[2] He was born in Widnes, Lancashire, England, and educated at Monkton Combe School in Somerset and Clare College, Cambridge, graduating BA as 10th Wrangler in 1895.
In 1902 he collaborated with John Hilton Grace on the book The Algebra of Invariants.
In 1908 he became an ordained clergyman, and in 1910 became parish priest at Birdbrook in Essex, a village 25 miles east of Cambridge.
Most of his long series of papers on invariant theory and the symmetric group were written while he was a clergyman.
These topics intertwine sufficiently that a single result may have implications in more than one area.