David Mowbray Balme
British academic

David Mowbray Balme (8 September 1912 – 23 February 1989) was a British expatriate professor and scholar who became the first principal of the University College of the Gold Coast which is now University of Ghana. The Balme Library was named after him.
A banquet was held in his honour at the Commonwealth Hall of the university on the eve of his departure from Ghana. He was presented with an emblem of the university, a crowing cock carved in ivory, by the University Council. He left Ghana the next day to take up his new position as Reader in classics at Queen Mary's College, University of London.
His father was Harold Balme, who was a British medical missionary to China, and served as president of Cheeloo University (Chinese: 齐鲁大学) from 1921 to 1927.
Publication
Aristotle; Gotthelf, Alan; Balme, David M. (Translator) (1 January 1991). Balme, David M. (ed.). Aristotle History of Animals : Books VII-X (Loeb Classical Library, No. 439).
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This entry incorporates text from “David Mowbray Balme” 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.