by D. J. Owen, rev. Alan Yoshioka
© Oxford University Press 2004 All rights reserved
Whitworth, William Allen (1840-1905), mathematician and Church of England clergyman, was born at Bank House, Runcorn, on 1 February 1840, the eldest son in the family of four sons and two daughters of William Whitworth, at one time schoolmaster at Runcorn and incumbent of Little Leigh, Cheshire, and of Widnes, Lancashire, and his wife, Susanna, daughter of George Coyne of Kilbeggan, co. Westmeath, and first cousin to Joseph Stirling Coyne.
After education at Sandicroft School, Northwich (1851-7), Whitworth proceeded to St John's College, Cambridge, in October 1858, and in 1861 was elected a scholar. In 1862 he graduated BA as sixteenth wrangler, proceeding MA in 1865, and he was fellow of his college from 1867 to 1884. He was successively chief mathematics master at Portarlington School and Rossall School and professor of mathematics at Queen's College, Liverpool.
From early youth Whitworth showed a mathematical promise and originality to which his place in the tripos scarcely did justice. While an undergraduate he was principal editor with Charles Taylor and others of the Oxford, Cambridge, and Dublin Messenger of Mathematics, started at Cambridge in November 1861; Whitworth remained one of the editors until 1880, and was a frequent contributor. His earliest article, 'The equiangular spiral, its chief properties proved geometrically' (Messenger, 1, 1861, 5-13), was translated into French in the Nouvelles Annales de Mathématiques (1869). An important treatise, Trilinear Co-ordinates and other Methods of Modern Analytical Geometry of Two Dimensions, was issued at Cambridge in 1866. Whitworth's best-known mathematical work, Choice and Chance, an Elementary Treatise on Permutations, Combinations and Probability (1867, 5th edn, 1901), was elaborated from lectures delivered to women at Queen's College, Liverpool, in 1866. A model of clear and simple exposition, it presented a very ample collection of problems on probability and kindred subjects, solutions to which were provided in DCC Exercises (1897).
Whitworth was ordained deacon in 1865 and priest in 1866, and won high repute in his clerical career. He was curate at St Anne's, Birkenhead (1865), and of St Luke's, Liverpool (1866-70), and perpetual curate of Christ Church, Liverpool (1870-75). His success with parochial missions in Liverpool led to preferments in London. He was vicar of St John the Evangelist, Hammersmith (1875-86), and from November 1886 until his death, vicar of All Saints, Margaret Street, Marylebone, one of the early strongholds of the Tractarian movement. He also held from 1885 a sinecure college living in the diocese of Bangor, and was in 1891-2 commissary of the South African diocese of Bloemfontein. Whitworth was select preacher at Cambridge five times and Hulsean lecturer there in 1903-4, and was made a prebendary of St Paul's Cathedral in 1900. On 10 June 1885 he married Sarah Louisa, only daughter of Timms Hervey Elwes; the couple had four sons, all graduates of Trinity College, Cambridge.
Whitworth, though he had been brought up an evangelical, was influenced at Cambridge by the scholarship of J. B. Lightfoot and B. F. Westcott, and he studied later the German rationalizing school of theology. He was considered a 'vigorous and original preacher' (The Times, 9). His sympathies lay mainly with the high-church party, and in 1875 he joined the English Church Union. In the ritual controversy of 1898-9 he took a moderate position, differing from the union over its opposition to the archbishops' condemnation of the use of incense. He contended that the obsolete canon law should not be allowed 'to supersede the canonical utterance of the living voice of the Church of England'. His ecclesiastical publications included an almanac of dates of Easter (1882), a description of All Saints Church, Margaret Street (1891); Worship in the Christian Church (1899), and two posthumous volumes of sermons (1906, 1908).
Whitworth died on 12 March 1905 at Home Hospital, 16 Fitzroy Square, after a serious operation on 28 February and was buried at Brookwood, on 16 March, in ground belonging to St Alban the Martyr, Holborn. His wife survived him. There is a slab to his memory in the floor of All Saints Church, Margaret Street.
D. J. OWEN, rev. ALAN YOSHIOKA
Sources
The Times (13 March 1905)
The Eagle, 26 (1905), 396-9
The Guardian (15 March 1905)
The Guardian (22 March 1905)
Church Times (17 March 1905)
private information (1912)
Venn, Alum. Cant.
CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1905)
Archives
LPL, corresp. with Frederick Temple, bishop of London
Wealth at death
£5060 11s. 2d.: probate, 7 April 1905, CGPLA Eng. & Wales
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