Edmund Brisco Ford, 23 April 1901 - 21 January 1988

Abstract

Edmund Brisco Ford, Emeritus Professor of Ecological Genetics in the University of Oxford, Distinguished Fellow of All Souls College and Darwin Medallist of the Royal Society, died on Thursday 21 January 1988 at the age of 86. His body was cremated and, at his request, the ashes were scattered on a grassy Cotswold hillside near Birdlip. In death he returned to the butterfly-meadows that had been the setting for so much of his working life. As the author of what is widely regarded as the best book on butterflies ever written, he progressed through entomology to using his insects as tools for the study of evolution, and finally (as he wrote) to ‘invent and develop the science of ecological genetics.’ 1 * In doing so he became one of the outstanding evolutionary biologists of his generation, famous not only for the quality of his science but also for the individuality, not to say the eccentricity, of his behaviour. ‘Henry’, as he was known to friends and colleagues, was a man about whom tales accumulated. * Numbers in this form refer to entries in the footnotes at the end of the text.