Researching John Thompson

Thompson was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He trained as a lawyer and was called to the bar in 1865. Thompson was elected to the Nova Scotia House of Assembly in 1877 as a representative of the Conservative Party. He became the provincial attorney general the following year, in Simon Holmes' government, replaced Holmes as premier in 1882. However, he served for only two months before losing the 1882 general election to the Liberal Party. After losing the premiership, he accepted an appointment to the Nova Scotia Supreme Court.

In 1885, Thompson entered federal politics at the personal request of John A. Macdonald, becoming Minister of Justice. In that role he was the driving force behind the enactment of the Canadian Criminal Code. Thompson became prime minister in 1892, following the retirement of John Abbott. He was the first Roman Catholic to hold the position. On a trip to England in 1894, Thompson unexpectedly suffered a heart attack and died, aged 49. He is the second and most recent Canadian prime minister to have died in office, after John A. Macdonald.

Thompson played college basketball for the Providence Friars and earned honorable mention All-American honors in 1964. He played for two seasons in the National Basketball Association (NBA) for the Boston Celtics, who won an NBA championship in both seasons. Thompson became a high school coach in Washington, D.C., before coaching Georgetown for 27 seasons. He worked as a radio and television sports commentator after his retirement from coaching. Thompson earned his Master’s Degree in Counseling and Guidance at the University of the District of Columbia (UDC). He also served as an employee at the Center for 4-H and Youth Development at UDC .

Periodically throughout his short life, Thompson suffered from severe mental disorders including depression, mania and paranoia. He also struggled with the alcoholism that contributed to his early death. Other poets who influenced him, such as Dylan Thomas, Theodore Roethke and John Berryman, were afflicted in similar ways. Thompson's erratic behaviour combined with his frequent hostility to others he considered literary philistines hampered his academic career and blighted his closest personal relationships. One critic complained that some of his poems read less like "stunning epiphanies" than "crossword puzzles" because Thompson composed them while he was drinking, but others praised him for his disciplined and meticulous dedication to his poetic art.

In his introduction to Stilt Jack in which he writes briefly about ghazals (or "guzzles" as he called them), Thompson could have been describing the essential elements of his own poetry when he asserted that the form allows the imagination to move in its own natural ways: "discovering an alien design, illogical and without sense — a chart of the disorderly, against false reason and the tacking together of poor narratives. It is the poem of contrasts, dreams, astonishing leaps. The ghazal has been called 'drunken and amatory' and I think it is."

Thompson, the eldest son of John Thompson, solicitor, was born in England in August 1846. He was educated at St Paul's School, and University College London, and qualified for the diplomas of the Royal College of Surgeons and Physicians. In 1878 he obtained the degree of M.D. with distinction at the Brussels University. From 1872 to 1878 he was surgeon at King's Cross to the Great Northern Railway Company, and also had a private practice. His health breaking down towards the end of 1878 from overwork, he went first to New Zealand and then to New South Wales.

He led an open-air life until his health was completely restored, and in 1883 was sent to Mackay to investigate an epidemic of dengue. Returning to Sydney in 1884 he was given the post of temporary medical officer to the Board of Health, and a year later was appointed its chief medical inspector and deputy medical adviser to the government of New South Wales. There was no public health act and his activities were therefore much restricted, but in 1896, having been made president of the board of health, he assisted Premier Sir George Reid in drafting a bill, which became law in November of that year. He also prepared all the necessary regulations which were still unchanged at the time of his death.

Thompson had taken much interest in leprosy and had visited Molokai and the Hawaiian Islands to investigate it. In 1896 he was awarded the prize offered by the national leprosy fund of Great Britain for the best history of leprosy. When there was an outbreak of Bubonic Plague in Sydney early in 1900, he was in charge of the measures taken to combat it, and wrote an elaborate and able Report on the Outbreak of Plague at Sydney, 1900, which was issued at the end of that year. Thompson appointed Frank Tidswell as Bacteriologist to the fledgling board. Thompson, Tidswell and William George Armstrong went on to produce important research on plague and are credited with developing 20th century scientific understandings of plague, in particular that Yersinia pestis is spread to humans by fleas from infected rats. Their work was a large part of a revolution of social medicine in Australia. The knowledge that infectious diseases could be spread from one human to another by insects and that infection could be derived from animals, brought public health into scientific scrutiny. The outbreak also led to further improvements being made to the North Head Quarantine Station as the value of segregating infected patients from the populace had been realised. They adopted the theory of the French doctor, Paul-Louis Simond, now generally accepted, that the disease was communicated to man by fleas from infected rats. His general conclusion was that "the best protection against epidemic plague lies in sufficient sanitary laws persistently and faithfully executed during the absence of the disease".

He delivered an address on plague at the 1906 meeting of the American Medical Association held at Boston, and was asked to write a description of the disease for Gould and Pyle's Cyclopedia of Medicine, issued in U.S.A. He retired on a pension in 1913 and died in London on 16 September 1915. He married a daughter of Sir Julian Salomons, who survived him.

He was born in Salisbury, England, in 1810, the son of Joseph Thompson, and educated at Berwick-on-Tweed. He was reeve for Brock Township and served as warden for Ontario County in 1856–7, 1860 and 1864–5. Thompson lived in Cannington. He was elected in 1867 but defeated in the 1872 election. Thompson also served as lieutenant-colonel in the county militia from 1869 to 1880 and was commissioner in the Court of Queen's Bench.

In 1847, he married Margaret Cowan. Thompson died at Qu'Appelle Station, Saskatchewan, at the age of 83.

Thompson (brother of William George Thompson) was born near Butler, Pennsylvania. He attended the common schools and Witherspoon Institute. He studied law, was admitted to the bar in 1854 and began practice in Butler. He was a member of the Pennsylvania State House of Representatives in 1859 and 1860, and served one year as speaker. He entered the Union Army during the American Civil War and served as major and subsequently as lieutenant colonel of the One Hundred and Thirty-fourth Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry. He was a delegate to the 1868 Republican National Convention.

Thompson was elected as a Republican to the Forty-third Congress to fill the vacancy caused by the resignation of Ebenezer McJunkin. He elected to the Forty-fifth Congress. He was not a candidate for renomination in 1878. He resumed the practice of his profession and died in Butler in 1903. Interment in Butler Cemetery.

He spent part of his childhood in Jamaica. His parents, in search of a better life for their children moved from the United Kingdom to New York. In 2012 he returned to his homeland Jamaica, to implement the Digital Jam 2.0 project. This included directing a course of mobile apps development workshops. According to him the vision for the project was to "export an innovative software development strategy to enable Jamaican youth to prosper in the global internet knowledge economy." He was honored for his innovations and commitment to coaching with the Silver Musgrave Medal for Science in 2012 by the Institute of Jamaica (IOJ).

, Garcia Thompson is tall and weighs . He competes for the Palma Son Amar club and is coached by Alfredo Zamora.

From 2009 to 2010 Garcia Thompson competed alongside Robin Miedzybrodzki. In 2011 he teamed up with fellow British player Steve Grotowski; the pair achieved a best finish of seventeenth at the 2011 Fédération Internationale de Volleyball (FIVB) Open in Shanghai, China. At the 2011 Swatch World Tour Prague Open the pair defeated the top seeded American pairing of Casey Jennings and Kevin Wong 25–23, 24–22 in the first round of competition but were then beaten 19–21, 16–21 by Josh Binstock and Richard Van Huizen of Canada in the second round.

Garcia Thompson and Grotowski were selected to compete for Great Britain at the 2012 Summer Olympics after being chosen ahead of Gregg Weaver and Jody Gooding. Both pairs competed in the minimum twelve FIVB events require for qualification with Grotowski and Garcia Thompson earning 522 rankings points compared to Weaver and Gooding's 354 points. The pair qualified for the Games despite public funding for the men's event being withdrawn in 2010. Grotowski and Garcia Thompson will become the first ever British men to compete in beach volleyball at the Olympics. The men's event will take place between 28 July and 9 August at Horse Guards Parade. Garcia Thompson said of his selection "For an athlete, there is nothing better than being selected to compete at an Olympic Games".

His piano methods, Modern Course for the Piano, Teaching Little Fingers to Play (the first part of the Modern Course), Adult Piano Course and Easiest Piano Course are published by the Willis Music Company.

Thompson died in Tucson, Arizona, after a long illness in 1963.

Thompson also engraved the design for the 1839 penny postage envelope, on a brass plate; and the design for the iconic figure of Britannia which appeared on British banknotes.

John Joseph Meagher Thompson, known as John Thompson, (20 December 1907 – 19 July 1968) was an Australian poet, writer and radio broadcaster.

Thompson was born in Kew, Victoria, Australia. He was educated at Melbourne Church of England Grammar School and the University of Melbourne, where he obtained a BA in 1929. In 1931 he travelled to London, where he attempted to make a living as a writer.

He was awarded the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry for his collection Thirty Poems in 1954 and wrote poetry throughout his adult life.

He met and married Patricia Drakeford Cole in 1938 and worked at a number of jobs before returning to Australia in early 1939. The couple landed in Perth, Western Australia, where Thompson got a job as an announcer with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. In December 1942 he enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force, serving in Australia in an educational capacity, before being discharged from the army on 2 August 1945 to work as a war correspondent for the ABC.

After the war he settled in Sydney where he became a senior feature writer and producer at the ABC and where he remained until retirement in 1968. Thompson and his wife had one son, the film critic Peter Thompson, and adopted another, the actor Jack Thompson. He died in 1968.