Frank Engledow


Sir Frank Leonard Engledow was a British agricultural botanist who carried out research at the Plant Breeding Institute at the University of Cambridge Farm from 1919 onwards.
He was a fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, and held the positions of University Lecturer in Agriculture and Drapers Professor of Agriculture at Cambridge, where he directed the School of Agriculture from 1930 to 1957. Engledow advised the British government on agricultural production in the colonies as well as in the homeland from 1927 to 1962. He kept publishing on agricultural practices and teaching after his retirement.

Education

Engledow was born in Deptford, Kent, the fifth and youngest child of Henry Engledow, a police sergeant and, after his retirement, agent of Bexleyheath Brewery and Elizabeth Prentice. Frank was educated at Dartford Grammar School, from where he went to University College London to study pure and applied mathematics and physics on a one-year scholarship. He won College Prizes in these subjects and obtained a year later a BSc externally. He was then admitted to St John's College, Cambridge, where he was more interested in the application of mathematics than in the theory which he was supposed to be studying. He was, however, allowed to change to study botany, zoology and geology and earned a First in Part I of the Natural Sciences Tripos in 1912, the award of a Slater Studentship of the College and, later, a Research Scholarship of the Ministry of Agriculture.
He had been accepted as assistant by R.H. Biffen, who had been appointed in 1908 as the first Professor of Agricultural Botany and became the first Director of the newly founded Plant Breeding Institute in 1912. A programme of research combining genetics with quantitative methods and statistics was launched resulting in three papers by Engledow in 1914. One of these was co-authored by G. Udny Yule, who became very interested in the statistics to be used in agricultural botany. Engledow became a Fellow of St John's, submitting his thesis in 1919 based on his experimental work.

World War I

Engledow enlisted in The Queen's Own Royal West Kent Regiment shortly before the war. From 1915 to 1919 the Regiment served in India and Mesopotamia and Engledow rose to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel.
He was stationed in Jhanai, where he was also in hospital with typhoid, and at regimental headquarters in Rawalpindi. Late in 1917 he spent a number of months as assistant to the Director of Agriculture of Mesopotamia. He was decorated with a Croix de Guerre in 1918.
During his overseas service he made notes on the agricultural practices he saw. After the war he returned to the School of Agriculture and the Plant Breeding Institute to resume his research.

The Plant Breeding Institute

The Institute was a rather modest facility and the work very labour-intensive. Nevertheless, fruitful research was done on breeding wheat and barley. Biffen's discovery that characteristics such as resistance to disease and grain quality were inheritable was the basis by which Engledow, by introducing quantitative analysis and statistics, was able to improve these crops. Seven consecutive papers on wheat were published between 1923 and 1930 in the Journal of Agricultural Science of Cambridge and with G. Udney Yule he published a seminal paper on yield trials in 1926. These papers were innovative with regard to breeding of cereals and other commodities, linking the roles of geneticists, plant breeders and field experimentalists.
Engledows breeding activities resulted in new varieties of wheat by selection, and by hybridisation.
In 1921 he married Mildred Emmeline Roper, a graduate botany student from Cape Town, South Africa. She gave up her academic activity to become his wife and expert adviser on a daily basis. In 1924 they made a tour through Canada and the USA for seven weeks, visiting various agricultural areas and a scientific meeting, to become better acquainted with the agricultural practices of that continent.

Drapers Professorship

In 1930 Engledow was appointed to the Drapers chair of Agriculture in 1930, having been Lecturer in Agriculture from 1926. Once he became Professor the School of Agriculture was extended. The Plant Breeding Institute was enlarged from 250 to 450 acres, more research laboratories were installed and advisory services were begun. Engledow was active in developing and planning further changes in the School and its curriculum to reflect the changing role of agricultural science in improving food production worldwide.
During World War II he served in the Home Guard and the Ministry of Agriculture, helping food production. He was also a member of the Agricultural Research Council of England and Wales and the Agricultural Improvement Council. These activities culminated in him attending the United Nations conference on Food and Agriculture in 1943 in Hot Springs, VA, USA as a deputy of the Ministry. Back home he wrote a policy Memorandum for England and Wales based on a recommendation of the UN Conference. The report was approved by ARC and AIC and was to serve as the foundation for agricultural policy in the UK.
In 1943 he was appointed as a Managing Trustee of the newly established Nuffield Foundation, retiring in 1966. He was, as Chairman of a special committee responsible for the study and the publication of "Principles for British Agricultural Policy" that had been initiated in 1945 and was completed in the late fifties. He became a Knight Bachelor in 1944 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1946.
His plans for the School of Agriculture, formulated in 1939, were to be put in practice after the war when both the research institutes and the advisory service were taken up in nationwide organisations. Well aware of the changing expectations in the post-war world of the role of agricultural science and of the alumni of the School, he was concerned with the balance between specialisation and breadth, as his papers of 1968 and 1970 show. Direct contact with farming practices and their consequences for the environment in the long-term were the responsibility of his graduates, he maintained.

Travelling and advising

Engledow undertook a long series of overseas travels with the aim of advising either local parties or governmental bodies or part of the British government:
Engledow married in 1921 Mildred Emmeline Roper. They had four daughters, Margareth Elizabeth, Catherine Mary, Ruth Mildred and Audrey Rachel. They lived from 1931 onwards on Huntingdon Road next to Howe Farm, a part of Cambridge University Farm in a newly built house called Hadleigh.

Honours

Selected papers