Sir William Henry HadowCBE (27 December 1859 – 8 April 1937) was a leading educational reformer inGreat Britain, a musicologist and a composer.

Sir William Henry Hadow CBE
Vice-Chancellor of Durham University
In office 1916–1918
Preceded by	Henry Gee
Succeeded by	John Stapylton Grey Pemberton
Vice-Chancellor of theUniversity of Sheffield
In office 1919–1930
Preceded by	William Ripper
Succeeded by	Arthur Wallace Pickard-Cambridge
Personal details
Born	27 December 1859 Ebrington, England
Died	8 April 1937(1937-04-08) (aged 77)
Spouse	Edith Troutbeck ​ ​ (m. 1930; died 1937)​
Alma mater	Worcester College, Oxford
Profession	Educationalist musicologist

Born atEbrington inGloucestershire and baptised there on 29 January 1860 by his father, he was the eldest child of the Reverend William Elliot Hadow (1826–1906) and his wife Mary Lang Cornish (1835–1917).^[1] His grandfather, the Reverend William Thomas Hadow, had married Eleanor Ann Bethune, daughter of ColonelJohn Drinkwater Bethune.^[2]

He studied atMalvern College,^[3] followed byWorcester College, Oxford, where he taught and became Dean (1889).^[4] In 1905, Hadow was elected the first Old Malvernian member of the Council of Malvern College.^[5] In 1909, he was appointed principal ofArmstrong College in the Newcastle Division ofDurham University before succeeding, asWarden andvice-chancellor of theUniversity of Durham in 1916. In 1919, he was appointed the Vice-Chancellor ofSheffield University (1919–30).

As chairman of several committees, he published a series of reports on education, notablyThe Education of the Adolescent (1926). This called for the re-organization of elementary education and the abandonment of all-age schools (separate schools from the age of 11, when existing schools, both state and voluntary (i.e. associated with a particular religious denomination), often educated children up to the age of 14, the school leaving age under theEducation Act 1918), and the creation ofsecondary modern schools for children over the age of 11. These became known as theHadow Reports. He was a leading influence in English education at all levels in the 1920s and 1930s. He chaired a committee, established in 1926 jointly by theBritish Broadcasting Company (laterBBC) and theBritish Institute of Adult Education, to report on the possibilities of using radio broadcasting for education. The results were published as a book, "New Ventures in Broadcasting - A Study in Adult Education".^[6]

Hadow wrote and edited a number of publications on literature, music and music theory. He took on the general editorship of the original six-volume edition of theOxford History of Music between 1901 and 1905, writing the fifth volume (covering the period from C.P.E. Bach to Schubert) himself.^[7] With his younger sisterGrace Hadow he editedThe Oxford Treasury of English Literature (1907–8).^[8]

He was also a composer, mostly of chamber-works between 1892 and 1897. Many of these have now been lost (including the 1889 Violin Sonata in Ab, the Piano Trio in G minor and the Violin Sonata in A minor), but two were published: his Piano Sonata in G-sharp minor by Augener in 1885, and his String Quartet by Novello in 1886.^[9] Manuscript copies of the Violin Sonata in F major (1891) and his last chamber work, the Clarinet Sonata of 1897, have survived. Some songs and incidental music followed the Clarinet Sonata, but nothing after 1912.^[10] In 1917 he delivered theMaster-Mind Lecture, on Beethoven.^[11]

Hadow was awarded aKnight Bachelor in 1918^[12] and a CBE in 1920. He was also a Member of the Council of theRoyal College of Music

In 1930 in London, when he was 70 years old, he married a long-standing friend, Edith Troutbeck (1863-1937), daughter of the musicologist and translatorJohn Troutbeck.^[13][14] She died a few weeks before his own death inWestminster, London. They are buried inBrookwood Cemetery inSurrey.

• Studies in Modern Music (Berlioz, Schumann and Wagner)(1893) Seeley and Co. Limited, London
• Studies in Modern Music Second Series (Chopin, Dvorak and Brahms) (1895) Seeley and Co. Limited, London
• Sonata Form (1896) Novello, Ewer & Co^[15]
• A Croatian Composer. Notes toward the Study of Joseph Haydn (1897) Seeley and Co. Limited, London
• The Oxford History of Music, Volume 5: The Viennese Period (1904)^[16]
• William Byrd 1623-1923 (1920) Humphrey Milford, London
• Citizenship (1923) Oxford at the Clarendon Press
• Music (1925) Williams and Norgate Ltd, England
• A Comparison of Poetry and Music (1926) Cambridge University Press
• Beethoven's Opus Eighteen Quartets (1927)
• Collected Essays (1928) Oxford University Press (ed.Hubert Foss)^[14]
• English Music (1931) Longmans Green & Co, London

• Biography.com entry
• The Hadow Reports: an introduction at InfEd
• Gillard D (2006) The Hadow Reports: an introduction
• "Archival material relating to William Henry Hadow".UK National Archives. 
• Free scores by William Henry Hadow at theInternational Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)
• Works by William Henry Hadow atProject Gutenberg
• Works by or about William Henry Hadow at theInternet Archive