Edgar Prestage

Edgar Prestage (1869-1951) was the pre-eminent British expert of his time on Portuguese history and literature and Britain’s first professor of Portuguese. Mixing in the highest circles (he was, for example, a member of the Royal Sporting Club of Cascais), Prestage was made a Grand Officer of the Order of Saint James of the Sword in 1930.

Born in Manchester of a wealthy family from Bowdon in Cheshire, although originally from High Wycombe, Prestage was educated at Radley College where, according to the APN’s obituary, “for no accountable reason” he began to take an interest in Portugal and its history, apparently being fascinated by the maps of the country. Another source says that his interest in Portugal arose from reading adventure stories, particularly of Vasco da Gama's voyage to India. He converted to Catholicism when he was 16. He then went on to Balliol College, Oxford, studying Portuguese history and literature. However, he did not immediately become an academic, first taking a law course at Owens College, the forerunner of Manchester University, and then spending a decade working with his father’s law firm in Manchester, something he did not enjoy. In 1905, together with Sebastião Clemente Deiró, he formed the Anglo-Portuguese Chamber of Commerce, although it did not last long. In 1908 he became a special lecturer in Portuguese literature at the University of Manchester.

Never reluctant to approach the famous men of his day, he corresponded with Sir Richard Burton and several celebrated Portuguese writers, including Teófilo Braga and Jaime Batalha Reis who was the Portuguese consul in London in the 1890s. His particular interest was Camões and he soon became accepted as a leading scholar of the poet. He first visited Portugal in 1890 or 1891 and must have rapidly achieved prominence because he was elected as a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of Lisbon in 1893, although he had not produced any significant work at that time. Among those he met during his first trip was Oliveira Martins, said to be Portugal’s leading historian, who provided Prestage with letters of introduction. He would also become a member of the Geography Society of Lisbon and the Coimbra Institute, and later of the Royal Historical Society of Madrid.

Starting to spend more time in Portugal he became a regular participant at the literary salons in Lisbon of Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho, wife of the poet António Cândido Gonçalves Crespo, and married their daughter, Cristina, in 1907. She was to commit suicide ten years later. In 1912 he founded the Sociedade Portuguesa de Estudios Històricos. During the first World War he was the press attaché at the British Embassy in Lisbon, ceasing his connections with Manchester University. Prestage was a monarchist and never became reconciled to the republican regime until Salazar came to power.

In 1923 Prestage became Camões Professor at King´s College, London, a position he held for a decade. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy and Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He and his second wife, Victoria Cobb of the Porto port family, were among the just 20 guests at the wedding of the Anglo-Portuguese News editor, Luiz Marques and Susan Lowndes in 1938 in the crypt of Westminster Cathedral. In 1914 he had sold and donated his personal library and personal papers from his home in Cheshire to the Rylands Library of the University of Manchester. He died in London in 1951, having produced around 100 publications on Portugal but in his last years had been in bad health and had been more concerned with spiritual matters than work. He had once been told by Batalha Reis that he certainly deserved “a monument in Lisbon”. His correspondence, kept at King´s College Library, continues to be studied as does that in Manchester.

Main source: John F. Laidlar. Edgar Prestage: Manchester's Portuguese Pioneer. BHSP Annual Report 23. 1996