John Evershed, 1864-1956

Abstract

John Evershed was born on 26 February 1864 at Gomshall in Surrey. He was the seventh child of John Evershed and Sophia, daughter of David Brent Price of Portsmouth. John Aubrey, F.R.S., in his History of Surrey , refers to the Eversheds of Evershed, in the parish of Ockley ‘a family here rather before than since the Conquest’. The earliest member of the family, of whom there is record, was Thomas de Evereshavede, a witness to a charter in 1240. The Eversheds wrere yeoman farmers and have been traced from father to son living on the same farm for 500 years, until 1716, when the last John Evershed of Evershed, Sheriff of Surrey, died without heirs. Evershed’s grandfather, John Evershed of Albury, was descended from a younger branch of the family, who had continued as yeoman farmers in the neighbouring parish of Newdigate. He was the last of the branch to carry on an unbroken family tradition as yeoman farmers in Surrey for over 600 years. Evershed’s maternal great-grandfather kept a shop in Portsmouth where he sold nautical almanacs and charts; he was well known to Nelson. The only relative of Evershed’s of scientific attainments was his brother Sydney, who invented electrical apparatus and electrical measuring instruments for the Navy and carried out researches in permanent magnetism. Evershed was educated at a preparatory school of the Unitarian persuasion at Brighton, where he had Neville Chamberlain as a school-fellow, and at a more advanced school at Croydon, where, as he said ‘by a lucky accident I passed the only examination I have ever been subjected to’. He remembered stealing out of bed at Brighton in the middle of the night to see a fine comet (Coggia 1874). While still at school, when the planet Mars was in a near opposition (1877), he constructed a telescope with odd lenses.