In 1895, Marshall Ward succeeded Charles Cardale Babington who had held the Chair of Botany since 1861, when he was already in his late fifties. As the years passed, age and infirmity meant that Babington was rarely seen in the Botany Department. Despite the efforts of Sydney Vines to introduce some elements of the ‘New Botany’ into its teaching, the atmosphere in the Department was stale.  Matters were made worse because of the facilities in which Botany was housed; dating from 1865 they were at the New Museums Site (land that had previously been the home of the Botanic Garden).  Housed together with Mineralogy in the central part of a U-shaped building, and with a lean-to laboratory against its west face, Botany’s rooms were ill-suited for teaching and research, only the Herbarium being purpose-built, while the library was divided into disconnected areas (Anon, 2004; Gibson, 2019). 

Sydney Vines, Reader 1885-1888 and de facto Head of Botany, ‘had established a laboratory by cutting off a corner of the herbarium with papers screens’. Later, he found facilities for the advanced students in ‘a nondescript gallery room which also housed the botany library’.  In 1890, when Francis Darwin had taken over Vines’ Readership (Professor Babington continuing to be absent because of illness), Botany was granted the use of a more distant building (but on the same site) formerly occupied by the Headmaster of the Perse school. It left much to be desired as a place for delicate physiological experiments but was, nevertheless, 'a pleasant place bathed in sunshine and the centre of much good work during the period 1890-1904' (Porter, 1968). Nevertheless, like the other natural sciences, Botany had by the 1890s outgrown its current facilities.

Within nine years of his appointment in 1895 ( the year following Babington’s death), Marshall Ward had, through his tireless work on the Sites Syndicate and the University's timely purchase of land from Downing College, acquired for Botany a splendid new building which accommodated all the needs of teaching and research, and included a library and an herbarium.

In teaching, Marshall Ward ‘led from the front’, believing, unlike Babington, that it was the Professor’s duty to undertake a large part of the teaching offered by his department. Thus, by 1904, Marshall Ward was delivering not only ‘The General Course of Botany’, but also an advanced course on Fungi. The former consisted of:   ‘An introduction to organography, morphology and anatomy’ and the ‘Physiology of plants’, both courses taught in the Michaelmas term, followed by an ‘Evolutionary Course on the Biology and Classification of the Fungi, Algae, Bryophyta, Vascular Cryptogams and Conifers’, taught in the Lent term. In the summer, he taught the ‘Systematic Botany of Flowering Plants’; which was supplemented by visits to the new Botanic Garden, and by excursions into the surrounding country during the Long Vacation (Walters, 1981).

Marshall Ward’s staff was small, all the men were Cambridge graduates, and most came from middle-class professional or business families, rather like their female students.  Marshall Ward’s teaching was supported at different times by three plant physiologists, FF Blackman, Francis Darwin, and Walter Gardiner, the last being principally a cell physiologist. Unfortunately, the temperaments of Marshall Ward and Gardiner were incompatible – they never ‘understood’ each other – with the result that Gardiner resigned his lectureship in 1897, concentrating thereafter on college duties and his private laboratory (Hill, 1941). Albert Seward, who would succeed Ward to the Chair in Botany, taught and researched palaeobotany, while Reginald Gregory (whose interests were in cytology and genetics) and Arthur Hill were Demonstrators. Hill was made a lecturer in 1904; for a while after Gardiner’s departure Hill had continued Gardiner’s studies of the protoplasmic connections between plants cells but, after travelling in South America in 1903-04, he became a passionate student of the world’s flora, leaving Cambridge in 1907 to become Assistant Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.   Gregory was appointed lecturer in 1907; sadly, he was to be one of the casualties of the Great War.

Next: A Woman's Experience in Marshall Ward's Cambridge, or the  Women Inspired by Marshall Ward.

References

Anonymous. 2004. 100 Years of Plant Sciences in Cambridge, 1904-2004. Published by the Department of Plant Sciences, Cambridge (available online).

Gibson, Susannah. 2019. The Spirit of Inquiry. Oxford: University Press.

Hill, AW. 1941. Water Gardiner 1859-1941. Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society, 3, 985-1004.

Porter, Helen K. 1968. Vernon Herbert Blackman (1872-1967). Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 14, 37-60.

Walters, SM. 1981. The Shaping of Cambridge Botany. University Press: Cambridge.