Martin, Anthony R.H.   (1926 -  )

Born in Coventry, England, and was at secondary school during the German aerial campaign that destroyed much of the city.

In April 1941, he and the rest of the senior science stream at King Henry VIII Grammar School had to be billeted to the science wing of another school after bombs demolished their laboratories.

At Cambridge, he was inspired by the lectures of Harry Godwin on fenland ecology to take up botany as a career, and was encouraged by his tutor, Hamshaw Thomas, who had studied fossil plants in South Africa, to apply after graduation for a lectureship at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, where he commenced full duties in February 1946.

One of his major projects while he was at Rhodes was an ecological study of Groenvlei, one of the Knysna Lakes with a surrounding fenland that is now part of the New South African National Park.

In 1952 Martin won an 1851 Overseas Scholarship to pursue doctoral research on his Groenvlei project at University College London. Diatoms were added to the study, since the Knysna lakes were rich in them, and so part of his time was spent at the Natural History Museum, London learning diatom taxonomy and ecology under the tutelage of Robert Ross in the Cryptogamic Section.

His study, which earned him a PhD in 1955.

After finishing his projects, Martin accepted a lectureship at Sydney University.

While embarking on his purely Australian research, he continued through the 1950s and 1960s to research and publish his South African work. The several hundred vials of acetolysed pollen grains that provided the data for his South African pollen analysis came with him to Australia.

By the time he retired, in 1991 as Senior Lecturer, the collection had grown to several thousands of samples but some years later the entire collection was accidentally thrown away.

Source: Extracted from:
https://plants.jstor.org/stable/10.5555/al.ap.person.bm000058253
Portrait Photo: none found.

Collecting localities for 'Martin, A.R.H.' from AVH (2025)

Data from 6 specimens