Sidney Barrington Gates, 1893-1973

Abstract

What little we know of Gates’s forebears comes from the opening chapters of an autobiographical account which he started writing during the closing years of his life, and which is thus unfinished. We can do no better than to quote his actual words: ‘My parents’ marriage was an alliance of haberdashers. My father Ernest was the eldest son of Walter Gates who traded as W. Gates and Sons, tailors and outfitters, in a corner of the Butter Market, the main square of the flourishing Suffolk town of Bury St Edmunds hard by the town’s clock. I was much less familiar with mother’s family in Norwich, though I always understood that my maternal grandfather, who died before I was born, was a shop walker in a clothing store.’ Such was the good, solid English merchant rootstock that sported to give that exceptional scion of which we shall speak, Sidney Barrington (Barry) Gates, the scientist and man of letters, born on 2 February 1893, the only son of Ernest Edwin Gates. Two of Walter Gates’s sons followed him into the family business but Ernest, the eldest, went into banking. From clerk in the Norwich branch of Barclay’s Bank, he rose to become manager of the branch at Watton, then a little market town. It was here that Gates spent his very early childhood up to the age of eleven, when he suffered the most bitter blow any child, much less one of such a sensitive nature, could experience—the loss of his mother.