Oliver Rackham
(Natural Sciences m.1958)
17 October 1939 – 12 February 2015
Oliver Rackham was born in Bungay, Suffolk, in 1939, the son of Geoffrey Rackham, a bank clerk, and his wife Norah (née Wilson), who died when Oliver was in his early teens. Oliver was educated at Norwich School, matriculated at Corpus Christi College in 1957, and was elected Fellow of the College in 1964. He would later serve as Master from 2007-08.
Although he began by studying physics, his mentor at Corpus, Tom Faber (m.1953), suggested that he broaden his studies in his first year by including a biological subject. Oliver chose botany, and he soon displayed outstanding ability and an insatiable curiosity. His supervisor in second year botany found it impossible to teach him with less-able undergraduates and he switched to supervision by the ecologist Professor Peter Grubb. As a postgraduate under Clifford Evans, Oliver investigated the limits to the rate of photosynthesis in leaves, and thus ultimately of plant growth. He identified and quantified the problems for the plant that arise from the slow diffusion of carbon dioxide into water and the low capacity of the enzyme that catalyses incorporation of carbon dioxide into sugar. When his thesis, Transpiration, assimilation and the aerial environment, was published in 1966, leading figures in the study of photosynthesis were paying no attention to the issue. Only in the 1990s did plant physiologists around the world realise its importance begin to investigate it using modern technology.
In 1964 Oliver was elected a Fellow of Corpus and appointed a University demonstrator in the Department of Botany. He moved in 1968 to work at the Plant Breeding Institute (PBI) in Trumpington, studying the impacts of drought on barley. While a Demonstrator, encouraged by his senior colleague David Coombe, he began to study in his spare time the field in which he was to become an international figure, the historical ecology of woodlands. In 1972, he left the PBI and became an independent researcher supported by grants from a variety of sources. He remained a Fellow of Corpus for the rest of his life, becoming in 2006 an Honorary Professor of the university.
A true polymath, Oliver was a gifted linguist, reading Latin verse for relaxation. During stays in southern Austria as a young man he had developed a special interest in Ladin, the local dialect. He was highly skilled as a carpenter, and made furniture to a high standard. His antiquarian knowledge was far-reaching. The Rackham archive held at Corpus includes the historico-geographic notes which he kept in large filing cabinets in his study at home, and also some of his correspondence with scholars and lay readers of his work who consulted him on a range of topics. He built up an extensive herbarium of fully documented dried plant specimens that was donated to the university. One of Corpus’ s longest-serving Fellows, Oliver became an expert on the College’s history, traditions and architecture. He authored, with Peter Carolin (m.1957), The Courts of Corpus Christi and, with Patrick Bury (m.1927), A Short History of Corpus Christi and the Blessed Virgin Mary in Cambridge. He was Keeper of the College Plate, and his book, Treasures of Silver at Corpus Christi College, is authoritative.
Many tales have been told of Oliver's ability to entertain non-stop a guest for an entire dinner - or a companion for the whole of a long journey. He had a great sense of humour, with a special delight in the preposterous, and was always ready to break into laughter. Oliver was a quietly devoted Anglican and an eccentric dresser, wearing sandals and red socks with a dinner jacket. It was hard to penetrate any room in his house because of the piles of books and specimens. He was appointed OBE in 1998, awarded an Honorary DU by the University of Essex in 2000, and elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2002.
Oliver fell ill at Leckhampton whilst dining and passed away on 12 February 2015. He was buried in the Corpus Chapel, which is marked by a memorial stone. He was not married and had no children.
With thanks to Professor Peter Grubb
Oliver Rackham in Ethiopia.
Oliver Rackham in Ethiopia.
Oliver at General Admission.
Oliver at General Admission.
Oliver with the coconut cup and the aurochs horn.
Oliver with the coconut cup and the aurochs horn.
Showing the aurochs horn to the King (then Prince Charles).
Showing the aurochs horn to the King (then Prince Charles).
With his Master's portrait, depicting him with his trusty notebook.
With his Master's portrait, depicting him with his trusty notebook.
Oliver Rackham's funeral procession.
Oliver Rackham's funeral procession.
Flowers on Oliver Rackham's memorial stone in the Chapel.
Flowers on Oliver Rackham's memorial stone in the Chapel.
The Books of Oliver Rackham
One of the distinctive features of Rackham’s work was its interdisciplinary nature, and particularly the way it related scientific observation to historic and cultural context, revealing the nature of humanity's interaction with its surroundings.
His work greatly increased scientific understanding and attracted a wider following, primarily through his books. The first, Hayley Wood: Its History and Ecology (1975) was an account of the finest wood left on the boulder clay of western Cambridgeshire, near St Neots. It analysed the evidence of the historical management of the wood: the tall standard trees cut for timber used in building; and the coppice (trees cut periodically to ground level) for firewood, the wattle in “wattle and daub” and hurdles. He also dealt with pannage – releasing domestic pigs to eat acorns that would be poisonous to cattle. For this work, Oliver drew on the Ely Coucher Book, compiled in Latin in 1251 to detail the bishop’s manors.
The monumental Ancient Woodland: Its History, Vegetation and Use in England (1980, and enlarged 2003) presented a mass of original information and ideas gathered from Oliver’s studies across the whole of south-eastern England. It covered woodland soils, descriptions of the types of woodland, and most importantly a critical analysis of the various kinds of information on woodland history and management – pollen analysis, medieval manuscripts and later maps, earthworks, archaeological artefacts, place names – and their application to specific woods, for many of which he provided his own invaluable hand-drawn maps. Oliver’s discoveries about past practices began to inform present-day management, and he became increasingly involved in the conservation of woodland. He fought the Forestry Commission over the planting of conifers, and demonstrated the serious threats to woods from large populations of deer, from the pests and diseases being moved freely around the world, and from the ignorance of countryside managers who planted trees and shrubs supposedly of native species and subspecies that were actually lookalikes from abroad.
In The History of the Countryside (1986) he took on a wider range of subjects, opening readers’ eyes to regional differences in patterns of land settlement, the original meaning of the term forest (countryside beyond the common law), the timing of key changes in human management of the landscape, new ways of looking at hedges, ponds and marshes, and, through it all, the balance between the natural world and human activities.
The Last Forest: The Story of Hatfield Forest (1989) used the records of this National Trust property in northern Essex to show that many widely accepted ideas about the history of forests in Britain were wrong. The preface of this book is one of the most compelling pieces he wrote. It begins: “Why write yet another book on forests? There are, for a start, two versions of forest history: one cannot be true, but the other may be. Forests are one of the most prolific fields of pseudo-history – a consistent, logical, accepted corpus of statements, copied from writer to writer down the centuries. We still read, for example, that forests necessarily have to do with trees, that medieval England was very wooded; that the king’s hunting was protected by savage laws and extreme punishments ... The story reads well and makes excellent sense, but it has no connection with the real world; it cannot be sustained from the records of any actual forest or wood.”
With the American archaeologist Jennifer Moody, Oliver presented a remarkable combination of ecology and archaeology in The Making of the Cretan Landscape (1996). In 2008 the two of them led a successful campaign against development of the Toplou peninsula in Crete. A further collaboration, with the geographer AT Grove, examined a still wider region. The Nature of Mediterranean Europe: An Ecological History (2001) presented many new observations and new ways of interpreting the landscape. Oliver’s knowledge and understanding were further increased during visits made by invitation to the US, Japan and Australia.
His last massive work, called simply Woodlands (2006), was volume 100 in the New Naturalist series, and covered all his many interests in the subject, including the use of timber in building houses, temples, churches and barns. The Ash Tree (2014) paid tribute to one of Britain’s favourite trees, now threatened by the fungus Chalara.
The Notebooks of Oliver Rackham
Although College duties claimed a large proportion of Oliver’s time, the work of observing the landscape, and writing about his findings, remained a continuing and central preoccupation throughout his life. He kept these writings in small red and blue notebooks, which are now being digitised.
The red notebooks form a chronological sequence, and were kept continuously by Rackham from his youth right up until his death. They record observations on plants seen on his travels as well as in his home surroundings, as well as other kinds of information, for example about weather and College duties. They are paginated continuously and include some sketches. A label on the outside usually lists the locations covered in each notebook, with page numbering, thus serving as a kind of contents page.
He also kept a parallel series of blue, location-specific notebooks (in the same format as the red) which tend to contain more structured data in the form of tally charts showing incidence of plant species, as well as little maps. They tend to contain more raw data than the red notebooks, for example tally charts showing frequency of particular plant species in particular areas of woodland, with photocopied maps of woodland areas often pasted in. When conducting fieldwork, Rackham would also take photographs to preserve a ‘snapshot’ of the particular location at a specific moment in time. These complement the written record kept in the notebooks, and the archive of his slides and prints is also kept in the Modern Archive.
Another kind of record kept by Rackham which is archived at the College is the collection of woodland record cards. These give details of the plant and tree species found in a particular area of woodland, and remain of especial value to ecologists and conservationists working in the field.
Currently the notebooks, which are numerous, can be viewed on the Cambridge University Digital Library alongside a sample of photos taken by Rackham. The Library has enlisted the help of volunteers to transcribe the notebooks. If you would like to contribute to the transcription project, visit the crowdsourcing project website.
“Now, when you search Cambridge Digital Library for the term “tree”, nearly as many results are returned from the Rackham Collection as from Darwin’s letters and papers!”
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