Captain on the Gridiron and in the Air

The annals of Trinity College Athletics include many student-athletes who went from the playing fields of Hartford to the battlefields of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, serving in the U.S. armed services, first in the Civil War, certainly through the First and Second World Wars, and on to Korea, Vietnam, and even modern-day conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of those was Charles Hurd Howell, Class of 1912, captain of the undefeated 1911 Trinity football team and later a captain in the British Flying Corps during World War I.   

Charles was the son of George Dawson Howell, Trinity Class of 1882, an accomplished lawyer from Pennsylvania who moved the entire family to Hartford in 1909, when Charles was a sophomore, and served as a trustee of the College for 16 years. Charles two brothers, who were also standout athletes at Trinity: Alfred, Class of 1911, and Dawson, Class of 1915. Charles’s maternal grandfather was Captain Charles Henry Hurd, a hero of the Civil War, and who, as a student at Harvard, was on the crew of the Oneida that rowed and won in the first Harvard–Yale boat race on August 3, 1852, the first intercollegiate athletic competition of any kind in the United States.   

Charles’s accolades at Trinity went well beyond the playing field. He was instrumental in forming a YMCA chapter at the College and served as its first president. In a long tradition of service by Trinity athletes to the local community, Charles and other YMCA members volunteered as probation officers, helping to mentor and guide young “juvenile offenders” in the city of Hartford.   

At the end of his junior year, Charles was tapped for the senior honorary society, Medusa Head, granted to those “who had accomplished the most for their class during their three years at Trinity.” Four out of the five members of the outgoing class of Medusa Head were student athletes, including the captains of the football, baseball, hockey, and track teams. The same was true of the incoming class including: Charles; Philip A. Ahearn, described as “the best all-around athlete in the class”; and William B. Bleeker, who played no fewer than four sports—football, baseball, track, and hockey. At just 19 years of age, Bleeker was “one of the youngest men in his class.” In announcing the Medusa Head ceremony in June 1911, the Hartford Courant reported:   

There was a loud applause from the college body when former Captain Ramsdell of the football team passed down the line and tapped the fourth candidate, Howell of Hartford, captain of the football team for the next fall. Howell is president of the college YMCA, a member of the football and hockey teams, former leader of the Mandolin Club, and one of the most popular men on campus.  

 After leading the Trinity team to an undefeated season in the fall of 1911, Charles graduated in the spring of 1912 and returned to his high school alma mater of St. Mark’s in Southborough, Massachusetts, where he worked as a teacher and coach. Two years later, he won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford and arrived in England in 1914, just as World War I was beginning. Hardly willing to stand on the sidelines for long, the former football captain soon volunteered for the Royal Flying Corps of Britain, predecessor to the Royal Air Force, and earned his wings at the Brookfield Flying School in August 1915.   

 Not to be outdone by his older brother, Dawson Howell, Class of 1915 and also captain of the Trinity football team, volunteered for the U.S. Navy after graduation and served as an ensign on a subchaser patrolling the U.S. coast against German submarines. It was not Dawson’s first experience at sea. While still a student at Trinity, Dawson had spent his summers taking “volunteer boats” to the coastal regions of Labrador in northeast Canada under the direction of British medical missionary Wilfred Grenfell. Later, still as a member of the U.S. Navy, Dawson served on the 1921 expedition to the Arctic led by explorer Donald MacMillan.    

  Meanwhile, in late 1916 and still on active duty, Charles married Margaret Russell, daughter of the late governor of Massachusetts, William E. Russell. In 1917, Charles was promoted to supervise a squadron of “aeroplanes” on the French and English lines in France due to his “distinguished service on the field of battle.” The following year, 1918, Charles was promoted again to captain, and The Hartford Courant reported that “a number of Taubes and Fokkers [German fighter planes] have been brought down by him.” While some 300 Americans volunteered for the British Flying Corps during World War I—and several them became “aces”— it’s unclear how many of them achieved the recognition and seniority that Captain Charles Howell had achieved.   

The United States did not formally enter the war until April 1917, and by November 1918, the war was over, a mere 19 months, but for Charles, he served a full four years in the British Flying Corps. After the war, he returned to Cambridge University to complete his studies. Later, he and Margaret returned the United States, where he served as a member of the faculty and coach at Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts. He died in 1972 and is buried in a family plot at the Mount Auburn cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.