Obituary Notice
STANLEY ERNEST ELLIS was born in London on20th March 1904 and educated at Kilburn GrammarSchool. He matriculated from there in 1920 with sixdistinctions. He joined the British Museum (NaturalHistory), initially in the Botany Department inJanuary 1927, but moved to the MineralogyDepartment in October of the same year. He workedin the chemical laboratory from 1928 to 1937 when hewas transferred to more curatorial duties in thePetrology section and registered many rock collections. For a period during the Second World War hewas the sole petrologist in the Museum . S. E . Ellisjoined the Geologists ' Association in 1929 andcollected many specimens for the Museum onAssociation field trips.
Ellis obtained a University of London B.Sc.(Special) degree, with First Class Honours in June1935, by evening study mainly at Chelsea Polytechnic(later Chelsea College).
His research interests included phosphate minerals ,and also dior ites and gabbros , and the conclusions ofhis statistical work on these rock types of 1948 stillfinds a place in a student text book of the present day(Hatch, Wells and Wells. The petrology of the igneous
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rocks . 13th edition , 1972). But he is perhaps bestremembered for his petrological work relating to thegrouping and provenance of abrasive stone archaelogical artefacts , and in particular hones orwhetstones. It was isotopic dating by the then Instituteof Geological Sciences, but initiated by Ellis, thatdetermined a pre-Caledonian age (approximately950 Ma) for a petrographically characteristic honestone which first appears in the English archaeologicalrecord after the first Danish invasion of the 9thcentury AD. Ellis's conclusions were published in1969. Later work confirmed that this 'NorwegianRagstone' was a widespread hone in northwestEurope for upward of a thousand years. The writerwas privileged to work with Ellis in the 1970s on themedieval hones and quernstones excavated atWinchester ten years earlier. Written over ten yearsago, these Winchester reports are still in press.
Whilst a delegate at the International GeologicalCongress in Prague in 1968 he was caught up in theRussian invasion of Czechoslovakia. S. E. Ellis ret iredfrom the Museum at the end of December 1968 anddied on 14th February 1986 leaving a widow.
D.T.M.
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