In the ‘Golden Days’ leading up to the Great War of 1914-1918, Reginald John Elliott Tiddy, born on the 19th March, 1880, at Margate in Kent, epitomised the late Victorian-Edwardian intellectual that so easily moved from glorious schooldays to the life of a don at an Oxford college still reminiscent of the ‘dreaming spires’ immortalised in the poetry of Matthew Arnold.
So typically English was Tiddy, or Reggie, as he was always known to his friends, that he could easily have stepped out of the pages of an E.M. Forster novel, so it is not surprising to learn that Tibby, the brother of the Schlegel sisters in Howards End was based on Tiddy himself, who had been friends with Forster whilst at school at Tonbridge.
On the surface, this is certainly a Tiddy that his many acquaintances would recognise, but scratch a little below the surface and a far more interesting character emerges, whose personality still has the power to fascinate people nearly a hundred years after his death.
Read more about Reginald in this PDF of the Society’s Journal No 21
