Edward Glover: A Biographical Sketch1

Edward Glover was born on 13 January 1888 in Lesmahagow, Scotland. This is a rural community in the lowland county of Lanarkshire, about 25 miles from Glasgow. He was the third of three sons of Matthew Glover, M.A., a country schoolmaster. His father was furthermore a scholar and a Fellow of the Educational Institute of Scotland; but for reasons of health he had given up what had promised to be a distinguished academic career in Glasgow to bring up his family in what Edward many years later described as 'the intimate and healthier atmosphere of a rural village'. That his health problems were somatic, and certainly not solely psychosomatic, was subsequently confirmed.

Edward's mother, Elizabeth Smith Shanks, had come from a line of country farmers. Her uncle, who subsequently adopted her, was a Scottish Presbyterian minister. Dr Glover described the wife of his mother's uncle-foster-father as 'a formidable character to judge from a daguerreotype', who brought her up 'in the way that she should go', which in those days meant that she was 'educated privately'. In short, in spite of being 'well endowed intellectually and with some native wit she remained in any modern sense uneducated except in the domestic arts, in religious observances and in the current arcana of superstition that prevailed during her childhood and adolescence'.

A quite different phase of her education began with her marriage to Edward Glover's father, a 'Victorian of outstanding intellectual capacities and breadth', who, after having 'been brought up in straitened circumstances, manifested a quiet tenacity of purpose' in both his private and public life. According to Edward Glover he was like most schoolmasters of that period in that he had mastered a wide curriculum, and with equal ease could teach a small group of senior pupils Greek, Latin, Hebrew and French, 'not omitting an English of the type that most Scottish dominies considered their rightful and unchal