Elsie Conway

Elsie Conway FRSE (née Phillips, 15 March 1902 – 22 July 1992) was a British phycologist. She served as president of the British Phycological Society from 1965 to 1967, and was one of the few female Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Biography

Conway was born Elsie Phillips on 15 March 1902 in Aldford, Cheshire, England, the elder daughter of William and Margaret Phillips.^[1] She attended the Queen's School in Chester from 1912 to 1919.^[2] She then won studied botany at the University of Liverpool, graduating BSc in 1922, BSc(Hons) in 1923, and PhD in 1925. Her thesis, supervised by John McLean Thompson, was on floral morphology.^[1]

She was appointed to a lectureship in botany at Durham University in 1925, but, as was then the norm, gave it up when she married Geoffrey Seymour Conway, an England rugby union representative and son of Robert Seymour Conway, at the Church of St Mary's-without the-Walls, Chester, on 28 June 1928.^[2][3] The couple divorced in 1948.^[2]

Conway returned to university life in 1938, at the University of Glasgow where she continued until retiring in 1969.^[2] In 1952 she was a co-founder of the British Phycological Society and later served as its president from 1965 to 1967. From 1967 to 1969 she was president of the Andersonian Naturalists of Glasgow, and also vice-president of the Botanical Society of Edinburgh. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1967. Between 1955 and 1965, Conway was the editor of the British Phycological Bulletin.^[1]

After her retirement from Glasgow, Conway undertook a visiting professorship at the University of British Columbia between 1969 and 1970, and then, from 1970 to 1972, a professorial fellowship at the University of Otago. She returned to British Columbia between 1972 and 1974 for further study of the genus Porphyra in Canada's northeast Pacific region. In later life she returned to live in Chester and died on 22 July 1992.^[1][2]

Publications

The standard author abbreviation E.Conway is used to indicate this individual as the author when citing a botanical name.^[4]

• Clyde Seaweeds and Their Economic Uses (1942)
• The Raising of Intertidal Algal Zones on Fair Isle (1954)
• The Herbarium of British Algae in the Botanical Department of the University of Glasgow (1954)
• Water Soluble Polysaccharides of Porphyra Species (1962)
• Juvenile stages of the genus Porphyra (1966)
• Observations on an Unusual Form of Reproduction in Porphyra (1973)
• Porphyra in the Pacific (1973)
• The Marine Algae of Stewart Island, New Zealand (1974)
• The genus Porphyra in British Columbia and Washington (1976)

Family

Her eldest son is John Conway, professor emeritus of history at the University of British Columbia. Her second son, Robert Conway, was a senior lecturer in radioastronomy at Manchester University. A third son, Martin Conway, was president of the Selly Oak Colleges in Birmingham.^[1]

References