Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley (29 September 1851 – 28 May 1920) was an Anglican priest, poet, local politician and conservationist. He became nationally and internationally known as one of the three founders of the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty in the 1890s.
Rawnsley was descended from a line of Church of England vicars, and after briefly considering medicine as a career he graduated from Oxford and took holy orders. In the mid-1870s he worked with the urban poor in London and Bristol, before being appointed in 1877 to a rural parish in Westmorland in the English Lake District. He soon became a vigorous activist in the campaign to preserve the region from excessive industrial development.
In 1883 Rawnsley was appointed Vicar of Crosthwaite, Cumberland, in the north of the Lake District. He remained in the post for 34 years, becoming known locally and nationally for his energetic efforts to improve life for working people. He and his wife founded the Keswick School of Industrial Art, and he led campaigns to make access to the countryside available for everyone. Concluding that protests and legislation were not enough to protect the environment, he joined Robert Hunter and Octavia Hill in 1893 to found the National Trust to own land on the public's behalf. It grew to become one of Britain's largest and most important landowners, holding land and buildings in trust for the people of Britain.
Rawnsley was a prolific writer, publishing more than 40 books, including verse, sermons, historical studies, travel accounts and biographies. He retired in 1917 and moved to the village of Grasmere, in the southern Lake District, where he died in 1920, aged 68.
Life and career
Early years
Hardwicke Rawnsley – known to his family and intimates as "Hardie" – was born at the rectory, Shiplake, Oxfordshire on 28 September 1851. He was the second son and fourth of the ten children of the Rev Robert Drummond Burrell Rawnsley (1817–1882) and his wife, Catherine Ann, née Franklin (1818–1892). In 1862 Drummond Rawnsley accepted the post of vicar of Halton Holegate in the fen district of Lincolnshire. According to Hardwicke Rawnsley's biographer Vivian Griffiths, "Observing the wildlife of the Fens, the construction of the Holbeach-to-Spilsby railway and watching the navvies building embankments were to be formative influences".
Later in 1862, aged eleven, Rawnsley enrolled at Uppingham School, where his godfather, Edward Thring, was headmaster. Thring became a major influence on him: Rawnsley excelled at athletics and gymnastics, but Thring encouraged his aesthetic side, particularly his budding gifts as a poet. The historian George Bott writes:
In 1869 Thring introduced Rawnsley to the Lake District, staying in Grasmere village, where William Wordsworth had lived. Rawnsley quickly came to share the enthusiasm shown by Wordsworth and others for the Lake District landscape.
In 1870 Rawnsley went up to Balliol College, Oxford, initially reading classics but switching after two years to natural sciences, with the intention of becoming a medical practitioner. He was at first an exuberant undergraduate, prominent in athletics and rowing, and not conspicuously conscientious about his studies. His outlook became more serious under the influence of the art critic and social campaigner John Ruskin. Rawnsley was one of a group of undergraduate volunteers – others were Oscar Wilde and Arnold Toynbee – who undertook manual labour under Ruskin's direction to improve the road and drainage between Oxford and the village of Hinksey. The project foundered after two months when Ruskin left for Venice, but for Rawnsley it was, in Griffiths's words, "life-changing, his social conscience awakened". He began to think that the Church rather than medicine was his vocation. In 1874 he graduated with a third class degree in natural sciences and the following year was awarded his Master of Arts degree.