# Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 supplement/Herford, William Henry

​HERFORD, WILLIAM HENRY (1820–1908), writer on education, born at Coventry, 20 Oct. 1820, was fourth son in a family of six sons and three daughters of John Herford by his first wife, Sarah, daughter of Edward Smith of Birmingham, uncle of Joshua Toulmin Smith [q. v.]. Brooke Herford [q. v. Suppl. II] was a younger brother. The father, who was through life a strong liberal and convinced unitarian, became a wine merchant in Manchester in 1822, residing at Altrincham, where his wife, a woman of cultivation and an accomplished artist, conducted a successful girls' school. After attending a school kept by Charles Wallace, unitarian minister at Hale Barns, William was from 1831 to 1834 a day boy at Shrewsbury under Samuel Butler [q. v.]. From 1834 to 1836 he was at the Manchester grammar school. Then, being destined for the unitarian ministry, he was prepared for entry at the ministerial college at York by John Relly Beard [q. v.], from whom ‘I first learned by experience that lessons might be made interesting to scholars.’ From 1837 to 1840 he studied at Manchester College in York, and there came into contact with German philosophy and theology. He removed with the college from York to Manchester in the summer of 1840, and thus came under the influence of three new professors, Francis Newman [q. v. Suppl. I], James Martineau [q. v. Suppl. I], and John James Tayler [q. v.], the last of whom he regarded as his spiritual father. Graduating B.A. of London University in the autumn of 1840, he began to preach in unitarian pulpits, but declined a permanent engagement as minister at Lancaster in order to accept a scholarship for three years' study in Germany. In 1842 he went to Bonn, where he attended the courses of Arndt, A. W. Schlegel, and F. C. Dahlmann, and formed an intimate friendship with his contemporary, Wilhelm Ihne. After two years at Bonn he spent eight months in Berlin, where he was admitted to the family circles of the Church historian Neander and the microscopist Ehrenberg. In the summer of 1845 he accepted an invitation from a unitarian congregation at Lancaster, where he remained a year. In 1846 Lady Byron, widow of the poet, invited him, on James Martineau's recommendation, to undertake the tuition of Ralph King, younger son of her daughter, Ada, Countess of Lovelace. Herford, early in 1847, accompanied the boy to Wilhelm von Fellenberg's Pestalozzian school at Hofwyl, near Bern. Herford grew intimate with Wilhelm von Fellenberg, became a temporary teacher on the staff, and accepted with enthusiasm Pestalozzi's and Froebel's educational ideas.
In Feb. 1848 he resumed his pastorate at Lancaster, and soon resolved to work out in a systematic way the ideas which he had developed at Hofwyl. In Jan. 1850 Herford, while retaining his ministerial duties, opened at Lancaster a school for boys on Pestalozzian principles. Prosperous on the whole, but never large, the school continued with some distinction for eleven years, when a decline in its numbers caused him to transfer it to other hands. Resigning his pastorate at the same time, he with his family went for eighteen months to Zurich in charge of a pupil. On his return in September 1863 he filled the pulpit of the Free Church in Manchester until 1869, acquiring increasing reputation as a teacher and lecturer, especially to women and girls. He was an ardent advocate of the opening of universities to women. Some of his teaching was given at Brooke House School, Knutsford, whose headmistress, Miss Louisa Carbutt (afterwards Herford's second wife), was educating girls upon principles closely akin to his own. Herford formed a plan of a co-educational school for younger children. In 1873 he ​opened his co-educational school at Fallowfield, Manchester, and afterwards moved it to Ladybarn House, Withington. For twelve years he directed it with an individuality of method which diffused through the neighbourhood a new educational ideal. Resigning the school to his second daughter in 1886, he thenceforth devoted his leisure to authorship and to travel, publishing in 1889 his chief work, ‘The School: an Essay towards Humane Education,’ a masterpiece of English educational writing, which he described as ‘the fruits of more than forty years of teaching; various in the sex, age, class and nation of its objects.’ In 1893 he published ‘The Student's Froebel,’ adapted from ‘Die Menschenerziehung’ of F. Froebel (1893; revised edit., posthumous, with memoir by C. H. Herford, 1911). This is the best English presentment of the educational doctrine which it summarises and expounds. In 1890 he settled at Paignton in South Devon. 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. He died at Paignton on 27 April 1908, and was buried there. Herford married (1) in Sept. 1848 Elizabeth Anne (d. 1880), daughter of Timothy Davis, minister of the Presbyterian chapel, Evesham, by whom he had three sons and four daughters; (2) 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. A medallion of Herford by Helen Reed, made in Florence in 1887, hangs in Ladybarn House School, Manchester.
Herford spoke of himself as having been for the first quarter of a century of his teaching an unconscious follower of F. Froebel, and for the following fifteen years his professed disciple. With Pestalozzi he urged the teacher never to deprive the child of ‘the sacred right of discovery,’ and to seek to bring things, both abstract and concrete, into actual contact with the pupil's senses and mind, putting words and names, ‘those importunate pretenders,’ into a subordinate place. Moral training, ‘practised not by preaching and as little as possible by punishment, but mainly by example and by atmosphere,’ he held to be of supreme importance, and its primary purpose to be ‘an intellectual clearing and purifying of the moral sense.’ To physical training (including play, gymnastics, singing, and handwork) he attached importance only less than that which was assigned to moral culture. Himself a teacher of genius, he disdained any compromise with educational principles or conventions of which he disapproved.
[Memoir of W. H. Herford by Prof. C. H. Herford, prefixed to revised edit. of Herford's Student's Froebel (1911); autobiographical statements in preface to The School; family information and personal knowledge.]
M. E. S.