Albert Charles Seward, 1863-1941

Abstract

Albert Charles Seward was born at Lancaster in 1863. His father, Abram Seward, seems to have been one of those stalwart Victorians who owned an old family business and devoted his leisure to local administration, educational and religious work, serving as Mayor of the ancient town in 1877 and earning in his old age the title of the ‘grand old man of Lancaster’. Entering the Lancaster Royal Grammar School in 1874 the study of chemistry first attracted Seward’s interest, but his subsequent career was largely due to his hearing a course of University Extension lectures by J. E. Marr, an old boy of the school, who was just making his mark as a geologist at Cambridge. In 1883 he entered St John’s College, Cambridge. His contemporaries there included Sir Humphrey Rolleston, Dr A. B. Rendle, and Dr L. E. Shore, while one of his early friends was Dr Alfred Harker who had just taken his degree. A first class in the Natural Sciences Tripos, Part I, resulted in his election to a scholarship at his college, and this was followed by similar success in Part II when his subjects were geology and botany. Professor T. McKenny Hughes, who did so much for the study of geology at Cambridge, appears to have been responsible for directing Seward’s attention to the largely unexplored fields of palaeobotany. This led in 1886 to a year’s study of fossil plants in Manchester under Professor W. C. Williamson, the founder of modern palaeobotany in Britain.