Thomas Rawson Birks

BIRKS, Thomas Rawson. b. Staveley, Derbyshire, 20 September 1810; d. Cambridge, 21 July 1883. He was the son of a Baptist tenant farmer, educated locally at Chesterfield and then at Mill Hill school, north London, founded in 1807 as a nonconformist Grammar School, where he became a master for a short time. He became a member of the Church of England in 1830, and went on in that year to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he had a distinguished career as an undergraduate (BA 1834), and became a Fellow. He took Holy Orders (deacon 1837, priest 1841), and became curate of Watton, Hertfordshire, where the rector was Edward Bickersteth*, compiler of Christian Psalmody (1833). In 1844 he married...