Gerard Corley Smith - Evolution

Evolution

In Ecuador, Corley Smith's expertise on high altitude humming-birds found on the Cotopaxi led him to become friends with Professor Jean Dorst, a French ornithologist who was also president of the newly formed Charles Darwin Foundation (CDF) for the Galápagos Islands, which Corley Smith went to visit. On the Royal Yacht Britannia he visited the islands again in 1964 with the Duke of Edinburgh, who later became patron of the foundation.

Corley Smith worked to establish a national park to protect the Galápagos environment under Ecuadorean control, and organised a British-financed study to recommend how the needs of conservation should be reconciled with the development of tourism to help the economy of the islands. Corley Smith left Ecuador in 1967, and the following year the new National Parks Service of Ecuador came into existence. The newly retired ambassador was lured to join the CDF's executive council. The first council meeting he attended was in England, at Down House, Darwin's former home, where members saw in the tall, silver-haired and distinguished-looking former diplomat a remarkable likeness to the portrait there of T. H. Huxley. In 1972, when Sir Thomas Barlow stepped down, Corley Smith took on the role of secretary-general of the foundation. It was a great coup for the ever-persuasive Jean Dorst. While the Charles Darwin Research Station (CDRS) on the islands was managed by a resident director, all the CDF administration and other international work - including the production of a bi-annual bulletin Noticias de Galápagos - were carried out from Corley Smith's home, Greensted Hall, in Essex.

He is credited with successfully promoting and maintaining a good working relationship between the national government and the international scientific body, which was seen by many in Ecuador as encroaching on their territory. "Most crucially," as Professor Dorst later wrote, "he perceived and understood the way the foundation had to meet and adapt to changing conditions in Ecuador." On handing over the role in 1984, Corley Smith was awarded the Order of Merit by the Ecuadorean government, and continued to visit the Galápagos often - eight times in the next 12 years - and to travel widely round the world.

The extensive library at the CDRS, which holds the most complete collection of material on Galápagos anywhere in the world, is dedicated to the memory of Corley Smith.