Grove, SIR GEORGE

Grove, SIR GEORGE, born at Clapham in 1820, was trained as a civil engineer, and erected in the West Indies the first two cast-iron lighthouses built. As a member of the staff of Robert Stephenson, he was employed at the Chester general station and the Britannia tubular bridge. He was secretary to the Society of Arts from 1849 to 1852, and secretary to the Crystal Palace Company from 1852 to 1873, where he subsequently became a director. It is for his services to literature and music that Sir George is best known. As editor of Macmillan's Magazine, as a large contributor to Smith's Dictionary of the Bible, and as editor (and part author) of the great Dictionary of Music and Musicians (4 vols. 1878-89), he has served the reading public; and these and his zeal and success in promoting the love of good music secured for him the degree of D.C.L. from Durham University in 1872, and LL.D. of Glasgow in 1886. He was knighted in 1883 on the opening of the Royal College of Music, of which he was made Director—a post he resigned in 1895. He was founder of the Palestine Exploration Fund, published Beechoven and his Nine Symphonics in 1896, and was a contributor to this Encyclopædia. He died 29th May 1900.