Henry Cabourn Pocklington, 1870 - 1952

Abstract

Henry Cabourn Pogklington was an unusual man, a solitary person but not a lonely one. According to his own lights he lived a full and satisfying life, but it was one almost completely filled with mathematics, physics and astronomy. Perhaps his only real confidants were his father, Henry, and his sister, Ida; otherwise he seems to have had no friends nor to have had any desire for acquaintance to ripen into friendship. He rarely spoke, not even to his own brothers and sisters. He shunned people, which makes it all the more surprising that he chose to become a schoolmaster and was content to remain one all his working days. To all intents and purposes he walked through life with unhurried pace, interested neither in events nor people. He was certainly unaffected by them nor had he any influence on them; his sister, Miss E. Ida L. Pocklington, says that his attitude and character remained unchanged from boyhood to death. With children, however, he seems to have had great sympathy and patience; he spent much time with them trying to elucidate their difficulties in mathematics and physics. But he had to be assured of the genuineness of their interest. It was for this reason that even though he chose to remain a schoolmaster, he made no mark in his profession; he found it impossible to impose his will upon classes of boys as a whole and transmit his interests to them, but he was kind and patient with those in whom he could detect genuine scientific curiosity. His pupils used to plague him unmercifully, cruelly, sometimes even wittily, but he hardly ever appeared to notice. Only when something particularly foolish had been perpetrated in the school physics laboratory was he known to fly into a rage— and his rages, even though they were of short duration, were terrifying to small boys. Pocklington’s insistence that his vocation was to be a schoolmaster makes him, perhaps, unique among the Fellows of the Royal Society of the twentieth century.