George Whitaker (educator)

George Whitaker
A plate of Whitaker taken in the last years of his term as Provost of Trinity
Born	(1811-10-09)9 October 1811 Bratton, Wiltshire
Died	27 May 1882(1882-05-27) (aged 70) Newton Toney
Education	BA, MA
Alma mater	University of Cambridge
Occupation	clergyman and educator

George Whitaker (9 October 1811 – 27 August 1882) was an English-Canadian clergyman and educator.

Born into a Baptist farming family in Bratton, Wiltshire, England, he received his early education at Frome Grammar School and Charterhouse School. He matriculated at Queens' College, Cambridge, in 1829 and graduated BA in 1833 and MA in 1836. In the course of his early academic life he became a member of the Church of England and was baptised at Bratton Parish Church in 1832. This came at the beginning of the Cambridge academic year in which he would need to subscribe to the Church of England's Thirty-Nine Articles to take his degree.

Whitaker was elected a foundation fellow of his college in 1834 and the next year became a university lecturer in classics. He was ordained a deacon on 4 June 1837. He took the orders of a priest on 27 May the following year.

In 1840 he was appointed Vicar of Oakington, Cambridgeshire, a living in the gift of his college.

He served as the first provost and professor of divinity of the University of Trinity College, now federated with the University of Toronto, from its opening in 1852 (when it had just thirty students) until his retirement in 1881. From 1875 he was also Archdeacon of York, Toronto.

After ending his career in Toronto, Whitaker retired to his home county of Wiltshire as Rector of Newton Toney, near Salisbury, England. He died in August 1882 and was buried at Newton Toney.

Whitaker was the eighth child of Philip Whitaker, a farmer of Bratton, Wiltshire, and his wife Anne Andrews. Two of the couple's older sons, Alfred and Edward, became solicitors, Alfred at Frome and Edward in London. On 22 October 1844, at Bath, Somerset, George Whitaker married Arundel Charlotte Burton, the daughter of the Rev. Richard Burton, born in Sumatra, where her father had been a Baptist missionary, and brought up in Somerset in the west of England. George and Arundel Whitaker had at least eight children.