Horace Alexander - Life and Work

Life and Work

Horace was born on 18 April 1889 at Croydon, England. His father Joseph Gundry Alexander (1848–1918) was an eminent lawyer who had worked to suppress the opium trade between India and China. His mother was Josephine Crosfield Alexander. His early schooling was at Bootham School in York after which he studied at King's College, Cambridge University where he graduated in history in 1912. In 1914, the war broke out and he served as secretary in various anti-war committees. In 1916, he declined to join the army as a conscientious objector and took up teaching at Warwick, Kent. He married Olive Graham (1892-1942) on 20 July 1918 and joined the staff of Woodbrooke, a Quaker college in Birmingham, teaching international relations there from 1919 to 1944, especially in relation to the League of Nations. His wife Olive died in 1942, having been confined to a wheelchair for several years. In that year he joined a section of the Friends Ambulance Unit and went to parts of India threatened by the Japanese. In 1958 he married Rebecca Bradbeer (née Biddle, 1901–1991), an American Quaker. After ten years they moved to Pennsylvania, United States, where he spent the remaining twenty years of his life. He was also, for its first ten years, a governor of Leighton Park School, a leading Quaker school in England. He died of a gastrointestinal illness at Crosslands, a Quaker retirement community in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania.