Henry Ford (professor)

Henry Ford, from Cranbrook in Kent, joined the University of Oxford on 9 July 1776, at the age of 23, matriculating as a member of Pembroke College.

He had a reputation as a radical, and although Ford was "a comparative nonentity" (in the words of Jones's biographer), he had the advantage of having married the niece of a bishop,[nb 1] and so "nepotism and politics triumphed".

[1][2] He then "retired as much as he could from the public view", wrote one historian of Hertford College (a successor institution to Magdalen Hall), adding that "it was his excessive shyness that gained for him a certain notoriety and a place among the early Oxford caricatures.

[9] Alumni Oxonienses, a 19th-century register of students and academics at the university, records that Ford had two sons, Charles and Frederick, who both studied at Oxford.

[4] An obituary in The Gentleman's Magazine praised Ford's "great and varied acquirements in general science", his "profound knowledge of Oriental literature" and his "unaffected piety, gentleness, and benevolence.