OBITUARY NOTICES 95

KENNETH PAGE OAKLEY BSc., PhD., DSc., FBAdied on the 2nd Novemb er last year at the age of 70and the Associat ion lost one of its most eminent andrespected members. Born on April 7, 1911 , he waseducated at Amersham Grammar School and Univer­sity College School before pro ceeding to UniversityCollege, Lond on where he obtained a first class hon­ours degree in geology and anthropology in 1933. TheUniversity of London awarded him a PhD for histhe sis on Silurian pearl-bearin g Bryozoa (Polyzoa) in1938 and a DSc in 1955. His ea rly pap ers includedworks on phosphatic calcite , corals , sponges andBryozoa as well as his contribution to The CentralEngland District Regional Guide in the British Reg­ional Geol ogy ser ies .

Although his first appointment had been with theGeological Survey, he tr ansferred to the BritishMuseum (Natural History) in 1935 to spend the rest ofhis career in the service of the Museum. During histime as Head of the Sub-Department of Anthropologyhe greatly expanded the collections and the scope ofthe research carri ed out by his staff.

Kenneth was a Life Member of the Geologists 'Association which he joined in 1932 and , until hand­icapped by illness, was a loyal supporter to its ac­tivities contributing to discussions and being leader orjoint leader of a number of field meetings to Taplo w,Burnham and Iver in 1937, Swanscombe in 1939,Brighton in 1940 and the Chilterns in 1952. He evi­dently found the atmosphere of the Associationstimulating. Man The Toolmaker, later the title of ahighly successful book, first appe ars as a concept pre­sented to the Association in 1944. He was the th irdand eminently suita ble recipient in 1952 of the HenryStopes Memorial Medal for work on the preh istory ofMan and his geological environment.

But in 1953 came the unm asking of the Piltdownfor gery, part ly due to the application of his newlydeveloped relative dating techniques, and Oakley'sinterests in things geological had to take seco nd placeto the problems of dating the progress of humanevolution. In the absence of any suitabl e absolutedating methods and with a growing lack of confidencein stratigraphic or biostratigraphic methods when ap­plied to the short time-span of the Pleistocene, thepotential of chemical methods for evaluating the ageof fossil mat erial was worth exploring. Oakley, withhis knowledge of the behaviour of phosphates (one ofhis ea rliest papers was on phosphatic calculi in SilurianPolyzoa Proc. Roy. Soc. Lond., 1934) thanks to war­time work with the Geological Survey, appreci atedthat the elem ents acquired by buried bones might berelated to time of burial. He quickly reali sed that theacquired level of such elements as fluorin e anduranium in a fossil could not be calibrated against atime-scale and developed his concept of relative dat­ing. By this method derived or instrusive materialcould be recognized ; for hum ans have had a trouble-

some habit of burying their dead into older depositsfor the last 50,000 years or so. Oakley set himself totest as many fossil hominids as Museum cura torswould let him have. And he was highly successful,culling material from all over the world . So the Gall eyHill skull was not old nor was Ubeidiya, but Kanamwas. The European evide nce was published in 1980 ina Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History); hislast important work on the subject.

I first came to know KPO as an undergraduate dur inga vacation job at the Museum. I came to work for himand ended working with him ; for that was his way.Always courteo us he respected the ideas and opinionsof others even whe n they disagreed with his. Alreadythe multipl e scleros is, that was to cause his earlyret irement in 1969 was upon him. Soon colleagues andfriends would rem ark 'but you should have known himbefore-he had such industry, such a breadth of know­ledge, such a mem ory and so many interests thatcollaborators and frie nds came from all over the worldto see him'. Th e Geolog ists' Association wasprivileged to know him in those days.

T .I.M .

Dr. THOMAS ROBERTSON, form erly AssistantDirector of the Geological Survey of Great Britain ,and a member of the Association since 1925, died on 6.October 1981 aged 89. A meticulous and carefulobserver , whose maps reco rded all that he saw,Robertson had extrao rdinarily varied Surve y experi­ence and he was author or part author of elevenmemoirs. Rob ert son was born on 31 July 1892, studiedmining engineering at the Heriot-Watt College , Ed in­burgh where the course includ ed university classes,under James Geikie , in geolo gy in which Robert sonwas a medalli st . He obtained the Associateship of theCollege in 1913 and a London Uni versity externa lB.Sc. (Eng.) degree. He was elected to the Institut ionof Mining and Metallurgy in 1912, and was awarded apost-graduate course in South African gold mines bythe Institution. He became a full Member in 1922.

Aft er the outbreak of war in 1914 Robertson joinedthe South African Scottish Regiment , was wounded onthe Somme in 1916, and discharged from Army Ser­vice. A meeting with Robert Campbell led to hisappointment on 1 Jun e 1917 as temporary geologist inthe Geological Survey. He was first engaged on astudy of the Carboniferous iron stone s of Fife , and wasa contributor to the Memoir upon the Iron Ores ofScotland. In 1918, Robertson left to become officialgeologist to Togoland which led to his Ph .D . (Lond .) ,later published. Returning to the British Geol ogicalSurve y in 1920 he was posted briefly to the Londonand the South-Eastern District, but was soon moved tothe Midlands and later South Wales before returningto the Midlands.

96 OBITUARY NOTICES

As detailed in successive Summaries of Progress, heworked on a wide variety of rocks, from Precambrianto Recent, and was an author of the Sheet Memoirsfor Stafford and Market Drayton, Shrewsbury, Wol­verhampton and Oakengates , and Birmingham, re­vised the Abergavenny and Merthyr Tydfil CoalfieldMemoirs, contributed to the South StaffordshireCoalfield Memoir, as well as being joint author of theEconomic Memoir on Barytes and Witherite. With T.N. George he described in the Association's Proceed­ings Carboniferous Limestone from South Wales(1929).

In 1931 Robertson had a complete change of geolo­gy with a move to Scotland where he was concernedwith the schists and igneous rocks of the westernMainland of Shetland, as well as mapping Out Sker­ries, Whalsay, and Papa Stour, and later in Skye. Inthe Midland Valley he worked on the Kilsyth andKirkintilloch area of the Central Coalfield, and madedetailed correlations in the Limestone Coal Group(Namurian) of the Midlothian and East Lothiancoalfield, as well as making important studies of thequartz-dolerite sills. Numerous papers that attest thebreadth of his interest include an early recognitionwith R. T. McCallum of engineering geology problemsin excavations.

In 1938, Robertson, who had been promoted toSenior Geologist in 1928, succeeded W. B. Wright as

District Geologist for the area of Chester to Cumber­land, in charge of the Manchester Office. With theoutbreak of war he became deeply involved in thecoalfield, iron-ore, and other investigations, continuedfrom 1941 in Scotland where he was moved as DistrictGeologist for the Lowlands. He wrote or contributedto six 'Wartime Pamphlets', and was principal authorof the Economic Memoir 'Limestones of Scotland'(1949). Another move followed in 1945 to take chargeof the North-east unit based on Newcastle. In 1949 hewas promoted Assistant Director in London, in chargeof field work in England and Wales (except for theNorth-east and South-east units), to which he broughta very balanced outlook.

He was elected FRSE in 1944. As President ofSection C of the British Association for the Advance­ment of Science in 1956, he took as the theme of hisaddress 'The presentation of geological information inmaps'. Although he retired in 1955 because of de­teriorating health, he had the long spell in retirementof 26 years, spent in remote Wester Ross near Ulla­pool where he continued a lively interest in aspects ofthe local geology almost to the end of his life. His wifedied in 1976; he is survived by two daughters. I thankDr. A. G. MacGregor for information about Robert­son's early career.

P.A.S.