Herbert Kenneth Airy Shaw
British biologist (1902-1985)
Herbert Kenneth Airy Shaw (7 April 1902 – 19 August 1985) was a notable English botanist and classicist. He worked at Kew Gardens, as was an expert on tropical Asian botany and on entomology. The genus Airyantha is named for him.
Life
Airy Shaw was born at The Mount, Grange Road, Woodbridge, Suffolk to a father serving as Second Master at the Woodbridge Grammar School and a mother descended from George Biddell Airy, Astronomer Royal (1835–1881). His younger sister was the illustrator Margaret Olive Milne-Redhead (also known as Olive Shaw). In 1921 he entered Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University, to read classics, but he switched to natural sciences, taking his degree in 1924 and finishing in 1925, having been a student of Humphrey Gilbert-Carter. He was an active member of the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union.
Research
Airy Shaw took a position at Kew Gardens after graduation, beginning as an unpaid volunteer in 1925. Initially he worked with William Dallimore and John Holland in the museum, and then moved to the Herbarium, where he worked with William Turrill and Cecil Marquand. During the war he was evacuated to Gloucester with the Kew collections, and there became interested in Euphorbiaceae.
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This entry incorporates text from “Herbert Kenneth Airy Shaw” 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.