Harold Edgeworth Butler

Harold Edgeworth Butler (8 May 1878 – 5 June 1951) was a British Latin scholar. He studied at Oxford University and in 1899 won the Newdigate Prize for the Best Composition in English verse. He became a lecturer and fellow of New College, Oxford the same year. In 1909 he moved to University College, London, and in 1911 he was appointed Professor of Latin in succession to A. E. Housman, a post he held until his retirement in 1942. Butler was the son of the Rev. Arthur Gray Butler, the first headmaster of Haileybury College; the great-nephew of the novelist Maria Edgeworth; the second cousin once removed of the politician Rab Butler; and the father of the psephologist Sir David Butler. He served as a lieutenant and then captain in the Royal Artillery during World War I but never saw action. In 1917 he married Margaret (Peggie) Lucy Pollard (daughter of his colleague A.F. Pollard, Professor of Constitutional History at University College London from 1903 to 1931) who had previously been one of his students. In 1919 the family moved to 16 Taviton Street in Bloomsbury to be within walking distance of his UCL office. Their four children were all educated at St Paul's School of which he was a governor. Upon retirement he and his wife moved to Dunraven, 27 St Johns Avenue, Leatherhead, Surrey. Butler edited and translated a wide range of Latin authors in both verse and prose. On Butler's edition of Quintilian, it has been said that: