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GH Darwin

Stories about my father's school days

My father was a boarder at Shrewsbury school notwithstanding that my grandfather lived in the town. He often used to run home between school bells & he used to tell how his occupation at home consisted at one time in lying underneath the drawing room table reading Robinson Crusoe

The sanitary arrangements he described as very bad; I have heard him mention that there was one particular long dormitory in which 20 or 30 boys slept in which there was only a single window at the end. Even after 60 years the abysmal smell of that room in the morning seems to have been vividly present to him

I do not think that he got on very well in I rather think the dormitories had no basins in them & that the boys had to go down into a yard to wash. The boys never had a thoro' wash all year & the "tubbing' was limited foot-pans. I suppose this state of things was usual enough at the early years of the century.

I do not think that he got on very well at school, at least in the way of learning

He related how one day in the presence of the school Dr Butler; after I suppose an unusually bad copy of verses, pulled him by the ear & said "This stupid fellow will attend to his gases & his rubbish but will not work at anything

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really useful." The useless rubbish alluded to the chemistry at which he & his brother worked, and the "really useful" was Latin verses. The teaching of anything but classics seems to have been most inefficient. The mathematical master was an [underbred] usher & all that my father ever learnt then of mathematics was a little arithmetic & two books of Euclid.

In history & geography, nothing whatever was taught excepting on the ancient & sacred branches. They had to learn a great deal of latin by heart & this afterward as he thought utterly useless kind of memory. He used to learn his 50 verses during morning chapel & forget them again utterly within an hour of the recitation.

At that time the boys neither played cricket nor boated. I have heard him say however that he was one of the best jumpers in the school. I think it must have been at school that he learnt fencing & I believe he was pretty skilful at it & fond of it.

When we were small boys [that] he taught  us how to lunge & parry. Long before leaving school he became a very keen sportsman, & I have heard him say that he generally scarcely slept on his 31st of August

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He used constantly to shoot at Mr. Owens at Woodhouse, I think at Eyton, & at his uncles at Maer. When at Cambridge his tutor said to him "Mr Darwin why are always cracking whips in your room?" The fact being that he was always bringing up his gun to the present & snapping caps at a candle.

Because One of these amusements at school used to be raising the Doctor; this consisted of a dozen boys going into the rooms over the Doctor in the middle of the night & dancing a tattoo & then rushing back to bed & pretending to be asleep. On one occasion Kennedy, afterward headmaster of the school & later Greek Professor at Cambridge, was really asleep, when the rest in his dormitory went to raise the Doctor. The Doctor, on arriving in the room at once pounced on Kennedy with many objurgations  against him for pretending to be asleep. What was the result of these amusements I do not know but I fancy the writing out of many lines of Virgil.

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During his school days he & my uncle Erasmus used to work hard at chemistry in some sort of outhouse, & my grandfather to encourage their zeal built a little laboratory for then & got them proper apparatus. The result was [illeg] that from that day their zeal was almost killed.

I remember very little of which my father told us of his life at Edinburgh. Indeed all I know is his description of the ponderous dullness of Prof. Jameson's lectures, he said that Jameson used to lecture thus

Gentlemen, the apex of a mountain is the top and the base of a mountain is the bottom.

He used to mention the keen delight he felt when he first saw his name in print to some Entomological record as the capturer of some rare insect, and this was probably at E during the time at Edinburgh.

When he was at Cambridge one of his friends said to him that he would one day be a fellow of the Royal Society. He told us that he regarded this is perfectly ludicrous.

Both these little facts illustrate his characteristics & almost exaggerated modesty, which remained unchanged to the end.

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During his stay at Cambridge he used to read much & was I believe a good rider. He related one rather absurd incident which happened during one of his rides at that time. He was out riding with several friends & they were jumping their horses over anything which came in their way, all the riders but one got all right over a hurdle, but one of the horses refused most obstinately over & over again. My father said "I'll soon get him over", & changed horses with his friend. He put him at the hurdle & did get the horse to jump it, but was thrown in doing so, thus allowing the others to have a good laugh at him.

When he first went to Cambridge he was in the house of Bacon the tobacconist whose shop was not where it is now, but some other street, which he could not exactly remember. Years after when staying at Cambridge he went to Bacon's & inquired after his old land lord, who had died many years before.

When he moved into college, his rooms were on the second staircase on the right hand side of the first court of Xts on the first floor. Curiously enough my brother William succeeded to the same rooms when he was an undergraduate, but the same gyp attended

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him. The old gyp however died during William's time at Cambridge.

From what he had said I fancy he must have been idle at Cambridge, so I think as regards the regular studies of the place. The only thing at which he worked hard amongst the regular studies was Paley's Evidences, which, then as now, was a subject of the Little Go. At that time he was strictly orthodox & I fancy I have heard him mention it as a sort of shock when during the Beagle voyage he first met some one who openly avowed disbelief in the flood.

It would be very unjust an injustice of wh I always thought he was himself guilty — to suppose that he gained no advantage. It was at Cambridge that he formed an intimate friendship with Henslow, which not merely first regularised his scientific pursuits, but gave him his great opportunity of the Beagle voyage. Besides this he was brought in contact with Whewell, Airy & Sedgwick.

During As he has himself related he took a walking tour with Sedgwick in Wales during one of the vacations, to which I only refer

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in order to relate a story to which it gave rise. One morning they started their walk after some six miles Sedgwick strode on gloomy & silent & my father thought he must somehow have offended him, when at last Sedgwick broke out, "I know that damned waiter won't give that shilling to the chamber-maid." And this cleared the atmosphere.