MURIEL WHELDALE (aka WHELDALE ONSLOW)

Muriel Wheldale, the only child of a barrister, had the good fortune to attend King Edward VI High School in Birmingham, a school which, exceptionally for the time, placed emphasis on the natural sciences in its curriculum (Ayres, 2020). Matriculating at Newnham College in 1900, she obtained first class marks in both Part I (1903) and

Part II of the Tripos (1904), specialising in botany in her final year.

Like Dorothea Marryat and Gladys Sykes (also on this site), she was attracted to the pioneering genetics research being carried out by Geoffrey Bateson, who was building around himself a group of talented young women. Some accounts (such as Canham & Canham, 2002) say she joined his group in 1903 but it seems more likely that, like Sykes, she was introduced to genetics via Bateson’s ‘Bible Classes’ - evening classes through which Bateson proselytyzed the new subject to allcomers.  Probably on ‘graduation’, she joined Bateson’s group beginning her studies with investigations of the inheritance of flower colour in Antirrhinum.

Muriel Wheldale was one of several women featured here whose work was funded by a Bathurst studentship; hers commenced in 1904. She initially worked in the Cambridge Botanical Garden and the Balfour Laboratory for Women.  Muriel Wheldale became as assistant lecturer at Newnham 1906-8 and was subsequently awarded a college fellowship for 6 years, starting in 1909. After Bateson left Cambridge for the John Innes Horticultural Institution, near London, Wheldale followed him for three years before returning to Cambridge.

However, Muriel Wheldale became increasingly interested in the synthesis of anthocyanins (flavonoid pigments which may appear red, purple, or blue according to the cell’s pH). It was a natural progression to migrate to the laboratory of Frederick Gowland Hopkins, Cambridge’s first Professor of Biochemistry (1909). The move marked not only her metamorphosis into a biochemist but her meeting in 1916 with her future husband, The Honourable Huia Onslow (godson of Queen Victoria and son of the 4th Earl of Onslow), whom she married in 1919. Paralyzed from the waist down as the result of an earlier diving accident, Onslow suffered continual ill health and died in 1922. 

Among Muriel Wheldale’s many publications, two of the most notable were, The Anthocyanin Pigments of Plants (1916), and, Practical Plant Biochemistry (1920), the latter “intended for students of botany”. In the Preface to each book she gives special recognition to the help she has received from FF Blackman; both books were published by Cambridge University Press.  As the latter title suggests, Muriel Wheldale was an enthusiastic teacher; in 1926 she was rewarded with a university lectureship in biochemistry, becoming one of the first women to hold a lectureship in Cambridge.

Muriel Wheldale was unusual for her time in that she studied the biochemistry of plants rather than of animals, a consequence no doubt of her ‘degree’ in botany and her lasting connections with the Botany School.  A skilled artist, with an exceptional eye for both detail and colour, as Geoffrey Bateson gladly recognised, she frequently used watercolours to illustrate her work.

She was one of the first three women elected to be members of the newly established Biochemical Society (1913). Combining expertise in genetics and biochemistry, two relatively young sciences, The Honorable Muriel Wheldale Onslow pointed the way to the future. Her own future was, however, relatively short for she died in 1932 at the early age of 52.