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Floreat
Prescotia |
The
Website for former pupils of the Prescot
Grammar and Prescot Schools |
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Prescotian 2000 - 2010 |
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| Professor
Alan Morton (1910-2003) |
ALAN
GILBERT MORTON was born on 12th
March 1910 in Prescot, of
Manchester parents. Prescot was
in those days a rural area,
despite its proximity to
Liverpool, and he always
considered himself a Lancashire
man. His interest in botany was
first stimulated by the woods and
fields of a local farm, and by
neighbouring mosses, waste heaps,
lanes and ponds, where he spent
all his leisure hours.
He began his education at a dame
school, having been taught to
read by an aunt, and attended
Prescot Grammar School (1918 to
1927). Botany at Higher School
Certificate was not provided for
in the school curriculum, but
when he specialised in science in
the sixth form, his headmaster,
Mr C W H Richardson (known as
‘Dick’), was
foresighted enough to make it
possible for him to study botany
to this level. Alan was always
grateful to him and to his French
master, Mr Whitby, who taught him
German out of school hours.
From 1927–1931, he attended
Liverpool University where he
gained a B.Sc. in Botany before
spending a year there as a
research assistant, working on
tannin metabolism in Epilobium
hirsutum. In the autumn and
winter of 1931–32, he
attended the Institut fur
Auslander in Berlin, perfecting
his knowledge of German and
laying the foundation of a
lifelong love of German
literature, both botanical and
classical, and a particular
appreciation of Goethe’s
works.
From 1932–33 he did some
botany teaching to pharmacy and
horticultural students at the
Liverpool Technical College,
before going to the University of
Cambridge (1933–36), where
he did research on carbohydrate
metabolism in ivy leaves under
the supervision of E. J. Maskell,
which he presented as his Ph.D.
thesis in 1937. A second visit to
Berlin in 1933 showed him the
horrors of rising Nazism and on
one occasion he heard Goebbels
speak. He had Jewish friends in
Germany, but after the war never
heard of them and could guess
only too well what had happened
to them.
From 1937–40, he was
appointed Research Assistant to
Professor W. Neilson Jones at
Bedford College, London
University, with an Agricultural
Research Council Grant, and here
he studied the effect of soil
conditions on tree growth in
heath soils. This work provided
what was probably the first
demonstration of the occurrence
of mycostasis in soils and its
removal by manurial treatment
(see Journal of Agricultural
Science 31, 379 (1941)). During
1937–39, he also studied at
the Regent Street Polytechnic, as
it then was, taking an inter-BA
in German and Russian, where he
gained the class medal in Russian
for two years running.
Other posts followed as research
and advisory worker in the
biological laboratories of Lever
Bros and Unilever Ltd, Port
Sunlight, Cheshire; then,
secondment to the Scientific
Adviser’s staff in
Dehydration Division, Ministry of
Food, returning at the end of the
war to Lever Bros and Unilever.
In 1943, he married Freda Mary
Clayton, a teacher from Doncaster
whom he met in Cambridge and who
had volunteered to remain in
London throughout the war to work
in a Jewish rest centre. One of
his worse memories of that time
was of going to her home in
London to find it in ruins after
a German air raid and, to his
last days, he maintained that all
aerial bombardment was a crime
against humanity. Freda
unfortunately predeceased him in
1987.
From 1946–47 he worked in
the Botany Department of
Rothamsted Experimental Station,
Harpenden, on laboratory and
field studies of the physiology
of leaf-growth in crop plants
(published in Annals of Botany),
before being appointed Head of
the Plant Physiology Laboratory
at Akers Research Laboratories
(ICI), The Frythe, Welwyn,
Hertfordshire, in 1947. Here he
engaged in research on the
nitrogen metabolism, enzymology
and development of fungi. As well
as this, he gave unofficial
German and Russian classes to his
younger colleagues in the lunch
hours. In 1946 also, he and his
long-standing friend, Desmond
Greaves, published a joint volume
of their poems, By the Clock
‘Tis Day.
He delighted in how new ideas
were founded, developed and
evolved, and had a lifelong
interest in left-wing philosophy,
visiting colleagues at the
University of Greifswald in the
then German Democratic Republic,
also taking part in the first
scientific delegation from the UK
to the Soviet Union. This led to
a book on Soviet genetics,
outlining Lysenko’s ideas.
When Lysenko was exposed as a
fraud, who had not allowed full
access to his data, Alan could
only think of Darwin’s
words, which he had used to
preface the book –
“Great is the power of
steady misrepresentation; but the
history of science shows that
fortunately this power does not
long endure”. For many years
he was on the board of Marx House
and on the committee of the
Society for Cultural Relations
with the USSR.
In 1963, he was appointed Reader
and Head of the Botany Department
at Chelsea College of Science and
Technology, becoming Professor of
Botany in 1966 when Chelsea
became a constituent college of
London University. In 1970, he
became a Fellow of the Institute
of Biology; in 1971, Senior
Editor of the Transactions of the
British Mycological Society,
having acted as Associate Editor
from 1967. When he retired from
Chelsea in 1973, he was given the
title of Emeritus Professor.
At this point, he left St Albans,
Hertfordshire, where he had lived
for many years, to move to
Edinburgh. There he devoted his
time to editing the TBMS; to
writing a History of Botanical
Science (1981) with the help of a
Leverhulme Research Fellowship,
his Marginalia to Andrea
Cesalpino’s work on Botany
(Archives of Natural History 10,
31–36) (1981), and John Hope
1725–1786, Scottish Botanist
(1986), a biography produced for
the bicentenary of the Royal
Botanic Garden, Edinburgh. He
joined forces with the late Dr
Mary Noble to contribute a
chapter on Botany and Mycology
[in Scotland 1783–1983] for
a special issue of the
Proceedings of the Royal Society
of Edinburgh (84B). His mastery
of languages led Professor Robert
Kuhner of Lyon, one of
France’s greatest
agaricologists, to ask Alan and
Professor Roy Watling to
summarise and translate into
English Kuhner’s great opus,
and this appeared in 1980. He was
elected a fellow of the Royal
Society of Edinburgh in 1981.
He also devoted time to
translating poems of the Austrian
poet Lenau, to his own poetical
compositions and to study of
classical philosophy in the
original – when writing his
History of Botanical Science, he
read his sources, be it
Theophrastus or Cesalpino, in
their original languages to avoid
perpetrating existing mistakes in
translation. The loss of his
‘botanical eye’,
because of glaucoma and retinal
deterioration, was a great
sadness during his last years but
he continued to experiment with
plants, to research the minutiae
of botanical history, and to read
philosophy. He also maintained
his great love of English
literature, and particularly of
Wordsworth’s poetry, and his
interest in current affairs,
voting in every election and
supporting devolution in his
adoptive country.
He died on 19th March 2003, after
a short illness, leaving three
children, John, David and
Alisoun, and five grandchildren.
Alisoun Morton |
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