Ann. appl. Biol. (1982), 100,413-414 With portrait Printed in Great Britain

Obituary

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CARRINGTON BONSOR WILLIAMS 1890-1981

President of the Association 1945-1946

Dr C. B. Williams FRS (widely and affectionately known simply as ‘CB’) died at the age of 9 1 on 12 July 1981. He had been a member of the Association of Applied Biologists for 69 years, serving as Vice-president twice (1934-35 and 1947-48), and President (1945-46). In 1953 he was elected to honorary membership of the Association, and latterly had the distinction of being its oldest distinguished scientist.

His early interest in butterflies at Birkenhead School was to form the foundation of pioneering work on insect migration, to which he linked a unique appreciation of the relevance of mathematics and statistics to population biology.

On leaving Cambridge in 19 11 he went to the John Innes Horticultural Institute, then in 19 16 to the Department of Agriculture, Trinidad, to work on pests of sugar cane, particularly the biological control of froghoppers, a novel approach to pest control in those days. His tropical experience was increased in Egypt (1921-27) where he was Director of the Entomological Service, Ministry of Agriculture, and in Tanganyika (1927-28) as entomologist at the East African Research Station, Amani. He returned to Edinburgh as lecturer in agricultural and forestry zoology, and after a short spell as visiting professor at the University of Minnesota he settled at Rothamsted in 1932 as Head of Entomology, a post he held far longer than anyone else, until retirement in 1955.

During his service overseas he accumulated an immense amount of data on butterfly migration, documented in his book ‘Migration of Butterflies’ (1930), and popularised in ‘Insect Migration’ (1958). At Rothamsted he started his programme of two periods of continuous nightly light trapping for moths, using this data to formulate and develop his classic ideas with R. A. Fisher showing how the logarithmic series could be used to describe population frequency distributions. He became progressively more intrigued with problems in statistical ecology, having particularly a fascination for the diversity of natural populations. The orderliness he introduced into ecology, and the awareness of it he fostered in others, has been the basis for many of the developments in population biology over the last 30 years. His third book ‘Patterns in the balance of nature’ (1969), published after retirement, brought together from plant and animal kingdoms a wealth of ecological data, handled and interpreted in his own inimitable style.

He never lost his boyish love of butterflies and moths, and since the early 1920’s, with the help of a retired naval officer, Captain Dareuther, he encouraged the systematic collection of records of British immigrant Lepidoptera to produce an unrivalled impression of the ebb and flow of these migrants over the years.

Although most widely known for his work on migration and mathematical ecology, his fertile mind made important contributions to other groups, notably the Thysanoptera, on which he wrote his first paper in 1913 on specimens collected from Wicken Fen, Cambridgeshire, and his last in 1972 on allometric growth of thrips antennae. His paper on the pea thrips, published in the Annals of Applied Biology in 1915, still stands as the standard work on this species in the U.K., and his large collection was lodged with the Grahamstown Museum, S.A., about 20 years ago. Work on aerial dispersal, bees, earthworms, and slugs, still important features of Rothamsted’s programme, can be traced to his early influence.

Despite all the vigour and imagination that CB put into his research, he was far more than a distinguished scientist. He was an extremely kind and humorous person, always ready to help

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juniors, and possessing a seemingly inexhaustable supply of amusing, but always apt stories, often told against himself with a mischievous smile.

Those who had the pleasure of working under him or being entertained in his home by his charming family will always cherish the memory, He won respect and affection from all who knew him, and with his death applied entomology has lost one of its pioneers and a figurehead.

Trevor Lewis