Obituaries: Martin Ellis, Edgar Milne-Redhead, Colin Smith, P. J. O. Trist

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M A R T I N B E A Z O R E L L I S 1911-1996 It is with great sadness that I report the death of Martin on June 8th 1996 after a short illness. He was born in Guernsey, the younger brother of the late, wellknown East Anglian naturalist Ted Ellis, of Great Yarmouth parents, who returned to settle in Gorleston in 1920. The brothers had a wonderful early childhood in Guernsey where the love of natural history was born and lasted with them all through their lives. Martin attended Yarmouth Grammar School and both boys became members of the Yarmouth Naturalists' Society where Mr. Hurrell introduced them to micro-organisms which became a life-long fascination to both of them.

After leaving school Martin was apprenticed to Palmer's in Great Yarmouth for three years. After going to jobs in London and the Home Counties he became bored and decided to take a degree. First he took London matriculation, working on his own at home and then travelled to Norwich technical College to study for Inter B.Sc. Ted, now at Norwich Museum, helped him with his fares until Martin was appointed to be the Lab. Assistant in the college, and also managed to get jobs in private coaching. Then his father agreed to fund him for two years in London. Martin opted to go to Chelsea Polytechnic to study Botany and Mycology under dr. Barnes. He took the Hons, degree in the two years and obtained a first. He stayed on at Chelsea, doing research, demonstrating in the labs and coaching medical students privately, until he joined the R.A.M.C. at the beginning of the war in 1939. He was sent on a draft to India and was posted to Quelta. In his off time he took natural history walks and forayed to collect fungi. He took exams in Urdu and was commissioned as a Captain into the Indian Army Ordnance Corps and went to Calcutta to set up an inspection depot for medical stores. In August 1943 he took over the largest depot in Lahore and travelled all over northern India.

After the war in 1946 Martin joined the then Imperial Mycological Institute in Kew, later Commonwealth Institute and now the International Mycological Institute. He worked there for thirty years, the last sixteen as Chief Mycologist.

He became a world authority on dark-spored Hyphomycetes, wrote many mycological papers and eventually two large books 'Dematiaceous Hyphomycetes' in 1971 and 'More Dematiaceous Hyphomycetes' in 1976. They are still being reprinted and used world-wide.

Meantime Martin joined the British Mycological Society, of which he became the president in 1973. On a fungus foray in 1946 met Pamela Morgan, also a mycologist and they married in 1948. Martin worked on his PhD thesis and finished it at the same time as the arrival of his first son. Martin always rose at 5 a.m. and this time until 7 a.m. was very precious to him as he lined and dotted his drawings made under the camera-lucida apparatus on his microscope, for his publications. His three sons learnt not to disturb their father during this time. I returned to work part-time at the Mycological Institute when the boys were at school.

In 1976 we retired to Southwold and joined the Lowestoft Field Club and the Suffolk Wildlife Trust. When a group of the SWT was formed in Southwold Martin became the Chairman for the first two years, later the President. We led many natural history walks for visitors for several years and made many friends. In October we led the annual fungus foray of the L.F.C. They brought

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their collections home to identify in the afternoon. Through these outings we learnt where to collect Suffolk Fungi, but identification without a herbarium and the literature of a learned establishment was rather difficult. Martin decided we would write an identification handbook. With the help of friends met on forays of the British Mycological Society - and loans of specimens from Institutes and our own collections in Suffolk we were able to produce 'Microfungi on land Plants, an identification handbook' - this took seven years to produce and was published in 1985. It was followed by two others, 'Microfungi on Miscellaneous Substrates' in 1988 and 'Fungi without Gills' in 1990.

The collections made in Suffolk prompted the first list of 'Fungi and Slime Moulds in Suffolk' published by Suffolk Naturalists' Society in 1988 followed by supplements in 1991, 1994 and 1996 which brought the total of species in the County to 4275.

Martin was very artistic, painting wild flowers in his student days, and the larger fungi which we collected in Suffolk fill many notebooks. This gift was inherited from his mother. He was also always interested in languages, he learnt German at evening classes in Richmond, and, whenever we went abroad on holiday he liked to learn as much as possible of the language prior to the trip.

Finally he decided to teach himself Spanish to keep his memory alert and was revising his vocabulary right up to the time he went into hospital.

He is greatly missed by us all, three sons, eight grandchildren and me.

well as the Suffolk Wildlife Trust. His direct involvement in measures to conserve the lady's slipper orchid, the adder's tongue spearwort and especially the black poplar are well known.

I got to know him when he was co-ordinating, single handed, the joint STNC/SCC scheme to conserve ecologically important road verges, which he had taken over from John Trist. We used to meet and travel round the county inspecting existing protected verges and considering new ones, and as I became more interested I gradually took over the clerical side of the operation and eventually the whole scheme. Even after he gave up his yellow Metro, we still met from time to time and it was always an interesting and instructive experience since he knew the county well, so we would often deviate to look at something of interest, while he would reminisce about his visits to Africa from Kew to collect plants for the Herbarium (many of which were new to science) and his many eminent botanical friends and colleagues.

The highlight of my visits to 'Parkers' at Nayland, was the obligatory tour of his lovely garden, which he and his wife managed to cope with even though he seemed to be out most days on his conservation business. The borders, colourful with conventional garden flowers, could always reveal some w i l d rarity he had introduced, and some, like mousetail, grew so luxuriantly under his undoubted horticultural skills, that he had to pull it out in barrow-loads. M y favourite, however, was the extremely rare ground pine, which seeded itself freely in cracks in paths.

Despite all this, he interested himself in many other aspects of nature and had an eye for the unusual, often finding uncommon fungi and invertebrates. Many of these were the subject of his frequent notes printed in the SNS publications.

I was greatly honoured to be invited to his investiture with the M B E for services to nature conservation by the Lord Lieutenant of Suffolk at his daughter's home on his 90th birthday, and even then, despite his failing health, he was his usual outspoken self. His indomitable spirit and strong will-power, which many of us w i l l never forget, kept him going for this memorable event and he died peacefully only five weeks later.

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Pam Ellis E D G A R M I L N E - R E D H E A D , M B E , I S O , T D , M A , F L S 1906-1996 Few people can have achieved more for nature conservation in Suffolk in so short a time as Edgar (or M-R as he was often known), since he lived in the county only from his retirement from the Kew Herbarium in 1969 until he and his wife Olive moved a mile across the river Stour into Essex to live with their daughter and sonin-law some 6 years before his death in June 1996, at the age of 90.

He quickly got involved in the Suffolk Trust for Nature Conservation (now the Suffolk Wildlife Trust) and during these twenty-five years of retirement he served on virtually all its various committees, including the Technical (later Conservation) Committee, which he chaired for a long period. Many of the Trust's reserves were acquired due to his unrelenting efforts and dogged determination and he willingly spent much of his well-earned retirement working for the cause of nature conservation both in his adopted county and much further afield.

He was born in Somerset, and after school in Cheltenham, he went to Cambridge University and subsequently got a job in the Herbarium at The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew where he eventually achieved the post of Deputy Keeper. During this period he was sent on three major plant-collecting expeditions to what were then Rhodesia and Tanganyika. As a result, East Africa became the area of the world in which he specialised as a professional botanist.

In Britain, he was in the forefront of nature conservation and botany, and was elected President or Vice-President or made chairman of committees for the Botanical Society of the British Isles, the Linnean Society, the Council for Nature, the World Wildlife Fund, the Royal Society for Nature Conservation as

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Peter Lawson C O L I N C . S M I T H , E M E R I T U S P R O F E S S O R , M . A. P H D , L I T T . D. ( C A N T A B . ) 1927-1997 Colin Smith dies on February 17th 1997, after a relatively short illness, he w i l l be well-known to a few of our members, but completely unknown to many.

He lived in Cambridgeshire and joined our Society primarily because of his interest in the 'Transactions'.

Colin spent most o f his life in the academic world, at Cambridge and the University of Leeds, finally becoming Professor o f Spanish at St. Catherine's College, Cambridge. He was an authority on Spanish mediaeval literature and was made a Commander of the Order of Isabel la Catolica. He wrote several books, the best known being 'Collins Spanish Dictionary', which sold over 1 million copies. He might equally well like to be remembered for writing 'The Place Names of Roamn Britian' (1979) with A . L . F. Rivet, which w i l l be known to some of our members.

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Although he had no formal training in entomology, Colin also had a lifetime interest in moths. On the first day of his retirement he discovered a moth new to Britain, now called the Southern Chestnut. He had become a close friend of Rafe Eley and often studied moths in Suffolk and elsewhere with him. He would also go 'mothing' with the late Peter Wanstall. Colin, Peter and I were at school together - a long time ago! Colin was a man of many talents and a good companion. I , and many others, w i l l miss him greatly.

Geoff, D. Heathcote P H I L I P J O H N O W E N T R I S T O B E B A , M R A C , F L S 1908-1996 John was born in London, the son of a doctor, but spent much of his childhood in Cornwall where his father was in practice. Later the family moved to Bristol from where John completed his school education at King's School, Taunton.

Following three years gaining basic farming experience in New Zealand he attended the Royal Agricultural College at Cirencester where he obtained his M R A C and later graduated in Economics at Bristol University.

He spent most of the war years in Essex as a District Officer serving the Essex War Agricultural Executive Committee. Immediately after the war he was appointed County Agricultural Officer for East Suffolk and was responsible for the programme of reclamation of farmland following its inundation by salt water in the great storm of January 31st 1953. For this work he was awarded the OBE and it also marked the beginnings of his serious study of botany, particularly grasses, to which he devoted much of his later life. His book 'A survey of the agriculture of Suffolk' was published in 1971. It covered all aspects of farming in the County and includes much useful information for the naturalist.

He retired in 1971 and became the first Conservation Officer for the Suffolk Trust for Nature Conservation, now the Suffolk Wildlife Trust He was active in the establishing of several new reserves in Suffolk and wrote the first guide to them. After five years as Conservation Officer he joined Marg Rutterford in wardening the Breckland reserves and their friendship provided John with some of his happiest years.

He became a specialist in grasses and built up an enormous private herbarium of specimens which now forms part of the University Herbarium at Cambridge, where he did much meticulous work in determining, labelling and updating the collections. For several years he was a grass referee for the BSBI, sharing with Clive Stace that most formidable o f genera, Festuca. It was through my own interest in grasses that I became acquainted with John, towards the end of his life, and came to realise what a knowledgeable, meticulous and kind man he was. 1 well remember spending a morning with him at a Festuca workshop at Leicester University in the early nineties where, with great patience, he determined specimens of the Festuca ovina group I had collected at Landguard Common, Felixstowe and on Wortham Ling. We exchanged herbarium and/or living material and seeds of species one of us had not seen, and in 1994 he remarked that he had never come across Agrostis castellana. I promised to send him a plant when next I saw it. In June 1996, when 'botanising' with a friend in South Essex, I encountered A. castellana van mixta on

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Mucking Golf Course and promptly collected it for John. Sadly it arrived at his Balsham home a week after he had died in hospital from complications following a second hip replacement operation. His courage, warmth and humility w i l l live on in the memories of all who knew him. He is survived by a widow and a son and three daughters from his first marriage, to whom the Society sends its deepest condolences.

Publications John was responsible for over 100 items in total of which probably the best known was his editorship of An ecological flora of Breckland, pp 105, maps 95 (1970), EP Publishing Ltd., Wakefield.

The following is a list of his contributions to Transactions.

Salt Tolerant Flora on the Suffolk Mashes. 8: 147-148 (1953).

Blythburgh Marshes. 9: 36-37 (1954).

Sandcovert Marshes Blythburgh. 9: 259-261 (1955).

A Frequent Alien .Amsinckia intermedia. 10: 74 (1956).

Sandpit Covert Marshes, Blythburgh. 11: 68-70 (1958).

Vegetative proliferation of grasses and phyllody of clovers. 11: 307-310 (1960).

An ecological study of Fritillaria meleagris L . 11: 392-399 (1960).

Records of interesting grasses in Suffolk 1960-61. 12: 5 8 (1962) The flora of an old pasture: habitat study. 12: 100 (1962).

Icklingham Plains: habitat study. 12: 199 (1963).

Avena fatua L , and other Gramineae records for Suffolk. 12: 345-346 (1964).

The flora of a manorial pasture. 13: 288-289 (1967).

The Flora of Suffolk. 14: 58 (1968).

Records o f some grasses in Suffolk. 1968. 14: 220-221 (1969).

Visit to the West Suffolk sites held by the County trust for Nature Conservation.

14: 226. (1969).

Festuca glauca Lam. and its variety caesia (Sm.) K. Richt. 15: 443-444 (1971).

Narcissus 'Van Sion' at Monewden. 16: 230-231 (1974).

Fritillaria meleagris L , at Mickfield, Suffolk. 17: 332-334 (1978).

Tulipa sylvestris L in Suffolk v.c. 25. 18: 82-83 (1979).

Molinia caerulea (L.) Moench subsp arundinacea (Schrank) H Paul, a subspecies of Purple Moor-grass. 22: 57-58 (1986).

Festuca trachyphylla (Hackel) Krajina, a grass introduced into the Suffolk Breckland. 22: 59-61 (1986).

The influence of farming practice on the survival and final extinction of Veronica triphyllos L . at Lakenheath. 26: 82-84 (1989).

Molinia caerulea subsp. altissima (Link) Domin. 26: 85 (1990).

Obituary of Margerson George Rutterford: 1907-1991. 27:59-60 (1991).

Veronica triphyllos L . in Breckland v.c. 26. 29: 61 (1993).

Elytrigia repens (L.) Desv. Ex Nevski subsp. arenosa (Spenner) A . Love. 31: 54-56(1995).

A. C. Copping

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