GLADYS SYKES

Mary Gladys Sykes had links with both Girton and Newnham Colleges. After obtaining a first class ‘degree’ in 1906, after four years at Girton, she conducted research for two years as a Bathurst Student and then as a Fellow of Newnham. In 1910, at age 26, she married one of her collaborators, David Thoday, and the couple moved to Manchester, where he was appointed a lecturer in plant physiology.

It is said (Rootsweb) that her father, a wealthy cotton broker in Liverpool, had opposed her going to University so her studies were financed by her maternal grandmother. Gladys Sykes proved to be not only exceptionally intelligent but also exceptionally determined, the latter trait being also displayed by her mother, Mary Louisa, who in WWI was Commandant of an Auxiliary Hospital with 32 beds, operating theatre, and an x-ray room, all in the family home at Croes Howell Hall, Wrexham. A grateful nation awarded her an MBE. It was clearly a family of strong-minded women.

Gladys Sykes has been described as a ‘versatile botanist’, her studies ranging from cytology to the histology of seaweeds and the interface between the parasite Cuscuta (Dodder) and its hosts. Simple extant plants thought to reveal pathways for the evolution of land plants were a central interest. She published prolifically, mainly in the Annals of Botany but also in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, on subjects ranging from the anatomy and morphology of Psilotum (a ‘Whisk Fern’, Psilotum was thought at the time to be an ancestor of modern ferns) to that of members of the Gnetaceae (once thought to be close to the angiosperms, these tropical evergreens Gnetales are now recognised as conifers, albeit with a peculiarly simple anatomy). With Thoday, she researched the genetic basis of flower colour and the ‘transpiration current of submerged water plants’.  The first of the couple’s four sons was born in Cambridge in March 1911. Gladys Sykes’ research career went into a swift decline thereafter, although she was made an Honorary Research Fellow by the University of Manchester. Still a young woman by the time her third son was born in 1916, she began to direct her energy in different directions.

The movement for women’s suffrage had its roots in Manchester, thanks to the botanist, Lydia Becker, co-founder of the ground-breaking Manchester National Society for Women’s Suffrage and inspiration of her fellow Mancunian, Emmeline Pankhurst.  Sykes belonged to the more peaceful wing of the suffrage movement, the suffragists.  Both wings scaled down their campaigning during the Great War.  Nevertheless, in 1917, Sykes was a joint signatory of a letter delivered to Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, demanding votes for women in post-war Britain.

As was normal for the day, Gladys Sykes followed her husband wherever his job took him.  At Cambridge, Thoday had been inspired by Harry Marshall Ward. However, his post-graduate studies were largely influenced  by the physiologist, FF Blackman. In 1918, the couple moved to South Africa following Thoday’s appointment to the Harry Bolus Chair of Botany in Cape Town, where he succeeded the recently deceased HHW (Harold) Pearson. A fourth son was born in 1920, nevertheless Sykes found time both to help her husband with his studies of the South African flora and to continue her own studies of the Gnetaceae. At the suggestion of AC Seward, she used her expertise to finish Pearson’s incomplete book, The Gnetales, published in 1929 in the series, The Cambridge Botanical Handbooks.

In passing, it is noteworthy that Harold Pearson was another who received help from Harry Marshall Ward at critical points in his life: after graduating in 1897 as a non-collegiate scholar, he was awarded a scholarship by Christ’s College (Marshall Ward’s College), with the help of a University grant travelled to Ceylon (where Marshall Ward had many contacts) for a year’s study, and was then was employed by Marshall Ward as Assistant Curator of the Herbarium (1898-99).