United States or Martinique ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
There are people, to be sure, who would like their birthdays to be four years apart, but they are not boys. Grenfell was also lucky, or, let us say, fortunate in the place where he was born and spent his early boyhood. His father was Head Master of Mostyn House, a school for boys at Parkgate, England, a little fishing village not far from the historic old city of Chester.
Inspiration of genius. Cabled right away. Have you Weekly Freeman of 17 March? Right. Have you got that? He flung back pages of the files and stuck his finger on a point. Take page four, advertisement for Bransome's coffee, let us say. Have you got that? Right. The telephone whirred. I'll answer it, the professor said, going. B is parkgate. Good.
In the course of time he had accumulated a creditable museum of natural history, which to this day may be seen at Mostyn House, in Parkgate; and to it have been added specimens of caribou, seals, foxes, porcupines and other Labrador animals, which in his busy later years he has found time to mount, for he is still the same eager and devoted student of nature.
This is why it was fortunate that he was born at Parkgate, for his life there as a boy trained him to meet adventures fearlessly and prepared him for the later years which were destined to be years of adventure. Far up the river, wide marshes reached; and over these marshes, and the Sands of Dee, Grenfell roamed at will.
From the school-days at Parkgate came the step to Marlborough College, where three years were marked by earnest study, both in books and in play, for the one gained a scholarship and the other an enduring interest in Rugby football.
"On the road thither," says he, "about seven miles from hence, at a village called Sutton, they were met by upwards of one Hundred Arm'd Seamen from Parkgate, belonging to different privateers at Liverpool. The alternative route to Liverpool, by passage-boat down the Dee, was both safer and cheaper. Mr.
Here at Parkgate the River Dee flows down into an estuary that opens out into the Irish Sea, and here spread the famous "Sands of Dee," known the world over through Charles Kingsley's pathetic poem, which we have all read, and over which, I confess, I shed tears when a boy: Charles Kingsley and the poem become nearer and dearer to us than ever with the knowledge that he was a cousin of Grenfell, and knew the Sands o' Dee, over which Grenfell tramped and hunted as a boy, for the sandy plain was close by his father's house.
But as years passed the sands, loosened by floods and carried down by the river current, choked and blocked the harbor, and before Grenfell was born it had become so shallow that only fishing vessels and small craft could use it. Parkgate is on the northern side of the River Dee.
Parkgate, at one time a seaport of renown, when Liverpool was still unimportant, and later a seaside health resort to which came the fashion and beauty of England, had fallen, through the silting of the estuary and the broadening of the "Sands of Dee," to the level of a hamlet in the time of Dr. Grenfell's boyhood.
Algernon Sydney Grenfell and Jane Georgiana Hutchinson, was born on the twenty-eighth day of February, eighteen hundred and sixty-five, at Mostyn House School, Parkgate, by Chester, England, of an ancestry which laid a firm foundation for his career and in surroundings which fitted him for it.
Word Of The Day