William Forster Lanchester

FRSE Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) is an award granted to individuals that the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland's national academy of science and letters, judged to be "eminently distinguished in their subject". This soci ...

(1875-1953) was a British

zoologist Zoology ()The pronunciation of zoology as is usually regarded as nonstandard, though it is not uncommon. is the branch of biology that studies the Animal, animal kingdom, including the anatomy, structure, embryology, evolution, Biological clas ...

Life

He was born in

Croydon Croydon is a large town in south London, England, south of Charing Cross. Part of the London Borough of Croydon, a local government district of Greater London. It is one of the largest commercial districts in Greater London, with an extensi ...

on 14 March 1875 to Dr Henry Thomas Lanchester MD and his wife Catherine Forster. He was one of eight children, but the only son. In 1893 he was admitted to

Cambridge University , mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge. , established = , other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...

. He studied Science and graduated BA in 1897 and gained an MA in 1900. He went on to work as a Demonstrator in Zoology at

University College, Dundee A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, t ...

. He was elected a Fellow of the

Royal Society of Edinburgh The Royal Society of Edinburgh is Scotland's national academy of science and letters. It is a registered charity that operates on a wholly independent and non-partisan basis and provides public benefit throughout Scotland. It was established i ...

in 1907. His proposers were

John Graham Kerr Sir John Graham Kerr (18 September 1869 – 21 April 1957), known to his friends as Graham Kerr, was a British embryologist and Unionist Member of Parliament (MP). He is best known for his studies of the embryology of lungfishes. He was involv ...

, Edward J. Bles,

Malcolm Laurie Malcolm Laurie FRSE FLS (27 February 1866 – 16 July 1932) was a Scottish zoologist and palaeontologist. Biography He was born in Brunstane House south of Portobello, Edinburgh on 27 February 1866, the son of Simon Somerville Laurie an ...

and

Ramsay Heatley Traquair Ramsay Heatley Traquair FRSE FRS (30 July 1840 – 22 November 1912) was a Scottish naturalist and palaeontologist who became a leading expert on fossil fish. Traquair trained as a medical doctor, but his thesis was on aspects of fish anatomy ...

. He resigned in 1910 when he returned to England. In 1910 he was living at 19 Fernshaw Road in

Chelsea, London Chelsea is an affluent area in west London, England, due south-west of Charing Cross by approximately 2.5 miles. It lies on the north bank of the River Thames and for postal purposes is part of the south-western postal area. Chelsea histori ...

, a fashionable three storey Victorian mid-terraced villa. At the outbreak of the

First World War World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

he was in the

Royal Navy Reserve The Royal Naval Reserve (RNR) is one of the two volunteer reserve forces of the Royal Navy in the United Kingdom. Together with the Royal Marines Reserve, they form the Maritime Reserve. The present RNR was formed by merging the original Ro ...

so was immediately called up. However, he moved to the

Royal Army Medical Corps The Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) is a specialist corps in the British Army which provides medical services to all Army personnel and their families, in war and in peace. The RAMC, the Royal Army Veterinary Corps, the Royal Army Dental Corps a ...

and rose to the rank of captain. He returned to

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...

in later life, living at 10 St Andrews Hill in 1945.

Academic work

In 1899 he and his friend from King's College, Francis Perch Bedford, had collected some

crustacean Crustaceans (Crustacea, ) form a large, diverse arthropod taxon which includes such animals as decapods, seed shrimp, branchiopods, fish lice, krill, remipedes, isopods, barnacles, copepods, amphipods and mantis shrimp. The crustacean group ...

s in

Singapore Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, borde ...

and

Malacca Malacca ( ms, Melaka) is a state in Malaysia located in the southern region of the Malay Peninsula, next to the Strait of Malacca. Its capital is Malacca City, dubbed the Historic City, which has been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site si ...

. He studied them and then published on

gephyrea Gephyrea is a now-dismantled taxon for a group of non-annulated worms, considered intermediate between annelids and holothurians, containing the three modern phyla Echiura, Sipuncula, and Priapulida. References

Obsolete animal taxa Proto ...

ns and crustaceans during the first years of the 20th century. He is honoured in the

sipuncula The Sipuncula or Sipunculida (common names sipunculid worms or peanut worms) is a class containing about 162 species of unsegmented marine annelid worms. The name ''Sipuncula'' is from the genus name ''Sipunculus'', and comes from the Latin ' ...

n name '' Thysanocardia lanchesteri'' and also in the

stomatopod Mantis shrimp, or stomatopods, are carnivorous marine crustaceans of the order Stomatopoda (). Stomatopods branched off from other members of the class Malacostraca around 340 million years ago. Mantis shrimp typically grow to around in leng ...

name '' Gonodactylellus lanchesteri''.

Family

He married Grace Margaret Ainslie in 1900. They had four children.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lanchester, William Forster 1875 births 1953 deaths People from Croydon British zoologists Alumni of the University of Cambridge Academics of the University of Dundee Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh