Philip Herbert Cowell, 1870-1949

Abstract

Philip Herbert Cowell was born on 7 August 1870, at Calcutta, the second of the five children of Herbert and Alice Cowell. His father, born at Ipswich in 1837, who was a barrister, first in India and then in England, of the Middle Temple, was related to E. B. Cowell, professor of Sanskrit at Cambridge, and to J. E. Cowell Weldon, successively headmaster of Harrow, bishop of Calcutta and dean of Durham: his mother, born in 1842, was the third daughter of Newson Garrett, merchant, of Aldeburgh, Suffolk. Mr Garrett’s second daughter, Elisabeth (Elisabeth Garrett Anderson, M.D.), was the first woman to qualify in medicine; and his fifth daughter, Millicent (Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett), became the wife of the Rt Hon. Henry Fawcett, the blind PostmasterGeneral in the Gladstone ministry of 1880-1885. From 1881 to 1883 Cowell was at a private school at Stoke Poges, the headmaster of which, the Rev. E. St John Parry, was the father of Reginald St John Parry, afterwards a brother Fellow of Cowell’s at Trinity. In 1883 he went to Eton, as a King’s Scholar: it was his good fortune that the Rev. Edmond Warre, who became headmaster in 1884, considerably enlarged the opportunities for boys whose bent was mathematical; and, beginning with Cowell, the school produced several excellent mathematicians in succession: in the year below him was G. H. J. Hurst, second wrangler in 1893 and Fellow of King’s, and in the next year F. W. Lawrence (now Lord Pethick-Lawrence), fourth wrangler in 1894 and Fellow of Trinity. Cowell, Flurst and Lawrence all won the Tomline mathematical prize three years before they left Eton, over the heads of their seniors. He left Eton in 1889 with an entrance scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, and a leaving scholarship from the school. As an undergraduate he worked only three hours a day, but he seemed to remember almost everything that he had ever read; and in 1891 he won the Sheepshanks Exhibition in astronomy, graduating in 1892 as Senior Wrangler: the distinction of being ‘above the Senior Wrangler’ had been gained two years earlier by his first cousin Philippa Fawcett. In 1894 he was appointed to the Isaac Newton studentship in astronomy or physical optics, which had been founded three years previously by the generosity of Mr Frank McClean: Cowell elected to work on celestial mechanics.