. But his time in Yale was interrupted by
World War II.
Professional career Having no keen interest in joining the war or returning to England, Whittington accepted a job offered by the American Baptist Mission Society of New York City to work in a Christian-run Judson College (which was a part, and later forerunner of, the
University of Rangoon) in Burma. With his newly wedded wife, he headed for Rangoon in August 1940. His teaching job was cut short by the aftermath of the
battle of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, as the college was forced to close. With his wife, he volunteered to work in a medical unit headquartered in China. While staying in
Chengdu on their mission in January 1942, he was invited to a teaching faculty at
Ginling Women's College. The college was one of the refugee colleges from east China affiliated with
West China Union University, and was supported by the American Baptist Mission. By the end of the war in 1945, he had become Professor. In August, an invitation arrived from the University of Birmingham to join as a lecturer (which was initiated by Wills). He arrived in Birmingham in October just in time to start his course. He immediately set to work on trilobites particularly from North America. He had taken a research student
Frank H. T. Rhodes (who later became the ninth President of
Cornell University). In 1949 he received another invitation, this time from
Harvard University, to succeed
Preston E. Cloud, to hold the posts of Associate Professor in the Department of Geology, and Curator of Invertebrate Paleontology in the
Museum of Comparative Zoology. After 17 years of serving in America, in 1966 he received yet another invitation from the
University of Cambridge, to become the
Woodwardian Professor of Geology, which is by far the oldest chair in geology in Britain. In the Autumn he was in Cambridge, with a joint appointment as Professorial Fellow in
Sidney Sussex College. In 1983, at age 67, he retired from his posts. ==Awards and honours==