| AdminHistory | Thomas Henry Farrer, first Baron Farrer (1819-1899), civil servant and statistician, was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford. Farrer was the son of Thomas Farrer, a solicitor in Lincoln's Inn Fields. He was called to the bar of Lincoln's Inn in 1844 but retired from practice a few years later. He became a civil servant in 1850 when he took the post of secretary to the naval department of the Board of Trade. In 1865 he was promoted and became one of the joint secretaries of the Board of Trade, and in 1867 he became permanent secretary. Farrer was President of the Royal Statistical Society from 1894 to 1896.
He married Frances Erskine (1825-1870) in 1854 and they had four children: Emma Cecilia "Ida" Farrer (1854-1946), Thomas Cecil Farrer (1859-1940), Claude Erskine Farrer (1862-1890), and Hon. Noel Maitland Farrer (1867-1929). Ida Farrer went on to marry Horace Darwin, son of Charles Darwin (1851-1928).
Farrer's first wife, Frances, died on 15 May 1870. Farrer remarried in 1873 to his wife's half-cousin, Katherine Euphemia Wedgwood (1839-1931). Farrer died on 11 October 1899 at Abinger Hall, Dorking. |