Keeper (curator) of the Department of Sculpture, Victoria and Albert Museum, 1967-1974. Hodgkinson's parents were Ivan Tattersall Hodgkinson and Kathryn Van Vleck Townsend (Hodgkinson), though he was raised by his paternal grandmother in Somerset, England. He attended Oundle School, a boarding school near Peterborough, England, and then entered Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1932 intent on a career in economics or politics.

British Museum Keeper of Prints and Drawings; scholar of Italian art. Popham was son of Arthur Frederick Popham, a failed architect who worked in the bookbinding division of the Doves Press, and Florence Radford Popham. Both parents were connected to the draper's firm of Popham and Radford, Plymouth. Popham's parents both had died by 1908. He was educated at Dulwich College and University College, London before being sent to King's College, Cambridge, by his guardian, where he graduated with a second-class in classics in 1911.