Percy George Hamnall Boswell, 1886-1960

It was at Woodbridge in East Suffolk, on 7 August 1886 that Percy George Hamnall Boswell was born to George James Boswell Jr. and Mary Elizabeth Boswell, nee Marshall, of Hobart, Tasmania, the daughter of an emigrant Yorkshire farmer. He was the third of four children, of whom an elder brother and sister died young and a younger brother was three years his junior. The family carried on a printing business in Ipswich, which his younger brother entered in due course, and Boswell relates that he was brought up strictly in a Victorian household on English grammar and punctuation, Charles Dickens and the Bible. His grandfather, a Tory of the old school, did the Party printing in a gorgeous ultramarine and was a stalwart of the Pickwick Club. As Boswell was somewhat delicate in health, owing to bronchitis and asthma, he was nearly seven years of age before he entered St Matthew’s Church of England School, whence in 1896 he gained an Ipswich Scholarship to the Higher Grade School at Ipswich, where he remained until 1901. He noted that discipline was very severe, but the teaching very good and to his delight the pupils were ‘soaked in the Bible and Prayer Book English’ and in ‘beautifully phrased collects, psalms and gems of Bible literature, songs and laments’ many of which he remembered, and used, to the end of his life. In 1899 the school moved to new buildings which were excellent, with splendid laboratories. The Headmaster, Pollard Wilkinson, was a scholar and a man of broad views. His son, George, became Boswell’s best friend and the latter much appreciated the access which this brought him to Pollard Wilkinson’s fine library and home. George Wilkinson later became a recognized expert on aero-engines. At school, as an alternative to sport, the boys were taken for country excursions, when they were taught elementary surveying and practical trigonometry; they also visited chalk pits to collect fossils, which they later identified in the Ipswich museum.