| Activity | Museum Staff: Department of Geology (Palaeontology) 2nd class assistant keeper October 1931; first class Assistant Keeper August 1940; Principal Scientific Officer April 1948, retired 1965. Worked on Fossil echinoderms.
After attending Ackworth School (1918–22) and Bootham School, York (1922–25), he went to King’s College, Cambridge, where he obtained a degree in Geology in 1928. He started research on the Lower Lias of Robin Hood’s Bay in the summer of 1928, supported by college scholarships. He had become interested in collecting fossils from the Yorkshire Lias during his school and undergraduate years, and in getting his ammonites identified he came into contact with Dr L.F. Spath at the British Museum (Natural History). It was at Spath’s suggestion that he decided to undertake serious research on the Lower Lias of Robin Hood’s Bay, and Dr W.D. Lang, also at the Museum, was keen to get another Lower Lias section accurately documented for comparison with his own work on the Lower Lias of Dorset. He also consulted S.S. Buckman, who advised him to record the location of every ammonite he collected with sufficient accuracy to enable the sequences of ammonite ‘hemerae’ to be compared at the north-western and south-eastern ends of Robin Hood’s Bay. Initially the project was intended to be a thesis for a higher degree at Cambridge University, but the detailed mapping, bed-by-bed description and collecting during 1928–1930 were submitted as a dissertation in support of a fellowship application at King’s College in late 1930. This was not successful, and Bairstow was preparing for a second application in 1931, when the offer of a permanent post at The Natural History Museum in South Kensington (then the British Museum (Natural History)), with the opportunity to continue work indefinitely on the Lower Lias of Robin Hood’s Bay, appealed to him more than a fellowship at Cambridge of six years duration. In fact, during his early years at the Museum he was elected to a three-year visiting Fellowship at King’s College in 1932–35. He started at the Museum in October 1931, and although initially put in charge of fossil echinoderms and later Coleoidea (including belemnites), he was able to continue work on Robin Hood’s Bay until his retirement in June 1965. He continued to work at the Museum until 1985, when he moved to Todmorden, Yorkshire.
The meticulous attention to detail that Bairstow lavished on the description, collecting and mapping of the Lower Lias of Robin Hood’s Bay, made it unlikely that he would produce a final description with which he would be satisfied. It is fortunate, therefore, that for the Cambridge fellowship dissertation of 1930 he produced a finished manuscript version of the map and a stratigraphical description of the whole succession, which are the basis of the present paper. His most useful collecting occurred during the period 1928–34, and work during the following 40 years did not greatly enhance that original burst of activity. His ammonite collection of about 2,360 specimens is housed in The Natural History Museum, and is a prime record of the sequence of ammonite faunas for the upper two-thirds of the Lower Lias. Such a collection would be difficult to repeat today, because so many of the accessible ammonites have been removed from the Bay. Bairstow conducted field parties to the Bay for the 18th International Geological Congress in 1948 and the William Smith Jurassic Symposium in 1969, and gave brief summaries of the zonal sequence and his bed numbering in the guide books for those meetings (Bairstow, 1948, 1969). Apart from a summary in a guide to the fossils of the Scarborough district (Bairstow, 1953), he left no other published account. The geological map of Robin Hood’s Bay, the description of the stratigraphy and basic biostratigraphy formed the first half of his dissertation for the fellowship at King’s College, Cambridge, in 1930. The second half of that dissertation consisted of a description of the Lower Lias belemnites of Robin Hood’s Bay, and included an assessment of the 19 specific names proposed by Simpson (1855: 22–31; 1884: 47–54) and partly revised by Phillips (1863–1909), for belemnites from the bay. This part of his work was also destined never to be published, but it did give Bairstow an interest in belemnites and related groups, which led to him being put in charge of fossil Coleoidea at the Natural History Museum. In fact, he did much valuable investigation into the early generic nomenclature of fossil Coleoidea, especially the non-belemnite groups, and his detailed notes were passed on first to Dr J.A. Jeletzky, then to later Treatise authors, for incorporation in the Coleoid volume of the Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology (not yet published). In these and other matters, especially the geology of Robin Hood’s Bay and general identification of specimens sent to the Museum, colleagues found him helpful and were always enlightened by his views. He had a longassociation with the Palaeontographical Society, first as Treasurer for the years 1948 to 1955, then as Vice President from 1966 until 1969, and he was a Trustee of that Society for several years during the same period.
[Source: http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=1&fid=126852&jid=&volumeId=&issueId=02&aid=126851] |