Arthur Benoni Evans

...another parson, yet of a wholly different stamp. In his books and papers—albums of sketches, books of satire and verse, and most of all in the thirty-two volumes of the diary that he kept from 1823 until his death—he was revealed as a man of variable spirits, a character that loved peace until it was suddenly goaded into pugnacity; a man, too, with a true sense of poetry and a knowledge of the overwhelming value of beauty wheresoever it was to be found. In him I found much that I knew already in his grandson, another Arthur Evans, sometimes the very turn of his phrases would recall my brother’s manner of speech. Yet gradually he came to life for me as an individual: more pious, more gentle, less adventurous and less strong-willed than my brother, living a life in many ways frustrated by circumstances and yet glorified by achievement.

There was an enchanting unworldliness about Arthur Benoni Evans; he loved beauty and elegance and variety, and yet learned by force of religion and regard for his fellow men to live a useful and monotonous life. Yet when an opportunity came, he had courage to seize it: only once in his life did he get abroad, for a ten days’ visit to Belgium, but during that visit he succeeded in buying a magnificent self-portrait by Ferdinand Bol. At the time of my father’s birth he kept a coaching establishment at Britwell, near Burnham Beeches, a house later famous as the home of the Christy Miller library. His sketches show it as a two-storied house, with a high brown roof and a good cornice underneath; built round a quadrangle, and standing in a great shady garden.

Dixie Grammar School Market Bosworth

When my father was a little boy of six, [1829] Arthur Evans was appointed head-master of Market Bosworth Grammar School, where he passed the rest of his days. It was a sixteenth-century foundation, but a very small one; its only claim to fame was that Samuel Johnson had been an usher there a hundred years before, and had disliked it very much. The school-house there was new, and the garden held little but two old walnut-trees. The picturesque that my grandfather loved was lacking, but he made the best he could of the midland countryside. He drew and painted in delicate sepia wash the Leicestershire oaks as he had the Buckinghamshire beeches; he played some Handel and much Corelli on his cello; he wrote verses, “On Education” and “The Phylactery”; he acquired a fine library and a collection of Roman coins; he published a dictionary of Leicestershire dialect words and phrases and he dabbled in archaeology.

[Joan Evan, Prelude and Fugue, p143...]

Prizes

If one goes forward in action one must also go back in memory. I was invited that autumn [1944] to give away the prizes at the Dixie Grammar School at Market Bosworth, of which my grandfather had been head-master from 1829 Until his death in 1854.

I slept in a room where my father must have slept as a boy, for his name had been scratched on the pane with a diamond; I was entertained in what had been my grandmother’s drawing-room and met the descendants of her friends. As I looked at their grave, an old lady who was doing flowers in the church came up, surveyed me critically, and remarked; “You look to me as if you might belong to the Evanses.”

I realized that even after ninety years’ absence no one of my family was a stranger in Bosworth. I found it curiously cheering.

[Joan Evan, Prelude and Fugue, p158]

1911 Encyclopaedia

...Rev. Dr A. B. Evans, head master of Market Bosworth grammar school...

http://58.1911encyclopedia.org/E/EV/EVANS_SIR_GEORGE.htm

11th September 1987 The new Dixie Grammar School opened. 80 students aged 10 to 14 years were to wear a uniform similar to one worn by students of the original Dixie Grammar School that closed in 1969, and which dates back to the 14th century.

Dixie Grammar School

Station Road,
Market Bosworth,
Nuneaton,
Warwickshire,
CV13 0LE
England
Tel:01455 292244

www.pipemedia.net/dixie

http://www.colonialwarsct.org/1636.htm

http://www.portraitsofbritain.co.uk/d-commerce/PB1182.htm