| AdminHistory | Alastair Graham was born in Edinburgh in 1906. He enrolled at Edinburgh University in 1924, initially on a combined arts and science degree with the intention to go on to study Medicine. Instead he opted for zoology, gaining his BSc in 1929. He went on to join the Zoology department at Sheffield University as a lecturer. His research interests lay primarily in bivalves and prosobranch gastropods. Alastair married his first wife, Gwynneth Hayes, in 1932, and left Sheffield in 1933 to take up a Readership at Birkbeck College, London. Among his research students there was Vera Fretter, who would later be one of his key research partners after the Second World War.
Graham accepted the Chair of Zoology at Reading in 1952 in order to move out of London due to his wife's failing health. Fretter joined him there in 1954, though managing the Zoology department was a challenge that restricted Graham's time for research. Graham retired in 1972 but was given working space in the department to allow for continuation of his research. In the 1990s his eyesight deteriorated, preventing him from contuining investigative research, and he died in 2000 after a short illness
Elizabeth Andrews first met Alastair when she was an undergraduate at Reading in 1955, and would become his second wife. She worked as a lecturer at Birkbeck College and later at Royal Holloway, where she was the Director of the Electron Microscopy unit. She died in 2022. |