His father, Sir John Hope Simpson was in the Indian Civil Service, in 1916 the family returned to England to farm in Somerset.
His missions included Greece (to solve the refugee problems of Turks and Greece), Palestine (he wrote The Hope-Simpson Report in 1930 which examined the economic conditions and to suggested solutions to the territorial dispute between Jews and Arabs), and Newfoundland (1934–36) before it joined Canada as the 10th province in 1949 Canada (he was a Natural Commissioner and there is an area of Newfoundland called Port Hope Simpson named after him).
[1] Hope-Simpson went to prep school at Heddon Court in Hertfordshire (1913–1919) and then Gresham's in Norfolk (1919–1925) where he won a prize for natural history.
[citation needed] Being a life-long member of The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) Hope-Simpson was a pacifist, and when World War II began in 1939, he registered as a conscientious objector, even though he was unlikely to have been called up due to his profession.
[citation needed] During the war, he established a pioneering home nursing service amongst his rural patients, as well as outside surgeries in the Marshwood Vale, Salway Ash, Toller Porcorum, West Milton and Powerstock.
[citation needed] His landmark paper, showing how immunity conferred by natural chicken-pox in childhood waned with age, published in 1965, provided the reasoning for vaccinating older adults against shingles.
Hope-Simpson increasingly believed there was only one, and took his small team of research colleagues to Yell, Shetland in 1953, where he followed up every known case in an isolated community.
His career-long interest in the manner of transmission of the influenza virus was first stirred by the great epidemic of 1932–33, the year in which he entered general practice.
[3] His later research suggested that the correlation may be due in part to a lack of vitamin D during the wintertime, after documenting that influenza A epidemics in temperate latitudes peak in the month following the winter solstice.
The then-president of the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) presented him with the George Abercrombie award, for outstanding contributions to the literature.