Richard Cowley Powles

Richard Cowley Powles (1819–1901), known often as Cowley Powles, was an English cleric, academic and founding headmaster of Wixenford School.

Richard Cowley Powles, 1861 photograph

Early life

He was the son of John Diston Powles,[1] and was educated at Helston Grammar School under Derwent Coleridge. There he met Charles Kingsley, a friend for life.[2] Another friend from Helston was Charles Alexander Johns, who gave him instruction as a naturalist.[3]

Kingsley and Powles both moved on to King's College, London for a time.[4] Powles matriculated at Exeter College, Oxford in 1838. He became a Fellow of the college in 1842, graduating B.A. in 1845 and M.A. in 1846.[1]

Oxford in the 1840s

Exeter College had an Essay Club in 1839–40, in which Powles and Richard John King took part, Powles being President.[5][6] Powles was President of the Oxford Union in 1841.[7] He was ordained deacon in 1843.[8] A witness of most of the course of the Oxford Movement, he gave Sidney Leslie Ollard an anecdotal story about John Henry Newman and ritual: alleging that the Tractarian use of the mixed chalice was explained by their severe fasting.[9]

In Oxford, a literary and intellectual group arose in the 1840s, to which Powles belonged. It grew around the Oxford and Cambridge Review, and comprised also George Butler, Arthur Hugh Clough, and James Anthony Froude.[10] The Review is now identified with the periodicals advocating "Tory paternalism".[11] Powles was one of the Oxford supporters, Kingsley and F. D. Maurice too supported as Cambridge graduates.[12]

Froude was another close personal friend. He wrote to Powles, complaining of Kingsley's "Chartist" views.[13] Powles collected Kingsley's poems, about which the author was careless.[14]

Another friend from this period was John Duke Coleridge. He considered Powles one of his two closest friends.[15]

Later life

On leaving Oxford in 1850, to marry, Powles ran a school, first in Blackheath.[1] This he purchased from George Brown Francis Potticary, an Oxford contemporary who in that year became rector of Girton, Cambridgeshire.[16] Potticary had had the school, at 9 Eliot Place, since 1831. Powles moved it in 1865, as "St Neot's Preparatory School", to Wixenford House, in Kingsley's parish of Eversley.[3] The Eliot Place school, set up in 1805 by John Potticary, was also the origin of St Piran's, later in Maidenhead, where it was moved by Thomas Nunns around 1872, who had bought the school from Powles. The Blackheath school continued under George Valentine.[17][18]

One of his Wixenford pupils, Albert Victor Baillie, called Powles "a genuine educator and a remarkable man", going on to describe his hairstyle, brushed up into two horns over his ears.[19]

Kingsley died in 1875. Powles left his school in 1880. He became a prebendary of Chichester Cathedral, where John Burgon, an old friend, was the Dean.[20][21] The school was taken over by Ernest Penrose Arnold, an Oxford graduate in 1874; and it moved to Wokingham.[22][23][24]

Works

Powles edited Sermons Preached at St. John's Chapel, St. John's Wood, by the Late Rev. Percy Lousada (1860). Percy Martin(g)dale Lousada (c.1823–1859) was an Anglican cleric and photographer.[25][26]

Family

Powles married in 1850 Mary Chester, daughter of George Chester.[20]

Notes
  1. Foster, Joseph (1888–1892). "Powles, Rev. Richard Cowley" . Alumni Oxonienses: the Members of the University of Oxford, 1715–1886. Oxford: Parker and Co – via Wikisource.
  2. Thorp, Margaret Farrand (2015). Charles Kingsley, 1819–1875. Princeton University Press. p. 9. ISBN 978-1-4008-7693-8.
  3. Dare, Deirdre; Hardie, Melissa (2008). A Passion for Nature: 19th-century Naturalism in the Circle of Charles Alexander Johns. Hypatia Publications. p. 208. ISBN 978-1-872229-58-4.
  4. Jones, Tod E. (2003). The Broad Church: A Biography of a Movement. Lexington Books. p. 169. ISBN 978-0-7391-0611-2.
  5. Stride, William John Francis Keatley (1900). Exeter College. London : F.E. Robinson. p. 243.
  6. King, Richard John (1840). Two Lectures Read Before the Essay Society of Exeter College, Oxford ... private distribution.
  7. The Oxford Union 1823–1923. 1923. p. 315.
  8. The Ecclesiastical gazette, or, Monthly register of the affairs of the Church of England. 1843. p. 30.
  9. Ollard, S. L. (Sidney Leslie) (1915). A short history of the Oxford movement. London : A. R. Mowbray ; Milwaukee, The Young Churchman. p. 157 note 5.
  10. Brady, Ciaran (2014). James Anthony Froude: An Intellectual Biography of a Victorian Prophet. Oxford University Press. p. 8. ISBN 978-0-19-872653-1.
  11. Roberts, F. David (2002). The Social Conscience of the Early Victorians. Stanford University Press. p. 44. ISBN 978-0-8047-8093-3.
  12. Brady, Ciaran (2014). James Anthony Froude: An Intellectual Biography of a Victorian Prophet. Oxford University Press. p. 115. ISBN 978-0-19-872653-1.
  13. Paul, Herbert W. (Herbert Woodfield) (2012). The Life of Froude. tredition. p. 383. ISBN 978-3-8472-0185-4.
  14. Kingsley, Charles (1877). Charles Kingsley, His Letters and Memories of His Life. Scribner, Armstrong. p. 36.
  15. Butler, Josephine Elizabeth Grey (NaN). Recollections of George Butler. Bristol, Arrowsmith. p. 32. Check date values in: |date= (help)
  16. Foster, Joseph (1888–1892). "Potticary, George Brown Francis" . Alumni Oxonienses: the Members of the University of Oxford, 1715–1886. Oxford: Parker and Co – via Wikisource.
  17. Our History, St Piran's School.
  18. McDonald, Deborah (2014). The Prince, His Tutor and the Ripper: The Evidence Linking James Kenneth Stephen to the Whitechapel Murders. McFarland. p. 83. ISBN 978-1-4766-1691-9.
  19. Baillie, Albert Victor (1951). My first eighty years. J. Murray. p. 24.
  20. Boase, Charles William (1894). Registrum Collegii exoniensis. Register of the rectors, fellows, and other members on the foundation of Exeter college, Oxford. With a history of the college and illustrative documents. Oxford : Printed for the Oxford historical society. p. 183.
  21. Goulburn, Edward Meyrick (1892). John William Burgon, late dean of Chichester : a biography with extracts from his letters and early journals. 2. London : John Murray. p. 335.
  22. Rugby School Register. A. J. Lawrence. 1886. p. 104 note k.
  23. Foster, Joseph (1888–1892). "Arnold, Ernest Penrose" . Alumni Oxonienses: the Members of the University of Oxford, 1715–1886. Oxford: Parker and Co – via Wikisource.
  24. Secrest, Meryle (1985). Kenneth Clark: A Biography. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. p. 31. ISBN 978-0-03-054066-0.
  25. Taylor, Roger; Schaaf, Larry John (2007). Impressed by Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840–1860. Metropolitan Museum of Art. pp. 342–3. ISBN 978-1-58839-225-1.
  26. s:Alumni Oxonienses: the Members of the University of Oxford, 1715-1886/Lousada, Rev. Percy Martindale
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