Frederic Charles Bartlett was born on October 20, 1886, in Stow on the Wold, Gloucestershire. He studied literature, logic, and philosophy before becoming a tutor at the University of Cambridge in 1909. At Cambridge, his interests turned to psychology, partly through his acquaintance with James Ward; he was awarded a fellowship at St. John's College in 1913 and obtained a first-class degree in moral sciences in 1914. Cambridge then was in the forefront of the movement to make experimental psychology a recognized branch of science in the British university system; C. S. Myers (1873-1947), a lecturer in experimental psychology there, not only had campaigned for Cambridge to build a laboratory, a wish fulfilled in 1912, but also had helped to found the British Journal of Psychology in 1904. Bartlett wrote an account (1937) of the early history of the Cambridge laboratory.

When World War I began in 1914, Myers appointed Bartlett "relief director...