Arthur Gray Butler (1831–1909) was an English academic and cleric, the first headmaster of Haileybury College.
He entered Rugby School under A. C. Tait in August 1844, and was admitted as a scholar of University College, Oxford, in March 1850.
He did not reside on his fellowship: returning to Rugby School in 1858, he served as assistant master under Frederick Temple, and was ordained deacon in 1861 and priest in 1862.
[1] On resuming work in 1874, Butler served as chaplain of the Royal Indian Civil Engineering College, which was established at Coopers Hill near Egham in 1871.
[2] He resigned his official position in 1895; it was partly under his influence that Oriel College and the university benefited by the will of Cecil Rhodes.
In 1910, a fund was raised by former pupils to found a Butler scholarship, and a tablet was erected to his memory in the chapel.
In The Three Friends: a Story of Rugby in the Forties (1900), he recorded the effect produced on his contemporaries by the early poems of Alfred Tennyson.
[1] Their daughters, Ruth Florence Butler (1881-1982) and Christina Violet Butler (1884-1982) were both social activists and local historians who contributed to the Victoria history of the county of Gloucester (1907) This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Lee, Sidney, ed.