Frederick Robert Irvine

Frederick Robert Irvine FLS (30 April 1898, Newcastle upon Tyne, Northumberland, UK – 19 August 1962, Accra, Ghana) was a British botanist.^[1]

Irvine graduated with agricultural training at Armstrong College, University of Durham.^[2] There he received a D.Sc.^[1] For 16 years from 1924 to 1940 he taught botany and agriculture at Achimota College in Accra, Ghana.^[2] In 1927 he was elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London.^[1] His 1930 book Plants of the Gold Coast focused on the uses of such plants. His 1931 book Botany of West Africa was the first text-book on the subject.^[2] He became in 1940 an administrative officer at the University of Edinburgh and in 1961 returned to Ghana.^[1]

From 1924 to 1939 Irvine collected plants in West Africa.^[1] His main co-collector was A. O. Ohene (of Ghana's Akan tribe). Irvine collected plants in Ghana, Mali, Senegal, Sierre Leone,^[3] and the French protectorate in Morocco, as well as in the UK.^[4] Many of his botanical specimens are stored at the Natural History Museum, London.^[3]

During the 1940s and 1950s he frequently visited the Kew Herbarium. There he sought obscure publications on food plants, asked questions about plant taxonomy, and took copious notes. His interest in food plants led him to accumulate information about the traditional food plants of the Australian Aborigines and the North American Indians.^[2]

Irvine was concerned about the well-being and success of overseas students in the UK. After WW II, his work with the Society of Friends, as warden of the society's International Centre at Tavistock Square, brought him into contact with a large number of such students. Irvine's interest in food supply motivated him to collect zoological information. He collaborated with 3 colleagues in writing the 1947 book The Fishes and Fisheries of the Gold Coast.^[2]

In 1959, while working under Quaker auspices for a year in the United States, he became seriously ill — after returning to the UK, he recovered but for the rest of his life his health was not good. At the time of his death, he was revising his 1934 book West African Agriculture, working on a book about herbs as a companion volume to Woody Plants of Ghana, and attempting to complete his book Vocabularies of Plant Names in the Nigerian Languages. Upon his death in 1962 he was survived by his widow, their son, and their two daughters.^[2] In 1963 his widow donated his papers to the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh.^[5]