Anthony Hope - Youth

Youth

Hope was born in Clapton, then on the edge of London, where his father, the Reverend Edward Connerford Hawkins, was headmaster of St John's Foundational School for the Sons of Poor Clergy (which soon moved to Leatherhead in Surrey and is now St John's School). Hope's mother, Jane Isabella Grahame, was an aunt of Kenneth Grahame, the author of Wind in the Willows. Hope was educated by his father and then attended Marlborough College, where he was editor of The Marlburian. He won a scholarship to Balliol College at Oxford University in 1881. Before graduating in 1886, he played football for his college, took a first-class degree in Classics, and was one of the rare Liberal presidents of the Oxford Union, becoming known as a good speaker. His contemporaries included Cosmo Gordon Lang, later Archbishop of Canterbury; A.E.W. Mason, author of The Four Feathers; Arthur Quiller-Couch, a literary critic; Gilbert Murray, a classical scholar and intellectual; Sir Michael Sadler, an historian and educationalist; and J. A. Spender, editor of the Westminster Gazette.