Ernest Charles Large

[ 167 ]

OBITUARY ERNEST CHARLES LARGE B.Se. (Engineering), F.R.I.C., a.B.E. 1902-1976

E. C. Large joined the British Mycological Society in 1948. He served for several years on the Plant Pathology Committee, was President in 1960, and elected Honorary Member in 1972. He and his wife added much to the liveliness of Forays in the 1950S and 60S. His diverse interests and notable achievements are reflected in his three interlocking careers as chemical engineer, writer and plant pathologist - documented in two manuscript autobiographical memoirs which have been drawn on and cited freely in this notice. He was born on 24 June 1902 at Parsons Green, London. He attended Clark's College, Putney and later St Paul's School. Not wishing to follow his father's career in Law, he became apprenticed to a Hammersmith engineering firm, and simultaneously an internal evening student at London University, obtaining B.Sc. (Engineering) at Battersea Polytechnic in 1924 with mathematics as an additional honours subject. During the next 4 years, while employed as an engineer in daytime, he demonstrated to evening classes in mechanical engineering at Battersea, and himself studied electrical engineering. He writes: 'Over this period I spent my week-ends and holidays rambling about the country, and began to develop a taste for writing which lowed to my father and to early encouragement in essay writing .... I filled my notebooks with juvenilia and read much of Stevenson, Defoe, De Quincey, Shaw and Samuel Butler'.

Chemical Engineer Then in 1928 he moved to South Wales to take up research under R. Lessing on a new air and gravity process for separating coal and pulverised fuel from colliery waste. Eighteen months later he 'retired' to a derelict oast house in Kent to sit out the financial slump by learning to write. 'During this year of "unemployment" - really the best spent year of my life - I married Gladys May Unwin, a London school teacher, then working for her Dip. Lit. under Sir Israel Gollancz', at King's College, London. In 1930 his knowledge of the flow of liquids containing solids in suspension led to appointment as Engineer, later Manager, of the Colloidal Products Section of Einstein's Electro-Chemical

Processes Limited at Acton under Emil Hatschek. Two of their colloidal products, 'Sulsol' and 'Bouisol', were developed as fungicides, and the need to arrange and conduct field trials against a range of plant diseases gave him an introduction to plant pathology. 'G. H. Pethybridge of the Plant Pathology Laboratory at Harpenden guided me in my approach to leading workers and became my friend and mentor'. William Brown planned for him an investigation at Imperial College Field Station. This was carried out by Aphra P. Wilson, who coached him in elementary biology and later joined his staff.

Writer When the Colloidal Products Section was bought by Boots Pure Drug Company in 1936, though retained as a consultant for a time, he was again unemployed: this time with three young children, Michael, Patrick and Joanna. He again turned to writing. Encouragement from Editors who had published essays from the earlier retirement, and 'the scald of my experiences in industry' led him to write a novel. Sugar in the Air, published by Jonathan Cape in 1937, was a Book Society Choice and quickly a best seller. It foreshadows the industrial synthesis of carbohydrates, within a thinly veiled background of his experiences as a chemical engineer, and with characters drawn from life including several former members of the B.M.S. This technological novel was described in U.S.A. as: 'about the most devastating attack on the current scheme of existence since Aldous Huxley wrote Antic Hay'. His second novel, Asleep in the Afternoon (1938), which he considered better than his first, described England on the eve of war. A mathematician, Hugo Boom, had invented an electrical appliance to put himself to sleep. His wife Agatha, who later exploited the invention commercially with gusto, was 'a loving and life-size caricature of Marie Stopes ', In this period, 1936-40, he became a member of the Society of Authors, and of International P.E.N., which brought him friendship with other writers including Middleton Murray, T. S. Elliot, George Orwell, Ezra Pound and Sinclair Lewis. During all this he remained a student: four more

168

(,')

w Q. ~

~ 1

Z Z ::)

u,

Z

~ .~

I

CO

~ 0rr

r-I

L

'~ ~

-, .

" J

)

-

..r-.

r- ~

,0

r { ~

X-

Obituary

~&J

@@

O@)

,

VI

..

~

.

I \Il

I

"

....

",

"J :::.

".J

•

.,,,;i " ..../ (

.,

-t

'7

Obituary years evening classes at Chelsea Polytechnic led to Associateship of the Institute of Chemistry. At the end of Asleep in the Afternoon, the author, who is the central character of both novels (characteristically named' Charles Pry'), is left taking up the study of parasitic fungi in his own garden. In this second 'retirement' Large started work on a technical handbook on fungicide s and insecticides. ' But as I worked at this a more interesting idea took shape in my mind : namely to write a history of plant pathology, not only scientifically accurate and responsible, but also attractive to the general public. This involved a long course of reading , really historical research, in the libraries of the British Museum, the Herbarium at Kew, the Linnean Society and elsewhere. I was sustained in this work by the interest and help of my friend Dr G. H. Pethybridge, and my publisher.' The Advance of the Fungi was published in 1940 and has persisted as a scientific best seller. Its conspicuous social relevance has stimulated countless students. Plant Pathologist

With World War 2, he went to Seale-Hayne Agricultural College, Newton Abbot in 1941 for work on potato seed production and blight spraying as assistant to the Advisory Mycologist, A. Beaumont. Here the foundations were laid for his later work on the quantitative assessment of the disease in the field and its relation to yield. In 1946 he was transferred to the newly created National Agricultural Advisory Service to work under W. A. R. Dillon Weston in Cambridge, where he became familiar with cereal diseases as well as the potato industry of the Fens. W. C. Moore brought Large to the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries Plant Pathology Laboratory, Harpenden, in 1950 to promote and organize quantitative plant disease surveys for England and Wales, and to edit the new journal: Plant Pathology. From his experience in the South-West and Eastern counties, he initiated a national potato blight forecasting service over the radio and in the press. This was based on 'Beaumont periods', with weather criteria provided by the Meteorological Office with help and guidance from L. P. Smith. The associated annual reviews of the progress of blight heralded a series of national surveys of other diseases for which he devised assessment keys. Both surveys and keys were developed in close collaboration with plant pathologists in the advisory and resear ch services. From his interest in cereals came the widely reproduced modification of the Feekes Cereal Growth Stage Key . This he linked with an

assessment key to provide a formula relating levels of mildew infection with yield loss. His philosophy of assessment, which evolved in his thirteen years at P.P.L., putting the U .K. in the forefront of disease-loss appraisal, is expounded in the Annual Review of Phytopathology (1966). As a Civil Servant, Large adopted a highly professional stance: at home he could still satirize Society's conventional values. For years the conspicuous space over the fireplace held a framed graph recording progress in paying off the mortgage on the house. On Sunday mornings from 1952 to 1955 he was again writing fiction : Dawn in Andromeda, published by Jonathan Cape in 1956, with a Book Society recommendation. This technological allegory, which is again partly autobiographical : 'embodied the experience of bringing up a family of enquiring young technologists in their teens ... and it dealt with the origins of many arts and sciences in the guise of a fantasy about " beginning again" on a new planet'. An additional task was given to him from 1955 to 1957, when he was joined by A. E. Cox to work on a project requested and supported by the Alumni Research Foundation of the University of Wisconsin at the instigation of Professor A. J. Riker . The task was to undertake a comprehensive review of recent potato blight epidemics in the hope that certain underlying principles might emerge. The results were published in U.S.D.A. Agricultural Handbook No. 174, by Cox and Large, entitled Potato Blight Epidemics throughout the World (1960). Retirement After retiring from the service of the Ministry of Agriculture in 1963, Large planned to devote his time to an illustrated work on common British toadstools. He recounts how in 1948 he had visited Kew to consult E. W. Mason on the identity of a certain pyrenomycete. 'Mason regarded me quizzically, and hummed and ha'd and would not tell me what the thing was until I had joined the British Mycological Society, for which he there and then produced the application form. I went to Muskett's famous foray in Belfast that year . . . [and] started making engineering drawings of toadstools on 8 x 5 inch index cards . Thereafter we spent almost all our annual holidays on B.M.S. Forays. My labours in running our national potato blight forecasting service were over by September and the annual forays in different parts of the country were vastly entertaining and enjoyable. The B.M .S. must be the friendliest Scientific Society on earth'.

17°

Obituary

In his Presidential Address to the Society in 1960 he had lamented that few toadstools possessed accepted common names. Mary English convened a Committee, including E. C. Large, to remedy this situation, and a provisional list of names of 215 common species was published in 1964. He rapidly developed his talent with water colour and by 1972 had illustrated nearly all species on the list. 'My friends in the Society fed me with specimens as the ravens fed Elijah. Margaret Holden ... brought most of them to me.' Thirty of his paintings were published in W. P. K. Findlay's Wayside and Woodland Fungi (1965), alongside others by Beatrix Potter. Long before retirement the graph over the fireplace had been replaced by a pokerwork map of the World on Mercator's projection, with coloured pins showing how far savings would take E. C. and Gladys on a voyage around the World. In 1964 they spent a year visiting their

radio-astronomer son Michael, and other relatives and friends in New South Wales and Queensland. As Visiting Professor for a term in the University of Sydney, E. C. delivered the first ever course on 'Phytopathometry'. Following this up on returning to England a start was made on a book setting out principles of crop disease measurement, for which his training and experience provided unique qualification. But increasing sickness frustrated these projects. The winter of 1970 was relieved by the absorbing task of making a portable field microscope, designed to be worn round the neck (hence named 'The Albatross Microscope '), which is now in use in Nigeria. This was the last of many ingenious inventions inspired by his engineering talents. After long spells of illness, cared for throughout by his wife, he died in hospital on 25 August 1976. P. H. GREGORY AND F. J. H. MOORE