Sir John Edwin Sandys was a classical scholar.

He was born at Leicester on 19 May 1844, a son of the Reverend Timothy Sandys of the Church Missionary Society and Rebecca née Swain. Living at first in India, he returned to England at the age of 11, and was educated at the Church Missionary Society School in Islington then at Repton School. In 1863 he won a scholarship to St John’s College, Cambridge.

He obtained a Bell scholarship and won several prizes for Greek and Latin prose. In 1867 he was elected Fellow at his college, and appointed to a lectureship, then later also a tutorship. He was elected public orator in 1876, and was given the title orator emeritus when he retired in 1919. He was awarded honorary doctorates from the Universities of Dublin in 1892, Edinburgh in 1909, Athens in 1912 and Oxford in 1920. He was made a Fellow of the British Academy in 1909, and a Commander in the Greek Order of the Saviour. He was awarded his knighthood in 1911.

He wrote a number of books on Greek oratory, and a book on his travels in Greece, but is best known for the History of Classical Scholarship.

In 1880 he had married Mary Grainger, the daughter of the vicar of St Paul’s Church, Cambridge. They had no children. He died on 6 July 1922 at Cambridge.

Source: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography