March 1918, when the development of a fatal disease from which he had for a considerable time suffered rendered further public work impossible. He received in 1918 a peerage—the first bestowed on an Australian politician—as the culminating reward for services which had won him the K.C.M.G. in 1901 and the G.C.M.G. in 1911, and it was his most earnest wish to proceed to England to take his seat in the House of Lords and to obtain further skilled aid for his health, but he died at sea 4 September 1918.
Forrest’s greatest work was accomplished for Western Australia, and he never failed, when in federal politics, to press for the carrying out of his great project, the establishment of railway connexion between that state and the rest of the continent. For an Australian statesman his political views were conservative; they prevented him from attaining the premiership of the Commonwealth, which was the goal of his ambitions. A strong and outspoken opponent of the labour party, he nevertheless won the respect of his opponents, whose denunciations of his peerage as undemocratic were modified by personal regard. Resolute in the support of local autonomy, he attached the greatest value to the imperial connexion and was unwearied during the European War in defending British institutions and aims. In private life he was a warm and trusted friend. He married in 1876 Margaret Elvire, eldest daughter of Edward Hamersley, J.P., of Pyrton, near Guildford, Western Australia. They had no children.
[Forrest’s Explorations in Australia, 1876; A. W. Jose, History of Australasia, 1921; H. G. Turner, First Decade of the Australian Commonwealth, 1911; Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates; personal knowledge]
FORTESCUE, GEORGE KNOTTESFORD (1847–1912), librarian, the fourth son of Edward Bowes Knottesford Fortescue, provost of St. Ninian’s Cathedral, Perth, by his wife, Frances Anne, daughter of William Spooner, archdeacon of Coventry and rector of Elmdon, Warwickshire, was born at Alveston Manor, Warwickshire, 30 October 1847. After a short stay at St. Mary’s College, Harlow, an anglo-catholic school where his high spirits brought him into trouble, he went to sea in the merchant service and then in the royal navy. In 1870 he entered the department of printed books in the British Museum, on the nomination of Archbishop Tait, his mother's brother-in-law. Though not a student he had great abilities and a sailor’s quickness and versatility. He thus soon made his mark and became an expert on the French Revolution, from cataloguing the Museum collection of its pamphlets. In December 1884 he succeeded Richard Garnett [q. v.] as superintendent of the reading-room, and promptly began, mainly in his private time, to compile a subject-index of the modern books acquired since the titles of accessions were first printed (instead of transcribed) in 1880. He grasped at once the doctrine, which he continually preached, that headings must be chosen to fit books, not books classified under headings previously selected to cover the whole of human knowledge. His Subject-Index to the acquisitions of 1880–1885, published by the trustees in 1886, met the wants of readers, and its continuation in successive volumes to 1910 was his main achievement. It left him little energy for literary work, but he wrote the lives of eight of his ancestors for this Dictionary, besides a few articles and papers. In May 1899 he became keeper of printed books, and held this office (despite much ill-health) till his death on 26 October 1912, four days before he was due to retire. In 1908 he had edited a catalogue of the books and newspapers relating to the Civil War and the Commonwealth, collected by George Thomason [q.v.] and given to the Museum by George III, and became almost as much interested in these as in the French Revolution pamphlets. He was president of the Library Association (1901) and of the Bibliographical Society (1909-1910). In 1906 he received an honorary LL.D. from the university of Aberdeen. He married: first, in 1875 Ida, daughter of the Rev. William Blatch, incumbent of St. John’s (episcopal) church, Perth; and secondly, in 1899 Beatrice, widow of H. Webster Jones, M.D. He had no children.
[Henry Jenner, George Knottesford Fortescue: A Memory, reprinted from The Library, 1918; personal knowledge.]
FOWLER, WILLIAM WARDE (1847–1921), historian and ornithologist, born at Langford Budville, Somerset, 16 May 1847, was the second son of John Coke Fowler, stipendiary magistrate at Merthyr Tydfil and afterwards at Swansea, by his first wife, Augusta Bacon, granddaughter of John Bacon, R.A. [q.v.]. After two years at the school of the Rev. F. Kilvert at Bath, and tuition from his father, he went in 1860 to Marlborough
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