Francis Arthur Bather, 1863-1934

Abstract Francis Arthur Bather, who died on March 20, 1934, was born on February 17, 1863, at Richmond, in Surrey. The name Ap-Ather indicates a Welsh ancestry, and his family home was in Shropshire. His father, Mr. A. H. Bather, a civil servant at the Admiralty, married a daughter of Bishop Blomfield, and Dr. Bather was their eldest son. His early years were spent in London, since his father lived at Roehampton; but he was sent to a preparatory school at Eastbourne whence, in 1875, he passed to Winchester. He lost his mother in early life, and while he was at Winchester his father married again. Naturalists are wont to appear sporadically, giving no premonitions of their advent; and there does not seem to have been anything in Dr. Bather’s ancestry or early environment to predispose him to a love of natural history. That he was a born naturalist is evident, and we hear of the little boy of six pestering his father for information about the fossils he is finding at the sea-side, and for books describing them. At Winchester he followed his father’s wishes, rather than his own, and studied classics; so that his scientific education was built upon a classical foundation—a method which his subsequent career entirely justified, and the results of which could be seen repeatedly to characterize his many activities, and particularly his writings. At Winchester, too, Dr. Bather developed and employed that love for wide and deep reading which continued throughout his life. Thus, on leaving Winchester for New College, Oxford, with a scholarship in Natural Science, he faced his special work with a mind well grounded in classics, natural science, and general knowledge. Of his Oxford days Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell writes: “ Bather was at New College, and I was at Christ Church.