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[in another handwriting] E. H. Cradock

Brasenose College
Oxford
July 10, 1882

Dear Sir
I sincerely wish that I could comply more efficiently with your wishes for information about your fathers early days.
I was at Shrewsbury with him (but not in the same house) for a year or more when I went as a new boy all forlorn in 1823 he at once took notice of me, not owing to any merits of my own, but because of my relationship to

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the Sneyds of Byrkley Lodge who were friends of your family.
He shewed me great kindness and introduced me to your grandfather at whose house, over the river, I remember dining to meet the Sneyd, and on another occasion to meet one of the Edgeworths, Lovell I think, who was my father's first cousin.
I have a very distant recollection of the attention which I received from the Darwin family & especially from your father. I do not think that it was in his nature to be

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awkward to any one — never was a boy less set out for a bully or a school tyrant.
Both in manner and in mind he was old for his age — on reading the obituary where I was surprised to find that he was so little older than myself. I do not remember that he passed any distinction in ordinary school work or that he seemed to covet any — nor again that he was a hero of the cricket field or the river.

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I never saw your father after our school days. He left the school long before I did. Neraly sixty years may have confused and dimmed the recollections of my acquaintance with him. I am sure that they have effaced nothing which was better forgotten.
Dear Sir, Yours faithfully
E.H. Cradock

Francis Darwin Esq.

My name in school days was 'Grove'