ABSTRACT

Robert Morant was born at Hampstead on 7 April 1863 the only son of Robert Morant, a decorative artist, and Helen Berry, the daughter of the headmaster of Mill Hill School. Educated, despite his mother's poverty after his father's early death, at Winchester and New College, he studied hard and lived abstemiously, excelling at boxing and gaining a First in Theology in 1885. Richmond used him as a model for Christ on the ceiling above the altar at St Paul's Cathedral; his boss later, Michael Sadler, referred to Morant's 'austere and episcopal appearance'. He met and became the confidant of Sir John Gorst, Vice President of the Council from 1896. Morant believed that the central authority, the Board of Education, had to be 'an aristocracy of brains' and his work presaged the 1902 Education Act which established local education authorities as junior partners to the Board in the service of education.