ABSTRACT
W. G. de Burgh could have been speaking of himself. Tall, slim, bespectacled, and of aristocratic features, he had an aloof air but, as we shall see, his students loved him, notwithstanding the dim view he took of some of their attainments and interests. Beneath all was a religiously-grounded optimism which looked for the best in others, and could write off no one. His friend, A. E. Taylor, supplies many of the basic family details:
William George de Burgh, born at New Wandsworth on 24 October 1866, was the son of William de Burgh, a barrister holding a post at the War Office, and of his wife, Hannah Jane Monck Mason, a great-granddaughter of Samuel Whitbread,2 and granddaughter of the Lady Grey (great-grandmother to Viscount Grey of Falloden) who was well known in the Evangelical movement of her day.3 Of his paternal uncles, one, Maurice de Burgh, was Archdeacon of Ness, another, Hubert, became a priest in the Roman Catholic Church. Dean de Burgh, his paternal grandfather, was the builder of the church at Sandymount, Dublin. He was thus of mixed Norman-Irish and Northumberland strain, an ‘aristocrat’ in the proper sense of a much abused word ... his mother (who lost her own father early) was much attached to her uncle, Sir George Grey, Home Secretary, and to her cousins, in particular to Thomas Baring, Lord Northbrook.4
