British Museum (Natural History): Department of Mineralogy: Official Diaries, Correspondence...

This series consists of official diaries, correspondence and papers of scientific staff of the British Museum (Natural History) Department of Mineralogy.

The staff covered range in status from the Keeper/Director, L Fletcher, to technical assistants such as S Ellis and T F Vincent. The earliest staff to be employed in the Department are represented , but coverage is not so good for the later part of the twentieth century.

The whole range of the Department's activities are covered in the series, including mineralogy (H A Miers), petrology (S E Ellis), chemistry (W Flight), crystallography (W J Lewis and G F Herbert Smith), X-ray work (G F Claringbull and P M Game) and meteoritics (L Fletcher).

Official diaries, laboratory and general notebooks, and letter registers predominate, with correspondence, bibliographical notes, drafts of scientific papers and travel notes also present. All are the result of official work except for the student notes of W Flight (pieces 20-22) and P M Game (pieces 316-330), some private diaries of G T Prior (pieces 162-164) and J D H Wiseman's collecting diariies (piece 345).

The three largest 'collections' are those of W Flight, (pieces 20-72), L Fletcher (pieces 88-129) and G F Herbert Smith (pieces 188-225).

Includes files originally in DF 7.

Papers are arranged in order of the date of appointment of the officer concerned

Access conditions: Subject to 30 year closure

Walter Flight (1841-1885) was born in Winchester and educated in Hampshire. He studied chemistry at Halle and Heidelberg in 1863-1866, and worked briefly in Berlin and at the University of London before being appointed as assistant in the Department of Mineralogy in 1867. Flight worked in the chemistry laboratory set up at 46 Great Russell Street until he transferred to South Kensington in 1881. He worked principally on the analysis of meteorites and published papers and a book on the subject. Flight resigned due to ill health in 1884 and died the following year.

Lazarus Fletcher (1854-1921) was born in Salford and educated in Manchester. He studied mathematics and physics at Oxford, and so impressed the professor, N H M Story-Maskelyne, that he was appointed Assistant in the Department of Mineralogy in 1878, and succeeded Story-Maskelyne as Keeper in 1880. Fletcher worked on the curation and exhibition of the collections in the Mineral Gallery, on descriptive mineralogy and on meteorites, publishing widely in all these fields. Fletcher was proposed as Director by the Trustees in 1898, but not appointed until 1909, by which time he was in poor health. He retired in 1919 and died two years later.

George Frederick Herbert Smith (1872-1953) was educated at Winchester and Oxford, and studied under Paul Groth in Munich before taking up the post of Assistant in the Department in 1897. He worked at crystallography and femmology, and designed a number of instruments, including a three-circle goniometer. Herbert Smith left the Department in 1921 to work in the Director's Office, and returned as Keeper in 1935. He retired in 1937.