PERCY FRY KENDALL

1856-1936

Percy Fry K endall was bora on 15 November, 1856, the youngest of eight children of Charles Kendall, commercial traveller, and his wife, Hannah Eltringham, at Mile End, Bow, in the Parish of Stepney. His forbears on both sides were sea-faring folk, and as he was considered delicate he was never sent to school. As a boy he was a studious reader, a naturalist, and a collector, and as a young man he attended classes at Charles Bradlaugh’s Hall of Science, where he was associated with Annie Besant, and profited by a course of University Extension lectures in geology given by a young graduate from Cambridge, who became Professor Sollas. In 1874, on results of the South Kensington Science and Art Department Examination, he gained the only silver medal ever awarded by that Department for Geology.

In 1879 and 1880 Kendall attended summer courses for teachers at the Royal College of Science, and thereafter transferred to the full day course in Biology under Professor T. H. Huxley. He always recollected with pride an occasion in the spring of 1881 when a class which Huxley was conducting was visited by “ the greatest of evolutionists, Charles D arw in” . In 1881 he was accepted to study Geology under Professor Judd, and was also taught by Warington Smyth, Rutley, and Grenville Cole, being placed at the head of the class list of the year 1882. He stayed on at College for a further year, to assist Judd in some of his researches, and to do independent work on the anatomy of Crocodilia in Huxley’s laboratory.

Before he went to South Kensington, Kendall was already an assiduous collector of London Tertiary and East Anglian Pliocene fossils, and had supplied material to Edward Charlesworth, Gwyn Jeffries, Searles V. Wood, jr., R. B. and E. T. Newton, the Brothers Bell, Harmer, Thomas Huxley, H. B. Woodward, and Robert Etheridge. He was stimulated by Dr. Sorby’s Presidential Address to the Geological Society to investigate the mineralogical constitution of the shells he had collected, and his earliest publications are “ On the dissolution of Aragonite Shells in the Corallian Crag of Aldborough,” Geol. Mag., 1883 ; and “ On Slickensides and the Origin of Marl Bands in C halk” (of Croydon), Geol. Mag., 1884, which were supplemented by others on like subjects in 1888, 1896, and 1931. The paper “ On the Pliocene Rocks of St.

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Erth ” Qiiart. J . Geol. Soc., 1886, in collaboration with R. G. Bell, is thecompletion of work begun by S. V. Wood, jr., for the identification of material assembled by many collectors. He did not return to the working out of his collections from East Anglia until 1930, when for the London Meeting of the British Association he wrote up “ The Red Crag of Walton- on-the-Naze,” Geol. Mag., 1931, after a lapse of forty-five years.

For four years from 1885 Kendall was at Owens College, Manchester, two years as Bishop Berkeley Fellow, and then for two further years as Assistant Lecturer in Geology in Victoria University under Professor Boyd Dawkins. In 1886 he married Helen May Woodward, of Wolver­hampton. Short papers of this time record a visit with Butler to collect volcanic rocks, especially tachylites, in Mull ; and his watchfulness for temporary exposures in the district about Stockport and Manchester. A published lecture “ On the History of Our Local Rocks,” Trans. Manch. Micr. Soc., 1886, is evidence of his ability to present scientific argument with popular appeal. As a University Extension Lecturer, his services were in demand at several Lancashire and Yorkshire towns.

As an associate and leader of late Victorian and twentieth-century amateur geologists, Kendall was for forty years an active committee worker of Section C of the British Association. To the Manchester Meeting of 1887 came Carvill Lewis to present the case that in Europe, as in North America, the Pleistocene Glacial deposits were put in place by land ice, and that the margins of that ice can be located. Lewis had read the British literature and had spent the summers of 1886 and 1887 tramping or driving through our glaciated or unglaciated country, or viewing the topography from the windows of a railway train. His argument that drift banks and boulder clay deposits are the analogue of moraines at the edges of the Greenland ice-cap, was attractive and well presented. Kendall had been cicerone to Lewis through the Yorkshire dales, and was already converted to the land-ice view ; so when Lewis was taken ill, and in the spring of 1888 died, Kendall became chief advocate, and took up the organization of workers to accumulate specific facts to document the case. About this time (1889) Kendall left M an­chester for a part-time Lectureship in Natural Sciences in Stockport Technical School. This was a period of keen debate, and intensive search for critical evidence, by members of local scientific societies, co­ordinated through the Erratic Blocks Committee of the British Associa­tion. Within four years, Kendall and his friends had charted the distribution of sea-shells and travelled boulders in drift on plains and hills about the Irish Sea. In 1891 the Glacialists’ Association was formed to extend this work, and through the North-West of England Boulder

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Committee Hints for the Guidance of Observers of Glacial Geology, written by Kendall, was published and widely distributed from Stockport. After the Cardiff Meeting of the British Association, a distinguished party of geologists visited the high-level shelly drifts of Macclesfield, where the American Glacialist G. F. Wright was so impressed by “ The lucidity and force of Mr. Kendall’s arguments ” that he called for the manuscript of his discourse, and included it as the chapter on Britain in his International Primer, Man and the Glacial Period, published in 1892. Gregory in a review ( Geol.Mag., 1892) described this statement as “ a general sketch of the whole subject of glaciation from a new, advanced, and revolutionary point of view” .

From September, 1891, Kendall was appointed to give two courses of lectures during the winter terms to classes of coal-mining and of agricultural students at the Yorkshire College, Leeds. This revival, after an interval of several years, of the Department of Geology which had been started by Professor A. H. Green in 1878, was an instant success, and the following year, when a degree course for Science Students was demanded, the Stockport Lectureship had to be abandoned. Other extramural classes, both in Lancashire and Yorkshire, were carried on for a time, but even five years later, when the number of College students had increased to fifty and the teaching hours exceeded five hundred per session, little Departmental equipment had been provided and the appointment at Leeds remained a part-time lectureship. Meanwhile, full and careful investigations of the difficult problems connected with the origin of drift were being prosecuted with vigour on both sides of the Pennines, and half a dozen papers presenting the land-ice case had stimulated the local controversialists. The importance of one of these, On the Glacial Geology of the Isle of Man, delivered as a lecture in 1891 and published by the Isle of M an Natural History Society in 1894, together with other of his researches, was recognized by the award to Kendall in 1895 by the Council of the Geological Society of London of a moiety of the Lyell Fund.

Encouraged by this recognition of his achievements, Kendall in 1896 protested by broadsheet to the Council of the Yorkshire College against the continued starvation of the Leeds Geology Department. Thereafter conditions were improved ; local water authorities, the railways, and by and by the coal owners, discovered the ingenuity and encyclopaedic knowledge of the Leeds Lecturer in Geology, and began to require his professional help ; and soon an Assistant Lecturer and later a personal Research Assistant were added to the staff of the Department. Visits to South Norway and to Switzerland, and especially to the Marjelen

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See in the summer of 1894, had coloured his outlook on glacial matters, and stimulated him afresh to discoveries of ice-margin phenomena in Yorkshire. From the dales opening on the Vale of York, he worked round and remapped in detail the drifts of Cleveland, the Wolds, and Holderness in the course of a decade.

From the time of his coming to Leeds, Kendall was a central figure of the Leeds Geological Association, and at meetings and excursions of the Yorkshire Geological and Polytechnic Society, and he was almost as active in the East Riding with the Hull Geological Society. Members of all these Societies were enthusiastic supporters of the Glacialists’ Association, for whom from 1893 till 1898 Kendall contributed, assembled, and edited, at first monthly and later quarterly, The ’ Magazine.It was for him that they, with his students, collected the long series of boulder-dispersal records, published by the British Association, and helped towards completion the extensive monographic description of “A System of Glacial Lakes in the Cleveland Hills,” Quart. J . Geol. Soc., 1902, republished with supplementary detail and additional maps by the Yorkshire Geological Society in their Proceedings of 1904.

During this time, the mysteries of underground watercourses of Ingleborough and the Craven Uplands were explored by pot-hole clubs and ramblers, and Kendall lent a guiding hand in organizing the com­pletion of the records concerned with the sources of the River Aire. He thus became familiar with the Carboniferous Limestone and its sub­divisions ; and, with M arr and Garwood, was concerned in the beginnings of the British Association’s Carboniferous Zones Committee. He also took up the general question of natural storage and feed of underground water to wells in jointed and porous formations, for local supplies of drinking-water to villages and towns, more particularly in chalk under the Drift of East Yorkshire, and in the Trias and Magnesian Limestone about Doncaster and along the western margin of the Vale of York. A paper “ On the Brockrams of the Vale of Eden and the Evidence They Afford of an Inter-Permian Movement of the Pennine Faults,” Geol. Mag., 1902, sets forth discoveries made by successive field classes, and develops a novel and important inference from the provenance of these conglomerates.

From water-bearing drifts, and from Mesozoic and Permian strata to the Coal Measures which extend eastwards from Leeds beneath them, was but a step, and as with the turn of the century there was great activity in the development of new collieries about Doncaster and in Sherwood Forest, it was natural that Kendall should watch the water troubles met at the sinking of new pits. He had recognized how Jurassic

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formations thin towards the Market Weighton axis, and when, early in 1904, the Chairman, Lord Allerton, and the Geological Committee of the Royal Commission on Coal Supplies asked for evidence bearing on the probable limits of the Concealed Coalfield of Yorkshire, Derbyshire, and Nottinghamshire, Kendall assembled all that was known of the recurrent bendings about that axis, and along the south-eastward continuation of the axial line through Charnwood. Adopting the Godwin Austin-Suess view of posthumous folding, he maintained that major pre-Permian anticlines underlie these lines of Mezozoic bending, and that these determine the limits of the Coalfield basin. Kendall’s report to the Royal Commission of 1905 is a masterly summary of this optimistic view (he estimated the area of unexposed coalfield at 3885 square miles), and its importance was recognized forth­with by the conferment on him of the M.Sc. degree by the newly established University of Leeds; by his election as an Honorary Member of the Institution of Mining Engineers, and later, in 1909, by the Geological Society’s award to him of the Lyell Medal.

Meanwhile, younger men, stimulated to enthusiasm by the teaching which Kendall had broadcast to all comers during the years he was working out the system of glacial lake overflow valleys in Cleveland, were investigating ice retreat stages about most of the other upstanding hill masses of the Pennines, and Southern Scottish hills. A crop of papers by Dwerryhouse (Teesdale 1904), Maufe and Jowett (Airedale 1903), Charlesworth, and joint papers by Kendall with Maufe on the Cheviot Hills (1903), and with Bailey on East Lothian Hills (1908), are note­worthy products of this infective stimulation.

During his fifteen years of service as Lecturer in the Yorkshire College, the Leeds School of Geology had so developed, both in teaching and as a centre of research, that when, at the break-up of the older federation of northern colleges which constituted the Victoria University, Leeds University received its charter, the status of the Department was advanced and in 1906 Kendall was made Professor of Geology. With increased responsibilities, Kendall had much less opportunity for researches in the field, and except for records of observations made during inspections of colliery workings, and the considerations of their plans, most of his later publications are summary accounts of Yorkshire geological formations and their history, or argumentative interpretations of the growth of coal seams, their irregularities, and the conversion of vegetable material into coal. The earliest of these compilative works is the long chapter on Geology in the Victoria County History of Yorkshire, written in 1904 and published in 1907. This is remarkable for its wealth of detail and

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its breadth of view, and was characterized by Sollas, when presenting the Lyell Medal, as “ a model of its kind It is full of suggestions for researches, many of which have since been undertaken by Yorkshire amateurs or by professional geologists.

Chapters descriptive of British Carboniferous and Permian Sediments, and the Quaternary Deposits, which were contributed to the Handbuch der Regionalen Geologie, written before 1914 and published in Germany during the war, are scholarly summaries of a widely scattered literature, so presented that no reader is left in doubt as to which, among alternative interpretations of evidence, the writer would wish his reader to adopt. That British coal-seams grew on land-flat marshes is maintained as strongly as the view that no great Pleistocene submergence is required to explain the origin of British glacial drift, while the evidence for inter­glacial periods in Britain is characterized as indecisive.

During the war period, in collaboration with H. E. Wroot, the com­mercial editor of the Yorkshire Post, a well-tried course of local lectures on the Geology of Yorkshire was written up in book form. It was designed to interest and stimulate the northern amateur geologist, and special emphasis was laid upon the historical, personal, and speculative interpretations of the origin of local formations. The second half of the book is a route-guide for more than a hundred field excursions by train or on foot in Yorkshire, arranged systematically for those who, without loss of time, would examine for themselves the geological features of the county. The book, printed in Austria, is very fully illustrated and was published and distributed by the joint authors in 1924.

The latest of these summary presentations is the chapter on coal Measures in the English edition of the British section of Regionalen Geologie the Handbook of the Geology of , edited by Evans andStubblefield. This, written in 1927 and published in 1929, is a clear statement of the then state of knowledge of the British Coalfields, focussed with the experience of a master, and full of suggestions for further in­vestigations which are required to make the local narratives complete.

In 1910 the Marquess of Ripon, who for fifty-two years had been Patron and President of the Yorkshire Geological Society, died, and Professor Kendall was elected his successor. The presidential review of the evolution of ideas from a Noachian deluge and cataclysmal waves of translation to land-ice for prime movers of the Yorkshire Drift, affords the clearest exposition of Kendall’s glacial and geological philosophy. In 1911 the Geologists’ Association held their summer field meeting in the West Yorkshire Dales. The party was led by Kendall, who presented a balanced view of the Marr-Tiddeman alternative interpretations of

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the Craven Carboniferous knoll reefs, and demonstrated the fault system along the edges of the Pennine Block. He also took the party to Whitwood Colliery, Normanton, and showed them examples of “ split seams ” and “ washes ” in coal seams, suggesting problems for which no complete solutions has even yet been found. Minor interruptions were explained as silted-up channels of streams which had meandered through the coal swam ps; but it was allowed that the broader washes are intimately asso­ciated with tectonic movements which took place during Coal Measure times.

During his last decade at Leeds, coal seams, the manner of their growth and consolidation, and their wash-out interruptions, became a very personal matter with Professor Kendall. He made inquiries by correspondence at every colliery in Britain, and accumulated much new information by visiting colliery workings, and by the transcription of large-scale working plans. He developed the opinion that as the deltas on which the coal swamps grew subsided, their foundations were bent or broken by faults and from time to time so shaken by earthquakes that the violent lurching of watery and gassy subsoils broke through the coal seams and produced the jumbled ground which characterizes the margins of many wash-outs.

A paper “ On Cleat in Coal Seams,” Geol. Mag., 1914, draws the attention of geologists to the universality of this unexplained joint phenomenon, and the hypothesis is advanced that the cleat cracks were produced by earthquakes as the coal consolidated. In this view Kendall persisted for many years, but in the last of all his published papers “ On the Formation of Rock Joints and the Cleat of Coal,” jointly with Professor Briggs, presented to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1933, he adopted instead the Daubree view that jointing stresses must be torsional. That sweep of earth tides, providing rhythmic alternating torque acted on vegetable material as, during consolidation, it was losing plasticity and becoming brittle, and compelled it to flex and eventually to fail through fatigue, is their new alternative suggestion.

In 1917, “ Notes on the Correlation of Certain Seams in the Yorkshire Coalfield,” Trans. Min. Eng. 1917, and a paper “ On the Splitting of Coal Seams by Partings of Dirt. Part I, Splits That Rejoin” (there is no Part II), emphasize, as never before, the reduction of bulk associated with the change from peat to coal, and illustrate in cross-section the configuration of coal seams that may have resulted from the shrinkage of peat about channels partly filled with sand. These constitute one well-defined type of wash-out, and half a dozen examples are cited from West Yorkshire.

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A more general paper, “ On Wash-Outs in Coal Seams and the Effects of Contemporary Earthquakes,” was read to the Geological Society of London early in 1919, but was never completed for publication. The abstract printed in the Proceedings records that Kendall was convinced that rock faults, dumb faults, nips and jumbles on the edges of wash-outs, which others have regarded as internal redistribution of material by tectonic movements, can be matched as effects of earthquakes on present- day river deltas. More recently directed by Professor Kendall and aided by the Royal Society Government Grant Committee, wash-out phenomena in Yorkshire, Derbyshire, and Nottinghamshire, and in Lancashire and Cumberland, have been systematically visited and examined, and their outlines plotted by Dr. A. Raistrick ; but these records, and the con­clusions arising from them, have not yet been published.

For the Hull Meeting of the British Association, 1922, Kendall was elected President of Section C. His address “ On the Physiography of the Coal Swamps ” is a synthesis of his views on coal and coal seams. He compares the original spread of a Yorkshire coal seam with the post­glacial growth of marginal forest and the “ moor-log ” which were submerged on the deltas of the north European rivers and now form the floor of the south part of the North Sea. A section descriptive of cleat in coal claims that its formation “ is dependent upon the earth’s planetary ro ll” .

Kendall, then aged sixty-five, retired from the Chair of Geology at Leeds University at the end of the session in 1922. At his retirement over one hundred and fifty of his friends among geologists, coal-owners, and one-time students in Yorkshire, acknowledging his brilliantly original mind, his industry, and enthusiasm, and the fertile resource with which he pursued inquiries and encouraged others, more particularly in glacial geology and investigations in the coalfield, had subscribed to present a testimonial, which was spent on the purchase of a motor-car. He was elected Emeritus Professor of Leeds University, and in 1926 received the Honorary Doctorate of Science. He was elected into the Royal Society in 1924.

During the first four years of his retirement, Kendall carried on his professional work and continued to reside at Leeds, but engagements, more especially Parliamentary inquiries and duties as Consultant to the Metropolitan Water Board, occupied him so much in London that he moved to Wimbledon. Later, for health and family reasons, he went to live at Frinton-on-Sea, Essex, and there, in 1930, took up anew the study of the Pliocene fossils of the Crag, reopening the diggings of his youth, which with accustomed vigour he demonstrated to members of

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Section C attending an excursion prior to the British Association Meeting in London in September, 1931.

He died at Frinton on 19 March, 1936, and was buried at Ipswich. Mrs. Kendall and their two sons, Percy Fry Kendall, Lecturer in Zoology at the Agricultural College, Edinburgh, and Geoffrey Kendall, Technical Journalist, survive him.

W. G. Fearnsides.

OBIT. F