Percy Fry Kendall, 1856-1936

Abstract

Percy Fry Kendall was born on 15 November, 1856, the youngest of eight children of Charles Kendall, commercial traveller, and his wife, Hannah Eltringham, at Mile End, Bow, in the Parish of Stepney. His forbears on both sides were sea-faring folk, and as he was considered delicate he was never sent to school. As a boy he was a studious reader, a naturalist, and a collector, and as a young man he attended classes at Charles Brad laugh’s Hall of Science, where he was associated with Annie Besant, and profited by a course of University Extension lectures in geology given by a young graduate from Cambridge, who became Professor Sollas. In 1874, on results of the South Kensington Science and Art Department Examination, he gained the only silver medal ever awarded by that Department for Geology. In 1879 and 1880 Kendall attended summer courses for teachers at the Royal College of Science, and thereafter transferred to the full day course in Biology under Professor T. H. Huxley. He always recollected with pride an occasion in the spring of 1881 when a class which Huxley was conducting was visited by “ the greatest of evolutionists, Charles Darwin".