Andrew Goldie WOOD (1850-1874)

Andrew Goldie Wood (1850-1874) was the cousin of Eugénie Sladden.

Andrew Wood was born on 4th January 1850 in Calcutta, India, the eldest of three children of Thomas Wood, a Clerk in Holy Orders, by his second wife, Sophia (née Goldie).  He was baptised at St Paul’s Cathedral, Calcutta, on 9th February by his father who was the Assistant Chaplain at the cathedral.  Andrew had three half-siblings, all born in Bengal in the 1840s; their mother, Georgina, had died in 1847 at the time of the birth of the youngest child, Thomas.

By 1861, the Wood family were back in England and living in Speen, Berkshire.  Thomas’ mother died in 1862 when he was 12 years old.  His father married again the following year, and they later moved to Sandwich in Kent.

Andrew was a scholar at Pembroke College, Oxford.  In 1872 he won an Oxford University prize for Latin verse, the subject being “Puella Aurelianensis” and in 1873 he won the Chancellor’s prize for an English essay, “The effects of continued war upon a Nation”.  He was awarded his degree in June 1873.  In June 1874 he was awarded the Ellerton essay prize.

Tragically, Andrew lost his life soon after this.  He had gone to Barbados and died there on 10th July 1874.  He had gone out to Barbados as part of the entourage accompanying the third Bishop of Barbados, Rev John Mitchinson, who'd been consecrated bishop the year before. Bishop Mitchinson had an association with Pembroke College.

Andrew was a talented poet.  Ten years after his death, a book of his poetry, The Isles of the Blest, was published posthumously by Macmillan & Co.  In a review which appeared in the St James’s Gazette on 9th August 1884, it said:

Mr Wood was a young Oxford graduate of brilliant promise who died before the promise had time to ripen into performance.  Perhaps it is safe to conjecture that, if he had lived, the verses in the present volume would scarcely have been collected.  Under the circumstances, however, it was natural enough that his friends should be glad to give to the world some memorial of him.  The verses themselves are not very different from what might have been expected from a cultivated young man, whose mind was saturated in the literature of ancient Greece and 19th century England …

It cannot be honestly said that the volume before us shows more then promise; but the writer was evidently a man of cultured tastes and refined feeling, with a good deal of poetic fancy; and his poems enable us to share the regret felt by a large circle of friends and fellow-students at his early death.