Alister Hardy
British marine biologist (1896–1985)
Sir Alister Clavering Hardy (10 February 1896 – 22 May 1985) was a British marine biologist, an expert on marine ecosystems spanning organisms from zooplankton to whales. He had the artistic skill to illustrate his books with his own drawings, maps, diagrams, and paintings.
Hardy served as zoologist on the RRS Discovery's voyage to explore the Antarctic between 1925 and 1927. On the voyage he invented the Continuous Plankton Recorder; it enabled any ship to collect plankton samples during an ordinary voyage.
After retiring from his academic work, Hardy founded the Religious Experience Research Centre in 1969; he won the Templeton Prize for this in 1985.
Camoufleur and artist
Hardy was born in Nottingham, the son of Richard Hardy, an architect, and his wife, Elizabeth Hannah Clavering. He was educated not far away at Oundle School. In 1914, he matriculated at Exeter College, Oxford to read forestry, with the intention of becoming a forest entomologist, but left after his first term to volunteer for army service during World War I. He initially served in the Northern Cyclist Battalion, and was subsequently made a camoufleur, a camouflage officer. Hardy wrote that he had been
equally drawn to science and art, and if the truth be known, I must confess that it is the latter that has the greater appeal. I am lucky in not having been torn between the two; I have managed to combine them.
The public source identifies “Alister Hardy” as british marine biologist (1896–1985). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Alister, Hardy and British.
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This entry incorporates text from “Alister Hardy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.