High Street, Tonbridge,
Kent, TN9 1JP
E.M. Forster entered Tonbridge as a day boy in Michaelmas Term 1893, by coincidence the same term as another famous OT, Field Marshal Lord Ironside. His widowed mother, who had been left in more than comfortable circumstances, moved to Tonbridge specifically so that he could come to the school. In later years he claimed to have been unhappy at Tonbridge but this is a matter of contention. Certainly he disliked the philistinism and snobbery of English public schools but he developed friendships and a great love of the classics, and he left Tonbridge in 1897 with prizes for Latin verse and English essays.
He went up to King’s College, Cambridge where he gained a second in classics and then stayed on for a fourth year to read history. At the end of this he and his mother went travelling in Europe but returned to London in 1902 with Forster still unclear about what he wanted to do but with sufficient means to indulge himself. Moving to Weybridge, he earned some money giving lectures on classics and started writing, and in 1905 his first novel ‘Where Angels Fear to Tread’ was published.
This was followed by ‘The Longest Journey’ in 1907, ‘Howard’s End’ in 1910 and ‘Maurice’ written in 1913 but not published until 1971 because of its subject of homosexual love. He travelled to India before the war, in which he worked in Egypt for the Red Cross. He returned to India in 1921, where he was able to finish ‘A Passage to India’, but moved back to Abinger Hammer in Surrey with his mother in 1925, staying there for the next twenty years. The success of ‘A Passage to India’ in particular had made him a celebrated figure in England, and he became the first President of the National Council for Civil Liberties. He wrote articles and campaigned for liberal causes. During the war he broadcast to millions on the BBC, arguing for the importance of individual freedom and for tolerance.
His mother died in 1945 and he then moved to Cambridge where King’s awarded him an honorary fellowship and he became a familiar figure in Cambridge intellectual life. He refused a knighthood but became a Companion of Honour in 1953 and then was awarded the Order of Merit on his ninetieth birthday. He died in 1970, justly regarded as one of the greatest English novelists of the twentieth century.