Cecil George Botting

Cecil George Botting (1870-1929) was educated at Dulwich College and Cambridge University before teaching Classics, first at Colet Court Prep School and then at St Paul's itself. In all, he spent 37 years at the schools, and was known as the supreme scholarship winner, having coached more boys to success in university entrance exams than any other teacher. It was written later than he was driven to augment his income with out-of-school coaching, to the grave detriment of his health, and the...See more

Cecil George Botting (1870-1929) was educated at Dulwich College and Cambridge University before teaching Classics, first at Colet Court Prep School and then at St Paul's itself. In all, he spent 37 years at the schools, and was known as the supreme scholarship winner, having coached more boys to success in university entrance exams than any other teacher. It was written later than he was driven to augment his income with out-of-school coaching, to the grave detriment of his health, and the blame for this was pinned squarely on Hillard's salary policy. Cecil converted to Catholicism at the age of 36, and forced his wife and seven-year-old daughter to do the same. By his admirers he was said to have found the perfect flowering of his beloved Greeks within Catholic philosophy, and to him it seemed the spirit of Plato, even more than that of Aristotle, informed Catholic thought. His daughter, the author Antonia White, suffered mental illness for a large portion of her life. According to her autobiography, her disciplinarian father did not get the son he had hoped for, and she implies in her semi-autobiographical novels that he saw his conversion as salvation for sins of forbidden love. See less