Integral to the story of Gabrielle Matthaei are two men.  The first, Rowland Biffen, had graduated in botany in 1896. After two years travelling in the Caribbean and South America, where he investigated rubber production, he returned in 1898 to carry out mycological research under Harry Marshall Ward’s supervision (Engledow, 1950). Although Biffen remained a keen mycologist (he was President of the British Mycological Society in 1905 and again in 1930), he was in 1899 attracted to the newly formed University Department of Agriculture, where he was appointed Lecturer, relinquishing his post as Demonstrator in the Botany Department. Plant breeding became, thereafter, Biffen’s principal concern – a major focus being wheat breeding, particularly for disease resistance.

It is Rowland Biffen and, more so, a second Cambridge botanist, Albert Howard, who link Gabrielle Matthaei with Marshall Ward. Howard graduated in 1899, his undergraduate career having been exceptionally busy for two reasons. First, showing an early interest in agriculture, he had included alongside his botanical studies work for the Cambridge Diploma in Agriculture (Marshall Ward not only made available a small room in his already overcrowded Botany Department where some agricultural botany could taught but was among the professors who contributed lectures (Charnley, 2011)). Second, soon after graduating, Howard published research - on a disease of Tradescantia – that had been completed when he was an undergraduate; it had been under the supervision of Marshall Ward, his mentor to whom he acknowledged himself indebted (Howard, 1953, chapter 5).

Like Biffen’s, Howard’s first years after graduation combined travel with studies of tropical agriculture. From 1899-1902, he was in the West Indies, first as Lecturer in Agricultural Science at Harrison College, Barbados, and then as Mycologist at the Imperial Department of Agriculture for the West Indies. In his papers on the diseases of sugarcane he acknowledges following the methods of Marshall Ward and in the second, written in January 1903 (Howard, 1903), he gives thanks to Harry Marshall Ward for having allowed him to repeat some experiments after having returned to Cambridge. Back in Britain, Howard obtained a lectureship in botany at the South Eastern Agricultural College, at Wye, in Kent, where his attention turned to breeding hops.  

Gabrielle Matthaei was, like Agnes Robertson – who was three years Gabrielle’s junior – a product of the ground-breaking North London Collegiate School. From a German family and described as ‘quiet and reserved’, she found when she arrived at Newnham College in 1895 inspiration in the teaching of the Ida Freund, a chemist of German origins (Howard, L., ‘Mothers and Daughters’, unpublished). Gabrielle, nevertheless, chose to take botany in Part II of the Tripos examinations. Supported in part by income from a Demonstratorship in Chemistry in the Balfour Laboratory, she carried out research not in plant pathology but in plant physiology. Under the supervision of FF Blackman, her results formed a vital part of what has become known as ‘Blackman’s Law’ - surely, an example of the ‘Matilda Effect’, the celebration of a man’s but not a woman’s contribution to a joint endeavour.

Why is Gabrielle included here among ‘Women Inspired by Marshall Ward’? Apart from their both having arrived in Cambridge in the same year, her having been taught botany by him, and his love of Germany and fluency in the German language, further connection lies in her life after leaving Cambridge in 1905. 

In that year she married Albert Howard. He had recently been appointed Imperial Economic Botanist to the Government of India, charged with researching plant diseases and raising the yield of staple crop varieties (p.65, Barton, 2018). Their wedding took place in Bombay (= Chennai), India. The couple had met in Cambridge, become engaged, and continued a long correspondence during their years of separation, much of it about botanical matters. Sometimes the subject was plant pathology; Gabrielle’s clarity of thought and confidence are apparent in her comments on one draft plan Albert had sent to her: 'The part on plant diseases could be vastly improved and made much more effective if taken rather differently…’ (Howard, 1953, chapter one). 

From 1905 until Gabrielle’s death in 1930 the couple worked closely together, first at the new Imperial Agricultural Research Institute at Pusa, (Barton, 2018, p.62), and later at Indore after Albert was appointed Director of the Institute of Plant Industry in 1928.  Breeding wheat occupied a large part of the Howards’ first years in India as they tested large numbers of Indian and European wheats for their resistance to the three most common rusts in India. As noted by their biographer, Louise (Gabrielle’s sister and Albert’s second wife), they kept in touch with Biffen and the advances he was making in plant breeding (Howard, 1953, chapter 8). Rowland Biffen suggested they might try using Einkorn (one of the earliest forms of cultivated wheat) in their breeding programme, supplying them with the necessary seed. Though the experiment with Einkorn ended in failure, experiments with Emmer (another early form) yielded more promising results, resembling those that had been obtained in Cambridge by Dorothea Marryat working under Marshall Ward’s and Biffen’s guidance (Howard & Howard, 1907).  Gabrielle was fully involved in the practicalities of crossing different strains of wheat, but was noted also for enduring long hours of work in the field, where she employed her exceptional observational skills.

To summarise a lifetime’s work: as a result of the Howards’ breeding programme there were by 1921 over one million acres under cultivation with the new ‘ Pusa’ varieties of wheat (Howard, 1953, chapter 2). Other crops were bred with equal success. The Howards gradually turned their attention to controlling soil microbiology and chemistry in order to optimise whatever genetic resistance their plants possessed (a subject on which Ward had reflected many years before, suggesting that immunity might vary according to levels of mineral nutrients in the soil (Ward, 1902b)).

Gabrielle’s outstanding work was soon recognised by the authorities. In 1911 she was invited by the Governor General to attend the Durbar at Government House in Delhi where, she proudly remarked, she was the only woman present, and, in 1913, King George V was pleased to bestow on her the Kaiser-i-Hind medal for public service in India. The medal was of the highest kind (gold), similar to that given to Mohandas Ghandi the following year. Recognition came too from the scientific community.  She was President of the Botany Section of the Indian Science Congress in 1923, and President of the Agricultural Section in 1929, each time delivering a keynote address to the annual gathering (Howard 1923, 1929).

After Gabrielle’s death, Albert felt unable to continue his practical work in India concentrating instead on proselytising the benefits of organic farming.   More about Albert's life may be found here under Maud Grieve (see Medicinal Plants in Wartime).

Gabrielle Matthaei may not have worked directly under Harry Marshall Ward’s supervision but she and her peers learned their botany* from him – not least plant pathology – as too did Rowland Biffen and Albert Howard, the men who had the greatest influence on her professional life after Cambridge.

In the small world of Cambridge University, and Newnham College in particular, the few female botanists would have been well known to each other, not least through shared laboratories and activities such as the science clubs*. They enjoyed a common heritage, the ideas and inspiration of Harry Marshall Ward.

*Ward’s lecture courses and the clubs are described in 'Marshall Ward's Botany School'.

References

Barton, GA. 2018. The Global History of Organic Farming. Oxford: University Press.

Charnley, B. 2011. Agricultural Science, Plant Breeding and the Emergence of a Mendelian System in Britain, 1880-1930. PhD Thesis, University of Leeds.

Engledow, FL. 1950.  Rowland Harry Biffen, 1874-1949.  Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society, 7, 9-25.

Howard, A. 1903. On some diseases of the sugar-cane in the West Indies. Annals of Botany, 17, 373-413.

Howard, Gabrielle LC. 1923. The role of plant physiology in agriculture. The Agricultural Journal of India, 18, 204-218.

Howard, Gabrielle LC. 1929. The improvement of plants. The Agricultural Journal of India, 24, 149-158.

Howard, Louise E. 1953. Sir Albert Howard in India. London: Faber & Faber

Howard A & Howard Gabrielle LC. 1907.  Note on immune wheats. The Journal of Agricultural Science, 2, 278-280. 

Ward, HM. 1902b. Experiments on the effect of mineral starvation on the parasitism of the uredine fungus, Puccinia dispersa, on species of Bromus.  Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 71. 138-151.

Now read about four very different women and their role in the provision of Medicinal Plants in Wartime