James Haward Taylor, 1909-1968

K. C. Dunham

1968, 443-448, published 1 November141968 Biogr. Mems Fell. R. Soc. 

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JAMES HA WARD TAYLOR

1909-1968

Elected F.R.S. 1960

T h e untimely death of P r o f e s s o r J. H. T a y l o r while pursuing underwater studies of modern limestone formation off the Seychelles on 25 January 1968, deprived the Society and the science of geology of an outstanding man in the prime of his life. He was born at Esher on 24 February 1909, the only child of James Taylor of Milngavie, Dunbartonshire, a partner in the firm of Balmer, Lawrie and Co., Indian merchants, and Lilian Dudley Ward Haward of Spalding, Lincolnshire. His paternal grandfather, James Smith Taylor, and great-grandfather were both ministers of the Church of Scotland; his maternal grandfather, Henry Haward, served on the staff of the Surveyor- General of India. Both his parents spent much of their lives in that sub-con­tinent and James passed his early years at Calcutta and Mussooree. The family settled at Thames Ditton after returning from India, but Mr Taylor did not long survive. Mrs Taylor, however, lived until 1967 and between mother and son there was a lifelong bond of affection so strong that it was certainly a major influence in James’s life. Holidays from Thames Ditton were often spent in Scotland, where the interest of the growing boy in science was stimulated by his aunt, Margaret Taylor, one of the first women to complete the Natural Science Tripos at Cambridge.

Prepared at Shrewsbury House School, Surbiton, which had a strong classical bias, James went on to Clifton College in 1923. Here he came under the influence of distinguished scholars such as C. H. St L. Russell and H. B. Mayor, who stimulated an interest in the classics which, in spite of his later career in science, he never lost. Of his Clifton days he retained happy memories and maintained a life-long interest in his school, being Chairman of the London branch of the Old Cliftonians at the time of his death.

In 1926 he became an undergraduate of King’s College, University of London, reading chemistry, mathematics, botany and geology at intermediate levels. His selection of geology as one of the subjects was the result of the persuasiveness of Professor W. T. Gordon, an old friend of the family, who occupied the Chair of Geology; Gordon, who, as consultant to the De Beers Corporation, more often than not had a few diamonds in his waistcoat pocket. After starting in the General Degree course in second year, he changed to the Special Degree in Geology with ancillary Chemistry; the magic of the subject had attracted him and his interest was stimulated particularly

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444by the teaching of Dr A. Kingsley Wells in igneous petrology. He gained a First in 1931, was awarded the Tennant Medal and Prize for Geology and the Jelf Medal for the best all-round student in the Faculty of Natural Science. He became an Associate of his College at the same time.

Being now firmly launched in geology, James Taylor began postgraduate studies, supported by a D.S.I.R. grant, on the accessory minerals of British granites as an aid to correlation. This work was brought to a halt in 1933 by his election to a Henry Fund Fellowship tenable at Harvard, but after his return from America it formed the subject of his London Ph.D. thesis, the degree being awarded in 1936.

Harvard of those pre-war days had more than its share of the giants of geology. Those who most influenced Taylor were the petrologists Reginald Aldworth Daly and Esper Signius Larsen J r . ; but he also took courses with L. C. Graton and broadened his interests in the direction of economic mineralogy and mining geology. He was able to attend some of Waldemar Lindgren’s last lectures at M .I.T.; and he was also influenced by the mineralogists Charles Palache, Martin Peacock and Harry Berman. It was at Harvard that I first met Jim; even in those days a tall, elegant, well-groomed figure, beginning to go prematurely grey, looking far older than his age; an ornament of Winthrop House. There we began a life-time’s friendship and I came to appreciate the quiet charm of this reserved yet articulate man. How well I remember his typical castigation of those ‘who were heard for the much speaking’; for this was never to be one of his failings; indeed when he became, as he did in later life, a leader in the councils of his subject, he never wasted an unnecessary word yet contrived to represent a very positive point of view. But to return to Cambridge, Mass.: when, in 1934, winter suddenly changed to high summer and the academic year ended, Taylor, in common with other British visitors, began to make tracks for the West. He had been working, during a crowded year which also included the acquisi­tion of the A.M. degree, on material collected by Professor Larsen from the limestone-monzonite contact zone in the Little Bell Mountains, Montana. Thanks to a friendly arrangement to share a Ford car with Dr Mordecai Lewis, formerly an Anaconda Copper Company geologist at Butte, Montana, he was able to undertake an extended tour which included not only the Little Belt Mountains, but the Highwoods, Leadville, Cripple Creek, and the Yellowstone, Glacier, Yosemite and Grand Canyon national parks.

The profession of geology, seen against the background of the great depression, was not an attractive prospect on either side of the Atlantic. Returning in autumn 1934, Taylor was faced with a year of anxiety, eked out with a demonstratorship at King’s College, London, during which he came near to abandoning science for trade. The geologist competition of the Geological Survey of Great Britain saved the situation for him as for me, and we joined the Exhibition Road, London, office of ‘the Survey’ in 1935, the year of its opening, which also marked the centenary of the foundation of the institution.

Biographical Memoirs

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445It is the practice of the Geological Survey to train its recruits, whatever

their previous experience may have been, in the techniques of field mapping. Taylor was assigned to the Droitwich sheet (1-inch 182) in the care of Dr S. E. Hollingworth, and commenced work on Old Red Sandstone, Trias and Drift, his first independently-surveyed 6-inch quarter-sheet being Worcestershire 29 SW. Before long he had shown that he was a field-man of quality, developing a personal interest in the stratigraphical and glacial problems presented, though expressing still a feeling for igneous studies in his work on the Brockhill dyke. In the notes he has himself left he shows how much in harmony with the philosophy of the G.S.G.B. he became: T cannot too highly stress what I owe to the Geological Survey which I regard as the finest of all schools of field geology, demanding from its officers a wide range of geological interests and the highest standards of scientific accuracy.’ Taylor’s own interests were to widen to include the Cretaceous of Cambridge­shire, then during the war, the Jurassic belt of Lincolnshire, Rutland and Northamptonshire, the source of the greater part of the indigenous iron­stone without which the war effort could hardly have been sustained. Here a close-knit, effective team was mounted under T. H. Whitehead as District Geologist, and including among others, Hollingworth, G. A. Kellaway, F. B. A. Welch, and Vernon Wilson. Taylor not only took a large share in the field work (he wrote me during this period that he thought he had been arrested by nearly every unit in the British Army including the A.T.S.!), but also undertook a highly detailed petrograpliical study of the Northamp­ton Sands Ironstone. The memoir which resulted established his reputation internationally for it could well be claimed to be the only major advance in the understanding of the chamositic ores since A. F. Hallimond’s classic work more than two decades earlier.* Taylor had succeeded in the diffi­cult task of separating optically pure fractions of the two principal ferri­ferous minerals, chamosite and siderite, for analysis; he had given a new classification to the rocks of the individual layers or lenses composing the ironstone (e.g. sideritic chamosite oolite, the prefix signifying the nature of the matrix) and he had produced a coherent picture of a basin of ironstone accumulation, something then believed to be without parallel in modern sedimentation.

Another major contribution of the Midlands group of geologists was the recognition and description of the structural results of the mass-movements of competent beds relative to clays which took place at the surface or under shallow cover, presumably in Quaternary times. The results of these move­ments, described in joint papers (1944, 1953) are of great significance in foundation problems.

In the months immediately after the ending of the war, Taylor had an opportunity to see something of what had been happening in the German iron orefields which he visited as a member of a B.I.O.S. mission. Upon his

* Hallim ond, A. F. 1925. Iron ores: Bedded ores of England and Wales. Petrography and chemistry. Spec. Rpts Min. Resources o f Great Britain, 29.

James Haward Taylor

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return, doubts briefly assailed him about the future of official geology in Britain, and for a time he contemplated a transfer to the administrative civil service; fortunately for the science, in the end he did not take up the possibility offered to him, but instead devoted three more productive years to the Jurassics of the East Midlands. A brief diversion from this was pro­vided when he organized, jointly with me, Excursion A. 1 (Economic Geology of England and Wales) of the 18th International Geological Congress in 1948.

An important crisis in his affairs now occurred. The chair at King’s College fell vacant and was offered to James Taylor as by far the most suitable candidate. No one was surprised when he returned to his college as head of the Geology Department. This did not prevent him from completing the Geological Survey map and the Memoir (Kettering, published 1953) upon which he was engaged. He had already had some experience of lectur­ing, in a quiet way, as an honorary teacher of geology at the Working Men’s College, NW1, and now he found the academic life very much to his liking. His department, though hemmed in by difficulties of space, nevertheless flourished and attracted excellent students. He was able to branch out into new research and professional work Dealing with the latter first, he became geological adviser to the Iron and Steel Board in 1954, a position he still occupied in 1967: he served on the Burden Committee of the British Iron and Steel Research Association from 1950 to 1959; he became a member of the Raw Materials Committee of the British Ceramic Research Association in 1953 and its chairman in 1957. His professional work overseas took him to Portugal to advise on a bridge over the Tagus at Lisbon, to Nigeria in connexion with tin and columbite, to Ghana to visit gold and manganese operations, to N. Rhodesia to see the Copper Belt.

In the scientific category should be placed the study he made of the famous lead-zinc-vanadium deposit at Rhodesia Broken Hill. Here, among other new aspects he established firm evidence of the crystallization of galena from solutions of supergene origin (1954, 1958). He was to pursue the matter further in his thoughtful presidential address to Section C of the British Association at Aberdeen in 1963, when he considered aspects of diagenesis and came out in favour of supergene brines as major agents of mineralization, thereby anticipating by several years one of the dominating ideas of 1967-8. His contribution to the Prague conference on post-magmatic ore deposition in 1964 also emphasized the importance of brines.

Meanwhile the sedimentological interests that his work with the Geological Survey had generated were being pursued in depth. A group of young workers at King’s College, directed by him, systematically examined the Hastings Beds of the Weald, revealing an ancient delta. The connexions between sedimentation and orogeny were critically examined. In his last pub­lic appearance, at the Inter-University Conference at Leicester in December 1967, the philosophically significant point was made that chamosite is now known as a product of present-day sedimentation.

446 Biographical Memoirs

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447The value of Professor Taylor’s researches was recognized by his election

to the Fellowship of the Royal Society in 1960. He served on Council 1963-4, was the Society’s delegate to the International Union of Geological Sciences meeting at New Delhi, December 1964. In the same year he succeeded Professor L. Hawkes as Chairman of the British National Committee for Geology. He was elected a Fellow of the Geological Society in 1938; the award to him of that Society’s J. B. Tyrell Fund in 1947 enabled him to visit the Wabana iron orefield in Newfoundland; he was on its Council 1950-4. He has played an active part in the Mineralogical Society’s affairs, being on its Council 1945-8, Treasurer 1951-60 and President 1963-5; and in those of the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy, the Council of which he joined in 1955. He will be remembered particularly for his eight years’ chairmanship of the Publications and Library Committee, during which time the whole style and method of publication by the Institution was radi­cally changed. At the time of his death he had been President of the Inter­national Association of Sedimentologists, which had held a most successful meeting in this country in the summer of 1967. Mention should also be made of his service with the Geology and Geophysics Research Grants Sub-commit­tees successively of D.S.I.R., S.R.C. and N.E.R.C., of the influential support he gave to the process of integration of geological surveys as a member of the Natural Environment Research Council.

James Taylor never married, so there are no direct survivors. Sympathy can only go then to his distant relatives, his friends and his subject; in the latter his ideas will certainly survive him.

Photograph by Walter Bird, F.I.B.P., F.R.P.S.K. C. D u n h a m

James Haward Taylor

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1933. (With E. A. Gamba.) The Oatland Igneous Complex (I.O.M.). Proc. Geol.Lond. 44, 355-357.

1934. The Mountsorrel granodiorite and associated igneous rocks. Geol. Mag. 71, 1-16.1935. A contact metamorphic zone from the Little Belt Mountains. Amer. Min. 20, 120-128.1937. A contribution to the study of accessory minerals of igneous rocks. Amer. Min. 22,

686-700.1938. The contact zone of Sheep Creek, Little Belt Mountains, Montana. Geol. Mag. 75,

219-226.1940. The composite dike at Brockhill, Worcestershire. Min. Mag. 25, 538-549.1944. (With S. E. H ollingworth & G. A. K ellaway.) Large-scale superficial structures

in the Northampton Ironstone Field. Quart. J. geol. Soc. Lond. 100, 1-44.1946. (With S. E. H ollingworth.) An outline of the geology of the Kettering District.

Proc. Geol. Ass. Lond. 57, 204-233.1946. (With S. E. H ollingworth.) Kettering Field Meeting, Report by the Directors.

Proc. Geol. Ass. Lond. 57, 235-245.1946. Evidence of submarine erosion in the Lincolnshire Limestone of Northamptonshire.

Proc. Geol. Ass. Lond. 57, 246-262.

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1947. The geology of the Cretaceous ores of the Salzgitter-Ilsede region and the Doggerores of Bavaria, Wurttemberg and Baden. In Mining of German ore by under­ground and opencast methods. B.I.O.S.Final Report, No. 1158, 57-89.

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Mag. 29, 18-26.1950. The contribution of petrology to the study of sedimentation. Science Progress, 38,

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1958. The formation of supergene galena at Broken Hill, Northern Rhodesia. Min. Mag. 31, 908-913.

1958. Sedimentation and orogeny. Nature, Lond. 182, 91.1959. Pre-Cambrian sedimentation in England and Wales. Eclog. Geol. Helv. 51, 1078-1092.1960. Recent geophysical work in Britain. Nature, Lond. 185, 739-740.1961. Origin of the Northern Rhodesian Copper Deposits. Nature, Lond. 192, 98.1961. (With G. H. M itchell & R. W. Pocock.) Geology of the country round Droit-

wich, Abberley and Kidderminster. Mem. Geol. Surv. 137 pp.1963. Sedimentary features of an ancient deltaic complex. The Wealden Rocks of south­

eastern England. Sedimentology, 2, 2-28.1963. (With J. E. Prentice & others.) Geology of the country around Kettering,

Corby and Oundle. Mem. Geol. Surv. 149 pp.1964. Some aspects of diagencsis. Advancement of January, pp. 417-436.1964. Sidney William Wooldridge, 1900-1963. Biog. Mems Roy. Soc. 10, 371-388.1965. The chemistry of deep connate waters and of ore fluids. Problems of Postmagmatic Ore

Deposition, 2, 429-431. Prague.1965. Continental drift. Phil. Trans. A, 258, 52-53.1966. 7 he exploration of the upper mantle. Abbott Memorial Lecture, The University of Notting­

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Geol. Congress, Leicester, Dec. 1967 (in press).1968. (With G. A. K ellaway.) The influence of landslipping on the development of the

City of Bath, England. Compt. Rend. XXIII Int. Geol. Cong, (in press).1969. (With B. C. Worssam.) Geology of the country around Cambridge. Mem. Geol. Surv.

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