Thomas Pearson Stokoe (24 February 1868 Gateshead - 21 April 1959 Cape Town), born a Yorkshireman, became a South African botanist and mountaineer over the latter half of his life.
Stokoe left an unfulfilling job as printer in England to start a new life in South Africa in August 1911. He also left behind in Sunderland his wife, Lillian Downs, whom he had married on 23 February 1895, and his daughter Ena. [1] He arrived with a team of five men selected to work as lithographers for the Cape Times, his brother Joseph Stokoe already employed by the paper as head artist. Stokoe remained with the Cape Times until his retirement.
Stokoe was already a competent rock climber and mountaineer when he landed in Cape Town - his skills he had obviously acquired on the Yorkshire Moors and the Pennines. He rented a cottage at 48 Kloof Road in the suburb of Gardens, a location only a stone's-throw from the South African Museum which maintained a herbarium and knowledgeable staff, essentials for an aspiring botanist in the pre-Kirstenbosch days.
After joining the Mountain Club of South Africa in 1913, Stokoe explored the mountains of the south-western Cape, particularly the Kogelberg and Hottentots-Holland mountains, collecting extensively in the Cape fynbos, discovering new plants and rediscovering species known only from collections by the early Cape botanists. His success at finding new and long-lost species was due in no small part to his exploring of areas remote from easily traversed roads and paths. Among botanists it has long been a self-evident truth that a map of botanical collecting sites is largely a delineation of highways and byways.
Stokoe also gained the trust of Cape Town's flower sellers of the streets. These Coloured and Black vendors often had an intimate knowledge of the plants they were selling and their natural habitats. Such friendships enabled him to locate rare species such as Orothamnus zeyheri and Mimetes stokoei.
Flower-pickers are professional mountaineers. With a hunk of bread, some coffee, a can, a roll of hessian and a riempie they are equipped for a few days wandering amongst the flower-clad regions of the mountains. When not doing a solo trip I always engage them. They can carry weight over rough and awkward country, they know the caves for wet weather, and when the heaviest of dew falls I have crept out of my tent like a frozen shrimp to find that they have slept warm and dry under the stars by the simple method of lying in the lee side of a few low-burning logs - TP Stokoe
Through the Mountain Club Stokoe became friendly with Edwin Percy Phillips, who was at that time not only the Club's secretary, but also curator of the Museum herbarium. Phillips offered much useful advice and encouragement with regard to his collecting, but his mentorship ended when in 1918 he was transferred to the National Herbarium in Pretoria as its curator. Keppel Barnard, another Museum staff member and a close friend and climbing companion of Stokoe's, succeeded as the Mountain Club secretary. Stokoe's amateur status as a botanist and his easy relationship with the flower sellers, set him apart from the professionals - "my friends of the scalpel, pins and tweezers" - and produced a social rift such that the Cambridge botanist RH Compton, throughout his 34 years as director of Kirstenbosch, never invited Stokoe along on his field trips.
Stokoe is commemorated in some 30 species names such as Brunia stokoei, Erica stokoei, Mimetes stokoei, Protea stokoei, Watsonia stokoei, Nivenia stokoei, Esterhuysenia stokoei, Agathosma stokoei and a stag beetle Colophon stokoei. [2][3]