Sir Thomas Henry Holland, Past-President of the Institution, died on 15th May, 1947, at the age of 78.
He was born at Helston, Cornwall, and entered the Royal College of Science in 1885, obtaining a first-class Associateship, with Honours in Geology, in 1888, together with the Murchison Medal and Prize and a Berkeley Fellowship of Owen’s College, Manchester. In 1890 he was appointed assistant superintendent of the Geological Survey of India. He was promoted deputy superintendent in 1894 and in 1903 was selected for the post for the post of director-general of the Survey. The creation of the Chair of Geology at Presidency College, Calcutta, was largely due to his exertions, and he accepted the first appointment to the Chair. During this period also he held the positions of President of the Mining and Geological Institute of India, of which he was subsequently made an Honorary Member, and President of the Burma Oil Fields Commission.
Sir Thomas resigned from the Geological Survey of India in 1909 on his appointment as Professor of Geology and Mineralogy at Manchester University. He was a member of the Royal Commission on Naval Fuel and Engines, appointed in 1912, and in 1913 was President of the Manchester Geological and Mining Society. Soon after the outbreak of war in 1914 he was appointed President, of a Commission of Industries in India, and from 1917 to 1919 presided over the Indian Board of Munitions and Industries. In July, 1920, he was made member for commerce of the Viceroy’s Executive Council, but resigned in 1921, and from 1922 to 1929 Sir Thomas held the position of Rector of the Imperial College of Science and Technology. During this time he was for three years Chairman of the Council of the Royal Society of Arts, and in 1929 was President at the Johannesburg meeting of the British Association. He succeeded Sir Alfred Ewing as Principal and Vice-Chancellor of Edinburgh University in 1929, an office which he held for 15 years.
Sir Thomas had been a Member of the Institution since 1911 and had served on the Council from 1912; he was elected Vice-President in 1923 and became President for the two sessions 1925-27. He remained on the Council as a Past-President from 1927 to 1936 and returned to serve again in 1916 and 1947. Among the many honours he received was the Gold Medal of the Institution for 1929, awarded ‘in recognition of his distinguished services to Geological Science and to the mineral industries during his tenure of high public appointments — notably those of Director of the Geological Survey of India and of Rector of the Imperial College of Science and Technology — and of his researches and publications upon the mineral resources of the British Empire and their relationship to notional and international problems’. His paper entitled ‘Proposed review of the mineral resources of the Empire’ was published in Vol.36 of the Transactions.
He was Chairman of the Empire Council of Mining and Metallurgical Institutions from 1927 to 1930, and was a Past President of the Institution of Mining Engineers, the Institution of Petroleum Technologists, the Geological Society, and the Mineralogical Society of London. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society, and was awarded the Bigsby Medal of the Geological Society in 1914 and the Albert Medal of the Royal Society of Arts in 1939 ‘for his services to the Mineral Industries’. He was created K.C.I.E. in 1908 and K.C.S.I. in 1918, and was an Hon. D.Sc. of Calcutta, Melbourne and Witwatersrand, and Hon. LL.D. of Manchester, Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Professor W.R. Jones writes: Few men have carved out for themselves so brilliant a career as did Sir Thomas Holland. He had a magnificent brain, amazing capacity for work, indomitable courage and excellent health. These he used unstintingly to promote notable and far-reaching changes in almost all the many spheres of activity in which he was successively engaged throughout his most strenuous life.
When Director of the Geological Survey of India he enlarged greatly the scope of that Survey from being an exclusively scientific body to one in which the economic aspects of geology became of increasing importance at a time when India’s need of industrialization was acute. During World War I, when Head of the Indian Board of Munitions, he had the satisfaction of knowing that he was mainly responsible for the great help given by India to the Allies in the manufacture of munitions. As Rector of the Imperial College of Science and Technology he brought about closer liaison between the College and the University of London, and it was through his initiative that the College examinations were accepted for the degrees oi the University.
His strong personality and the unhesitating manner in which he advocated his views enabled him to accomplish a long series of unbroken successes as a geologist of international fame and as an administrator of outstanding capacity.
Vol. 57, Trans IMM 1947-8, pp.473-4
