In the Spring 2001 edition of White Admiral (issue 48) Bob Markham included in his Geological Notes some details of the life of Harold Spencer. Harold Spencer worked in the Ipswich Museum as a Technical and General Assistant, particularly dealing with the Geology collections. As Bob stated in his article;

‘In 1957 Harold Spencer had a fossil tree named after him when Mr D.W. Brett of London University described a new species, Cercidiphyllum spenceri. The specimens of fossil wood had been collected by Mr Spencer from the London Clay at Bridge Wood on the Orwell Shore in 1928.’

A short while ago I was contacted by Donald Brett, who had come across Bob’s article in the internet edition of White Admiral 48. Donald worked on fossil woods at the British Museum, Natural History in the 1950s and it was he who described the fossil wood Cercidiphyllum spenceri and named it after Harold Spencer. Donald has recently converted his papers into pdf format and has generously donated a copy of ‘Cercidiphyllum from London Clay’ to the website for any interested readers to download.

If you are interested in reading the paper by Donald Brett it is downloadable here as a pdf file (see below). Click here to download Cercidiphyllum from London Clay.pdf which is 3mb in size.

To read the file you will need Adobe® Reader®. Download it from:
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html

      Adrian Chalkley:Website Editor www.white-admiral.co.uk