Of teachers, there was Dr. Grenfell's paternal grandfather, the Rev.
Algernon Grenfell, the second of three brothers, house master at Rugby
under Arnold, and a fine classical scholar, whose elder and younger
brothers each felt the ancestral call of the sea and became admirals,
with brave records of daring and success.
Dr. Grenfell's father, after a brilliant career at Rugby School and at
Balliol College, Oxford, became assistant master at Repton, and later,
when he married, head master of Mostyn House School, a position which
he resigned in 1882 to become Chaplain of the London Hospital. "He was
a man of much learning, with a keen interest in science, a remarkable
eloquence, and a fervent evangelistic faith."
Mostyn House School still stands, enlarged and modernized, in the
charge of Dr. Grenfell's elder brother, and in it his mother is still
the real head and controlling genius.
Parkgate, at one time a seaport of renown, when Liverpool was still
unimportant, and later a seaside health resort to which came the
fashion and beauty of England, had fallen, through the silting of the
estuary and the broadening of the "Sands of Dee," to the level of a
hamlet in the time of Dr. Grenfell's boyhood. The broad stretch of
seaward trending sand, with its interlacing rivulets of fresh and
brackish water, made a tempting though treacherous playground,
alluring alike in the varied forms of life it harbored and in the
adventure which whetted exploration.
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