Thomas Petch (born Hornsea, Yorkshire, 11 March 1870; died

King's Lynn King's Lynn, known until 1537 as Bishop's Lynn and colloquially as Lynn, is a port and market town in the borough of King's Lynn and West Norfolk in the county of Norfolk, England. It is located north of London, north-east of Peterborough, no ...

, Norfolk, 24 December 1948) was a prolific English

mycologist Mycology is the branch of biology concerned with the study of fungus, fungi, including their genetics, genetic and biochemistry, biochemical properties, their Taxonomy (biology), taxonomy and ethnomycology, their use to humans, including as a so ...

and

plant pathologist Plant pathology (also phytopathology) is the scientific study of diseases in plants caused by pathogens (infectious organisms) and environmental conditions (physiological factors). Organisms that cause infectious disease include fungus, fung ...

best remembered for his work on the interaction between fungi and insects.

Biography

Petch was educated at the choir school of Holy Trinity at Hull, and taught at the King's Lynn Grammar School and Leyton Technical Institute while preparing for external degrees at the University of London. Petch had an early interest in natural history, but Charles Plowright, a doctor and mycologist in King's Lynn, encouraged him to study fungi. Through a friendship with George Massee of the Royal Botanical Gardens Petch was appointed Mycologist to the Government of Ceylon in 1905. He returned to England briefly to marry Edith Mary Plowright (b. 1875), Charles' daughter, in 1908. Petch held this position until 1924. After a leave to visit England, he returned to Ceylon as the founding director of the Tea Research Institute. In 1928 he retired to England, where he lived in North Wootton in the house formerly owned by his father-in-law, near King's Lynn. During his time in Ceylon, Petch studied the fungal diseases of rubber, cocoanut palm, tea, pepper, tobacco, and other crops grown there. He wrote ''The Diseases and Pests of the Rubber Tree'' (1921) and ''Diseases of the Tea Bush'' (1924), which were used for decades afterwards. He studied all the local fungi as well, and his life work, published posthumously in 1950, was his ''Fungi of Ceylon''. Petch became interested in fungi which lived with or on insects, starting in 1906 with a paper on fungi in termite nests. Between 1921 and 1944 he wrote 13 "Studies on entomogeneous fungi" and 7 "Notes on entomogeneous fungi", all except the first published in the ''Transactions'' of the British Mycological Society (which Petch had served as president of in 1920). He also compiled a list of entomogeneous fungi in England (1932).

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Petch, Tom 1870 births 1948 deaths English mycologists British phytopathologists People from Hornsea

Biography

See also

References

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