John Dudeney

The oldest of human occupations engaged a long line of Dudeneys as shepherds on the South Downs, and the crown of the family arrived in the person of John Dudeney, who was born here in 1782. Of regular schooling he had none, but picked up a little of the three Rs at home during winter evenings. At eight years old he took his little crook and went off to the calling of his ancestors, minding sheep on the Downs.

Fired with a passion for learning, he spent on books all that he was able to save from the profit derived from the wool and lamb of one sheep that his master allowed him yearly. From this he had 15s a year for literature and writing material.

After nine years of this watching and study he went as shepherd to Kingston, near Lewes, for £6 a year, and with this princely revenue launched out ambitiously, buying himself a French dictionary and some other books in the same language, and works that enabled, him to read the Bible in the original Hebrew.

From his downland eyrie he studied the ships and, unable to buy a telescope, made himself one from some loose lenses he had acquired, fitting these into a pasteboard case, to survey the heavens with the delight of a rustic Galileo. Next, with an old pair of iron compasses, and with his paper spread on the turf as a drawing-board, he mastered geometry and simple mathematics.

His sheepwalk lay on Newmarket Hill, and there he spent his days with books and implements which it was impossible to carry to and fro with him. So he dug himself a cave, roofed it with a large stone, and there kept his literature, copybooks, slate, and apparatus, in what he called his understone library. Sixteen happy fertile years passed in this way, and then John Dudeney came down from the hills a self-taught scholar, to fill the position of schoolmaster.

For nearly half a century the worthy shepherd presided over successive flocks of Lewes youth, teaching them science and languages in addition to the normal curriculum, in an age when elementary schools were a rarity for the poor, and more than reading, writing, and arithmetic a luxury undreamed of. He turned out hundreds of proficient scholars; and he built character as well, for his high intelligence was reinforced by a simple nobility of nature allied to unaffected piety.

The summit of his happiness was reached when he was able to play a leading part in the foundation of the Lewes Mechanics Institute. Then with a Nunc Dimittis he closed his books and the last chapter of his own career, and died, esteemed and honoured, in May 1852, having lived out his three score years and ten.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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