Nora Fisher McMillan
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16 March 1908
- Member of the most excellent order of the British Empire (MBE) 1992
- Elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy in 1970
- President Conchological Society of Great Britain and Ireland 1956 & 1957
- Honorary MSc for her contribution to natural history, University of Liverpool 1991
- Chrysallida macmillanae was named for her[1]
Eleanor ('Nora') Fisher McMillan | |
|---|---|
| Born | Eleanor Fisher 16 March 1908 Belfast, Ireland |
| Died | 23 August 2003, age 95 |
| Known for | interests in conchology and the history of natural history |
| Awards |
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| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | Belfast Municipal Museum (1929–1933), Liverpool Museum (1933–1937, 1954–2003), University of Liverpool (1940–1956). |
Eleanor Fisher (1908-2003) was an Irish chonologist, naturalist, botanist and museum curator. She become known asNora Fisher McMillan. She was known as a larger-than-life self-taught expert in natural history, especially conchology, specialising in post-glacial fresh-water Mollusca, but with broad academic interests in the history of natural history, geology and other areas, as well as being a keen amateur botanist, naturalist and local historian. She wrote prolifically, with over 400 publications to her name.
She moved to Liverpool in 1933 and, with a short interruption due to her marriage in 1937, worked for the Liverpool Museum until her retirement in 2000 at the age of 92. By the time of her death in 2003, she had become almost the last direct link with two generations of Irish and British Victorian conchologists who brought distinction to the subject through their personal research and field collecting. Largely self-taught, she was conferred an Honorary MSc by the University of Liverpool in 1991, was President of the Conchological Society of Great Britain and Ireland, and was elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy in 1970. She received an MBE for her life's work in 1992.[2][3]
Educated as a child in Ireland by governesses and in private schools, she was later sent to board at the Liverpool College for Girls in Huyton. Typhoid fever as a teenager terminated her formal education. However her interest in shells had been sparked by summer visits to the beach at Millisle at the age of six years and, encouraged by a family friend, H.C. Lawlor, who introduced her to the photographer and malacologist Robert Welch, she joined the Belfast Naturalists' Field Club. There her career began as a young girl in the Junior Section, where she gained a good knowledge of marine animals and flowering plants. During the 1920s her growing expertise in conchology was nurtured by Welch and other prominent members of the Field Club such as Robert Lloyd Praeger, the geologist John Kaye Charlesworth, and especially Arthur Stelfox, who was a major influence on her.[3]
From 1929 to 1933 McMillan worked in the Belfast Municipal Museum, when she was active in working out the local distribution of plants and animals. Moving to Liverpool in 1933, she joined the staff of the Liverpool Museum, looking after the shell collection and working in particular on fossil shells. She was forced to leave in 1937 when she married William McMillan, a local dental surgeon, and from about 1938–1956 she held two part-time posts in the Geology Department and Dental School of the University of Liverpool, returning to the Liverpool Museum full-time thereafter. In 1973, by now a respected curator, researcher and author at the Liverpool Museum, she reduced to part-time and finally retired in 2000 at the age of 92, though she continued to be in demand for her expertise.[2][3]
McMillan curated the British mollusca marine species collection of the Liverpool Museum from 1950 until 2000. In 1941 a fire had devastated the museum, and much was lost. Among the surviving collections were those of olive shells and netted dog whelks assembled by the conchologist, F. P. Marrat, who described many species in the 19th century, and about whom she wrote a book, Frederick Price Marrat, conchologist, Etc. in 1985.[4] A small part of the huge H.C. Winckworth British Marine Shell Collection was also saved, and remains the major component of the British mollusca marine species collection. It was McMillan's influence which persuaded several conchologists to pass their collections to the museum, so that it once again had one of the largest regional collections, with a good representation of the popular groups.[5] McMillan herself travelled widely in Europe, to Lake Chad in Africa, Australia and New Zealand, and went alone on a shell collecting expedition to a whaling station in the Arctic Ocean in the early 1970s.[3]
In 2000 a species of mollusca, Chrysallida macmillanae, was named for her.[6]
In 2001 McMillan published research into the career of naturalist Cuthbert Collingwood FLS, who worked in Liverpool in the 1850s and 1860s.[7] The research papers about Collingwood, including correspondence with descendants of his family, are held in the University of Liverpool archives.[8]
