Thomas Pell Platt



Childs Hill House 1813



One of the streets of Childs Hill here in London is Platt's Lane. It gets its name from Thomas Pell Platt (1798–1852) who lived there in Chlds Hill House (demolished 1904). A Bible translator, he was born in London but schooled in Little Dunham, Norfolk, then Trinity College, Cambridge, (pensioner 1816; elected scholar 1818; Davies scholar adn president of the union 1819; Tyrwhitt Hebrew scholar 1821; BA and fellow 1820; MA 1823).

While at Cambridge Platt became involved with the British and Foreign Bible Society, and was for several years its librarian. In 1823 he published a catalogue of Ethiopic biblical manuscripts held in the Royal Library of Paris and the BFBS Library. Afterwards he also collated and edited the Ethiopic versions of the NT for the society. The publication did not aim to offer new interpretations but ‘simply to give the Abyssinians the Scriptures in as good a form of their ancient version as could be conveniently done’. Platt did, however, make a few interpretative notes on the readings in the Gospels which particularly struck him, and was prepared to defend his methods when the publications of the BFBS were attacked in an article in a Quarterly Review (1827). In 1829 he prepared an edition of the Syriac gospels and in 1844 edited an Amharic version of the Bible, using the translation of Abba Rukh (OT) and Abu Rumi Habessinus (NT). He was an early member of the Royal Asiatic Society (founded 1823) and for many years served on its oriental translation committee.

Platt came under the influence of the Tractarian movement. He described his conversion from evangelicalism in a Letter to Pusey (1840). Even after his change of heart, however, he resisted ‘mystical and spiritual interpretations to the prophecies of the Old Testament’ in vogue among some Tractarians. He died at Dulwich Hill, Surrey in 1852, leaving an only son, Francis Thomas Platt.