Edward Charles Titchmarsh was born on 1 June 1899, at Newbury; he was the son of Edward Harper and Caroline Titchmarsh, and he had an elder sister, and a younger sister and brother. His father was a Congregationalist minister and an M.A. of London University; his father’s people were tradesmen at Royston, never more than fairly prosperous, and on both sides of the family there was a strict religious tradition. Titchmarsh himself wrote an eminently readable account of his family background for his own family; it begins with the derivation of the name from the place Ticcea’s marsh and contains a record going back to the eighteenth and even seventeenth century, and ending with his own schooldays. It is written with the clarity which was characteristic of his mathematical work, and recounts his school days and the somewhat restricted background of his early years with a critical and often humorous detachment. I have used this and the notes which he made for the Royal Society in what follows, in addition to other material supplied by Mrs Titchmarsh and many mathematical friends, especially A. E. Ingham, J. L. B. Cooper and J. B. McLeod. His father was chosen later as minister of Nether Chapel in Sheffield (partly because he was a non-smoker as well as, of course, a teetotaler), and so Titchmarsh was educated at King Edward VII School, Sheffield, from 1908-1917. He wrote that they had far too much homework, and that in the upper part of the school he went on to the classical side, giving up science, and learned ‘enough Latin to pass Higher Certificate and enough Greek to fail.’ After that he specialized in mathematics, and did some physics, but experiments always baffled him and he maintained that he knew no chemistry.
Early Years: Family Background, Education, Giulio Romano