Sidnie Manton received her primary education at Froebel Demonstration School.
Gallery of Sidnie Manton
Sidnie Manton received her primary education at St Paul's Girls' School.
College/University
Gallery of Sidnie Manton
Sidnie Manton received her higher education at Girton College in Cambridge, where she received a Master of Arts, A doctor of Philosophy, and a Doctor of Science in the 1920s.
Career
Gallery of Sidnie Manton
Sidnie Manton demonstrating to students. Photo provided by Elizabeth Clifford
Sidnie Manton received her higher education at Girton College in Cambridge, where she received a Master of Arts, A doctor of Philosophy, and a Doctor of Science in the 1920s.
Sidnie Manton was a prolific British entomologist. She worked on the evolution of the arthropods and wrote several books on that topic.
Background
Sidnie Manton was born on May 4, 1902 in Kensington, London, United Kingdom, into the family of George Sidney Frederick Manton and Milana Angele Terese (née d’Humy). Both sides of the family seem to have produced craftsmen of one sort or another and this ability to use, and enjoy using, her hands she inherited in full measure. Her father, a dental surgeon, was skilled in wood-carving and also worked with metals and enamels. One of his ancestors was Joe Manton, the gunsmith, a celebrated maker of flintlock guns, who also ran a fashionable London shooting range in the early 19th century. Her mother, of mixed Scottish and French ancestry, came from a family with a strong artistic bent, and was herself gifted in this direction, being skilled at drawing and needlework and did design work for Liberty’s.
Education
Sidnie Manton received her primary education at Froebel Demonstration School and St Paul's Girls' School. Then she received her higher education at Girton College in Cambridge, where she received a Master of Arts, a Doctor of Philosophy, and a Doctor of Science in the 1920s.
Sidnie Milana Manton began her long research career while at Cambridge, initially examining the form and structure and ihe embryology of crustaceans and Onychophora, another class of invertebrate animals. Manton went on teaching at Cambridge, serving as a demonstrator in comparative anatomy from 1927 to 1935 and as director of natural science studies at Cambridge’s Girton College from 1935 to 1942. Manton moved on to the University of London in 1943, serving as a visiting lecturer in zoology until 1946, an assistant lecturer from 1946 to 1949, and a reader in zoology from 1949 to 1960.
Manton’s work, Particularly on crustaceans, became the basis of many later studies of crustacean development by scientists around the world. As a member of an expedition to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef in 1928 and 1929, she studied crustaceans in Tasmania and explored the growth of a coral species. Another important achievement for Manton was her demonstration, in an extensive seventeen-year study beginning in 1950, that form and structure must have evolved concurrently with habits in Onychophora, and that these elements were central to the development of different classes and orders of arthropods.
In 1977 Manton published a book on this subject, The Arthropoda: Habits, Functional Morphology and Evolution. Away from work, Manton bred new varieties of house cats and published a book about domestic felines titled Colourpoint Longhair and Himalayan Cats: Genetics, Breeding and Care of These and Other Pedigree Cats. Manton was also the author of A Manual of Practical Vertabrate Morphology, which she wrote with J. T. Saunders. She died on January 1, 1979.
The focus of Sidnie's professional life as a zoologist in England was the comparative anatomy and embryology of invertebrates, especially arthropods, a phylum that includes such creatures as insects, spiders, and crustaceans and makes up about seventy- five percent of all known animals.
Membership
Sidnie Manton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in March 1948.
Personality
During the childhood, Sidnie enjoyed a comfortable home in which the constant example of two manually skilled parents who were always making things, from jewellery to lenses and furnishings, and who encouraged youthful assistants, had a great influence on her. Not surprisingly, as a child much of her spare time was spent making things, and she was also interested in pets, and in drawing creatures that she had collected.
Connections
Sidnie Manton was married to John Philip Harding and the couple had one son and a daughter.