GOLDSWORTHY LOWES DICKINSON, British scholar and professor, was born (d: 1932 ); Dickinson, known as “Goldie” to his friends and admirers, was a professor of the classics at Cambridge, where he was the hub of the so-called Cambridge Apostles, which in his time included A.M. Forster, Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, Lytton Strachey, and Leonard Woolf.

Goldie’s impact on all is recorded in Forster’s biography of his great teacher. Dickinson was a political writer as well as a classicist. His views were instrumental in the founding of the League of Nations, even though his own popularity declined because of his pacifism during WWI.

He was revered for his wit, which even managed to creep into such somber words as the Dictionary of National Biography. Dickinson’s write-up of the notorious educator Oscar Browning, who had been forced to leave both Eton and Cambridge for his “familiarity with young men,” includes the wonderfully ambiguous line: “He assisted young Italians, as he had done young Englishmen,towards the openings they desired.”

Goldie himself cared less about openings than he did about heels and soles since he was a boot-fetishist whose tastes were only too gladly satisfied by his Cambridge students. As he wrote of one young man in his journal, “I liked him to stand upon me when we met.”