Page:Dictionary of National Biography. Sup. Vol II (1901).djvu/381

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Grove
369
Grove

chargé d'affaires in 1883, and secretary of legation at St. Petersburg in 1885–6.

Besides the works already mentioned, Ebury published several pamphlets and speeches advocating liturgical reform; his speech on the revision of the liturgy, delivered in the House of Lords on 6 May 1858, was published in that year, and reached a fourth edition in 1860. In 1861 he published 'The only Compromise possible in regard to Church Rates' (2nd edit, same year); in 1880 ' Auricular Confession;' and in 1886 'Laity and Church Reform,' reprinted from the 'Times.' Other letters and speeches on similar subjects are collected in the Hon. and Rev. E. V. Bligh's 'Lord Ebury as a Church Reformer' (London, 1891, 8vo).

[Bligh's Lord Ebury, 1891; Ebury's Works in Brit. Mus. Library; Barker and Stenning's Westm. Sch. Reg.; Foster's Alumni Oxon. 1715-1886; Off. Return Members of Parl.; Hansard's Parl. Debates; Lincoln's Inn Records, ii. 92; A. H. Clough's Mem. i. 106; Liddon's Life of Pusey; R. G. Wilberforce's Life of Samuel Wilberforce; Davidson and Benham's Life of Tait; Mowbray's Seventy Years at Westminster, p. 127; Tiroes, 20 and 23 Nov. 1893; Guardian, 1893, ii. 1859; Burke's, Foster's, and G. E. C[okayne]'s Peerages.]

A. F. P.

GROVE, Sir GEORGE (1820–1900), writer on music and first director of the Royal College of Music, born on 13 Aug. 1820 at Clapham, in a house which is now occupied by the site of Wandsworth Road railway station, was the son of Thomas Grove of Charing Cross and Penn, Buckinghamshire. He went to a school on Clapham Common, kept by a Mr. Elwell, where he had as one of his schoolfellows George Granville Bradley, the present (1901) dean of Westminster, whose sister he subsequently married. He next entered Stockwell (afterwards Clapham) grammar school, then under Charles Pritchard [q. v.], the astronomer. After finally leaving school he was articled for three years to Alexander Gordon to learn the profession of a civil engineer. At the end of his articles he went to Glasgow for two years, where, in the factory of Robert Napier (1791–1876) [q. v.], he gained further experience in the practical part of his profession. He was admitted a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers on 26 Feb. 1839. When his old master (Gordon) received an order to erect an iron lighthouse at Morant Point, on the eastern extremity of the island of Jamaica—the first ever put up—Grove was despatched to superintend its erection. An iron plate at the foot of the lighthouse, first permanently lighted on 1 Nov. 1842, records Grove's name as the engineer. Scarcely had he returned to London before Gordon again sent him off to Bermuda, where the government were about to build a lighthouse on Gibbs' Hill, of which a sketch appeared in the 'Illustrated London News' of 20 April 1844, and which was first lighted on 1 May 1846. Upon his return from Bermuda Grove entered the office of Mr. C. H. Wild, one of Robert Stephenson's chief assistants, who sent him to Chester to look after the erection of the 'general station' there. From Chester he was transferred to Bangor, where he served under Edwin Clark, Stephenson's resident engineer, at the Britannia bridge [see under Clark, Latimer, Suppl.] An account of the first floating of the tubes is recorded in the 'Spectator' of 23 June 1849, which is interesting as being Grove's first appearance in print.

Engineering was, however, soon to be abandoned. In 1849 Grove became secretary to the Society of Arts, and shortly afterwards he accepted a similar post at the Crystal Palace, Sydenham, where the Great Exhibition building of 1851 was re-erected, and opened by the queen on 10 June 1854. For a period of twenty years he rendered invaluable service to the Crystal Palace, especially in regard to the development of the music there, which subsequently attained world-wide fame under the nurturing influence and enthusiastic sway of Grove and August Manns, the musical director of the palace, conjointly. The daily and weekly orchestral performances at Sydenham prompted those admirable analytical notices of musical compositions with which the name of George Grove was so long and is so favourably associated. He had always shown a great fondness for music, but had never received any technical training in the art. Entirely self-taught, his knowledge was acquired solely by 'picking up' information. 'I wish it to be distinctly understood,' he said, 'that I have always been a mere amateur in music. I wrote about the symphonies and concertos because I wished to try to make them clear to myself and to discover the secret of the things that charmed me so; and from that sprang a wish to make other amateurs see it in the same way.' The first analytical programme compiled by Grove was that of the Crystal Palace concert on 26 Jan. 1856 to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Mozart. Week by week during the concert season for forty years Grove continued to write those analyses, which have been reprinted over and over again, not only at the Crystal Palace but in many concert pro-