John Heslop-Harrison FRS FAAAS (10 February 1920 – 8 May 1998) was a British soldier and botanist.
Early life and education
He was born in Middlesbrough to John William Heslop-Harrison and his wife Christian Henderson, the last of three children. His older brother was George Heslop-Harrison.
Soon after John's birth, his father, at the time a teacher at Middlesbrough High School, accepted a position at the University of Durham as a lecturer in zoology, and the family moved to Birtley, his fathers place of birth. For seven years the family lived in a small wooden cabin formerly used to house World War I refugees until Jack's father, upon his promotion to Professor of Botany, felt rich enough to buy his own house. When he was four he attended the Elizabethville Infant School, later moving to the Elizabethville Elementary School until he was 11, when he was accepted into the Chester-le-Street Secondary School. He completed the Higher School Certificate Examinations in 1938, scoring highly in chemistry and physics but not highly enough in mathematics to win the State Scholarship he required to go to the universities of Oxford or Cambridge. He took the King's College Scholarship Examination as well, not doing well enough in chemistry to get in. After returning from a holiday in Rùm he found that one of the boys above him had dropped out, and he was now applicable for a scholarship of £60 a year to attend King's College, Newcastle, which he did in October 1938 to study chemistry, zoology and botany.
University life
At university he was taught by Meirion Thomas and Kathleen B Blackburn, who had been a collaborator with his father. He also met Yolande Massey, his future wife; they took the same courses and frequently competed for top marks. The city suffered irregular bombing raids during World War II, one of which happened during one of his final examination papers, forcing them to stop and go to the service tunnels they used as an air-raid shelter. He eventually graduated with first-class honours in Biology, as did Yolande.
World War II
Due to his position as a university student Heslop-Harrison was given deferred entry to the armed forces after the introduction of conscription. He was provisionally given a place on a radio operator course, and as a result spent some of his remaining time at the university doing a course at the physics department on electronic wave theory, something which had no relation whatsoever to his eventual position. He was trained to operate radio equipment in relation to radar and geolocation, and towards the end of the course also got to handle the then-new cavity magnetron. He graduated first in his course and chose to be posted to Orkney. He was given a position at an AA battery near Dounby with the equivalent rank to that of second lieutenant, something the battery commander was not happy with since Heslop-Harrison was effectively a civilian. He was next commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps on 17 April 1942, and was later moved to South Ronaldsay. As part of his technical work he was a frequent visitor to the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME) base on the Orkney mainland, and, after his commanding officer finally lost patience with the operating officer, Heslop-Harrison was offered a position as operator of the complex and a promotion to captain, which he accepted. He officially transferred to REME on 1 October 1942.
His time at Orkney was (for the most part) boring. After the beginning of the V2 attacks he took part in the efforts to develop a radar capable of tracking their trajectories, but after a few failed attempts at developing such a device the project was called off with the Allied occupation of V2 launching sites.
In March 1945 he was posted to 21 Army Group Headquarters in Brussels, where he was tasked with retrieving a sample of the fungus Eremothecium ashbyi from the Dutch National Mycological Collection at Baarn; it had proved useful in synthesising vitamin B, something in demand in post-war Europe. After VE day he was again reposted, this time to join T-force, teams tasked to retrieve technological data from German research facilities as they were discovered. His team proceeded to Pelzerhaken, near Denmark, where many of the scientists uprooted by allied bombings had been based. Here the team found research into infra red detection, radar systems and U-boat signature masking.