Alfred William Alcock, 1859 - 1933

Alfred William Alcock was born at Bombay on June 23, 1859. He was the son of Capt. John Alcock, who, after a lifetime at sea in sailing ships, retired and lived at Blackheath. His mother was a daughter of one Christopher Puddicombe, the only son of a Devon squire, who had run away to sea in his boyhood. Alcock was educated at Mill Hill School, at Blackheath Proprietary School and at Westminster School. He had only been at Westminster for a year when, in 1876, financial losses forced his father to take him from school and to send him to India, to the Wynaad district in Malabar, where some relatives were engaged in coffee-planting. We have no particulars of Alcock’s school career, but the boy of 17 who took with him to the jungles of Malabar “ my Horace and my Homer, along with my Canterbury Tales and my Golden Treasury ” cannot have been an idle or reluctant pupil.