Alfred Barton Rendle

Alfred Barton Rendle FRS^[1] (19 January 1865 – 11 January 1938) was an English botanist.^[2]

Rendle was born in Lewisham and educated at St Olave's Grammar School and St John's College, Cambridge.^[3] He was Keeper of Botany at the Natural History Museum from 1906 to 1930, in succession to George Robert Milne Murray.

In 1905, Rendle attended the International Botanical Congress in Vienna, where he was appointed on to the editorial committee for the International Rules of Botanical Nomenclature (now superseded by the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants and the International Code of Nomenclature for Bacteria) a role which he continued in until 1935.

Rendle published a number of books. Perhaps the best known of these was The Classification of Flowering Plants, which saw a gap of over 20 years between the publication of its two volumes - the first was published in 1904, but readers had to wait until 1925 for volume two. This long gap was attributed by Rendle to his "increasing official and non-official duties". He was also botany editor for the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, published in 1911.

Rendle was president of the Quekett Microscopical Club from 1916 to 1921 and president of the Linnean Society from 1923 to 1927.

References

1. Prain, D. (1939). "Alfred Barton Rendle. 1865-1938". Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society. 2 (7): 510–526. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1939.0011.
2. "The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography". 2004. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/35727.
3. "Rendle, Alfred Barton (RNDL883AB)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
4. IPNI.  Rendle.

Bibliography

• Stearn, William T.,The Natural History Museum at South Kensington ISBN 0-434-73600-7
• Books by A.B. Rendle at the Biodiversity Library including Flora of Jamaica coauthored with William Fawcett.