Richard Henry Yapp, 1871–1929
Professor of Botany, Pioneer Ecologist
The brother of Sir Arthur Yapp, Richard was a botanist and early ecologist who held a number of prestigious academic appointments.
Richard Yapp was born on Orleton, the son of Jane (née Gammidge) and Richard Keysall Yapp, a landowner and farmer. He attended the Lighthouse school in Leominster before moving to Hereford’s County School, but his education ended when he was 15 due to the death of his father.
He started working at Alexander and Duncan’s in Broad Street, but his thirst for knowledge led him to attend a variety of classes, including some at University College, Nottingham.
In 1895 he was awarded a scholarship and entered St John’s College, Cambridge where he studied botany, graduating with First Class Honours. He was awarded the Frank Smart Studentship by Gonville and Caius College, to which he transferred in June 1899. He was captain of the university’s lacrosse team for the year 1898–1899.
Yapp was appointed botanist to Cambridge University’s 1899–1900 expedition to the North-Eastern Malay States, which resulted in his paper, Two Malayan Myrmecophilous Ferns. The expedition also stimulated his interest in the then new science of ecology — as his travels confirmed to him the importance of studying the whole environment, not just individual plants.
On his return to Cambridge, he was curator of the university’s herbarium from 1900 to 1903, and took up the study of the local fens, publishing a paper on Wicken Fen. He was appointed Professor of Botany at Aberystwyth University in 1904, adding to the university’s museum collection specimens he collected in South Africa in 1905. While at Aberystwyth he studied the ecology of the Dovey Estuary.
He served on the central committee of the Study and Survey of British Vegetation, a group which evolved into the British Ecological Society, the first such society in the world.
In 1914 he became Chair of Botany at Queen’s University, Belfast. He was also assistant to Sir Arthur Yapp, his older brother, in the Ministry of Food during World War I.
Yapp was appointed as the University of Birmingham’s Mason Professor of Botany in 1919, succeeding George Stephen West and overseeing the department’s move from the city centre to the new campus at Edgbaston, with laboratories arranged to his design.
For the year 1920–1921, he was President of the British Ecological Society. His 1923 textbook, Botany: A Junior Book For Schools was published in eighteen editions, the latest in 2013.
By the time the new laboratories at Edgbaston were opened, in October 1927, Yapp was showing signs of ill health, and was soon unable to attend conferences. Nonetheless, in 1928 he was appointed President of the Botanical Section of the British Association.
He died in Birmingham on 1929.
