Born in Ireland in 1805, Madden was an Officer in the Bengal Artillery between 1830 and 1849. He sent seeds to Glasnevin Botanic Garden in Dublin between 1841 and 1849, and after this collected plants in Aden, Suez, Cairo and Malta. He became President of the Botanical Society of Edinburgh in 1853 and was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Source: Desmond
Born Hampshire 1805; died Edinburgh 1876.
Educated in Ayr, Edinburgh and at the universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, James Crauford became an advocate in 1829, building a criminal practice in the justiciary and church courts. In 1849 he became sheriff of Perthshire and in 1853 was appointed solicitor-general for Scotland. He was made a lord of the court of session and then a lord of justiciary in 1855, taking the courtesy title of Lord Ardmillan after the name of his father’s estate in Ayrshire. He held both posts until his death at his residence in Charlotte Square, Edinburgh.
Source: Dictionary of National Biography
D.W.
Liz studied Dentistry at Liverpool University and worked as a school dentist in Edinburgh between approximately 1963 and 1975 before working as a local authority dentist(?) in the Midlothian area, until her retirement, aged 50, in 1990.
A keen amateur botanist and hillwalker, Liz started volunteer work soon after “retirement” at the Royal Museum Annexe in Granton and at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. She regularly volunteered for the Botanical Survey of Scotland, which involved identifying and recording all the flora in a given square kilometre of countryside. She had a particular interest in taxonomy, and her work at the Botanics involved assisting Richard Pankhurst in cataloguing of the Rosaceae family.
With many thanks to Liz's family for this information.
Born China 1924; died 1995
Although born in China, David Irvine returned to the Shetland Islands as a baby and was educated in Lerwick. He served in the RAF during the Second World War and in 1947 entered St Andrews University to read botany, staying on to take a PhD on the ecology of a single rock pool. During this period he became a founder member of the British Phycological (the scientific study of algae) Society. In 1954 he was appointed a Demonstrator in Agricultural Botany at the University of Cambridge where he stayed until 1958. He then spent 2 years as a research assistant at the University of Illinois contributing to the ‘Index Nominum Algarum’, an index of the published names of algae. In 1961 he returned to Britain as senior lecturer in the Department of Biology and Geology at the Polytechnic of North London where he stayed until his retirement in 1984. Although dedicating most of his academic life to the study of seaweeds in the north eastern Atlantic, David Irvine was an accomplished field biologist and natural historian with a wide range of interests. He led a number of field trips to study seaweeds and marine algae around Lundy Island, Sullom Voe and the Faroes. An avid collector, he bequeathed his herbarium and reprint collection to the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.
Source: obituary, The Phycologist 1996 http://www.brphycsoc.org/documents/phycologist/The%20Phycologist%20No.%2044%20August%201996.pdf