Kenneth Mather, 22 June 1911 - 20 March 1990

Abstract Kenneth Mather was born on 22 June 1911 in the ancient rural town of Nantwich in the southeast of the county of Cheshire, England, a county noted for its flat fertile plains, its agriculture and salt mining. Kenneth’s paternal ancestors had lived for several generations in Prestwich, part of the great industrial area of the city of Manchester, some 40 miles away, until his grandfather, John William, left the area to work in the mainly ecclesiastical town of Beverley in Yorkshire and later in London and finally in Nantwich (since 1890). Kenneth’s father was born in Beverley in 1888 and brought up from the age of two in Nantwich where he lived, worked and married a local girl, Anne Mottram and brought up a family of two, Kenneth the first born and Barbara. Kenneth’s paternal grandmother, Kate Wilson was born in Bridlington on the east coast of Yorkshire where, her father, John Mowbray Wilson, was the organist of the main Church of England church. On the maternal side, the grandparents John Mottram and Ellen Allman were born and lived in the country south of Nantwich and both had an agricultural background. Kenneth’s genes, therefore, came from urban Manchester, rural Cheshire and the Viking-ridden northeast coast of England; not so spaciously isolated as the stocks of the fruitfly (Drosophila), Oregon, USA, and Samarkand, USSR, which were to be used in his selection experiments, but both sufficiently genetically different to produce the exceptional recombinant.