Background
He was born on 19 June 1917 in Chislehurst and died on 26 September 1985 at Kew.
Career
He is buried at Saint Anne"s Church, Kew. He received his Master of Arts in Biology from the University of Oxford in 1940 and began to work at the Imperial Forestry Institute (now the Oxford Forestry Institute) in Oxford. He collected plants in what is today Zambia and Tanzania from 1947 to 1948.
He began work at the herbarium of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in 1948 and became head of its African section in 1959.
In 1965, he became head of the herbarium and assistant director and became director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in 1976. This botanist is denoted by the author transcript Brenan when citing a botanical name.
Membership
Linnean Society of London]
He became a member of the Linnean Society of London in 1952. He was a member of several learned societies, and was president of the Association of Tropical Botany from 1970 to 1971, and of the Botanical Society of the British Isles in 1982.
