PART I
PERSONAL
Autobiographical Notes
I was born in 1861, February 15, at Ramsgate in the Isle of Thanet, Kent. The family, grandfather, father, uncles, brothers engaged in activities concerned with education, religion and Local Administration: my grandfather, born of yeoman stock in Isle of Sheppey, was probably a descendant of the Quaker George Whitehead, whom George Fox in his Journal mentions as living there in the year 1670. In the year 1815, my grandfather, Thomas Whitehead, at the age of twenty-one, became head of a private school in Ramsgate, Isle of Thanet, to which my father, Alfred Whitehead, succeeded at the correspondingly early age of twenty-five, in the year 1852. They were, both of them, most successful schoolmasters, though my grandfather was by far the more remarkable man.
About 1860 my father was ordained as a clergyman of the Anglican Church; and about 1866 or 1867 he gave up his school for clerical duty, first in Ramsgate, and later in 1871 he was appointed Vicar of St. Peters Parish, a large district mostly rural, with its church about two or three miles from Ramsgate. The North Foreland belongs to the parish. He remained there till his death in 1898.
He became influential among the clergy of East Kent, occupying the offices of Rural Dean, Honorary Canon of Canterbury, and Proctor in Convocation for the Diocese. But the central fact of his influence was based on his popularity with the general mass of the population in the Island. He never lost his interest in education, and daily visited his three parochial schools, for infants, for girls, and for boys. As a small boy, before I left home for school in 1875, I often accompanied him. He was a man with local interests and influence; apart from an understanding of such provincial figures, the social and political history of England in the nineteenth century cannot be comprehended. England was governed by the influence of personality: this does not mean “intellect.”
My father was not intellectual, but he possessed personality. Archbishop Tait had his summer residence in the parish, and he and his family were close friends of my parents. He and my father illustrated the survival of the better (and recessive) side of the eighteenth century throughout its successor. Thus, at the time unconsciously, I watched the history of England by my vision of grandfather, father, Archbishop Tait, Sir Moses Montefiore, the
