George Ratcliffe Woodward

WOODWARD, George Ratcliffe. b. Birkenhead, 27 December 1848; d. Highgate, London, 3 March 1934. He was born in Birkenhead and educated in Elstree, Hertfordshire, then Harrow School and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (BA 1872). During his time at Cambridge he encountered Anglo-Catholicism, and became an admirer of the works of John Mason Neale*. He took Holy Orders (deacon 1874, priest 1875), and became Assistant Curate at St Barnabas’, Pimlico. It had been built as an Anglo-Catholic church, and embodied the ideals of the Oxford Movement*: it claimed to be the first Anglican Church to use liturgical colours, the sign of the Cross, and an Eastward-facing position for the priest at the...