Sir Edmund Carshalton (the elder)

Chair of the Society throughout the 1920s. Arrested at the door of the Department of Education in November 1926 in the matter of the proposed standardisation of school grammar instruction; sentenced to four months at Pentonville, of which he served three. The Society did not disavow him, recording instead a formal vote of thanks "for his unflinching commitment to the Society’s cause, by means which a less devoted Fellow would have hesitated to employ". His portrait hangs in the anteroom; it is the second-largest portrait in the room.