Education
Burd was educated at Clifton College under Doctor Percival and attended Balliol College, Oxford.
Burd was educated at Clifton College under Doctor Percival and attended Balliol College, Oxford.
He received his Bachelor of Arts in 1885 and his Master of Arts in 1888. He spent a year travelling as a tutor to Lord Acton"s son and in 1886 joined the teaching staff of Repton School where he stayed until he retired in 1923, becoming the Classical Sixth Form master. Burd remained an active historical scholar throughout his teaching career.
He was a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and he produced a new edited edition of Machiavelli"s Il Principe (The Prince) (1891) which was highly praised in The English Historical Review and described as leaving nothing to be desired.
He also wrote the chapter on "Florence and Machiavelli" in Lord Acton"s The Cambridge Modern History (Volume 1, 1902). In philately, Burd specialised in early Great Britain, particularly pre-adhesive mail.
He was an early student of plating and was one of a small group of dedicated collectors who succeeded in plating the Penny Black. In 1922 he reminisced in The London Philatelist about the task of which he said "To most observers it must have appeared a visionary undertaking, the self-imposed task of quixotic idealists, whose conclusions could admit neither verification nor refutation." He described the painstaking nature of the activity: "year by year the work was carried forward-patiently, methodically, cautiously: perplexities were disentangled, hypotheses discarded or confirmed, until at length, in the fullness of time, the goal has been reached: a task, too great for the span of any single mind, has been completed".
His collection of 8,000 Penny Blacks, each "scientifically classified and indexed", was sold to the stamp dealer Charles Nissen in 1919.
Burd died at home, at The Pastures, Repton, on 12 April 1931.
Quotations: "To most observers it must have appeared a visionary undertaking, the self-imposed task of quixotic idealists, whose conclusions could admit neither verification nor refutation.".
Burd was a member of the Royal Philatelic Society London from 1918 and signed the Roll of Distinguished Philatelists in 1924.