FREDERICK HENRY MARVELL BLAYDES, 1818-1908

FREDERICK HENRY MARVELL BLAYDES, MA, hon, Oxford LLD, Trin Col Dublin, Phil D Budapest, Halle Athens & Corfu (1818–1908),

classical scholar, born at Hampton Court Green on 29 Sept. 1818, was the third son of Hugh Blaydes (1777–1829) of High Paull, Yorkshire, and of Ranby Hall, Nottinghamshire, J.P. and high sheriff for the latter county; his mother was Delia Maria, second daughter of Colonel Richard Wood of Hollin Hall, Yorkshire. James Blaydes of Hull, who married on 25 March 1615 Anne, sister of the poet Andrew Marvell, was a direct ancestor.

FREDERICK HENRY MARVELL BLAYDES

as a young boy

After his father died in 1829, Blaydes was sent to a private school at Boulogne, and thence, on 14 Sept. 1831, to St. Peter's School, York, where he became a free scholar in June 1832 and gained an exhibition before matriculating at Oxford, 20 Oct. 1836, as a commoner of Christ Church. John Ruskin, about five months his junior, was already a gentleman commoner there, and Thomas Gaisford [q. v.] was dean (of. Ruskin, Præterita, 1900, i. 371). In 1838 Blaydes was elected Hertford scholar and a student of Christ Church Oxford, On June 28^th, 1838 during the vacation he attended the Coronation of Queen Victoria at Westminster Abbey having a seat over the sanctuary and he remembers seeing the Young Queen Victoria step forward to assist Lord Rolls who stumbled in going up to make his obeisance. In the 9+ Easter term 1840 4 was placed in the second class in literae humaniores along with (Sir) George Webbe Dasent [q. v. Suppl. I] and James Anthony Froude [q. v. Suppl. I], He graduated B.A. in 1840, proceeding M.A. in 1843.

FREDERICK HENRY MARVELL BLAYDES

as a young man

After a long tour (which he described in family letters) through France and Italy in 1840-1, finally spending a week in Athens, he returned to Oxford in Aug. 1841. and issued an edition of Aristophanes' 'Birds' (1842), with short Latin notes. He was an ordained deacon in 1842 and a priest in 1843, and he accepted the college living in Harringworth, Northamptonshire. Harringworth was Blaydes' home for forty-three years (1843-86). A staunch 'protestant,' he joined on 10 Dec. 1850 the deputation from his university which, headed by the Chancellor, the Duke of Wellington, presented an address to Queen Victoria against the 'papal aggression' (The Times, 11 Dec. 1850).

But Blaydes' interest and ample leisure were mainly absorbed by classical study. In 1845 he published an edition of a second play of Aristophanes the 'Acharnians.' In 1859 he published in the 'Bibliotheca classica' three plays of Sophocles. The reception of the book was not altogether favourable, and a difference with the publishers (Bell & Daldy) led him to issue the four remaining plays with Williams & Norgate separately. He reckoned that he gave more than twenty years to Sophocles, and, with intervals, more than fifty to Aristophanes.

In 1871 the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) suffered an attack of typhoid fever (Enteric Fever) (the illness of which his father had died 10 years earlier) while at his home, Sandringham in Norfolk. F.H.M. Blaydes traveled from Brighton to Sandringham in the depth of winter to advise the Prince of Wales’s physicians of an American remedy. The medicine was approved and used by the Prince of Wales’s physicians with excellent results. The medicine was the concentrated Tincture of Baptisia Tinctoria and Fowler's solution of Arsenic, the dose of one drop of each in a wineglass of water, to be repeated every half hour after longer intervals.

Blaydes resigned his benefice in 1884, and from 1886 lived at Brighton. In 1907 he moved to Southsea, where he died, retaining his vigour till near the end, on 7 Sept. 1908; he was buried in Brighton cemetery.

The scholarship meant for Blaydes what it had meant for Elmsley at Oxford, for Porson and Dobree at Cambridge. With the later and more literary school of Sir Richard Jebb in England and von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff in Germany he had small sympathy. He likewise considered the study of Chaucer and Shakespeare a waste of time. Verbal criticism and the discovery of corrupt passages mainly occupied him, and his fertile and venturesome habit of emendation exposed his work to disparagement (N. Wecklein in Berliner philologische Wochenschrift, 28/20, 1908). Yet a good many of his emendations have been approved by later editors, most recently by Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones and N.G. Wilson in their Sophocles (Oxford Classical Texts, 1990), in which many of Blaydes's proposals are either accepted in the text or thought worthy of mention in the apparatus criticus. Blaydes's own views on the editing of classical texts are to be found in the introduction to his Sophocles (vol. 1) and in the preface to The Philoctetes of Sophocles (1870).

The University of Dublin made him Hon. LL.D. on 6 July 1892; he was also a Ph.D. of Budapest, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Letters at Athens.

Blaydes made a hobby of homeopathy and delighted in music, being an accomplished singer and naming his third son, George Frederick Handel, after the composer. To St. Paul's school, where his eldest son was a pupil, he was a munificent benefactor. In 1901 he presented to it the greater part of his classical library, amounting to 1300 volumes, with many framed engravings, principally of Italian scenery, now hung in the dining hall. In the following years, he gave many specimens of marble from the Mediterranean basin, together with more pictures, books, and a large collection of curios. The ample fortune which his first wife brought him he spent to the amount of 30,000l. on his studies, collections, and the printing of his books.

Fanny Maria Page-Turner eldest daughter of Sir Edward Page-Turner

married Rev F H M Blaydes

FAMILY TREE - CLICK HERE

Blaydes married firstly, in 1843, Fanny Maria, eldest daughter and eventually (on the death in 1874 of her only brother, Sir Edward Henry Page-Turner, 6th baronet) one of the coheiresses of Sir Edward George Thomas Page-Turner, of Ambrosden, Oxfordshire, and Battlesden, Bedfordshire; she was killed in a carriage accident, 21 Aug. 1884, leaving issue three sons and four daughters. Blaydes' second wife was Emma, daughter of Mr. H. R. Nichols.

Edward P-T or Alec Moore, Alice Blaydes F A Blaydes (P-T) from Left Helen & Blanche Blaydes
Dorothy seated with baby Edward & F H M Baydes Constance, daughters of F H M Blaydes

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