Kenneth Robert Sporne
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Kenneth Robert Sporne (23 December 1915 – 12 April 1989) was a British botanist and plant morphologist who lectured at Cambridge University.[1][2]
Sporne was born in Towcester, moving to Morecambe where his father, Robert William Sporne, was a headmaster. He attended The Royal Grammar School, Lancaster where, unable to study biology, he pursued an interest in collecting plants and animals, going on to win the Sanderson Herbarium Prize.[3] He studied biology at Downing College, Cambridge, where his interest was in ecology, especially the salt marshes of the river Lune. He completed his Natural Sciences Tripos[4] in 1939 and went on to study floral evolution under Dr H. Hamshaw Thomas. He joined a collecting expedition to Jamaica for three months with Dr Val J. Chapman.[2][5]
War service
As an undergraduate, Sporne had been a member of the Signals branch of the Cambridge University Officers' Training Corps. During the Second World War he volunteered for service and served in the Royal Corps of Signals,[6] being commissioned and taking part in D-Day on D-Day+3.[2] He was awarded the Belgian Croix de Guerre with palm and a Chevalier of the Order of Leopold II.[7] Eventually he was promoted to major,[8] and his last task was to set up an automatic telephone exchange connecting the main military headquarters in West Germany.[2]
Career
Back at Downing College after the war, Sporne was a temporary demonstrator (1946), appointed to a demonstratorship in 1948 and lecturer in Botany (1955). He became a Fellow (1949–1976) and eventually Emeritus Fellow; he was Director of Studies in Biology (1950–1976) and Dean (1952–1967). He visited New Zealand in 1951 and 1969.[2] He was elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society in 1956.[9]
Sporne's main interest was in angiosperm evolution and he pioneered the statistical analysis of the correlations between plant characteristics as a way of studying plant evolution.[10] In 1980 he published his 'advancement index' for 291 dicotyledonous angiosperm families using 30 correlated characters.[11]
Sporne published three major textbooks on plant morphology. He was awarded Doctor of Science (Sc.D.) by the University of Cambridge in 1976. He retired in 1982 [1] and died in Cambridge in 1989.