Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 2.djvu/173

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Gray
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Green

ever been dealt to an English judge by a minister of the crown. Yet Grantham was perfectly sincere in his belief that in the discharge of his office he was uninfluenced by political partiality, nor was Mr. Arthur Balfour exceeding the truth when he declared in the course of the 1906 debate that 'a more transparently natural candid man than Mr. Justice Grantham never exercised judicial functions.'

A fine model of the English country gentleman, a liberal landlord, always ready to champion the cause of his poorer neighbours against local boards and the red tape of officialdom. Grantham was devoted to all out-of-door sports; he was a notable critic of horseflesh, was one of the founders of the Pegasus Club, and used to act as judge at the bar point to point races. An enthusiastic volunteer, he would sometimes appear at the 'Inns of Court' dinners in the scarlet coat, which had descended to him from an ancestor, of the old Bloomsbury Association or 'Devil's Own.' In the long vacation of 1910 he paid a visit to Canada, and won all hearts by his picturesque personality and outspoken opinions. Though he had sat on the bench for upwards of a quarter of a century, and had been for some years the senior puisne, his physical powers showed no sign of decay when he succumbed to a sharp attack of pneumonia, dying at his house in Eaton Square on 30 Nov. 1911. He was buried at Barcombe.

He married on 16 Feb. 1865 Emma, eldest daughter of Richard Wilson of Chiddingley, Sussex, who survived him; there was issue of the marriage two sons and five daughters. A portrait of Grantham by A. Stuart-Wortley is at Barcombe; an earlier oil painting by Bernard Lucas is in the possession of his younger son, Mr. F. W. Grantham.

[The Times, 1 Dec. 1911; Burke's Landed Gentry; Foster's Men at the Bar; Hansard, 4th series, clx. 370, 6th series, xxii. 366; personal knowledge.]

J. B. A.


GRAY, BENJAMIN KIRKMAN (1862–1907), economist, son of Benjamin Gray, congregational minister, by his wife Emma Jane Kirkman, was born on 11 Aug. 1862 at Blandford, Dorset. He was educated privately by his father, and read omnivorously on his own account. In 1876 he entered a London warehouse, but found the work distasteful. His father vetoed, in 1882, a plan which he had formed of emigrating, and from 1883 to 1886 he taught in private schools, at the same time eagerly pursuing his own studies. Of sensitive and self-centred temperament, he interested himself early in social questions.

In September 1886 Gray entered New College, Ivondon, to prepare for the congregational ministry. He paid much attention to economics and won the Ricardo economic scholarship at University College. In 1892 he went to Leeds to work under the Rev. R. Westrope at Blgrave (congregational) Chapel. But congregational orthodoxy dissatisfied him, and in 1894 he joined the Unitarians. He served as unitarian minister at Warwick from that year till 1897. From 1898 to 1902 he was in London, engaged in social work at the Bell Street Mission, Edgware Road, and studying at first hand the economic problem of philanthropy. His views took a strong socialistic bent, and he joined the Independent Labour Party. But a breakdown in health soon compelled his retirement from active work. Removing to Hampstead he devoted himself to research into the history of philanthropic movements in England. In 1905 he lectured at the London School of Economics on the philanthropy of the eighteenth century. He died of angina pectoris on 23 June 1907, at Letchworth, whither he had been drawn by his interest in the social experiment of the newly established Garden City. His ashes were buried there after cremation. In 1898 Gray married Miss Eleanor Stone, who edited his literary remains.

'The History of English Philanthropy from the Dissolution of the Monasteries to the First Census' (1905) and 'Philanthropy and the State' (published posthumously, 1910) are substantial embodiments of much original research and thought. Gray traces through the social history of the nineteenth century a uniform tendency, whereby the effort of the individual is replaced by that of the State. In spite of his strong socialist convictions he writes with scholarly restraint and fairness, and throws light on tangled conditions of contemporary life.

[A Modern Humanist: miscellaneous papers by B. Kirkman Gray, with a memoir by H. B. Binns and Clementina Black, 1910.]

G. S. W.


GREEN, SAMUEL GOSNELL (1822–1905), baptist minister and bibliophile, born at Falmouth on 20 Dec. 1822, was eldest son of the family of five soas and four daughters of Samuel Green, baptist minister, of Falmouth and afterwards of Thrapston and London, by his wife Eliza, daughter of Benjamin Lepard, of cultured Huguenot descent. From 1824 to 1834 Green was with his