Bertram Evelyn Smythies was a forester and ornithologist who published various works in his fields of expertise.
Background
Bertram 'Bill' Smythies was born on July 11, 1912, in India. He was the son of a forest conservationist and a hunter. Bertram's father, E.A. Smythies, was a cilviculturist in Uttar Pradesh. He studied geology and forestry in Oxford, from 1908 to 1940 served in the Indian Forest Service. From 1940 to 1947 Evelyn Smythies worked in Kathmandu as a Forest Advisor to the Maharaja of Nepal. When Bertram came to visit father, he had the opportunity to see places, which are usually out of bounds for foreigners.
Olive Smythies, Bertram's mother, gained renown for her prowess as a hunter. Olive Smythies related some of her exploits in The Tiger Lady, which appeared in 1953.
Bertram also had a younger brother - John Raymond Smythies.
Arthur Smythies, Bertram's grandfather, was a member of Indian Forest Service (that's why he came to India), where he served until 1902.
Education
Bertram Smythies was sent to a preparatory school in England at the age of eight, but during the holidays stayed with his grandfather (who had himself worked in India teaching botany at the Dehra Dun forest school) in North Devon.
Smythies received his high education at Balliol College, Oxford, in the early 1930s.
According to obituaries of S.L. Jury, after graduating, Bill went in 1934 to work for the Colonial Forest Service in Rangoon, Burma, where he was quickly recruited by H. C. Smith to collect bird skins for the British Museum (Natural History). This led to the production of the Birds of Burma, published by the Mission Press, Rangoon, in 1941. Before leaving Burma in February 1942, Bill managed to rescue the copper printing blocks from the abandoned Mission Press and made possible the production of an enhanced second edition in 1953. Some copies of the original edition were sold to expatriate Europeans, but most were taken back to Japan where they were destroyed in an air raid: it is thus a sought-after rare work.
After the war, Bill returned to Burma but left in 1948 when the country left the Commonwealth. He then took up a post in the forest service in Sarawak, publishing a 300-page Annotated Checklist of the Birds of Borneo in 1957. This was the foundation for his glorious Birds of Borneo (1960), a classic work that was later revised with a second edition in 1968 and a third in 1981. Although he also worked for a while in Brunei in the 1950s, he returned to Sarawak to produce Sarawak Forest Trees, published in 1965 by the Borneo Literature Bureau. It aimed to enable foresters to identify tree species and is a fundamental work for the new Tree Flora of Sabah and Sarawak currently being prepared.
In 1964 Bill married Jill Rogers and shortly afterwards retired from the Sarawak Forest Service to live in Estepona, southern Spain. It was here that he pursued his love of botany, taking part in some of the John Carr Expeditions to Andalusia. He traveled widely in the area and produced a Flora of Spain: Checklist of Vascular Plants, published in three parts (1984, 1984, 1986) as volume three of the periodical Englera of the Botanischen Garten und Botanischen Museum Berlin-Dahiem. This phenomenal catalogue enumerates 7138 taxa compared to the 5948 in Flora Europaea (and an estimated 8600 in Flora lberica) and illustrates Bill's industry. This increase was not achieved by simply taking a more radical view of species, but by a careful review of the extensive recent literature and consulting specialists.
However, it is not for this fundamental work that botanists most remember him, but for Flowers of South-West Europe: a field guide, a very successful popular botanical guide produced in collaboration with Oleg Polunin and published in 1973 by Oxford University Press. It is a credit to them that even today it is still also a best seller in its Spanish edition.
Achievements
Bill Smithies was not only an outstanding ornithologist and forester but also a writer. He made a great contribution to the study of birds in Borneo and Burma. Additionally, he contributed to the flora of Spain and Sarawak (A province of Malaysia on Borneo). He published several significant books: "The Birds of Borneo," "The Birds of Burma," and “Common Sarawak Trees." Botanists mostly remember him for "Flowers of South-West Europe": a field guide, produced in collaboration with Oleg Polunin.
Bill Smythies and Jill Rogers married in 1964. They spent 15 years in the Spanish Sierras, the mountains of Britain, the Alps and the Pyrenees before moving to England. In 1986 Bill Smythies endowed the Jill Smythies Award in honor of his wife whose career as a botanical artist had been cut short by an accident to her right hand. She died in 1994.
