Background
Prudence was born in Liverpool in 1916, the daughter of Sir Hugo Rutherford.
Prudence was born in Liverpool in 1916, the daughter of Sir Hugo Rutherford.
She was the widow of the primatologist, John Napier. During the 1950s he became convinced that human functional anatomy could not be properly understood without a knowledge of non-human primates and, with Prudence"s help, founded the Unit of Primatology in the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine, which was the first centre in Great Britain devoted to the study of non-human primates. She contributed to A Handbook of Living Primates (New York: Academic Press, 1967, with John Russell Napier), the first book of its kind.
She was the foremost contributor to children"s books on non-human primates during the 1960s and 1970s.