Twentieth Century Impressions of Hongkong, Shanghai, and other Treaty Ports of China/The Rev. G. H. Bateson Wright
THE REV. G. H. BATESON WRIGHT, D.D. (Oxon.).—Seated quietly at his desk, or presiding over his classes, the gentleman who, for upwards of twenty-six years, has been the headmaster of Queen's College, has, perhaps, done more than any of his contemporaries towards the formation of that sterling character which so distinguishes the educated Chinese of Hongkong. The histories of many of the Colony's greatest men may be read in her stones and thoroughfares, in her docks and wharves, in the innumerable outward and tangible evidences of her commercial prosperity; but the history of Dr. George Henry Bateson Wright is writ even more legibly upon the lengthening human scroll issuing from Hongkong's leading academy. The second son of the late George Bache Wright, of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company's London office, and grandson of Augustus Wright, storekeeper of the magazine, Priddy's Hard, Gosport, during the Crimean War, Dr. Wright was born in 1853. He was educated at Queen's College, Oxford, where he graduated B.A., with second-class Theological Honours, in June, 1875. He gained the Denver and Johnson Scholarship and the Kennicott Hebrew Scholarship in 1876, and, in the following year, the Syriac Prize and the Pusey and Elerton Scholarship. He was ordained at Worcester a Deacon (Gospel) in 1877, and became Curate of Ladbroke, Warwickshire. In the following year he was admitted to the priesthood, again heading the list of candidates, and subsequently held the curacies of Christ Church, Bradford, and St. Peter's, Bournemouth. For a time he was a private tutor at Oxford, and in 1881 he was appointed headmaster of Queen's College. He proceeded to the degree of B.D. in February, 1891, and by grace of Convocation was allowed to take the degree of D.D. in May of the same year, when he was only thirty-eight years of age. In 1884 he published a work entitled "A Critical Edition of the Book of Job," whilst in 1895 he published "Was Israel ever in Egypt?" Dr. Wright is married and lives at "Ladbroke," No. 9, Conduit Road. His recreation lies in his work.
