62 OBITUARIES

George Hoole MITCHELL, C.B.E., D.Sc. (Liverpool), D.LC., F.G.S., F.R.S .E., F.R.S ., who joinedthe Association in 1926, died on 11 March, 1976. He was born in Liverpool on 31 December 1902,the son of a schoolmaster keen on fell walking and an amateur geologist. After leaving LiverpoolCollege, G. H. Mitchell went to Liverpool University to study geology under P. G. H. Boswell andgraduating in 1924, he started research on the Coniston Limestone and later on the Borrowdalevolcanic rocks and the geomorphology of the Lake District. These researches he enjoyed for manyyears, extending them into his holidays from professional work; his last printed contribution to theunravelling of the Lake District volcanic succession and structure appeared in 1963.

Awarded a Beit Scientific Research Fellowship in 1926, he moved to the Imperial College and hisstay there culminated as a demonstrator of geology during the winter of 1928-9. Then he wasselected for the Geological Survey of Great Britain and assigned to work based upon the Survey'sYork office. He undertook geological mapping successively in the Bamsley, Wakefield, Sheffield,Bradford and Leeds areas of the Yorkshire Coalfield and his results contributed to the publicationof the geological maps and accompanying sheet memoirs . When the York office was closed in 1938,Mitchell became based upon London headquarters and he made his home at Caversham, nearReading.

During, and just after, the war years he revised the Coal Measures geology in the Leicestershire,South Derbyshire, Warwickshire and South Staffordshire coalfields. He gave valued help in theselection of areas suitable for opencast mining of coal and also to the optimum siting of boreholesput down to test the content and extent of the several coalfields. His services were also welcomed bycolliery officials for his interpretation of the geological sequence and structure which in places led tothe establ ishment of new collieries and he continued this work for some years after the NationalCoal Board was set up.

In 1952, Mitchell took part in the Survey's six-inch mapping in the classic Caer Caradoc areaand in 1954, he was promoted District Geologist in charge of the Scottish South Lowland District;in 1959 he became Assistant Director in Scotland, an office which he held until his retirement in1967. Among his later publications was the Survey's memoir on the Edinburgh District (3rd edit. inco-authorship with W. Mykura); it is interesting in this connexion that Mitchell first visitedEdinburgh as a member of the Association's summer field meeting in 1927. He was the leader of theAssociation 's excursion to opencast workings in the Warwickshire Coalfield in 1945 and one of theleaders of longer excursions, respectively to Shropshire in 1952 and to the Lake District in 1954and 1970. He also contributed to the Association's Lake District Guide.

He served as President of the Yorkshire Geological Society from 1954 to 1956, of Section C ofthe British Association in 1957 at the Dublin meeting, and of the Edinburgh Geological Societyfrom 1961 to 1963. The value of his geological work and status was appreciated by awards to himof medals by the various councils of the geological societies of Edinburgh, Liverpool, London andYorkshire. He was elected to the Royal Society of London in 1953 and to the Royal Society ofEdinburgh in 1955. Subsequently, he was awarded a C.B.E. in 1967 and also a Fellowship of theImperial College.

Of excellent physique and of friendly and cheerful disposition , he was much liked and admired.Keen to bring his own geological work to publication , he was equally active in seeing that of hisjuniors made suitable for print and then passed for printing. He leaves a widow and two sons, Peter,a farmer, and Murray, a geologist. A fuller notice will appear in the Biographical Memoirs ofFellows of the Royal Society for 1977.

C. J. STUBBLEFI ELD

Brian Hunter MOTTRAM (1922-76) belonged to that large group of members of the Associationwho, without formal education in geology, make significant contributions to it through their energy

OBITUARIES 63

and enthusiasm. Brian Mottram, who became a member in 1946, directed a field meeting for theAssociation to the Vale of Wardour in 1954 and his account of the geology along the Mere Faultwas published in our Proceedings for 1961 and his mapping was incorporated on the new editionof the Wincanton Sheet 297 (I969). He wrote also on Dorset geology and geomorphology, and onEast African drainage development.

He may not have had formal geological training, but his informal training could hardly besurpassed. As a schoolboy at Bryanston School, and with the advantage of a family pied-a-terreatFalcon Barn near White Nothe, he made the acquaintance ofW. J. Arkell who stayed for summersat his cottage of 'Faraways' at the water's edge below. Thus his first appearance in geologicalliterature was as a scale in a text-figure in Arkell's Geol. Mag. paper of 1936 on the tectonics of thePurbeck and Ridgeway fault. Thereafter he held the tape, if not the hammer, during Arkell'sremeasurement and restudy of the South Dorset coast for the revised Weymouth Memoir. Forrewards he was taken by Arkell on motoring tours to Yorkshire, and in 1937 to the Assynt district.During the war he did farming work in the Vale of Wardour and there commenced the mapping ofthe Mere Fault.

The problem of the eastward extension of the Poxwell Fault then attracted his attention, and hespent parts of his holidays in 1949 and 1951 digging trenches and augering so that he was able todemonstrate that the fault passes northeastwards into the Chalk and not southeastwards as is stillshown on current Survey maps. Unaware of this work, the D'Arcy Exploration Company in 1955were interpreting the fault they found at depth in the Chaldon borehole as linking with a non­existing fault to the south rather than one to the north. This work, and that in adjacent areas waspublished in the Proc. Dorset Nat. Hist. Arch. Soc.

In 1950 he went up to Christ's College, Cambridge, as a mature student reading Geography.This was followed by a year at the Educational Institute of London University. He commenced hisprofessional career in 1954 as a teacher at Mbarara, Uganda. In 1965 he became founderheadmaster of Kitunga High School (Ntare). The sequence of photographs he would subsequentlyshow of virgin jungle, growing school buildings, rugger posts, the digging of a swimming pool, acroquet lawn and a bungalow for himself indicated something of his energy and of the contributioncolonialism made to African development. This was the period of his work on two papers dealingwith the drainage of western Uganda and co-authorship of a school text on the Geography ofEastAfrica (Arnold). But before long he was out of favour with the new political regime in Uganda, andin 1972 he could stay no longer. After a short stay in Kenya hoping for some improvement, hereturned, depressed, to this country. Once back he completed a paper on erosional benches alongthe Dorset coast which appeared in 1973.

He was born on 2 May 1922, the son of Professor V. H. Mottram, the nutritionist, and from himmay have inherited an inherent zest for life and wide-ranging interests which were referred to in theobituary of his father who died in the same week. Brian Mottram ended his days on 8 March 1976at Marshwood Manor, Dorset, in country exhibiting so well the pre-Albian unconformity whichwas so much a part of his geological interest. He is survived by his two sons, and many disconsolatefriends.

M.R.H

Dr. J. E. Wynfield RHODES died in a Steyning Nursing Home on the first of April 1976 in his 88thyear. He was a native of Prestwich near Manchester, and was educated privately until the age ofsixteen, when he transferred to Salford Technical College to take his Matriculation examinationsand then an External London Degree in Geology and Chemistry. This led to a succession ofteaching posts in Secondary schools until the Great War, when, as unfit to join the Army he wentinto industry at Courtaulds. After the war he returned to teaching and joined the Staffof BlackburnTechnical College where he remained until his retirement in 1948.