English geologist and antiquary, born at Norwich on the 3rd of October 1790. He was for the most part self-educated. Apprenticed in 1804 to a manufacturer of camlets and bombazines, a taste for serious study was stimulated by his master, Alderman John Herring and by Joseph John Gurney. Becoming interested in geology and archæology, he began to form the collection which after his death was purchased for the Norwich museum. In 1820 he obtained a clerkship in Gurney’s (afterwards Barclay’s) bank at Norwich, and Hudson Gurney and Dawson Turner (of Yarmouth), both fellows of the Royal Society, encouraged his scientific work. He communicated to the Archæologia articles on the round church towers of Norfolk, the Roman remains of the country, &c., and other papers on natural history and geology to the Mag. Nat. Hist. and Phil. Mag. He died at Norwich on the 14th of January 1838. He was author of A Synoptical Table of British Organic Remains (1830), the first work of its kind in Britain; An Outline of the Geology of Norfolk (1833); and of two works issued posthumously, The Norfolk Topographer’s Manual (1842) and The History and Antiquities of Norwich Castle (1847).
His eldest son, Bernard Bolingbroke Woodward (1816–1869), born in Norwich, on the 2nd of May 1816; graduated at London University in 1841, and entered the Congregational ministry. In 1849 he abandoned the ministry for literature and published a History of Wales (1852); a History of the United States of America to the End of the Administration of President Polk (1855); First Lessons on the English Reformation (1857); a translation of Reclus’s The Earth and The Ocean, Atmosphere and Life; and began The Encyclopædia of Chronology, which was incomplete at his death in London on the 12th of October 1869. The second son, Samuel Pickworth Woodward (1821–1865), became in 1845 professor of geology and natural history in the Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester, and in 1848 was appointed assistant in the department of geology and mineralogy in the British Museum. He was author of A Manual of the Mollusca (in three parts, 1851, 1853 and 1856).
S. P. Woodward’s son, Horace Bolingbroke Woodward (1848–1914), became in 1863 an assistant in the library of the Geological Society, and joined the Geological Survey in 1867, rising to be assistant-director. In 1893–1894 he was president of the Geologists’ Association, and he published many important works on geology. He died on the 5th of February 1914. Samuel Woodward’s youngest son, Henry Woodward (1832–1921), became assistant in the geological department of the British Museum in 1858, and in 1880 keeper of that department. He became F.R.S. in 1873, LL.D. (St. Andrews) in 1878, president of the Geological Society of London (1894–1896), and was awarded the Wollaston medal of that society in 1906. He published a Monograph of the British Fossil Crustacea, Order Merostomata (Palæontograph. Soc. 1866–1878); A Monograph of Carboniferous Trilobites (Pal. Soc. 1883–1884), and many articles in scientific journals. He was editor of the Geological Magazine from its commencement in 1864. He died at Bushey, Herts, on the 6th of September 1921.
See Memoir of S. Woodward (with bibliography) in Trans. Norfolk Nat. Soc. (1879), and of S. P. Woodward (with portrait and bibliography), Ibid. (1882), by H. B. Woodward.
