Frank Kingdon-Ward - Biography

Biography

He went on around 25 expeditions over a period of nearly fifty years, exploring Tibet, North Western China, Burma (Myanmar) and Assam (now part of North Eastern India). In Burma he met and conducted some research into forestry and plants in the country with native botanist Chit Ko Ko.

Among his collections were the first viable seed of Meconopsis betonicifolia (Himalayan blue poppy, first discovered by Pére Delavay), Primula florindae (giant cowslip, named after his first wife Florinda, née Norman-Thompson) and Rhododendron wardii, a yellow flowered species.

He is also commemorated in Ward's Trogon, Harpactes wardi.

He survived many accidents on his expeditions including being impaled on a bamboo spike, falling off a cliff (stopped by a tree growing from the cliff), lost for two days with no food, tent crushed by a tree in a storm, and he was close to the epicentre of an earthquake (registering 9.6 on the Richter scale) on 15 August 1950 during an expedition in Assam.

In addition to his professional activities as a botanist, in the 1930s Kingdon-Ward also served as a spy for the British India Office. In 1935, Kingdon-Ward was arrested by Tibetans after he crossed the Sela pass into the Tawang tract ( now Tawang District of Arunachal Pradesh,India) despite being refused permission to do so by the Tibetan authorities who were then administering Tawang. Tibetans protested this violation of their border to the British mission then visiting Lhasa. Kingdon-Ward was quickly released, but this incident led the British to investigate the status of the border, and it was discovered that the entire Tawang tract had been ceded to British India by Tibet by the Simla Convention negotiated by Sir Henry McMahon with the Tibetans in 1914.

In 1923 he moved to Hatton Gore, a big house on the east side of Hatton Road, Hatton, London; the site of the house is now under the east end of London Heathrow Airport. He built there a big rockery looking like a bend in a river ravine in the Himalayas. He sold the house due to a loss that he made running a plant nursery business.

He was married twice, first to Florinda Norman-Thompson on 11 April 1923; later, to Jean Macklin, on 12 November 1947, to whom he remained married until his death.

Florinda Kingdon-Ward had a brief political career which included standing as a Liberal Party candidate for Parliament at the 1950 UK General Election in Lewes.

Even towards the end of his career he was still active, his greatest "swansong" plant was probably Lilium mackliniae, found jointly with his second wife after whom it is named. At age 68 he climbed to over 11,000 feet in Myanmar (Burma) and was still discovering new species of plants on his last expedition in 1956, including Roscoea australis, the most southerly representative of its genus.

Frank Kingdon-Ward died on 8 April 1958 aged 72. He had suffered a stroke and went into a coma from which he never recovered. He was buries in the churchyard at Grantchester.