James Haward Taylor was drowned in the Seychelles on 25 January, 1968: he was 58 years of age. At the time of his death he was undertaking a short professional visit to the Seychelles and to Kenya.
Professor Taylor graduated B.Sc. in geology from King’s College, London, in 1931. He then did research at King’s College until 1933, when he was appointed Henry Fellow at Harvard University, gaining the award of A.M. (geology) in 1934. On his return to the United Kingdom he became a lecturer at King’s College, and gained the degree of Ph.D. in 1935.
From 1935 until 1949 he worked with the Geological Survey of Great Britain. He was engaged (1939-46) in a survey of the Northampton, Rutland and Lincolnshire iron ore fields. This work involved the correlation of geological data from boreholes, from opencast and underground workings and from 6-in mapping to prove the extent, grade and structure of the ore-bodies: in addition. Professor Taylor was concerned with the drilling programmes of the various ironstone companies. From this work came two memoirs of the Geological Survey of Great Britain — ‘Petrology of the Northampton Sand ironstone formation’ (1949) and ‘The Mesozoic ironstone of England: the Northampton Sand ironstone, stratigraphy, structure and resources’ (1951; with S.E. Hollingworth).
In 1949 he was appointed Professor of Geology at King’s College, University of London, and held this Chair until his death. In 1960 Professor Taylor was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society for his researches into the geology of ore deposits, particularly the iron ores of the Midlands. He served on various technical / scientific committees and professional bodies. Among these may be mentioned his presidency of the Mineralogical Society and his membership of the Council of the Geological Society: and his membership of the National Environment Research Council and his presidency of the British National Committee for Geology (for which he was also the Institution’s representative). He was elected to membership of the Institution in 1949 and served as a Member of Council from 1955, being Vice-President for the period 1962-65. He was chairman of the Institution’s Publications and Library Committee and an ex-officio member of the three Editorial Boards.
In addition to the publications mentioned above, Professor Taylor was the author of many geological papers, and made frequent contributions to the discussion of papers published by the Institution. He served as Chairman of the Organizing Committee for the 1964 Symposium on ‘Opencast mining, quarrying and alluvial mining’ and had been serving as Chairman of the Publications Committee for the Ninth Commonwealth Mining and Metallurgical Congress to be held in 1969.
Dr. K.C. Dunham writes: The tragedy of Jim Taylor’s untimely death while pursuing his work on modern limestones off the Seychelles robs the Institution of a most valuable councillor — we had confidently hoped a future President — and the world of one of its leading geologists. It is hard indeed to believe that his tall distinguished figure will be seen no more amongst us.
He was already grey-haired when we were graduate students at Harvard 35 years ago. He had changed little in physical appearance since then, though in his unassuming wisdom he had grown in stature, and had come to be appreciated in the councils where action in the earth sciences begins here and abroad. His father, who was for many years in India, died when James was a boy; he was brought up by his mother, to whom he was devoted.
Mrs. Lilian Dudley Ward Taylor died only a few months before him; he himself never married. Notwithstanding the difficulties usually experienced by an unusually tall boy, he had a good career at Clifton College, where he achieved some distinction on the rugby field. Going up to King’s College, London, in 1927, and gaining a First under Professor W.T. Gordon in 1931, he received the Jelf Medal for Natural Sciences and the A.K.C. in the same year. Now his interests began to crystallize in the direction of petrology: one may safely guess that that kindly teacher, Dr. A.K. Wells, influenced him.
He spent two years in research, producing papers on the Oatland igneous complex, Isle of Man, and on the Mountsorrel granodiorite, Leicestershire. In 1933 his Henry Fellowship took him to Harvard where he became a member of Winthrop House. Here he worked under that most inspiring (and most absent-minded) of petrologists. Esper Signius Larsen Jnr., who took a very kindly view of Taylor and remained interested in his work until his own death 20 years later. With Larsen he visited, and worked on, the Little Belt Mountains in Montana. At Harvard he started a Rugby Union group which made good progress in spite of the preoccupation with the American game; one day Jim got as far as making a radio commentary on one of their rugger games, somewhat to his surprise. Returning after the termination of his fellowship, he experienced the economic depression at its worst, and for a time despaired of continuing in professional geology. The 1935 competition for the Geological Survey of Great Britain solved the problem for him and opened the way to the very successful first half of his working life.
He was trained in Survey field methods by Dr. S.E. Hollingworth in Worcestershire; the death of Professor Hollingworth in June, 1966, was another sad example of the decimation of this generation of geologists. Considerable parts of the Droitwich Sheet were mapped by Taylor, including the Brock Hill dyke. In 1938 he was transferred to the Cambridge district, and mapped the country around Newmarket.
With the coming of war, he found himself debarred from military service, but was soon assigned to the resurvey of the Jurassic ironstone fields, urgently begun in anticipation of the special demand which led in due course to doubling production to over 20,000,000 tons. Long field seasons were devoted to mapping and to synthesis of subsurface data. It was during one of these that he wrote me, observing that he ‘had been arrested by nearly every unit in the British Army, including the A.T.S.!’ Taylor’s special province was the Northampton Sands ironstone, upon which the industry at Corby is based, and of his most notable works was his Memoir (1949) on the petrography and chemistry of this ironstone.
This was to place him firmly in the foreground of iron ore geologists. After the war he was also deeply involved in the preparations for the 1948 International Geological Congress in London, and led one of the two parties of the Economic Geology of Britain excursion, making many new overseas friends. In 1949 he joined the small band of men in mid-career who left the Geological Survey to become university professors; the invitation from his own college was not to be resisted. At King’s he built up, over the years, a happy and successful department, always prevented, until the current rebuilding, from large expansion by shortage of space. His students, now all over the world, think of him most kindly, and in 1962 the College recognized his achievements by electing him to a Fellowship.
His senior years have taken him much abroad: to Rhodesian Broken Hill to investigate the lead-vanadium deposits: to several of the African universities as external examiner for London degrees. He has become President of the International Association of Sedimentologists, the last meeting of which was at Reading in the summer of 1967. He was Royal Society delegate to the International Union of Geological Sciences at its Delhi meetings in 1964, and has been Chairman of the British National Committee for Geology since that time, guiding and developing our international relations. He was geological adviser to the Iron and Steel Board from 1955. He has been a member of the Natural Environment Research Council since its formation in 1965, and of the Geological Surveys Sub-committee. His long service on the Research Grants Sub-committees of D.S.I.R., S.R.C. and N.E.R.C. has been greatly valued. The investigation upon which he was engaged at the time of his death was sponsored by N.E.R.C. His last public appearance was at the 15th Inter-University Conference at Leicester, where he summarized a life-time of thinking about the ironstones and iron formations: in the case of the former he was able to report that there is now actualistic evidence to support and justify the sedimentary view of the origin of chamosite which he has always championed: while on the latter, he was evidently moving towards a greater appreciation of the role of Precambrian volcanics as source rocks. The torch that he has carried now passes on to others, but his worthy contribution to the race will not be forgotten.
Vol. 77, Trans IMM 1968, pp.57-58
