J. W. Mackail

John William Mackail (26 August 1859 – 13 December 1945) was a Scottish academic of the University of Oxford and reformer of the British education system.

He is most often remembered as a scholar of Virgil and as the official biographer of the socialist artist William Morris, of whom he was a friend.

Mackail was Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1906 to 1911, and president of the British Academy from 1932 to 1936.

Life

Mackail was born in Ascog on Bute, the second child and only son of the Rev. John Mackail, of the Free Church, and Louisa Irving, who was the youngest daughter of Aglionby Ross Carson FRSE, who was the rector of Edinburgh High School.

Academic career

He was educated at Ayr Academy; at Edinburgh University, from 1874 to 1877; and at Balliol College, Oxford, as Warner Exhibitioner, from 1877. At Oxford, he took first classes in classical moderations (1879) and literae humaniores ('Greats') in 1881, and he also obtained the Hertford (1880), Ireland (1880), Newdigate (1881), Craven (1882) and Derby (1884) Prizes. He was elected to a Balliol fellowship in 1882.

At Oxford, Mackail contributed, alongside Cecil Spring Rice, to the composition of a famous sardonic doggerel about George Nathaniel Curzon, later Lord Curzon, their contemporary at Balliol, that was published in The Masque of Balliol.

In 1884, Mackail accepted a post in the Education Department of the Privy Council (later the Board of Education), of which he became Assistant Secretary in 1903. In this position, made an important contribution to the system of secondary education established by the 1902 Education Act, and to the organisation of a system of voluntary inspection for the public schools. He retired from office in 1919.