Frank Fraser Darling

Sir Frank Fraser Darling FRSE LLD (born Frank Darling, 23 June 1903 – 22 October 1979) was an English ecologist, ornithologist, farmer, conservationist and author, who is strongly associated with the highlands and islands of Scotland. He gives his name to the Fraser Darling effect.

Fraser Darling was born in Soresby Street in Chesterfield in northern England, the illegitimate son of Harriet Cowley Ellse Darling and Cpt. Frank Moss. His mother was the daughter of a prosperous family from Sheffield. Her family wanted the child to be fostered and forgotten about. However, she would not cooperate and refused to part with Frank. His father, whom he never met, left for East Africa around the time of his birth, and was killed in action on the Kenya-Tanganyika border in 1917. In 1966 Darling revealed to his son that the pioneering plant geographer, Charles Edward Moss, was his uncle.

After running away from school at the age of 15, Darling was sent to work on a farm in the Pennines. He then studied at the Midland Agricultural College (now part of the University of Nottingham), at Sutton Bonington in the Borough of Rushcliffe in Nottinghamshire, and obtained diplomas in agriculture and dairying. Soon afterwards he married Marion Fraser ("Bobbie") and took the double-barrelled surname Fraser Darling, which, although he was divorced from Bobbie in 1948, he used until the end of his life.

While working as a Clean Milk Advisor in Buckinghamshire, and longing for a research post in Scotland, Fraser Darling heard about the work of the Institute of Animal Genetics at Edinburgh University, and in the early 1930s the Director, Francis Albert Eley Crew, offered him a place there to study for a PhD. From 1929–1930 he was Director of the Commonwealth Bureau of Animal Breeding and Genetics, part of the Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux, at Edinburgh.

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