Tom Tutin

Thomas Gaskell Tutin, FRS (21 April 1908 – 7 October 1987) was Professor of Botany at the University of Leicester and co-author of Flora of the British Isles and Flora Europaea.

Tutin was born on 21 April 1908 in Kew, Surrey, son of Frank Tutin, a biochemist at the Lister Institute, and his wife, Jane Ardern. He was educated at Cotham Grammar School, Bristol, then won a scholarship to Downing College, Cambridge, where he studied Biological Sciences. In 1929, while still an undergraduate, he went on a botanical expedition to Madeira and the Azores, afterwards publishing two papers on the results of his studies there.

After graduating in 1930 he stayed in Cambridge, interrupted by biological expeditions in 1931 to southern Spain and Spanish Morocco, and in 1933 to British Guiana, where the expedition was based on the banks of the Essequibo River. After that trip he moved to Plymouth to work in the laboratory of the Marine Biological Association, researching a disease of eel grass. In 1937 he joined the Percy Sladen Trust expedition to Lake Titicaca, resulting in a significant publication on the development and stability of lake plant communities

After a short period as a demonstrator at King's College London, he became an assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester. There, in addition to teaching and fire-watching duties occasioned by the War, he developed his interests in lake algae begun during the Titicaca expedition. This led to visits to the research station of the Freshwater Biological Association near Lake Windermere, where he met his future wife. In early 1942 Tutin joined the geographical section of the Admiralty's Naval Intelligence Division in Cambridge, which was producing a series of geographical handbooks for military use. Tutin's part in this was to survey the fenlands of the north of England for buckthorn, whose charcoal was used in certain shell fuses.

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