Professor Paul Weatherley

Born: 6 May, 1917, in Leicester Died: 8 August, 2001, in Torphins, Aberdeenshire, aged 84

PAUL WeatherIey was a distinguished plant physiologist who held the Regius Chair of Botany in the University of Aberdeen, following posts in the universities of Manchester and Nottingham. He was widely known for his innovative experimental work on the mechanisms involved in the transport of water and solutes in plants, and for his stimulating teaching of plant science, in which he strove to promote understanding of the ways in which plants function as whole organisms. He was Professor in Aberdeen from 1959 to 1981, and came to regard Scotland and the north-east as his home.

As a boy, his first love was chemistry, and he was already building his own apparatus in his bedroom at home in Leicester. This enthusiasm for science was encouraged by the staff at Wyggeston Grammar School, from where he won an open scholarship to Keble College, Oxford. There, he read Botany and came under the influence of some of the most renowned teachers of the subject at the time: AG Tansley, AR Clapham, WO James and WH Wilkins.

Later, he expressed regret at the rather specialised nature of the curriculum, but clearly he was given much encouragement to develop his interest in plant physiology.

Alongside academic work, he took up rowing enthusiastically.

During his undergraduate studies, he was attracted to work on fungal metabolism in submerged culture, and after graduation in 1939 he continued research on this subject with the aid of a college postgraduate grant. In 1940 he was awarded a scholarship by the then Colonial Office, for training in tropical agriculture. After a brief period of service in the Royal Engineers, he was released to take up his scholarship at the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture in Trinidad, where he qualified for its Associateship in 1942.

On completing his training, his first appointment was to the post of Botanist in the Department of Agriculture, Uganda Protectorate. Before leaving to take up this position, he married Margaret Pirie, whom he had met in Leicester. Her home was in Aberdeenshire and through her Paul came to know and love Scotland. She was able, a little later, to join him in Uganda, but in the meantime he had an eventful journey there, during which his ship was sunk by a torpedo and he was subjected to 18 hours in a lifeboat before reaching shore and eventually making his way to Uganda.

Five years were spent there, on duties which included the breeding of food crops and cotton but which also provided the opportunity for him to develop research on the water relations of field-grown cotton and to invent a technique for measuring the water status of plants using discs punched from their leaves, which was subsequently widely adopted. This work was written up shortly after he returned to the UK to take up an assistant lectureship at Manchester University in 1947, and he was awarded the degree of DPhil, Oxford University, in 1949.

Between 1949 and 1959 he was lecturer and then senior lecturer in Botany at Nottingham University, and this was a highly productive period in which he displayed his brilliance in the design and construction of apparatus and in bringing concepts of physics and engineering to bear on problems concerning the transport of water and solutes within plants.

In 1959 he was appointed to the Regius Chair of Botany at the University of Aberdeen, and this must have given both him and Margaret great satisfaction, providing as it did the opportunity for them to settle and develop their lives in the area in which they were most at home. Paul identified very closely with Aberdeen and its university and with Scotland in general.

This was just at the beginning of the main period of university expansion and he was exactly the right man to modernise and re-equip the Department, which under his guidance grew into one of the largest and most active botany schools in the country at the time. In 1960 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and later served on its Council.

In Aberdeen, his research in whole-plant physiology continued to flourish. He was quick to realise the potential of controlled environment growth cabinets, and brought with him from Nottingham a "climatological wind-tunnel" which he had designed and built there. With successive generations of talented research students, he and his colleagues developed innovative techniques for studying the uptake of water from roots, its movement through the plant and loss from foliage, as well as the complex problems surrounding the structure of phloem cells and their role in the translocation of sugars. He was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society in 1973.

Weatherley’s outlook on his subject informed and illuminated his teaching. Many undergraduate students were influenced by him and paid tribute to his "remarkable ability to make the complicated appear simple". He was at pains to move beyond the purely descriptive approach to plant science and to emphasise the need to understand how plants work. The many comments from all over the world received at the time of his retirement showed how much both undergraduates and postgraduates owed to his stimulating supervision and to his concern and consideration for their progress. Likewise, as Head of Department he was always approachable, courteous and supportive to his staff, who owe much to the ways in which he promoted their interests.

In keeping with the family atmosphere he fostered, Paul and Margaret hosted memorable departmental parties at their house in Old Aberdeen, when his marvellous sense of humour was often in evidence.

He was an enthusiastic hill walker and a member of the Cairngorm Club. In addition, he was a talented landscape painter and had a lifelong love of music (his father having been a professional cellist). He was also for many years an elder of St Machar’s Cathedral, Old Aberdeen, where one example of his valuable service was his convenership of an organ restoration fund which has left a magnificent instrument in fine shape.

In 1981 he retired and moved out to Torphins in the Aberdeenshire countryside, which had become his adoptive homeland. Sadly, however, his retirement was marred by the progressive onslaught of Parkinson’s disease. Latterly, this long illness isolated him from almost all but his strongly supportive family.

He is survived by his wife, Margaret, and their three daughters and one son.