William Henry Herford

William Henry Herford (1820–1908) was an English Unitarian minister, writer and educator. He was interested in education and married a school head mistress, Louisa Carbutt.

Early life Born at Coventry, 20 October 1820, he was fourth son in a family of six sons and three daughters of John Herford and his first wife, Sarah, daughter of Edward Smith of Birmingham (uncle of Joshua Toulmin Smith); Brooke Herford was a younger brother. His father, a liberal and Unitarian, became a wine merchant in Manchester in 1822, residing at Altrincham, where his wife ran a girls' school.

After attending a school kept by Charles Wallace, Unitarian minister at Hale Barns, Herford was from 1831 to 1834 a day boy at Shrewsbury School under Samuel Butler. From 1834 to 1836 he was at Manchester grammar school. Then, destined for the Unitarian ministry, he was prepared for entry at the ministerial college at York by John Relly Beard. She had signed the 1866 petition for women to be given the vote.

Herford and his wife then formed a plan of a co-educational school for younger children. The original announcement in the Manchester Guardian stated that Mr and Mrs Herford planned to start a school for boys and girls for children up to the age of thirteen. In 1873 he opened his co-educational school at Fallowfield, Manchester, and then moved it to Ladybarn House, Withington, as Lady Barn House School. For twelve years he ran it in an individual style. Resigning the school to his second daughter in 1886, he concentrated on writing and travel.

Botanist

Some of his plant collections are in the Charterhouse School Herbarium at the University and Jepson Herbaria, University of California, Berkeley.

Last years He and Louisa moved to Paignton in Devon where they shocked some there with their ideas. She died there in 1907 and he died there on 27 April 1908. He was buried there.

Works Herford published in 1889 his major work The School: an Essay towards Humane Education, based on his teaching experience. In 1893 he published The Student's Froebel, adapted from Die Menschenerziehung of Friedrich Fröbel (1893; revised edit., posthumous, with memoir by Charles Harold Herford, 1911). In 1902 he published Passages from the Life of an Educational Free Lance, a translation of the Aus dem Leben eines freien Pädagogen of Dr. Ewald Haufe.

Family Herford married:

in September 1848 Elizabeth Anne (died 1880), daughter of Timothy Davis, minister of the Presbyterian chapel, Evesham, by whom he had three sons and four daughters; in 1884 Louisa, daughter of Francis Carbutt of Leeds, and from 1860 to 1870 headmistress of Brooke House, Knutsford, who died in 1907 without issue.