Family and Early Life
Robert was the fourth son of Mark James Barrington-Ward, the rector of Duloe, Cornwall and an inspector of schools. He attended Westminster School, where he was a King's Scholar, and Balliol College, Oxford. While at Balliol, he was elected president of the Oxford Union Society and took a Third Class in Greats in 1913. Though planning for a career in the law and in politics, he undertook freelance editing work for The Times while reading for the Bar, and in February 1914 was given a position as secretary to the editor, Geoffrey Dawson. At the start of World War I Barrington-Ward became an officer with the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry (DCLI). He went on to serve in France and Belgium, where he was mentioned in despatches three times and awarded both the Distinguished Service Order and the Military Cross.
It the 1920s Barrington-Ward met and married Adele Radice, the daughter of an Indian civil servant who was working as a schoolteacher. The couple had two sons, Mark and Simon, and a daughter, Caroline. Mark followed his father by serving in the DCLI, studying at Balliol and editing a newspaper.
Read more about this topic: Robert Barrington-Ward
Famous quotes containing the words family, early and/or life:
“The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“If you are willing to inconvenience yourself in the name of discipline, the battle is half over. Leave Grandma’s early if the children are acting impossible. Depart the ballpark in the sixth inning if you’ve warned the kids and their behavior is still poor. If we do something like this once, our kids will remember it for a long time.”
—Fred G. Gosman (20th century)
“Whoever takes a view of the life of man ... will find it so beset and hemm’d in with obligations of one kind or other, as to leave little room to suspect, that man can live to himself: and so closely has our creator link’d us together ... that we find this bond of mutual dependence ... is too strong to be broke.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)