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William Hepworth Thompson

1810-86. Master; Vice-Chancellor; Regius Professor of Greek.

Thompson entered Trinity as a pensioner in 1828, with the Revd George Peacock as his tutor. He developed a lifelong friendship with Peacock whom he described as ‘the best and wisest of tutors’. Julius Charles Hare was one of the assistant tutors and Connop Thirlwall junior dean. Thompson derived great benefit from Thirlwall's lectures, and in 1830 was elected a scholar. In 1831 he obtained one of the members' prizes for a Latin essay. He proceeded to the BA degree in 1832, being placed tenth senior optime in the mathematical tripos. He was subsequently fourth in the first class of the classical tripos, and obtained the second Chancellor's Medal for classical learning. He was elected Fellow in 1834.

Thompson's classical attainments marked him out for work in College, but, as there was no immediate prospect of a vacancy among the assistant tutors, in 1836 he accepted the headmastership of an experimental school at Leicester, until the following year when he was recalled to Trinity College and became one of the assistant tutors. He was ordained in 1838. In 1844 he was appointed a Tutor. In his approach to this office Thompson followed the lead of his predecessor, George Peacock. At a time when undergraduates were kept at a distance by their seniors, he made his pupils feel that he really stood to them in loco parentis. He could be severe when discipline required it, but he was always inflexibly just and untrammelled by pedantic adherence to tradition.

Thompson remained Tutor of Trinity until 1853, when he was elected Regius Professor of Greek, and was appointed to a canonry at Ely, at that time annexed to the professorship. After his election as Greek professor, he was nominated one of the eight senior Fellows, under the belief that the statutes, as revised in 1844, permitted the Greek professor to remain a Fellow. A chancery suit was instituted against him, however, by the Revd Joseph Edleston, the Fellow next below him on the list, and, judgment having been given against Thompson by the Lord Chancellor, he became a nominal Fellow only, retaining his rooms in College and residing there when not at Ely.

Thompson's lectures were modelled upon those of his early teachers, Hare and Thirlwall, while containing characteristics of his own. He was particularly remembered for his own translations of the books he was teaching, which were delivered without notes during his lectures. J.E. Sandys commented that ‘By his published writings and by his personal influence he did much towards widening the range of classical studies in Cambridge, and preventing their being unduly limited to verbal scholarship’. Most of Thompson's published work was on Plato, although he never produced the complete edition or translation he is said to have contemplated. He published editions of the Phaedrus and the Gorgias, and a paper on the Sophist, in which he supported the genuineness of the dialogue and discussed the influence of the Eleatics on later Greek philosophy.

In 1866, on the death of Dr William Whewell, Thompson was appointed Master of Trinity . Soon afterwards he married Frances Elizabeth, née Selwyn, the widow of George Peacock. He resigned the professorship of Greek in December of the same year. In 1867-8 he was Vce-Chancellor of the University. The twenty years of his mastership were years of activity and progress. Although he disliked the routine of ordinary business, he had a strong sense of the responsibilities of his office, and shrank from no effort where the good of his college was concerned. He was alert to the necessity for reform, and the statutes framed in 1872, as well as those which received the royal assent in 1882, owed much to his criticism and support. He died in Trinity Master's Lodge in 1886, and was the last person to be buried in the College Chapel.