Obituary: William Stearn (original) (raw)

William Stearn, who has died aged 90, made a unique contribution to taxonomic botany, and to the history of botanical science. Yet he was largely self-taught; his widowed mother could not afford to send him to university, and he learned his Greek, Latin and German at evening classes.

Having started his career as a bookshop assistant, he became librarian at the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) in London at the age of 22. By the time he retired in 1976, he was senior principal scientific officer at the department of botany at the British Museum (Natural History), the Natural History Museum.

Willam was born in Cambridge, the elder son of a coachman. He attributed his lifelong interest in plants neither to his family background nor to his early childhood, though holidays on a Suffolk farm undoubtedly helped kindle his natural history enthusiasms.

Birds, rather than plants, were his first interest. On winning a scholarship to the then Cambridgeshire high school for boys (now Hills Road sixth-form college), he was inspired by an excellent biology teacher.

Unable to proceed to university, he took a job with the Cambridge academic booksellers Bowes and Bowes. There his career began when John Gilmour, five years his senior and already curator of the university herbarium, realised the extraordinary ability and enthusiasm of his remarkable assistant.

Around the herbarium, William found himself in a congenial academic company - a group that flourished under the benign patronage of Humphrey Gilbert-Carter, the first scientific director of the university botanic garden - and built lifelong friendships, which played a key part in the revival of taxonomic botany in Britain in the 1950s.

His first published paper, on a disease of a garden campanula, appeared in 1929, followed in 1930 by several on other horticultural genera, including allium and epimedium, which became major interests in his later career.

When the post of librarian at the RHS Lindley Library became available in 1933, Gilmour, by now assistant director of Kew Gardens, and EA Bowles, a well-known plantsman, successfully recommended William.

He now learned some Swedish, the language of the 18th-century botanist Carl Linnaeus, and began to travel to botanical centres in continental Europe. He was soon to receive and catalogue the largest bequest of books ever given to the Lindley Library, on the death of Reginald Cory in 1934.

The prewar years were a productive time for the young librarian, who published nearly 60 papers before the outbreak of the second world war, including, in 1938, the 130-page monograph of Epimedium, on which he had been working for some years, and to which he returned in the last months of his life.

Like so many Quakers, William refused to bear arms during the second world war, but was willing to serve in a medical capacity. He was accepted by the Royal Air Force Medical Corps, and saw service, from 1941 to 1946, and was in Burma in 1943 and 1944.

In 1940, he married Ruth Alford, who recently recalled how, in the Kew circle around John Gilmour, she and William met on "a badly attended League of Nations ramble", when they were full of the "desire to set the world to rights".

Back at the Lindley Library from 1946 to 1952, his output increased, ranging from single-page notes in botanical and horticultural journals to the fourth and final volume of the RHS Dictionary Of Gardening - thus, as William was known to say wryly, becoming an expert on plants from "So" onwards.

When we recall that the tally of William's publications, which had reached 430 by his 80th birthday, treats this encyclopaedic volume as a single publication, we get some feeling for the sheer size of his contribution. Not only could he recall freely where an inquirer might find guidance in a search for some esoteric information on plant taxonomy, he remained, to the end, very willing to share this encyclopaedic knowledge.

I am not the only inquirer to have benefited from his affable, patient care, which was sometimes positively uncanny. I recall an international botanical gathering in Cambridge some 20 years ago; we had set out in a coach for some local nature reserve, and I took the opportunity of asking William about cultivated varieties of cannabis, the illegal growing of which was just becoming a problem.

He answered my question adequately, and we proceeded on our outing. But, on the return journey - before any of us had been back to Cambridge - he presented me with a copy of his cannabis paper, which he "thought I might like to have". I never learned how he did that trick.

In 1952, he became a botanist at the Natural History Museum's department of botany. Not content with monographic studies of allium and lilium, and a significant contribution to the history of botany in his outstanding 176-page introduction to the Ray Society's edition of Linnaeus' Species Plantarum (1957), William patiently drafted the first edition of the International Code Of Nomenclature For Cultivated Plants.

This, with its introduction of the term "cultivar" (eg, rosa "peace" - a cultivated variety) became the basis for our continuing regulation of horticultural plant names.

The Linnean Society of London, owner of Linnaeus's collections, elected William to a fellowship in 1934, and he served as botanical curator from 1959-85, and president from 1979-82. He remained active in the RHS to the end, and was awarded the society's highest accolade, the Victoria Medal of Honour, in 1965. Abroad, he received many distinctions: honorary doctorates in Leiden (1960) and Uppsala (1972), and, last year, the prestigious Asa Gray Award by the American Society of Plant Taxonomists.

What of the enormous output of this benign, modest, erudite man will remain as his lasting contribution? My choice is Botanical Latin (first edition, 1966), a unique book written for everyone who uses the botanists' lingua franca by which we are able to communicate with our colleagues throughout the world. Originally designed to help students, it turned into the standard work used freely by all plant taxonomists.

William's marriage to Ruth was a very happy one. She, and their two daughters and one son, survive him.