The Plaque carries the following text:
ERNEST
WESTLAKE
F.G.S, F.R.A.I
FOUNDER OF THE ORDER OF
WOODCRAFT CHIVALRY
WAS BORN HERE
NOVEMBER 16
1856
Ernest Westlake was born in Hampshire, England in 1855 to evangelical Quaker parents, Thomas Westlake (1826-1892) and Hannah Neave (died 1857). While remaining a faithful, if unorthodox Christian, Westlake eschewed much of his upbringing to become a scientist who believed in spiritualism and psychical phenomena and who was dedicated to the Darwinian-inspired theories of evolution. These beliefs also informed his later interests in educational reform.
Westlake studied at University College London from 1873-1875 where he was awarded certificates in geology and mathematics. While he never joined the academy and published relatively little of his work, Westlake was a skilled geologist who carried out meticulous and professional work. He was a member of the Geologists’ Association (1877), an elected a Fellow of the Geological Society of London (1879), a founding member of the Hampshire Field Naturalists Club (1885) and Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Society (1910).
From the late 1870s Westlake studied the geological strata of Hampshire and beyond, visiting newly-made rail and road-cuttings, wells and quarries, and the cliffs of southern England, Ireland and parts of France resulting in a significant collection of fossils (many echinoids) that are held in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Some of Westlake's chalk fossils are also held in the Salisbury Museum where he was an Honorary Curator of Geology. Westlake also collected many thousands of palaeoliths and eoliths mostly in the Hampshire region, including Woodgreen and Breamore, and further afield, which are also held in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Ernest Westlake's English geological work advanced, or was referenced, by geologists including Clement Reid, William Whitaker, H. Osborne White and Jukes Browne.
Westlake’s scientific interests extended beyond geology. A founding member of the London-based Society for Psychical Research, Westlake researched phenomena of dream premonitions, haunted houses and also a history of water divining.
By the late 1880s Westlake had embraced an alternative lifestyle, travelling by a traditional horse-drawn ‘Gipsy’ caravan when collecting artefacts, becoming a keen cyclist and camper and advocating the benefits of exercise, fresh air, freer clothing and a meat-free diet. Westlake married Lucy Rutter in 1891.
Deeply affected by the outbreak of War in 1914, he successfully established, with the assistance of his son, Aubrey Westlake, and the influence of Ernest Thompson Seton, an alternative and pacifist scouts' movement for girls and boys called the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry in 1916. The Order promoted an educational model that remembered the major cultural evolutionary stages of human development. It is still in existence today, and it is in fact for this achievement that Westlake is best remembered.
Westlake’s plans to return to his geological work following the Order’s establishment were abruptly ended when he died in the side car of his son’s motorcycle in Holborn, London in 1922.
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