Ethel Thomas

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Ethel Nancy Miles Thomas (1876–1944) was a British botanist best known for proving, for the first time in Britain, that flowering plants have double fertilisation. Born in Islington, London, she studied botany at University College London under Ethel Sargant and earned her BSc in 1905, with her first papers published around 1900.

Thomas joined Bedford College in 1907 and became head of the new botany department in 1908. She was elected a fellow of the Linnean Society in 1908 and served on its council from 1910 to 1915; in 1912 she was also named Reader in Botany at the University of London. When Bedford College moved to Regent’s Park in 1913, she helped plan a botany garden and a plant physiology lab, but she left the college after a dispute with the principal.

She earned a DSc from UCL in 1915 and, during World War I, worked as an inspector for the Women’s Land Army and conducted research for the War Office and the Medical Research Council. After the war, she briefly acted as head of the botany department at University College, South Wales (Cardiff), and then served as keeper of the botany department at the National Museum of Wales.

In 1923 she joined University College, Leicester, where she built the biology program and established the first botany laboratory there. She led the biology department until retirement in 1937. She married Hugh Hyndman in 1933; he died in 1934. A lifelong member of scientific societies, she was vice-president of the British Association’s botany section.

After retirement she continued her research from Westfield College until ill health forced her to stop in 1940. She died on 28 August 1944 in Woking, Surrey.

Thomas is remembered for her work on flowering plants, especially as the first person in Britain to publish on double fertilisation, and for her studies of double leaf-trace in both flowering and non-flowering plants.