Ackworth School - Alumni

Alumni

The school's former pupils are called Ackworth Old Scholars. There is an active Old Scholars Association, with an annual Easter gathering in the school. Notable Old Scholars include:

• Elizabeth Robson (1771–1843), Quaker minister
• Jacob Post (1774–1855), Quaker religious writer
• William Darton (1781–1854), publisher
• Thomas Hancock (1783–1849), physician and epidemiologist
• Joseph Sams (1784–1860), bookseller and antiquities dealer
• Samuel Tuke (1784–1857), philanthropist and asylum reformer
• Susanna Corder (1787–1864), educationist and Quaker biographer
• Thomas Edmondson (1792–1851), inventor of the first railway-ticket printing machine
• William Howitt (1792–1879), writer
• Jeremiah Holmes Wiffen (1792–1836), poet and translator
• Henry Ashworth (1794–1880), cotton master
• Benjamin Barron Wiffen (1794–1867), biographer
• George Edmondson (1798–1863), headmaster of Queenwood Hall
• Sarah Ellis (1799–1872), writer and educationist
• John Priestman (1805–1866), worsted manufacturer and pacifist
• James Wilson (1805–1860), economist, founder of The Economist, politician, and Financial Member of the Council of India, 1859–1860
• Anna Richardson (1806–1892), philanthropist, slavery abolitionist and pacifist
• Henry Richardson (1806–1885), philanthropist and pacifist
• Thomas Thomasson (1808–1876), cotton master
• Henry Doubleday (1810–1902), starch manufacturer and comfrey cultivator
• Thomas Lister (1810–1888), poet and naturalist
• Jane Procter (1810–1882), headmistress of Polam Hall, Darlington; and temperance campaigner
• John Bright (1811–1889), politician
• Thomas Harvey (1812–1884), philanthropist
• William Allen Miller (1817–1870), chemist
• Francis Frith (1822–1898), photographer
• Henry Tennant (1823–1910), General Manager, North Eastern Railway, 1870–1891
• William Farrer Ecroyd (1827–1915), worsted manufacturer and politician
• John Howard Nodal (1831–1909), journalist and dialectologist
• Sir James Reckitt (1833–1924), starch, blue and polish manufacturer
• William Marshall Cooper (1833–1921), civil engineer, artist, surveyor and cartographer
• John Gilbert Baker (1834–1920), botanist
• Henry Bowman Brady (1835–1891), naturalist and pharmacist
• Sir Henry Binns (1837–1899), Prime Minister of Natal, 1897–1899
• Thomas William Worsdell (1838–1916), steam-locomotive engineer
• Alfred Darbyshire (1839–1908), architect
• Henry Ashby (1846–1908), paediatrician
• Wilson Worsdell (1850–1920), railway engineer
• Joseph Southall (1861–1944), painter and pacifist
• John Henry Salter (1862–1942), naturalist and diarist
• Eva Gilpin (1868–1940), founder and headmistress of the Hall School, Weybridge
• William Arthur Bone (1871–1938), chemist and fuel technologist
• Basil Bunting (1900–1985), poet
• Sir Joseph Burrt Hutchinson (1902–1988), geneticist and professor of agriculture
• Kathleen Tillotson (1906–2001), literary scholar
• Geoffrey Barraclough (1908–1984), historian
• Sir Arthur Snelling (1914–1996), diplomat
• Peter Strevens (1922–1989), linguistic scholar
• James Fearnley (born 1954), musician and member of the Pogues
• Dr. Fiona Wood (born 1958), burns-treatment pioneer, Australian of the Year
• Philip J Day (born 1959), documentary filmmaker
• James Willstrop (born 1983), squash player
• Kweku Adoboli (born 1980), Investment Banker