Lewis Leigh Fermor, 1880-1954

Abstract

Lewis Leigh Fermor died on 24 May 1954, at his home in Horsell, Surrey. He was born on 18 September 1880, the eldest of six children of Lewis Fermor and his wife Maria James. His father, a bank clerk in the London Joint Stock Bank, was obliged to retire prematurely due to ill health, and as a result the education of the family was a major problem. The young Fermor was taught by his mother up to the age of seven but was sent to the Goodrich Road Board School when the family moved to Dulwich. During the first term his education cost 4d. per week but by the following term elementary education had become free, and from this time his parents had nothing more to pay towards the education of their eldest son. From this school, to which Fermor always paid high tribute for the excellence of the teaching, he obtained a scholarship to Wilson’s Grammar School, Camberwell, and here he was fortunate in having the late Sir Percy Nunn as science master. It was largely due to the encouragement given by Nunn and Sir Thomas Kirke Rose (a cousin of Fermor who was at that time Chemist and Assayer at the Mint) that Fermor decided to try for a National Scholarship to the Royal College of Science and thereby to enter the Royal School of Mines, and work for an Associateship in Metallurgy. The competition for these scholarships was severe, and Nunn warned him that he would have little chance of success unless he was prepared to undertake a special course of additional reading which would have to last two years. A scheme was drawn up whereby he was to rise at 5 o’clock each morning, take a cold bath, do two hours’ work before breakfast, work another two hours in the evening, and always be in bed by 9.30 p.m. In his later years in some autobiographical notes which he wrote for the interest and amusement of his wife, he mentions that there was no hardship in this. The hardship was in the summer, turning into bed whilst the brothers and sisters were still out in the garden. Fermor kept to this regime loyally and was rewarded for his perseverance by obtaining his scholarship and entering the Royal School of Mines in October 1898. Here he obtained a first class in each year’s course and won the Murchison Medal for Geology, a prize of books to the value of £15, and secured his Associateship of the Royal School of Mines in metallurgy.