W. H. Hadow

Sir William Henry Hadow (27 December 1859 – 8 April 1937) British educational reformer, musicologist and composer. He edited many volumes of the original Oxford History of Music series.

Life

Born at Ebrington in Gloucestershire and baptised there on 29 January 1860 by his father, he was the eldest child of the Reverend William Elliot Hadow (1826–1906) and his wife Mary Lang Cornish (1835–1917). His grandfather, the Reverend William Thomas Hadow, had married Eleanor Ann Bethune, daughter of Colonel John Drinkwater Bethune.

He studied at Malvern College, followed by Worcester College, Oxford, where he taught and became Dean (1889). In 1905, Hadow was elected the first Old Malvernian member of the Council of Malvern College. In 1909, he was appointed principal of Armstrong College in the Newcastle Division of Durham University before succeeding, as Warden and vice-chancellor of the University of Durham in 1916. In 1919, he was appointed the Vice-Chancellor of Sheffield University (1919–30).

As chairman of several committees, he published a series of reports on education, notably The Education of the Adolescent (1926). This called for the re-organization of elementary education and the abandonment of all-age schools (i.e. separate schools from the age of 11, instead of the existing schools, both state and voluntary (i.e. associated with a particular religious denomination), which often educated children up to the age of 14, the school leaving age under the Education Act 1918), and the creation of secondary modern schools for children over the age of 11. These became known as the Hadow Reports. He was a leading influence in English education at all levels in the 1920s and 1930s. He chaired a committee, established in 1926 jointly by the British Broadcasting Company (later BBC) and the British Institute of Adult Education, to report on the possibilities of using radio broadcasting for education. The results were published as a book, "New Ventures in Broadcasting - A Study in Adult Education".