David Meredith Seares Watson, 1886-1973

Abstract

David Meredith Seares Watson was born on 18 June 1886 at Higher Broughton, near Salford in Lancashire. He was the son of David Watson and Mary Louisa Watson ( née Seares). David Watson was a chemist and metallurgist who was a pioneer of the electrolytic refining of copper and had been educated at Clewer House School and at the Royal School of Mines where he was a student of T. H. Huxley, A. C. Ramsay and the metallurgist Perry, and took one of the earliest D.Sc.s in London, receiving a gold medal on graduation. He joined the Broughton Copper Company and eventually became the Managing Director. David Watson was a descendant of a Scottish family which included such eminent men as his father John Watson, an Advocate of Edinburgh and once Lord Provost of that city; great-uncle David Watson who was Minister of Cupar, Fife, once Moderator of the Church of Scotland; his great-grandfather James Watson who was Writer to the Signet, Edinburgh; and a Professor of Civil and Natural History in the United Colleges, St Andrews. Ultimately the line came from Turriff, Banffshire. Mary Louisa Watson was the daughter of Samuel Seares, a stockbroker of London, who was reputed to have among his ancestors a former Governor of Rhode Island at the end of the seventeenth century who married a ‘Red Indian’ wife. D. M. S. obtained a pedigree of this Sears or Seares, as variably written. From this stock apparently descended the Sears of Sears, Roebuck. D. M. S. Watson had one sister, C. M. Watson, who read classics at Manchester University and achieved first class honours on graduation at the age of nineteen, obtaining 97% marks from the famous Gilbert Murray of Oxford. She died tragically young in her second year at Somerville College, Oxford, having won the Chancellor’s prize for Greek Prose. It is not surprising that the children of such forebears should both have been brilliant.