Queer Places:
University of Oxford, Oxford, Oxfordshire OX1 3PA
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 193 Kew Rd, Richmond TW9 2AA
Noel Yvri Sandwith (September 8, 1901 - May 7, 1965) was one of Britain foremost taxonomic botanists. He met Rupert Barneby, sometime in the early 1930s, at Cambridge, on a visit to Kew, or at Walter Ingwersen's alpine plant nursery in Sussex. Sandwith was ten years older than Barneby and an assistant then in the herbarium at Kew. It was Sandwith who prompted in Rupert his lasting engagement with the multivolume novel by Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu. Proust's immense novel, Sandwith told Rupert, is "a work of stupendous, mysterious genius." Sandwith, who died unexpectedly in 1965, willed his set of Proust to Rupert.
Sandwith's authoritative knowledge of the flora of South America and of the family Bignoniaceae in particular commanded world-wide respect.
Noel Sandwith was born on September 8, 1901 at Harworth in Nottinghamshire, where his father, the Reverend Edward Pitcairn Sandwith, was vicar. His grandfather was William Sandwith, a judge in the Indian Civil Service. His father died while Sandwith was still young, and the family moved to Bristol in the autumn of 1909. Here his mother, Cecil Ivry Sandwith, with her keen interest in field-botany, became one of the circle of enthusiastic botanists who gathered round James Walter White and contributed material for his admirable Flora of Bristol. Although Sandwith never underwent academic training in botany, he acquired in boyhood from his mother that love and interest in British plants which he never subsequently lost.
Both he and his brother were educated at Clifton College. While still a schoolboy, he made the spectacular discovery of Scorzonera humilis in Dorset, a genus previously unknown in Britain, and in June 1916 he was given special leave by his Headmaster in order to show the locality to G. C. Druce, whose attention had of course been attracted by the find and who wrote about it. In 1920 Sandwith went up to Keble College, Oxford, where he read Classics, taking his degree in the Honour School of Literae Humaniores.
His work at Kew started in 1924, when he was appointed as a Temporary Botanist, working under Dr. T. A. Sprague, in order to deal with arrears of American plants. His attention was at first focussed mainly on Mexico and Central America but later widened to cover other parts of tropical and South America. In 1929 he became a Temporary Assistant in the Herbarium and in 1933 Botanist. On the appointment of Dr. Sprague as Deputy Keeper he took charge of the American Section, a responsibility which he continued to hold until his death, with the exception of the period from 1942-1945 during which on account of his knowledge of modern Greek he was seconded to the Foreign Office. In 1947 he became a Principal Scientific Officer.
Noel Yvri Sandwith died unexpectedly on May 7, 1965.
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