George Edward Lynch Cotton

COTTON, George Edward Lynch. b. Chester, 29 October 1813; d. Kushtai, India, 6 October 1866. He was the son of an army officer, who was killed in the Peninsular War on 13 November 1813, two weeks after the birth of his son. George was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College Cambridge (BA, 1836), becoming a master under Thomas Arnold at Rugby School in 1837 (in Thomas Hughes’s famous novel about Rugby School, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Cotton is ‘the young master’). He was appointed headmaster of Marlborough College in 1852. During his time there he did much to enhance the school’s reputation. In 1858 he was appointed Bishop of Calcutta, where he encouraged education, founded schools...