1977/11/30 by S. Piggott · 3 citations
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Medicine · Psychology · #Historical Economic and Social Studies #Newspaper #Enthusiasm #Grammar school #Biography #Classics #History #Medicine #Art history #Sociology #Media studies #Psychology #Pedagogy
paper · doi:10.1098/rsbm.1977.0023
openalex publication_date 1977/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Abstract Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler was born in 1890 in Edinburgh. His father, a journalist with Bristol antecedents, was at that time working on the staff of a newspaper there; he was, as his son was to recall in his autobiography (1)* a graduate of Edinburgh University, where he had been grounded in the stern discipline of the classics under Masson and Blackie, and retained an enthusiasm which he communicated to his son. Appointment as assistant editor in Yorkshire took him and his family to Bradford, where his son entered the Grammar School in 1899, leaving aged 14 in 1904. Here again Wheeler has recorded how ‘by and large my school was of no great moment to me’ except for confirming his dislike of ball-games (which he seems to have been more successful in escaping at school than many like-minded sufferers), grounding him in Latin, and above all giving him an opportunity to draw and paint. Scholarships and Oxford seemed to lie ahead, when his father was asked to take over the London office of his newspaper, and the family moved again.