Albert Howard
Organic Farming Pioneer
Albert Howard was born on December 8th 1873
at The Cottage farm, Bishops Castle, Shropshire.
Sir Albert Howard was born into an extended family of Shropshire farmers on December 8th 1873. His family had farmed over several generations with mixed farms alongside each other. He was the eighth of ten children. His Grandfather and Uncle farmed as tenant farmers alongside his father Richard just outside the town of Bishops Castle, a small market town in south Shropshire, UK, an area of outstanding natural beauty.
Albert was by all accounts a very bright child. By the age of ten he was writing business letters for the farm and driving the cart to deliver produce to neighbours and market shops. He attended Bishops Castle Boys school from 1879 to 1888 where the curriculum shows a focus on the application of science to rural crafts and farming .
The Cottage Farmhouse where Albert Howard was born and spent his early years
Aged 15 he was a boarder at Wellington (now Wrekin) College whose charismatic headteacher John Bailey focussed on encouraging the personal skills necessary in the polished gentleman.
In 1893 Albert won an open scholarship to the Royal College of Science (now Imperial College) in South Kensington, London. He took an Associateship in Chemistry and gained a First Class distinction. Given his lifelong opposition to artificial fertilisers, chemical pesticides and herbicides, it is worth noting this achievement.
At St. John’s College Cambridge in 1896 he specialised in biological subjects, gaining a First Class Natural Sciences Tripos. It was here that he met his future wife Gabrielle Matthaei a gifted botanist and impressive researcher whose later contribution to Albert’s work proved essential.