CFHS code : BE78
Parish : St Bene’t
Inscription : In Memory of CHARLES VICKERY HAWKINS scholar of Kings College Cambridge b June 8 1872 d Aug 6 1894
Monument : Headstone (small)
Above information from Cambridge Family History Society Survey
Lat Lon : 52.20262, 0.13628645 – click here for location
Monument
This headstone, in the parish area of St Bene’t, is located on the east side of the west path.
Inscription
In Memory of CHARLES VICKERY HAWKINS
scholar of Kings College Cambridge
b June 8 1872 d Aug. 6 1894
Charles Vickery Hawkins (8 June 1872 – 6 August 1894)
Charles was born in Plymouth and was the son of Charles and Elizabeth Grace Hawkins. His father was a ships carpenter, who was paralysed in a work accident in 1880 and died when Charles was 12 years old. Elizabeth Hawkins ‘struggled against weakness and disease’ and Charles (jnr) had ‘consumptive tendancies’ as a child. His widowed mother was left in relative poverty and opened a small grocer’s shop in order to have enough money to care for Charles and his siblings. It was said that Charles used to go out in the early morning to sell newspapers ‘his limbs often tingling with cold’.
Charles won a Foundation Scholarship to Plymouth Corporation Grammar School and in December 1888 sat the ‘Cambridge Local Examination’ in Plymouth. He took ‘first place among the Plymouth Seniors’ in the exam and was awarded £4 as a prize for his achievment. He was the also the only senior student across Devon and Cornwall to secure first class honours in the exam. The previous year he had taken first prize amongst junior scholars and was awarded the Holmes Prize in recognition..He went up to Kings College Cambridge in April 1890 on an ‘exhibition’ worth £60 and it was reported that his ambition was to become ‘a minister in the Church of England in some great town…and preach the Gospel to the poor’.
He read History, and obtained 1st Class in the History Tripos in 1893. He was awarded the Lightfoot Scholarship (for ecclesiastical history) after his first year, such was his dazzling academic brilliance – it had never been awarded to an undergraduate, let along a freshman. Not everything went his way however and in a letter to his mother in June 1891 he noted that ‘I am at the top of the undergraduates of the first year in the Mays, although beaten by two marks by a Girton girl, Miss Toms….I am a bit vexed that one of the other sex has out distanced me, although I have heard rumours on all sides of her astounding ability’. He managed to secure a couple of scholarships ‘not only to maintain himself, but even to assist to some extent the slender means of the family household’.
Whilst studying he was the Cambridge correspondant of the ‘English Churchman’ publication. A lack of funds meant he had to live very simply whilst at Kings, and did not eat meat to further save money – this was said to have ‘weakened his already delicate consistution’. He was head of a Christian Union whilst at Kings, and was said to have been staunchly Protestant, but with sympathies to the non-conformist movement for their role in furthering religion.
In 1891 he fell on a pavement near Ridley Hall, and this started a decline in health. It was said that he underperformed in his 2nd and 3rd year exams due to ill health and was therefore not able to ‘make the brilliant appearance…which his genius and ability would otherwise have attained for him’. He had a lung haemorrahage in 1893 and was forced to ‘winter on the Mediterranean’ after graduation. He returned to Cambridge ‘to compete for the first Whewell Scholarship on International Law, through which he hoped to secure for his mother a comfortable old age’. By this time however he was so weak that the examination papers had to be completed in his room at Kings. He subequently won the Scholarship and but then died in College of consumption (TB).
A biography was published in 1896 entitled: Charles Vickery Hawkins: Memorials of his Life, edited by Rev. Waddington and Rev. Inskip. It was noted in the Nonconformist newspaper that ‘it is seldom that the career of of a young man of twenty-two merits a biography; but Charles Vickery Hawkins…had an extraordinary carrer and though he died while an undergraduate at Cambridge, a permanent record of his life may – and indeed, should – stimulate other youths to emulate the personal characteristics of one, who before reaching manhood, had impressed the master of his college, his tutors and many of his fellow under-graduates by his beauty of character, his illimitable industry, his extraordinary intellectual grasp and his profound and phenomenal knowledge. Charles…was something of an abnormality, if we can use the term without any suggestion of uncharitableness or opprobrium’.
The book included many of his essays, letters and articles which were said to ‘reveal a remarkable range of knowledge and great originality of thought. The biography is deeply interesting, and fully justifies publication, which in an age of innumerable superfluous biographies is high commendation’ (The Nonconformist). The Spectator described it as ‘one of the most striking, as it is one of the most detailed pictures of a student’s life that we have ever seen’. The Scotsman’s review said ‘it has rescued from almost absolute loss the life work of one of whom it was safe to forecast a career of great usefulness in virtue of his exceeding goodness of character and the brilliance of his intellectual attainments’.
The Glasgow Herald gave the book a glowing review in December 1896 noting that ‘the poor English ‘lad o’ pairts’ can seldom matriculate at Oxford or Cambridge; generally he becomes a Methodist minister, or degenerates in a ‘Jude the Obscure’. In this volume however we have the story of the career of an English youth, not unlike but even more pathetic that, that of the Drumtochty scholar’. It further noted that ‘We have not been able to see any traces of genius in anything that Hawkins has left; but he had a great power of generalisation, and that, combined with his immense industry, would undoubtedly had he lived, have made him one of the most distinguished men of the coming age. One of the most pleasant features of the book is the proof it gives of the extraordinary thoughtfulness and kindness of the University authorities towards their poor protege’.
His mother, Elizabeth died in 1895.
Sources:
Ancestry
Newspaper archives
by Claire Martinsen