Samuel Phillips Bedson, 1886-1969

Abstract

Samuel Phillips Bedson was born on 1 December 1886 in Newcastle upon Tyne. His father, Peter Phillips Bedson, was born in Manchester, educated at Manchester Grammar School and studied chemistry under Sir Henry Roscoe at Owens College, later Manchester University. After a period of postgraduate study at the University of Bonn, Peter Bedson returned to this country and was appointed to the Chair of Chemistry in the University of Durham (Durham College of Science, Newcastle upon Tyne). He held this Chair for 37 years until his retirement in 1921. His wife was the daughter of Samuel Hodgkinson, cotton spinner (Hollins Mill Co.) of Marple, Cheshire. There were three children of this marriage, Sam being the second. Along with his elder brother and four other boys he was educated privately until the age of ten. Then after one year at Newcastle Preparatory School he went to Abbotsholme School in Derbyshire where he spent the next six years. This school had been founded by Cecil Reddie as an experiment in secondary education because of his dissatisfaction with the narrowness of the curriculum in most Public Schools. Reddie planned ‘a programme of general education catering for physical and manual skills, for artistic and imaginative development, for literary and intellectual growth and for moral and religious training’.