Bertram Smythies
British forester and ornithologist (1912–1999)
Bertram Evelyn (Bill) Smythies (11 July 1912 (Nainital, India) – 27 June 1999 (Redhill, England)) was a British forester and ornithologist.
Life
Bertram 'Bill' Smythies, the elder brother of John Raymond Smythies, was born in India in 1912. His father E. A. Smythies, was silviculturist of Uttar Pradesh (and, in the 1940s, Chief Conservator of Forest of Nepal). His mother, Olive Smythies, née Cripps, was the author of The Tiger Lady. After school in the UK, Bill read botany and forestry at Balliol College, Oxford.
Bill's grandfather Arthur Smythies (1847- 1934) came to India in 1873 to join the Indian Forest Service and served until 1902 around Dehra Dun. Bill's father Evelyn (Arthur's son) had degrees in forestry and geology from Oxford and served in the Indian Forest Service from 1908 to 1940. Evelyn was based in Nainital, where Bill was born in 1912. He wrote:
... "started hill trekking at the age of six months, camping in tents in the hills of Kumaon...
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Bertram Smythies” as british forester and ornithologist (1912–1999). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2252779. VIAF identifies the subject as 41913779. The Library of Congress control number is n83134851. 5 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1912, 1999, 1847 and 1934.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bertram Smythies” 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.