Edward Bagnall Poulton 1856-1943

Abstract

Edward Bagnall Poulton, who died on 20 November 1943, was born at Reading on 27 January 1856. His father, William Ford Poulton, an architect, was a man of great industry and energy: his mother, ‘simply for the love of the work set herself to write a large volume on the history of England’. Edward considered that his love of science was inherited from his father’s family. Before he was ten he had been to two boarding schools of which he wrote, ‘the memories that remain are of punishments only and the broad principle that every natural inclination was wrong and dangerous. . . . A few months before my tenth birthday I was sent, in the autumn of 1865, to my third school’ newly opened by Mr W. M. Watson at Oakley House, Reading, at which the pupils were chiefly sons of Nonconformists. He spoke of the seven years spent there as a boarder as ‘a long dreary interval in a happy life’. There was little regular teaching of science, and Poulton’s comment was: ‘Being interested in science of all kinds, and kept very much alone in this section of my work, it is probable that the puzzling out of difficulties in books and in the little laboratory was a valuable discipline’. However, towards the end of his schooldays he benefited much by the teaching of J. N. Gordon, a Demy of Magdalen, who encouraged him to enter for a Science Demyship in 1872: he was unsuccessful, but ‘learnt a great deal about the proper books to read’. At the end of 1872 he began work in his father’s office: his mother, however, always longed for him to go to Oxford. The experience in the office improved his natural gift for drawing but ‘my heart was in science, especially in zoology, and late at night I used to read the books of which I had heard at the Magdalen examination’.