Thomas Petch (born

Hornsea Hornsea is a seaside town and civil parish in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England. The settlement dates to at least the early medieval period. The town was expanded in the Victorian era with the coming of the Hull and Hornsea Railway in 18 ...

Yorkshire Yorkshire ( ; abbreviated Yorks), formally known as the County of York, is a historic county in northern England and by far the largest in the United Kingdom. Because of its large area in comparison with other English counties, functions have ...

, 11 March 1870; died King's Lynn,

Norfolk Norfolk () is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in East Anglia in England. It borders Lincolnshire to the north-west, Cambridgeshire to the west and south-west, and Suffolk to the south. Its northern and eastern boundaries are the No ...

, 24 December 1948) was a prolific English mycologist and plant pathologist best remembered for his work on the interaction between

fungi A fungus ( : fungi or funguses) is any member of the group of eukaryotic organisms that includes microorganisms such as yeasts and molds, as well as the more familiar mushrooms. These organisms are classified as a kingdom, separately from ...

and

insect Insects (from Latin ') are pancrustacean hexapod invertebrates of the class Insecta. They are the largest group within the arthropod phylum. Insects have a chitinous exoskeleton, a three-part body ( head, thorax and abdomen), three ...

Biography

Petch was educated at the choir school of Holy Trinity at Hull, and taught at the King's Lynn Grammar School and Leyton Technical Institute while preparing for external degrees at the University of London. Petch had an early interest in natural history, but Charles Plowright, a doctor and mycologist in King's Lynn, encouraged him to study fungi. Through a friendship with George Massee of the Royal Botanical Gardens Petch was appointed Mycologist to the Government of Ceylon in 1905. He returned to England briefly to marry Edith Mary Plowright (b. 1875), Charles' daughter, in 1908. Petch held this position until 1924. After a leave to visit England, he returned to Ceylon as the founding director of the Tea Research Institute. In 1928 he retired to England, where he lived in North Wootton in the house formerly owned by his father-in-law, near King's Lynn. During his time in Ceylon, Petch studied the fungal diseases of rubber, cocoanut palm, tea, pepper, tobacco, and other crops grown there. He wrote ''The Diseases and Pests of the Rubber Tree'' (1921) and ''Diseases of the Tea Bush'' (1924), which were used for decades afterwards. He studied all the local fungi as well, and his life work, published posthumously in 1950, was his ''Fungi of Ceylon''. Petch became interested in fungi which lived with or on insects, starting in 1906 with a paper on fungi in termite nests. Between 1921 and 1944 he wrote 13 "Studies on entomogeneous fungi" and 7 "Notes on entomogeneous fungi", all except the first published in the ''Transactions'' of the

British Mycological Society The British Mycological Society is a learned society established in 1896 to promote the study of fungi. Formation The British Mycological Society (BMS) was formed by the combined efforts of two local societies: the Woolhope Naturalists' Field ...

(which Petch had served as president of in 1920). He also compiled a list of entomogeneous fungi in England (1932).

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External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Petch, Tom 1870 births 1948 deaths English mycologists British phytopathologists People from Hornsea

Biography

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