Frederick Daniel Chattaway, 1860 - 1944

Abstract

F. D. Chattaway was born at Foleshill in Warwickshire on 9 November 1860, being the eldest of five children of Daniel Clarke Chattaway and Eliza Anne Adcock. He died at Torquay on 27 January 1944 in his eighty-fourth year. His father was a ribbon and trimming manufacturer in Coventry but this trade collapsed and with it the family fortune, following the 1870 treaty with France. In consequence Chattaway’s education was achieved almost entirely by scholarships. His taste for science might derive from his grandfather, but his liking for and knowledge of poetry and literature almost certainly came from his mother who started a small private school in Birmingham when the family income failed. Chattaway received his early education privately from a nonconformist minister, the Rev. J. S. Withers. His training in chemistry began at Mason College under Sir William Tilden. A science and art scholarship enabled him to attend the School of Mines in London and he then passed preliminary examinations at Glasgow with a view to studying medicine. Having no stomach for dissection, however, he turned to chemistry as a career and proceeded to University College, Aberystwyth. Two years later he gained a scholarship at Christ Church, Oxford, where A. G. Vernon Harcourtwas tutor, and obtained a first class in the Natural Science School at Oxford in 1891: a first at London had been gained the previous year. He followed the then general practice of going to Germany and elected to work with Baeyar and Bamberger at Munich.