William Whitehead Watts, 1860-1947

Abstract

Born on 7 June 1860 in Broseley, Shropshire, William Whitehead Watts was the elder of two sons (and only children) of Isaac Watts, a music master, and Maria Watts (née Whitehead). His paternal grandfather, also Isaac Watts, was a schoolmaster, and his maternal grandfather, John Whitehead, a farmer. After some preliminary training (including a year in a dame school) he attended successively Bitterley Grammar School (1869-1870), Shifnal Grammar School (1871-1873) and Denstone College, Staffordshire. As he took pride in stressing, his parents, although not well off, considered no sacrifice too great to ensure that their sons should have the best education within their reach. According to Watts himself, his first essay in science took the form of firework making, to which he devoted the greater part of at least one term while at Bitterley Grammar School. His taste for science thus presumably engendered was encouraged at Denstone College by the mathematical master, the Rev. David Edwardes (later headmaster) who inaugurated a chemical laboratory almost immediately after the school was opened in 1873. Watts must have joined the College (which was the first Woodard School to be opened in the Midlands) at or shortly after its foundation. Coached by Edwardes in physics and chemistry for a Cambridge scholarship and doubtless aided by his own discoveries in a chemical laboratory which he enthusiastically fitted up at home, he gained a £40 Exhibition to Sidney Sussex College; to this award the school authorities added an Exhibition of £20 as a mark of the first occasion on which a scholar had obtained an open Exhibition at a university. The Exhibition was converted by the College into a Scholarship, which was further augmented in due course by additions and prizes.